Huckabee: God wants us to fight global warming

The Republican presidential candidate believes it's our biblical duty to stop climate change.

By Amanda Griscom Little

Read more: Environment, Politics, News, Mike Huckabee, Green Living, 2008 election, 2008 Energy Interviews

Nov. 19, 2007 | Should you heart Huckabee? The jovial former Arkansas governor famously shed 100 pounds in two years and became an outspoken health and fitness advocate, and now he's focusing that can-do attitude on a much weightier problem: America's beleaguered energy system.

"The first thing I will do as president is send Congress my comprehensive plan for energy independence," he proclaims on his Web site. "We will achieve energy independence by the end of my second term." The goal may sound admirable, but even if it's achievable -- and many experts doubt that it is -- Huckabee's plan for getting there is light on specifics. Rather than spell out what steps he would take, he talks of creating a market environment that encourages innovation, and he praises just about every energy source you can think of -- nuclear, "clean coal," wind, solar, hydrogen, biomass, biodiesel, corn-based ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other untapped domestic areas, and, yes, conservation too.

A conservative Republican and devout Christian, Huckabee believes he has a biblical responsibility to protect God's planet from climate change, even though he's not convinced that climate change is largely human-caused. But mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions make him squeamish.

I called Huckabee up in Iowa to find out how his ideas are playing on the campaign trail.

For more info on his platform and record, check out this Huckabee fact sheet.

What makes you the strongest Republican candidate on the issues of energy and the environment?

For one thing, I'm one of the few people who's actually talked about the fact that as Republicans we have done a lousy job of presenting the case for conservation. We ought to be the leaders, but unfortunately we've been the last people speaking out on conservation.

Not only as a Republican, but as a Christian it's important to me to say to my fellow believers, "Look, if anybody ought to be leading on this issue, it ought to be us." We can't justify destroying a planet that doesn't belong to us, and if we believe that God did create this world for our pleasure and wants us to enjoy it, then all the more reason that we should take care of it.

You've vowed in your presidential platform to achieve energy independence by your second term. What inspired this stand?

A country is not free if it can't produce three things for itself -- its own food, its own fuel, and its own fighting apparatus. If we depend on someone else for those things, then we are at the mercy of those producing states. That's why energy independence is not only an environmental and economic concern, but an urgent national-security priority. If we didn't have any dependence on oil from the Middle East or even from Venezuela or Russia, we would not be nearly so worried about what's happening in those countries. We're desperately tied up in making sure that their stability is, in essence, our stability.

How would you achieve energy independence by your second term?

The key is to create the kind of unbridled marketplace that turns innovators loose to find the solutions. I don't think we're going to find one big answer. I think it's going to be a combination of many that will include hydrogen, solar, wind, nuclear, domestically produced fossil fuels -- at least for the short term. Our goal is to be nondependent upon fossil fuels, but there will be an interim period in which we'll need to utilize all the domestic oil that we can generate by ourselves, whether it's from ANWR or the continental shelf.

What role will coal technologies play, including liquefied coal?

I think there's a place for it, and I think we need to insist that it's clean coal. What we don't need is another generation of coal that has serious polluting consequences.

Agricultural-based fuels are very important to me because they're renewable and help create some stability in the agriculture economy of the United States.

Hydrogen has great potential. I recently visited a hydrogen plant in Iowa -- they derive hydrogen-based fuel from ammonia. The technology is still somewhat challenging to make affordable, but it's a relatively simple process. We could accelerate our ability to make it more cost-efficient.

Do you think we need to expand the role of nuclear power in the U.S.?

Absolutely. France is almost completely nuclear, and it's not like they're a nation given to risky behaviors. There's been a real bias against nuclear energy in the United States, going all the way back to Three Mile Island in 1979, but I think most of it is unfounded. I mean, we've been running nuclear submarines for 60 years without accidents.

What would you do about the problem of storing nuclear waste?

I recognize that's the sticky part. Everybody wants the benefits of nuclear energy, but nobody wants the storage of the nuclear material in their own backyard. Part of it is you have to make it economically viable for somebody to actually receive it. But a lot of it is changing attitudes, educating the public that nuclear byproducts can be disposed of safely, because the first reaction people have is, "Our kids are going to glow in the dark if we put that stuff in our state." That's not the case.

You mentioned your support for ethanol and other biofuels. Do you think we'll need to transition from corn-derived ethanol to the more energy-efficient varieties, like cellulosic?

I think that makes sense. I think there's still going to be a place for corn to be a part of it. What we need to be doing is -- and I don't think we're all that far from it -- is developing a technology that would take virtually any kind of biomass, and be able to then burn it, so that it doesn't have to necessarily be corn-specific or rice-hull-specific. There would be different ways of processing it, and what you're really doing is generating the energy from the biomass itself.

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