No climate for old men

Why John McCain is not the candidate to stop global warming.

By Joseph Romm

Read more: Environment, John McCain, Politics, Science, News, Global Warming

Salon photo composite

Feb. 8, 2008 | Sen. John McCain is the only GOP candidate who believes in the science of global warming and who has proposed specific legislation that mandates a reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, especially carbon dioxide. That said, a President McCain would not be the climate leader that America and the world requires.

As increasingly desperate climate scientists have been telling us, the effects of global warming are occurring faster than anyone had thought possible.

The next president must make reducing GHG emissions a central focus of his or her administration if we want to avoid the worst impacts of global warming: catastrophic sea level rise, widespread drought and desertification, and loss of up to 70 percent of all species.

While McCain may understand the scale of the climate problem, he does not appear to understand the scale of the solution. He understands the country needs to put in place a mandatory cap on GHG emissions and a trading system to energize American innovation. But in a recent Republican debate, he denied that a cap and trade system is a mandate, even though it would arguably be the most far-reaching government mandate ever legislated.

Moreover, like most conservatives, he doesn't understand or accept the critical role government must play to make that system succeed. Besides initiating a cap-and-trade system, the next president must:

1. Appoint judges who won't gut climate-change efforts.

2. Appoint leaders and staff of key federal agencies who take climate change seriously and believe in the necessary solutions.

3. Embrace an aggressive and broad-based technology deployment strategy to keep the cost of the cap-and-trade system as low as possible.

4. Lead a change in utility regulations to encourage, rather than discourage, energy efficiency and clean energy.

5. Offer strong public advocacy to reverse the years of muzzling and misinformation of the Bush administration.

Let's start with judges. McCain has said that given the chance he will appoint Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and John Roberts. Given that liberal Justice John Paul Stevens is 87 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 74, he will likely have that chance, especially if he becomes a two-term president.

Yet last year, the conservative justices almost thwarted the majority in the landmark Massachusetts v. EPA case, in which the court decided 5-4 that the EPA has the authority and responsibility to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Justice Scalia, in his dissent (joined by Roberts, Thomas and Alito), argues that carbon dioxide, "which is alleged to be causing global climate change," is in fact not an air pollutant. All four conservative justices accept and repeat almost all of the EPA's laughable arguments. In one example, the conservative justices point out that the majority offers this requirement:

"If," the court says, "the scientific uncertainty is so profound that it precludes EPA from making a reasoned judgment as to whether greenhouse gases contribute to global warming, EPA must say so." Scalia and company continue that the "EPA has said precisely that -- and at great length, based on information contained in a 2001 report by the National Research Council (NRC)."

Although the NRC report -- which is over 6 years old now -- does talk about uncertainties, it opens by saying bluntly:

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities...

The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue.

No rational person could possibly cite the NRC report as evidence that "the scientific uncertainty is so profound" that the EPA can't make a "reasoned judgment as to whether greenhouse gases contribute to global warming." The fact that Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and Alito swallow all of the Bush EPA's absurd arguments without question is clear evidence that, like many conservatives, they are not open to rational argument or scientific evidence on matters related to climate change. One more conservative judge, let alone two, and the court will be effectively pro-warming, perhaps for decades.

Avoiding catastrophic climate change will require sweeping legislation that covers every sector of the economy. A McCain-stacked court led by Chief Justice Roberts will rule against any ambiguous or incomplete laws regulating GHG emissions in the commercial, industrial, utility, residential, transportation or agricultural sectors. That in turn will force Congress to write laws that are detailed and specific, but that are also overly intrusive, overly prescriptive, less flexible, less capable of stimulating innovation and hence politically unpopular.

Next page: Where will he find conservatives who believe in global warming for key energy positions?