Just as important as judicial appointments is the selection of Cabinet members and staff for federal agencies who execute the laws of the land. Secretaries of energy, treasury, state, agriculture and commerce, the head of the EPA, their senior staff, along with White House senior staff, are key players in the fight against global warming. Can we achieve significant domestic reductions of GHGs, and lead the world to significant production of sustainable energy, if most of those appointees are people who do not believe in the reality of global warming and the central role that government plays in solving the problem? Of course not.
Let me give an example from the Department of Energy, where I once worked. It is the agency most responsible for working with businesses to develop and deploy -- and oversee -- the energy sources and technologies that cause climate change and that are needed to solve global warming. Starting in 2001, the Bush administration appointed typical conservatives to run the agency. What did they do?
Like most conservatives going back to Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, they didn't believe the government had a major role in accelerating the deployment of clean technologies. So they gutted most of the clean tech deployment programs and shut down the partnership with U.S. automakers to develop hybrid cars, leaving the field to the Japanese. They launched a very large, very long-term effort to develop hydrogen fuel cell cars (which had no chance to help the U.S. cost effectively reduce GHG emissions by 2050), and funded it in part by slashing the main federal government effort to work with big energy-using companies to develop and deploy near-term energy-efficient technologies. And recently, we saw that they mismanaged and ultimately shut down their centerpiece clean-coal effort, FutureGen.
The problem for McCain is that the conservative pool of potential appointees who believe in global warming and the government role in its solution is tiny -- perhaps nonexistent. So McCain will either have to appoint moderate Cabinet secretaries and staff like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Christine Todd Whitman, further alienating him from the GOP conservative base, or appoint people who are incapable of overseeing the effort needed to arrest global warming.
That's assuming McCain even understands what is truly needed, which -- based on his recent remarks and legislation -- I doubt. After all, he has a lifetime 26 (out of 100) ranking by the nonpartisan environmental group the League of Conservation Voters. Conspicuously absent from his campaign Web site is any serious explanation of how he would address global warming. In contrast, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have offered specific policies that advance both renewable power and energy efficiency, including a budget for clean technology development and deployment that rivals, appropriately, the Manhattan Project or Apollo program.
The only technological solution to global warming that McCain consistently advocates is nuclear power. In his signature environmental legislation, the 2007 Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act, written with Joe Lieberman, McCain wants to devote a remarkable $3.7 billion in federal subsidies to nuclear power plants. According to an analysis by U.S. PIRG, a federation of public interest groups, the money would go for "engineering and design costs, loans and loan guarantees for building three new plants, and direct financial awards for new projects."
Yet when Grist asked McCain, "What's your position on subsidies for green technologies like wind and solar?" he said:
"I'm not one who believes that we need to subsidize things. The wind industry is doing fine, the solar industry is doing fine. In the '70s, we gave too many subsidies and too much help, and we had substandard products sold to the American people, which then made them disenchanted with solar for a long time."
Incredible. Nuclear power, a mature technology that provides 20 percent of U.S. electricity, must be heavily subsidized -- even after more than $66 billion in federal subsidies since World War II (five times what was spent on renewable and eight times what was spent on efficiency, according to the Congressional Research Service). But subsidize solar photovoltaics, a rapidly evolving technology that comprises 0.1 percent of U.S. electricity? No, we can't help them.
McCain then continues with words that put him right in the Reagan-Gingrich-Bush camp of skeptics of government-led clean technology:
"The government can help with pure research and development, whether it be on climate and greenhouse-gas emissions or development of the Internet. But there's a point where you should let the free-enterprise system take over."
That conservative view, of course, applies only to renewable and energy-efficient technologies. Last year, conservatives in the Senate blocked what might be considered a modest down payment on a serious clean technology effort: increasing funds for energy efficiency and renewables, $22 billion of which would have been paid for by reducing subsidies for oil production. Kind of a no-brainer for someone fighting climate change, especially given that oil prices and oil industry profits are both at record levels. McCain missed the vote, and "a spokesperson said that he would not have supported breaking the filibuster."
That view of clean tech, enforced by conservative presidents and legislators for a quarter-century, is precisely why the U.S. -- the leader in solar and wind technology development and use in 1980 -- has ceded technology and marketplace leadership to Japan, a variety of European countries, and even China in the crucial carbon-reducing, job-creating clean industries of this century.
So what about energy efficiency, probably the most important greenhouse gas reduction strategy? A recent study by McKinsey & Co. found that energy-efficiency measures for buildings and industry could allow this country to achieve deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at a negative cost -- the exact same finding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made in 2007. McKinsey concluded, however, that achieving such low- and no-cost reductions "will require strong, coordinated, economy-wide action that begins in the near future."
McCain occasionally talks about the benefits of energy efficiency. But he seldom details any specific policies, let alone "strong coordinated, economy-wide action."
His 2007 Climate Stewardship Act includes a section called "Measures to Increase Energy Efficiency." Measures? There is only one:
"The Secretary of Energy shall establish a program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the deployment of energy efficiency measures, including appropriate technologies, by large commercial customers by providing for energy audits. The program shall provide incentives for large users of electricity or natural gas to obtain an energy audit."
Energy audits? He must be joking. Having spent two decades working with businesses to help them adopt energy-efficient technologies, I can state unequivocally that energy audits qualify as a weak, uncoordinated, narrowly targeted action. They will barely have any impact, especially when it comes to large commercial users who can already afford them. And let's hope by "commercial" he means "commercial and industrial," as it's large industrial users that have the largest opportunities for energy savings.
The DOE does have a terrific program that does audits for small and medium-size industrial companies that typically can't afford them. McCain seems unaware of the program, given the obvious thing to do in his legislation would be to expand that successful but underfunded program. But then McCain seems unaware of most elements of a genuine energy-efficiency strategy.
Next page: McCain's silver bullet -- nuclear power plants -- will barely dent the problem