John McCain has been trying to sell us the message that he’s ‘green’ for months now. Between the false promises he spouts at every opportunity and his laughable line of ‘eco-friendly merchandise’, McCain is doing everything he can to appear just as environmentally responsible as his opponent, Barack Obama. Too bad most of us are aware that it’s simply not true. Despite McCain’s attempts to greenwash his record and how he would run the country given the chance, his record shows that he’s about as green as a barrel of oil.
From Salon.com:
The facts are clear. All you have to do is look at his voting record. It reveals that McCain has long been one of the strongest opponents of clean energy in Congress, with a record matching that of James Inhofe, the most hardcore global-warming denier in the Senate, who comes from the heart of the oil patch in Oklahoma.
Recently the Associated Press noted that “McCain has not shown up for eight Senate votes last year and this year to extend [renewable energy] tax credits, which expire at the end of this year. The last such vote was July 30.” Yet at an Aspen Institute meeting in August, when McCain was asked about those missed votes, he simply lied to the audience.
As for McCain’s “long record of that support of alternate energy,” consider the votes on renewable energy funding and a federal “renewable portfolio standard” (RPS) that he did show up for this decade:
In every case, McCain voted against renewables, as did Sen. “Global warming is ‘the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people’” Inhofe. On the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the biggest congressional effort to push alternative energy in more than a decade, McCain voted against it along with just 11 other senators. Even Inhofe voted for it.
As Salon notes, part of the reason McCain consistently votes against renewable energy is likely the fact that he’s technologically out of touch. He has claimed that “the truly green technologies don’t work”, saying that “most every expert” he knows believes that even if we maximized renewables in every way, the contribution they would make is “very small”. He also disagreed with T. Boone Pickens – the noted conservative Texas oil billionaire who’s now pushing wind power – that renewable energy could meet the demand over the next 20 years, a fact that even the Bush administration admits to. If even Bush sees the truth of green technology and McCain doesn’t, you get the idea of how much trouble we’ll be in if this guy wins.
Link [Salon]
Photo credit: EarthFirst composite/AP
