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Dave Roberts on McCain's environmental agenda:
this is domestic policy and McCain simply doesn't have his heart in it. He strikes the right pose, but it's an inch deep -- he's not committed enough to it to overcome his instinctive conservative aversion to the word "mandatory."He supports a "market-based program" to "beat climate change" in the abstract, but he also wants gas tax holidays, domestic drilling incentives, megapork for nuclear and coal, no boosts in sector-specific efficiency or fuel economy standards, limited public investment, and enormous tax cuts. When the abstraction bumps into the conservative interest group, the abstraction gives way.Yep. McCain totally believes in global warming and the need to get away from fossil fuels. He has a policy that will do this by raising the price of carbon, and thus of fossil fuels. He also believes fossil fuels should be cheap and plentiful, and has policies meant to lower the price of gasoline and drill more oil. Incidentally, the reason it's rare and admirable for a politician to be extremely open to the press is that the press can then ask a lot of questions about inconsistencies and hypocrisies and basically tear apart the politician. This is why politicians try to limit freewheeling interactions with the media. McCain, however, has managed to strike up some sort of working relationship with the press in which it's rare and admirable for a politician to be open to them because it's really fun for them to hang out with a politician. In theory, a candidate who regularly interacts with the press shouldn't be able to get away with this bullshit. in practice, the candidate who's most open to the press turns out to be substantially more protected from his own inconsistencies, because the press doesn't want to harsh the vibe on the bus.
