An interesting article on "How the Arizona senator doomed his own global warming legislation with billions in nuclear subsidies" forces us to ask the question: why would McCain, who says he abhors project-specific funding and directed government money meant to line the pockets of regions or entities specifically, be fighting to give billions of dollars to the nuclear energy, especially knowing that it would kill legislation he says he supports?
While it seemed the legislation would help the nuclear industry do better in a market with new ground-rules, McCain wanted to give money directly to the private firms themselves:
In meetings with McCain's staff, environmental lobbyists argued the obvious points, according to Karen Wayland, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council: what to do with nuclear waste, the need to prevent nuclear proliferation, the problem with security at nuclear facilities. They noted that legislation restricting greenhouse emissions in and of itself would create a competitive advantage for nuclear energy companies. They made no headway, so the enviros appealed to Lieberman and his staff. "Lieberman didn't seem to care for this provision," one of the green lobbyists remembers, "but he needed McCain, and McCain was pushing hard" for the nuclear subsidies.
Why McCain was so devoted to these private interests, why he seemed to give equal weight to feeding private industry with free money and combatting climate change, which he had begun to think of as a security, economic and quality-of-life risk to his own state, remains in question.
In 2005, after the climate bill's failure, McCain and Lieberman introduced similar legislation, this time with the subsidies written into the original language. McCain declared "I am a a green" and said environmental objections to nuclear energy and the severe risks posed by its waste products were "wrongheaded", insisting that legislation to reduce carbon emissions should also include money directed to the nuclear industry.
According to Mother Jones:
Several Democratic senators who had backed McCain's original legislation—Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Mark Dayton (D-Minn.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)—defected, and McCain picked up no new Republicans. (Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both voted for it.) "The staff didn't fully appreciate how much opposition there would be to the nuclear provision," Wicke says, adding, "I could say it was a bit of miscalculation.... It did stymie this climate change legislation." After collecting 44 supporters for the first bill, McCain had lost ground.
McCain was almost single-handedly responsible for killing a vital emissions reductions bill, and he did so fighting stubbornly for directed payments to private business for which no one could find a valid explanation. He also angrily told environmentally-oriented renewable energy proponents that renewables would never supply more than 1% to 2% of US energy needs. The US government had found as early as 1991 that wind from three states alone could —if properly developed— provide for all consumer electricity use, and 12 years later, the state of the art was such that the same hypothetical grid would cover all US energy demand.
McCain's position was and is out of touch with scientific and economic fact, and his allegiance to providing easy money to an environmentally dangerous, economically unsustainable industry smacks of the very politics of suspect gifts he claims to oppose. The degree of arrogance and stubbornness in fighting for the subsidies is only highlighted by the fact that he continues to proclaim himself to be an heroic crusader against such efforts, especially focused on how they contribute to killing much needed legislation.
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