As the Congress moves closer to bipartisan energy legislation, John McCain is nowhere to be found. Instead his campaign – on the one issue that was supposed to separate him from Bush – is clinging to the old energy paradigm. It's hard to believe, but John McCain is now more out of touch than most of the Republican members of the U.S. Senate.
Bipartisan energy legislation, discussed today at the U.S. Senate’s energy summit, has gained momentum through the work of the "Gang of 10/16/22," and now looks to be one of three proposals that will come up in the Senate next week. (The House is also at work on bipartisan legislation.)
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama has said he is willing to accept a compromise on drilling to advance energy legislation that includes provisions for the expansion of renewable energy and efficiency. McCain, meanwhile, is stuck in a dogmatic anti-tax fuzz. Left behind by much of his party, McCain unwilling to compromise, show up to vote, or take any sort of stand to help make moves on energy.
Meanwhile, the bottom half of the McCain ticket has pledged to try to move him toward drilling in ANWR, which shouldn’t be hard since he only recently moved away from an opposition to drilling in the OCS to a wholehearted, singular support of it, and since he looks to be moving away from supporting Cap and Trade climate legislation.
This move away from Cap and Trade isn’t a surprise, as coming up with a serious energy policy doesn’t seem to be a goal of his ticket. Since his VP candidate knows more about energy than just about anyone else, and doesn’t believe climate change is man made – despite her absurd claims on television last night that she had never said that – John McCain owes American voters a big clarification as to where he stands on energy.
It looks like he may get the chance next week. Will he step up to plate and vote, or will his old, no show ways get left in the dust by Democrats and Republicans alike? Next week, when John McCain finds himself looking to the right on energy and only seeing James "Global Warming is a hoax" Inhofe, he’ll find himself running on empty. (Unless Jackson Browne sues him again.)
Last night, House Leadership came together on a package that dramatically expands both offshore drilling and renewable energy. The bill is designed, as NDN Green Project Director Michael Moynihan writes, to be palatable to Republicans, as it gives them almost all of what they want on drilling.
The comprehensive package, as described by the E&E Daily (subscription required):
The drilling provisions are part of a broad package that includes a repeal of oil industry tax breaks for major companies, new renewable energy mandates and investments, a new fund to speed deployment of carbon control technology, and many other measures.
Have no doubts, this is a moment of truth for Republicans in the House. (Next week, Republicans in the Senate will likely get a similar opportunity.) If Republicans truly are for an "all of the above" energy solution, this package is their chance to vote for one.
If Republicans continue their obstructionism on actually achieving anything on energy by nitpicking at this legislation, they, and not the Democratic Congress, will be responsible for failing to lower energy prices, failing to break America’s dependence on foreign energy, failing to confront climate change, and failing to harness the clean energy economic opportunity.
A new intelligence report, discussed yesterday by Thomas Fingar, the top analyst in the American intelligence community, outlines the challenges the next president will face. In the midst of debates about lipstick on pigs and other such nonsense, it’s important to consider what some of these challenges may be.
According to an article from today’s Washington Post about the report, the next President will lead an era through which American dominance and the significance of military power will diminish, as will the roles of international institutions. This shift, which comes as a result of globalization, and, as the article points out, is described by Fareed Zakaria as not the "decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else."
Climate change, energy security, and immigration policies will also figure heavily into the challenges the next president will face:
The predicted shift toward a less U.S.-centric world will come at a time when the planet is facing a growing environmental crisis, caused largely by climate change, Fingar said. By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.
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Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world. But among industrialized states, declining birthrates will create new economic stresses as populations become grayer. In China, Japan and Europe, the ratio of working adults to seniors "begins to approach one to three," he said.
The United States will fare better than many other industrial powers, in part because it is relatively more open to immigration. Newcomers will inject into the U.S. economy a vitality that will be absent in much of Europe and Japan -- countries that are "on a good day, highly chauvinistic," he said.
"We are just about alone in terms of the highly developed countries that will continue to have demographic growth sufficient to ensure continued economic growth," Fingar said.
Dealing with the effects of globalization, confronting climate change, and formulating a rational immigration policy have been hallmarks of NDN’s economic narrative. For more on how to confront these challenges and make globalization work for all Americans, visit NDN’s Globalization Initiative page, and visit the Hispanic Strategy Center’s page for more on NDN’s immigration work, including a brand new poll.
On Morning Joe today, MSNBC’s panel got into some of these issues, and how they do (or don't) play into the state of the election. Take a look:
Since this presidential campaign cycle began, an array of falsities about John McCain’s record and what he stands for, ranging from misconceptions to flat out lies, have hallmarked the national debate. One of the most prevalent of these is the idea that McCain and Obama are similar on energy and climate change. This has not been the fault of just the media, or just the McCain campaign, but also many Democrats and environmentalists, who have been overeager to be "encouraged" by McCain’s stance on climate change.
The essence of this myth, articulated by Joe Lieberman last night:
If John McCain was just another go-along partisan politician, he never would have led the fight to fix our broken immigration system or to do something about global warming.
The fact is though, that the John McCain of this cycle is a "go-along" partisan, and is not good on energy. And Lieberman should know – not only did John McCain not lead on Lieberman’s climate change legislation, he didn't even show up to vote on it.
John McCain has no commitment to renewable energy, has not voted to encourage it, and does not believe that these sources can play a large role in the nation’s energy mix. He has backed away from cap and trade legislation, and the only energy plan he actually discusses is "drill." This is not "good on energy" and is nowhere close to Barack Obama’s energy plan.
In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman takes on this great myth. In his disappointment with McCain (a disappointment NDN shares on a number of issues, from climate change to immigration), Friedman argues:
With his choice of Sarah Palin — the Alaska governor who has advocated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and does not believe mankind is playing any role in climate change — for vice president, John McCain has completed his makeover from the greenest Republican to run for president to just another representative of big oil.
Given the fact that Senator McCain deliberately avoided voting on all eight attempts to pass a bill extending the vital tax credits and production subsidies to expand our wind and solar industries, and given his support for lowering the gasoline tax in a reckless giveaway that would only promote more gasoline consumption and intensify our addiction to oil, and given his desire to make more oil-drilling, not innovation around renewable energy, the centerpiece of his energy policy — in an effort to mislead voters that support for drilling today would translate into lower prices at the pump today — McCain has forfeited any claim to be a green candidate.
Or, as Bill Maher put it on HBO's "Real Time" this week:
New Rule: You can't put a windmill in your campaign ad if you voted against every single bill that might lead someone to build one.
Electric car pioneer Shai Agassi is on the cover of this month's Wired, with a story on "The Future of the Electric Car." Shai's innovative and impressive solution is already underway in Israel, and the story is worth a read. Click on the picture for more.
Shai spoke at NDN's "Moment of Transformation" event on March 12. Check out the video:
For the last month, the McCain campaign has drilled away at energy as the decisive "separate from Bush and make Obama look bad in the process issue" in the election. McCain’s ads first trumpeted his commitment to cap and trade and later whacked Obama on drilling. His ads pointed to a mythical "electricity tax," and, despite obvious errors, hypocrisies, contradictions, and outright lies, conventional wisdom decided that McCain had won the debate on drilling.
With McCain’s four word key position of "drill here, drill now" exhausted, Obama, as the New York Times covered today, pivoted his message to the economic well being of everyday people. His second Olympic ad focused completely on his economic plan (the first focused on building an energy economy).
In case you haven’t caught Olympic fever and seen it, "Three Bedroom Ranch:"
Then today, John McCain had a moment that played right into Obama’s hands. McCain forgot – in the midst of a housing crisis – how many houses he owned. As I briefly mentioned earlier today, the Obama campaign quickly turned an ad around, noting how out of touch McCain was with everyday people.
McCain will have two, already begun, responses: he will continue to go negative on Obama, moving from a celebrity attack to a politics of association line of attack, and he will try to move the debate back to the issues he feels good about: national security and energy. This strategy has two small problems and one big problem for McCain. First, king oilman Dick Cheney is speaking at the Republican National Convention a week and a half from now – not exactly the backdrop McCain wants on energy. Second, timetable is now an agreed upon word for the end of America’s engagement in Iraq, the proposed Democratic solution.
The really big problem for McCain is that, while some think offshore drilling is nice, and others may care about foreign policy, Americans, in large part, see the economy as the overwhelmingly dominant issue. The McCain responses to his housing uber-gaffe – all personal attacks – do not get away from the fact that their candidate, a man who has spent 26 years in Washington, thinks the level of being rich is having five million dollars, and is extraordinarily wealthy, is no doubt out of touch with the lives of everyday Americans.
If this narrative sticks, if Obama can convince everyday Americans that he is focused on them, and if Obama can close on this message, it is hard to see Obama losing, because, despite all this supposedly bad polling and this supposedly bad month, Obama is still ahead.
On the back of John McCain forgetting about how many houses he owns, the Obama ad team turns around an answer for him.
Seven:
Driving this narrative - that McCain can't possibly be good on the economy because he has no idea what every day Americans are going through - has strong potential for Obama in the coming two months.
Keith Johnson, of the Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital blog, has a solid summary of where the media narrative on drilling sits: Republicans are winning the battle. This narrative is backed by a new Rasmussen poll that has 64 percent of Americans supporting offshore drilling, and 42 percent seeing it as the "best way to reduce oil prices." Rasmussen also tells us that Americans believe McCain wants to find more sources of energy, while they believe that Obama cares more for limiting energy use. Unsurprisingly then, Americans two-thirds of Americans side with McCain’s approach.
The New Republic’seditors make some interesting but debatable points today about how the narrative has gotten to this point, arguing that blaming speculators and going after oil companies may not have been the best plan of attack. TNR also argues that the Obama and Pelosi shift toward allowing more offshore drilling in a compromise bill that would also include support for renewables and efficiency was the second losing move in this argument, and that Democrats’ inability to debunk the drilling idea in the minds of voters was troubling.
As I argued yesterday, the shift on drilling will not be a big deal, and will likely remove drilling as a wedge issue into the fall. The more important voter perception is that Americans believe that Obama cares about energy austerity while McCain wants to do everything he can to increase production. (His actions don’t bear this out, but perception is what matters.)
Whether drilling specifically will be a voting issue is unknown, and this is likely a case where Republicans are winning the battle on drilling but setting themselves up to lose the war on energy as a whole. However, being portrayed as promoting austere energy use is extremely dangerous for Democrats. Obama has already begun to recast the debate on energy about investing in a clean energy economy, which is forward looking, as opposed to the McCain Republican petro-economy of the past, one that, as Michael Moynihan notes, continues to have dangerous ramifications in foreign policy.
At the end of the day, the most important argument to make and win is that energy policy is central to the economy: energy to power the economy, energy impacting American households and families through gas, home heating, and overall prices, and energy jobs and investment allowing average Americans to enjoy the broad-based prosperity they knew in the 1990’s, but that disappeared in the Bush administration. Transitioning to a clean energy economy will not be simple or easy, but, done responsibly, it is a key to future prosperity. Americans already feel austerity in their pocketbooks; being perceived as asking them to feel it in their energy use is not in Democrats' interests, especially when the better option of investing in a clean energy economy exists.
In the surprise of the 110th Congress, it turns out that the pro-drilling position taken by many Congressional Republicans and their presumptive nominee for President may actually have been – gasp – election year politics. The 'Gang of 10,' a group of five Democrat and five Republican Senators, has offered a compromise proposal that would contain both incentives for energy efficiency provisions and a limited expansion of offshore drilling. Barack Obama has said that he would support such an expansion as part of a broader energy bill, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she may allow a vote as long as a bill includes renewable energy and environmental safeguard provisions, but many Congressional Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are opposed to the bill.
Republicans have used the offshore-drilling issue to paint Democrats as out of touch with ordinary Americans and beholden to environmental groups that oppose any relaxation of the current drilling ban. Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican's likely presidential nominee, has made Sen. Obama's opposition to offshore drilling a feature in recent ads critical of his Democratic rival.
But the drilling issue could lose its power as an electoral wedge if both parties agree to the concept put forward by a group of Republicans and Democrats. Their proposal would open additional acreage in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida's western coast to drilling, and also allow Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia to "opt in" to drilling off their shores if their legislatures approve.
The plan would also raise billions of dollars for conservation and energy-efficiency programs partly by making oil companies no longer eligible for a manufacturing tax credit and repealing other tax breaks. Some estimates have put the potential savings from such a move at $13 billion over 10 years.
Some conservatives worry that a deal would remove party differences on what they otherwise see as one of the Republicans' best issues for winning over voters in the November election. Conservative radio-show host Rush Limbaugh has accused the Republicans who favor the compromise of giving a "gift" to Sen. Obama and other Democrats seeking election this fall.
Among many Republicans, "there's a desire to not solve this problem" of gridlock over energy policy, said one of the Republicans supporting the compromise, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee. Sen. Corker added that "many people in the Republican Party are missing the point that this is a strong pro-[oil] production bill" and that Republican leaders "made a mistake" by not immediately endorsing it.
This proposal epitomizes the 'all of the above' solution that John McCain and his Republican allies in the Senate claim they support – expanding drilling and investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy. Sadly, only five have actually acted.
McConnell’s line about "objections to the proposal to eliminate the oil companies' eligibility for a tax credit" is part of his growing charade of election year intransigence. The oil industry receives tremendous direct and indirect subsidies from the federal government; meanwhile McConnell refuses to allow for a straight up or down vote for much smaller tax credits on renewables.
McCain, too, has said that he could not support the bill because it "would raise taxes;" he has since changed to a more 'wait and see' approach. For someone running for president on a supposed record of bucking his party on energy policy, this is certainly not the type of proactive leadership one would expect. (Thomas Freidman calls out McCain today for his lack of action on energy and quotes Suntech America President Roger Efird, one of NDN's panelists from our August 1 event on "Energy and the American Way of Life.")
There is only one conclusion to draw: McCain and Republican opposition to this proposal – which should serve as an important bipartisan step toward some sort of action on energy policy – is nothing more than an attempt to maintain a loosening grasp on drilling as a wedge issue in an election year. By refusing to lend his support to this compromise, McCain and his Republican Party owe America an explanation of what energy reform they are actually for, because behind the pretty windmills in McCain’s ads, there’s no substance.
An article in today’s New York Times by Stephanie Rosenbloom discusses the growing trend of the nation’s largest retailers putting solar panels on their roof in order to appear green, but mainly to save on their electricity bills.
In recent months, chains including Wal-Mart Stores, Kohl’s, Safeway and Whole Foods Market have installed solar panels on roofs of their stores to generate electricity on a large scale. One reason they are racing is to beat a Dec. 31 deadline to gain tax advantages for these projects.
So far, most chains have outfitted fewer than 10 percent of their stores. Over the long run, assuming Congress renews a favorable tax provision and more states offer incentives, the chains promise a solar construction program that would ultimately put panels atop almost every big store in the country.
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Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, has 17 stores and distribution centers with solar panels in operation or in the testing phase. It plans to add them soon to five more stores. People at the chain are considering a far larger program that would put panels and other renewable technologies at hundreds of stores.
"It’s going to be the Wal-Marts of the world that will buy these things over acres and make a difference," said Roger G. Little, chairman and chief executive of the Spire Corporation, a Boston company that provides solar equipment.
Analysts are not sure how much power the rooftop projects could ultimately produce, but they say it could be enough to help shave total electricity demand. In many communities, stores are among the biggest energy users. Depending on location and weather, the solar panels generate 10 to 40 percent of the power a store needs.
If Wal-Mart eventually covered the roofs of all its Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart locations with solar panels, figures from the company show that the resulting solar acreage would roughly equal the size of Manhattan, an island of 23 square miles.
As the story notes, these retailers are working to beat the Dec. 31 expiration of the Solar Investment Tax Credit, which, if it expires, will devastate the solar industry. These retailers, along with energy experts and economists, have stressed that long term financial stability is crucial to ensuring investment in renewable technology. These stores are to be congratulated for understanding both the advantage offered to their bottom lines by investing in this technology and the positive impacts of helping achieve scale in the solar market.
Thomas Friedman over the weekend also discussed Denmark’s energy policy – one of complete energy independence, and the lessons Americans can learn from it.
"I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy."
Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.
Why should you care?
"We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months," said Engel, "and not one out of the U.S."
Finally, Al Gore’s We Campaign is out with a new ad that will air tonight during the Olympics:
The broad consensus that has developed around renewable energy in general and solar in particular, from Al Gore to Wal-Mart, demonstrates that America is ready for action and leadership. Creating a low-carbon economy needs to be the (not "a") top priority of the next President’s administration, and Congress should be taking steps in that direction when it returns from recess. Continuing our energy policy – one that allows for, at the moment, conflict over South Ossetia, to affect our energy needs – when better options exist, is patently absurd.
For more on the development of solar power as a major economic opportunity for America, be sure to read NDN Green Project Director Michael Moynihan’s new paper entitled Solar Energy, the Case for Action.
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