The mainstream media has started to pick up on the fact that John McCain’s energy policy is totally inconsistent.
As a senator, John McCain has condemned policies that pick market winners and losers, aiming particular criticism at government ethanol subsidies as a taxpayer rip-off.
As a presidential candidate, the Arizona Republican himself is backing specific industries in proposals for relief from high energy prices and foreign oil dependence.
Coal producers and users would benefit under McCain’s energy plan from about $30 billion of government funding for clean-coal technology research. Federal carbon caps and a system for trading emissions credits would create winners and losers depending on how pollution credits are doled out. McCain has promised, without details, to push for construction of 45 nuclear-power plants.
Crisscrossing the country over the last two weeks to promote his energy plans, Sen. John McCain promised a forceful national strategy to combat global warming and end U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
“We must steer far clear of the errors and false assumptions that have marked the energy policies of nearly 20 Congresses and seven presidents,” the presumptive Republican nominee told a crowd of oil executives in Houston.
But McCain’s record of tackling energy policy on Capitol Hill shows little of the clear direction he says would come from a McCain White House. Instead, the Arizona senator has swerved from one position to another over the years, taking often contradictory stances on the federal government’s role in energy policy.
