John McCain on the Environment
Here is the speech. John McCain says that climate change is real and we must act now to solve the problem. As for its reality, I’m still not convinced; as for acting now, I’m entirely unconvinced we need to do anything drastic. But, I’m also not the guy running for President. As a political observer, however, I’m well aware of Lincoln’s maxim - a generally held opinion, whether well- or ill-founded, cannot be lightly set aside. In my view, the acceptance of climate change and its human genesis is an ill-founded opinion, but it is generally held. It can be argued against, but it cannot be lightly set aside. In other words, the environmentalist whackos have won the climate change debate in the public square (by lies and slander, it goes without saying, but won it they have), and now we just have to work within the agreed framework.
Given that we are going to have at least some generalised effort to reduce green house emissions, the only question for we conservatives is just what sort of effort we’ll have - our choices run “onerous burden on economy” to “massive, America-killing government boondoggle”. McCain’s plan tends towards “onerous burden on economy”, while Hillay and Obama gravitate towards killing America - and when we take the whole McCain economic picture (ie, he’ll keep taxes low), it is clear that whatever the merits of McCain’s plan, it will be less damaging to America - even at its worst - than anything Hillary or Obama would do. Meanwhile, if we can show that serious efforts are being made to reduce green house emissions, we can steal environmentalist thunder and prevent anything worse from being done. All of this, plus McCain gets to position himself in the center, which is vital for his election prospects in November.
We can hate this program and do something nasty to our own side over it, or we can just live with it - and come up free market mechanisms which will take care of any adverse economic effects…and then just wait for global warming to be shown (by a failure of temperatures to rise) to be the hoax we’ve all suspected it to be all along. Meanwhile, we might actually get some excellent, new energy technologies and any reduction of pollution is always a good thing.
62 comments May 13th, 2008
