Who’s done more on global warming, Al Gore or John McCain?

April 3, 2008

As high profile leaders in the Republican Party go, John McCain deserves some credit for believing that the earth really is warming, and that climate change is real. When it comes to environmental policy, McCain’s votes are pretty unreliable, and his plans to address climate change are sad and thin, but at an absolute minimum, he is willing to admit, publicly, that the scientific data is accurate and cause for concern. In the GOP, this is progress.

But for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who seems to be slipping further and further from reality all the time, to compare McCain favorably to Al Gore just makes him look ridiculous.

“To say John McCain is Dick Cheney is a bit of a stretch,” Graham said.

“He’s not going to run away from President Bush but at the end of the day, John McCain has earned a reputation, and has the scars to show it, of doing things that put the country ahead of party,” Graham said, noting McCain has differed with the party on immigration, his desire to close Guantanamo Bay, and enacting robust climate change policies.

“Climate change is the road less traveled but he’s traveled it even more than Al Gore,” Graham said. “Al Gore has talked about it and deserves great recognition but he was around here a long time and never introduced a bill.”

Let me get this straight. Al Gore has done less than John McCain when it comes to climate change? That’s the new argument from one of McCain’s top campaign surrogates?

It’s bad enough to hear Joe Lieberman argue that McCain knows what he’s talking about on Iraq, but Graham is just making a fool out of himself here.

Ben at Think Progress does a fantastic job in shredding Graham’s argument, which Ben said “rings of pure absurdity.”

…Gore held the first congressional hearings on climate change in the late 1970s, well before McCain was even elected to Congress.

In 1997, Gore helped broker the Kyoto Protocol which called for nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the passing of a Senate resolution stating that the U.S. should not join Kyoto, Gore symbolically signed the protocol in November, 1998. While McCain voted for the resolution, he claims today that “we have an obligation” to cut greenhouse gases but still thinks the U.S. “did the right thing by not joining the Kyoto treaty.”

Moreover, the evidence shows that McCain is confused on environmental issues. He now supports ethanol despite previously criticizing it. McCain has talked tough on capping carbon emissions but failed to even vote on key Senate legislation addressing the issue. Furthermore, he doesn’t seem to understand his own position on cap-and-trade. […]

While Gore was starring in the Oscar winning global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, McCain has been trying to build an environmental record that is just strong enough to anger conservatives and fool the media into continuing to call him a “maverick.” But the reality is that McCain’s record falls well short of the leadership Gore has shown on the issue.

Maybe Graham could apologize. Or maybe he could just stop talking nonsense. Either way, he just needs to stop.

No, no, let Graham Cracker keep on talking. This will surely win over the far-right conservatives who don’t trust McCain as one of their own.

  • “He’s not going to run away from President Bush but at the end of the day, John McCain has earned a reputation, and has the scars to show it, of doing things that put the country ahead of party,” Graham said, noting McCain has differed with the party on immigration, his desire to close Guantanamo Bay, and enacting robust climate change policies.

    First:

    So sick of that “at the end of the day” idiom.
    Pathological phraseology gone viral. Reminds me of the start of Dumbya’s Iraq war mess…
    When Condi, Blitzer, Rummy, and Cheney were saying “vis-a-vis” three times a paragraph in between the Sousa drumbeats for station identification and the viagra commercials.

    Second:

    When republicans are seen to be paddling madly towards the center-left of the river…
    Realize this: Their internal polls are hemorrhaging beeps.
    Their tocsins are going toxic.
    This is another issue Barack will positively filet them on…

  • he [Al Gore] was around here a long time and never introduced a bill

    So VPs can introduce bills in congress when?

  • Yes, it is true. McFlatulence has definitely contributed more to global warming.

  • I would love it if Al Gore, having successfully and admirably roused the public from their slumber so that now we all are aware of the problem, would come up with some actual solutions. Carbon trading and twisty lightbulbs and hybrid cars aren’t going to solve the problem. Now Al’s got his much-ballyhooed $300 million campaign to convince the public to put pressure on their legislators to take action against global warming. What kind of action? What’s the plan? World demand for energy will AT LEAST double by mid-century. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Al now seems intent on paving an 8-lane highway to hell. But that is not where we want to go.

    There are solutions, but Al isn’t going there. Seems he wants to avoid the other “N word” at all costs. I think the last time a physical process had an ideology formed around it like nuclear power has today was back in about 600 BC when the classical Greeks were venerating Prometheus for the gift of fire. We have to get over this. The parallels to religion are all too clear: a small group of high priests (“experts”) who understand the mysteries (nuclear physics) who advise the masses how to believe. And like religion, most of the high priests are as uninformed as the public. And like high priests, they end up profiting off the ignorance and gullibility of the masses. To carry the analogy even further, there is actually a terrific system that would work great, but—like mysticism in religion—very few (and this includes the high priests) know anything about it.

    That will change soon.

  • ” John McCain deserves some credit for believing that the earth really is warming,”

    And he also believes that, quite possibly, it may be round.

  • Coral, @3,

    Of course it’s worthless; just look where it’s awarded. Sweden, that’s where. Sweden may not be as bad as France but they’re a bunch of liberals all the same. You wouldn’t believe their social welfare!

    And anyway… He only got half of it; had to share it with another bunch of wackos. Peanuts. Not worth the spit it takes to talk about.

  • Actually, it’s not very well-known, but John McCain also received a Nobel Peace Prize for his service in the trenches of environmentalism and in the fight against global warming. He doesn’t like to talk about it, just as he doesn’t wear all his war medals with his suit jacket. He’s an “Aw, shucks” kind of guy.

    Besides, in the Repub world, acknowledging that a problem may be more than just a fantasy given dimension by twittering, ‘fraidy-cat libruls is the same as receiving the world’s highest award for addressing that problem.

    I wish I hadn’t mentioned that bit about wearing his medals with his civilian suit jacket, he’ll probably do it now.

  • Sen. Graham is hell-bent on adding to history. And every which way it turns out, America wins! If all goes according to plan, we’ll have either our first black president, our first woman president, or our first gay vice president…

  • “Al Gore has talked about it and deserves great recognition but he was around here a long time and never introduced a bill.”

    When Gore told ’60 Minutes’ last weekend that he’s tired of politics and can do more as an activist, it reminded me of Howard Zinn’s thesis that Americans are conditioned to channel their political energies through elections and laws. Gore is pursuing the alternate channel. Graham is perpetuating the distraction.

    libra #9: “Of course it’s worthless; just look where it’s awarded. Sweden, that’s where.”

    Bzzt. Most of the Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, but the Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo.

    MLE #5: “So VPs can introduce bills in congress when?”

    Strictly speaking, anyone can draft a bill in Congress. They only need to persuade a member to sponsor it.

  • President Lindsay –

    When step one towards global climate change is to convince people that it actually EXISTS, step two comes after those who profit from global warming denial are marginalized. THEN, a plan may be put into action. That being said, Gore’s plan was very well laid out in the film, and offered viable solutions that can be acted on by citizens and government alike.

    Then again, if you’re so convinced that a plan needs to be made, and one hasn’t been offered, what’s YOUR plan?

  • I thought you’d never ask, tom. My book is just about to be published that lays out the whole scenario that would take us beyond even Al’s most ambitious goals, with all the technology, economics, and politics to make it work. As soon as it’s ready to hit the shelves I will ask Steve to let me do a post here about it. As you can imagine, I couldn’t do justice to it in a comment section. Stay tuned, though. It’s not far off. The manuscript is already in the hands of several movers and shakers.

    I do believe you’ve got steps 2 and 3 reversed, though. Putting the plan into action will not only marginalize but eliminate those who profit from denial. And because there are so many tantalizing benefits to following this plan over and above its effect on the climate, even deniers will be eager to pursue this course. But it will take a tremendous amount of public pressure to coerce our lawmakers to repudiate those fossil fuel industrialists who’ve been pretty much running the show up to now. Can such pressure be brought to bear? That’s the purpose of the book, to show what CAN be done if only the decisions would be made to do it. While many are skeptical that Congress can be led to so radically shift the paradigm, are the threats of global warming, continued energy wars (and water wars), massive air pollution and resource shortages enough to abandon the status quo? I’m betting that they are. Once a credible plan is out there and millions of people know it can be done, I think we’ll see some major shifts. Stay tuned…

  • One day a man named al gore came up with an idea. It was called global warming. He wrote books and sold them to schools. He made a film and sold that also. His clam was the sky was falling. People became afraid and started believing this theory. There was proof. This was junk science. The extremists were now so hypnotized that they couldn’t get past the falsehoods and see the facts.
    What can we do cried his hypnotized minions. You can buy electric cars and make your own clean energy at home I will be willing to sell you my products for those who cannot afford to change immediately. I will sell them carbon tickets. This action put so many people who couldn’t pay these ridiculous fees out of work. They were truck drivers and workers that traveled the USA. The average person couldn’t afford to go to work anymore. Big companies that supplied jobs for Americans went out of business or moved out of the country.
    The global crazed answer to that day that other countries stopped sending oil was. STARVE AND DIE! If you can not afford to do so immediately we will not supply your gas needs you will have to loose your jobs and food will not be delivered to the stores anymore.
    The people who rightfully did not believe this theory became angry. There was certainly plenty of evidence against this theory. The weather itself was against this theory. They understood how many people would loose there jobs. They understood how many people would starve to death not only on their land but on many others that they have once supplied food for. This would isolate people all over the U.S.A and other lands that depend on the U.S.A. Crime would be high and people would have to resort to cannibalism. People would be like zombies walking to farms but the food had long ago already been stolen by the starving masses.
    The global warming advocates began investing in global warming companies with the money they collected from all these people who once had jobs. Yes that’s right they took the tax money that the U.S. citizen earned and invested it in this false ideology. They then would not allow these same people their own natural resources to pay future taxes. Taunting them with phrases like to bad, we have to clean things up even though we are all living cleaner then ever before. We are all buying more efficient products everyday it was not good enough they needed to force change so they could make money much more rapidly. OUR POLITICIANS ARE ELECTED TO SERVE US NOT THEMSELVES OR OTHERS!

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