Where in the World Is John McCain?

Portland, OR -- You could design a takeoff on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego while trying to sort out where Senator McCain really stands on energy and global warming issues as he moves towards his general-election showdown with Obama/Clinton.

A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal asked me if we had decided to endorse a candidate in the Presidential election, and I said, "No, because all three candidates still have the opportunity to show real environmental leadership." Note the word "opportunity." If you read this morning's Journal,  you would think that Senator McCain had risen to the challenge and was trying to demonstrate the true environmental leadership he has often talked about, but rarely shown. (Lifetime League of Conservation Voters rating: 24 percent.)

The Journal story is headlined "McCain Woos Democrats on Environment," and prominently features my offer to McCain to step up to the plate by saying that the Club "might not endorse" and could easily leave readers thinking that McCain was almost indistinguishable from Clinton and Obama. The article has McCain quoting Bruce Babbitt as a big fan of his environmental record. The paper also notes that I summed up McCain's record as being better than that of the average Republican senator's but dramatically worse than those of such Republican governors as Crist of Florida and Schwarzenegger of California.

But it's a bit hard to reconcile the profile McCain hopes to project with McCain's statement last week that the federal government ought to bribe states like California and Florida to open up their coastal waters to the oil industry by offering them richer royalty payments.

And if you look at McCain's own advertisements, his strategy looks a lot like something Dick Morris might have designed to triangulate Bill Clinton back in 1992. This ad, "A Better Way," for example, might serve as a textbook for triangulators. The voice-over says (about the climate crisis) that "One extreme says high taxes and crippling regulations are the answer. Another denies the problem even exists. There's a better way...."

Presumably McCain will claim in the fall that it's Obama and Clinton who favor those "high taxes." Right off the bat, Clinton and Obama pointed out the irony that McCain delivered his speech today at a wind-turbine manufacturer that has been telling Congress that it would be laying off workers because of the failure to renew the renewable-energy tax credits -- a failure that resulted in part from McCain's absence from the Senate on two critical votes to renew them, each of which failed by one vote.

What's really going on here is that McCain is once again trying to talk the talk without walking the walk. If you look at the three key ingredients in solving global warming, he's absolutely terrible on two (encouraging renewable energy and cleaning up the coal and oil industries) and stuck in the past on the third -- by setting outdated limits on how much carbon dioxide we will emit. The science on climate change has evolved alarmingly in the past five years. McCain's ad concedes this, saying, "climate change wreaks havoc with deadly weather." But McCain's proposed global warming bill remains where it was in 2003. Back then, introducing it did represent real early leadership -- but that early leadership appears to have stalled out badly as the senator gets closer to the White House.

Today's media blitz does show that McCain wants voters to think he's still leading. Unfortunately, reading the fine print strongly suggests that he's blinking.

A Good Day for the Critters

Los Angeles -- The past few days have seen two dramatic victories for wild places and wildlife. Both are a tribute to the grassroots efforts of Sierra Club volunteers -- as well as cautionary stories on the importance of raising the bar.

The most spectacular news came from Kern County, California, where Tejon Ranch agreed to set aside for preservation 240,000 acres -- 90 percent of the total ranch. This preserve, which will eventually include a major new state park, covers what is probably the largest, most ecologically significant and most pristine private land in the state. "For Southern California, this is the ecological equivalent of the Louisiana Purchase," said Bill Corcoran, senior regional representative for the Sierra Club. "It is the only place in the region where, within a few minutes, a visitor can ascend from Joshua tree woodlands to oak-filled  canyons on up to vast plains with views across the coastal range."

Tejon will now be free to seek regulatory approval for development projects on the remaining 10 percent. These projects, while not optimal, are far less damaging than earlier versions -- and the remaining 90 percent is safe forever.

The Tejon victory is also a sober reminder of the importance of setting your sights high, staying at the negotiating table, and being willing to bargain hard. Back in 2005 and 2006, Tejon offered to set aside much smaller parts of the ranch for preservation, in exchange for being able to pursue some very damaging versions of its development plans. The company balked at setting aside more than 100,000 acres, and some environmental advocates and groups wanted to accept those offers. But a coalition of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, turned down the offer, and the Sierra Club laid down a line in the sand. I told Tejon that we would make saving Tejon one of our top California priorities, and that long and bitter litigation would precede any development approvals. The company came back to the table, and this week we were able to ink this fabulous win for wildlife.

Three thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, we saw another major victory. Congress passed and the President signed the Wild Sky Wilderness bill -- another monument to hanging tough. The Wild Sky bill designates 167 square miles in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest north of Sultan as federal wilderness, the government's highest level of protection, and it was ready to pass in the last Congress. But the House Resources Chair at the time, Richard Pombo, held it hostage -- seeking to trade it off for his assaults on public lands and endangered species. But environmentalists, instead of caving in to Pombo, decided to take him out instead and pass Wild Sky once Pombo was an ex-Congressman. As we all know, the defeat of Pombo in the 2006 election was probably the highlight of election night for environmentalists, and with Pombo out of the way, Wild Sky sailed through to signature by President Bush this week.

The Lords of Trivial Pursuit

Washington, DC -- You've probably noticed that one of the most visible issues of the Clinton-Obama race recently has been the question of a "holiday" from the federal gas tax. John McCain originally supported it. Barack Obama strongly opposes it. And Hillary Clinton favors it with a windfall-profits tax to make sure that it doesn't end up even further enriching the oil industry.

This issue may even help decide today's Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

You may also have noticed that virtually every editorial board, columnist, and economist that has commented on this proposal has said that it's a bad policy proposal that will do little or nothing to help drivers, will make it slightly harder to replace our decaying transportation infrastructure, and will likely make the oil companies and oil producers richer.

What gets little or no attention is that this is another example of campaign coverage obsessed with the trivial, even when reporters had enormous opportunities to explore the significant.

Of course, each candidate is using his or her stand on the gas-tax holiday to convey a larger message. McCain wants to show that he is a member of the anti-tax wing of the Republican party, Obama that he will break with the traditional Washington way of approaching these issues, and Clinton that she better understands both the economic pain of the average driver AND their fury at rapacious oil-industry profits.

The public certainly understands this. Yesterday's New York Times poll  showed the public divided on the merits of the tax holiday -- 51 percent against it, 44 percent for it -- but overwhelmingly aware that the reason it was on the agenda was to send a political message. Seventy percent of respondents said that candidates were advocating the tax holiday because "it would help them politically," while only 21 percent said they thought the candidates were proposing the idea because it was "a sound proposal that will provide relief for Americans."

Politics, after all, is about communications. Sending a signal (which is what all three candidates are doing on the gas-tax holiday), is simply a short-hand way of communicating. So at one level there's nothing wrong with the way the candidates are operating.

What's puzzling is why the mainstream media steadfastly declines to provide voters with a broader context within which these signals can be received and evaluated. Since at least last December, pollsters have been telling the press that a cluster of issues revolving around energy -- gas prices, oil imports, global warming, the war in Iraq -- were important to the electorate. The public views an outmoded, outdated energy policy that's dependent on fossil fuels as the problem; high gas prices, global warming, and imported oil dependence are simply symptoms of this underlying failure. By the end of last year, this issue cluster was already the most powerful factor in moving independent and swing voters in states like California. This month, polling by Stan Greenberg is finding that it is the single largest contributor to voters' sense that the country is headed in the wrong direction.

You can be sure that the candidates got this news from their own internal polling. They each put out detailed and fully developed position papers, campaigned repeatedly on the issue, cut paid television spots on the topic, and made it part of their own positive stories and of their attacks on their opponents. And the mainstream political press yawned. As I wrote in January,  only three of the first 2,679 questions asked of the presidential candidates on the Sunday talk shows and presidential debates mentioned global warming. Though things improved a bit in recent months, only when McCain used the gas-tax holiday to reduce our nation's enormous energy-policy challenge to a trivia-sized bite did the mainstream media truly rise to the bait.