McCain's Climate Plan: Not Awful
Today, John McCain traveled to Portland, Oregon and speechified on his new climate policy. His plan is far from perfect -- more on that later -- but it's a remarkable departure from a certain president who shall remain nameless:
Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge.
That's a darn good question to be asking! And to the extent that McCain's new proposal, flawed as it is, constitutes the lower bound of new national climate policy, we've just made a gigantic step forward.
So what's wrong with McCain's plan?
Puget Sound's Lesson For Oregon
Oregon policymakers are now developing a very large transportation package that may go before voters this fall. As they design the package, officials should heed a recent cautionary tale: Puget Sound's big roads-and-transit ballot measure that was defeated in 2007. As far as we know, it was the first time in US history that concerns about climate change played a pivotal role in a public vote on transportation development.
There's every reason to believe that there is a growing segment of Pacific Northwest voters that is aware of the connection between climate and transportation. And Northwest voters are willing to vote against transportation investments that could increase climate-warming emissions. In fact, independent polls suggest that this voting dynamic contributed to the defeat of Proposition 1.
There is a straightforward solution, however. Including highway transportation fuels in a comprehensive cap and trade program could largely inoculate transportation packages from this voting dynamic. If cap-and-trade policies effectively guarantee reductions in climate-warming emissions, then proponents of transportation measures can convincingly argue that new transportation projects won’t, in fact, lead to higher global-warming emissions. But leaving transportation fuels out of a cap could subject future transportation mega-packages to the same political dynamic that sank Puget Sound’s transportation measure.
Details are below the jump.
