This week John McCain has an article in the Financial Times, “America must be a good role model.” It has two paragraphs on the need for leadership on greenhouse gas reductions, but endorses only one low-carbon energy source:

Right now safe, climate-friendly nuclear energy is a critical way both to improve the quality of our air and to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources.

That dependence, I am afraid, has become a vulnerability for both the US and Europe and a source of leverage for the oil and gas exporting autocracies.

You can tell a politician is being wishy-washy when he or she uses the phrase “dependence on foreign energy sources.” There is really only one foreign energy source Americans care much about — oil. It comes from unstable and undemocratic regions, and our trade deficit in it now exceeds $1 billion a day.

But nuclear power can’t significantly reduce US oil consumption or imports — because very, very little electricity in this country is generated by burning petroleum (only 1.6% of electricty in 2006 came from oil). [In the future that could change when a significant number of vehicles on the road substitute electricity for gasoline, but that is not imminent.]

And since McCain presumably knows that, he uses the catch-all phrase “foreign energy sources” to try to make it look like nuclear power is homegrown and patriotic. But is it? In fact, we import the vast majority of the uranium we use, so it is an even bigger “foreign energy source.”

McCain also cleverly throws in a second sentence that links America to the European vulnerability to leverage from Russia’s large natural gas exports. Yet as the U.S. EIA notes, “net natural gas imports equaled 16 percent of U.S. natural gas consumption, a ratio that has remained relatively stable in the past 8 years.” Moreover, most of that comes from Canada, by pipeline. Hardly a worrisome dependence.

What about uranium? Well just last month the Bush administration signed a remarkable deal:

The United States and Russia signed a deal that will boost Russian uranium imports to supply the US nuclear industry, the Commerce Department said Friday….

The new agreement permits Russia to supply 20 percent of US reactor fuel until 2020 and to supply the fuel for new reactors quota-free.

So if, under a President McCain, we build a bunch of new nuclear reactors — they could be fueled 100% by Russia.

I can almost hear Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin saying, “Excellent.”

Coal demand is through the roof even as prices soar. And that’s why “Carbon emissions race past all predictions.” And, of course, U.S. coal exports are soaring. As the NY Times reported in a major piece:

United States exports of coal grew from 49 million tons in 2006 to about nearly 59 million tons in 2007, according to coal industry statistics, while domestic production increased by 1 percent. Coal executives say they expect exports to reach 80 million tons this year, and with railroad and port improvements, to rise to as much as 120 million tons in the next few years.

China is the big driver, adding a stunning 200,000 Megawatts of fossil fuel power (most coal) in the past two years alone. As the Washingon Post reports today in a long must-read article:

China, the world’s largest consumer of coal, is burning through more than the United States, European Union and Japan combined. And its consumption is increasing by about 10 percent a year. In 2006, it installed power plants with more capacity than all of Britain.

If any sentence bears repeating, that one does: “China, the world’s largest consumer of coal, is burning through more than the United States, European Union and Japan combined.” Also, China has “limited electricity rate increases for years, encouraging greater use” and in January, it froze electricity prices. This completes a total reversal from their pro-efficiency policies of the 1980s and 1990s. The immorality of their energy policy (i.e. climate non-policy) almost matches ours.

India is working hard to catch up: “By 2012 India expects to add 76,000 megawatts of power, according to Upendra Kumar, a member of the mining committee at the Confederation of Indian Industries.” And many in India seem stuck in the same old misguided mindset that dominates China and parts of this country:

“Coal will continue to be king in India. There is no way out,” said Kumar… “The other choice is asking the country to stay poor. . . . The question is, are we going to allow poverty or allow a little bit of pollution?”

If that were their only choice, the answer would be obvious. But they have huge renewable and efficiency opportunities. Sadly for India, they are one of the countries that will suffer the most from climate change, especially the loss of the inland glaciers that provide water to hundreds of millions.

It is worth noting, though, that it isn’t just China and India fanning the flames. As the Post article explains, Germany and even the United Kingdom are turning back to coal, even as our country is having second thoughts.

MEDIA CONFUSION

So is there enough coal to fill demand? Well, the NYT headline from Wednesday reads: “An Export in Solid Supply.” The Post article from today reads, “Coal Can’t Fill World’s Burning Appetite.” Ah, don’t you just love the traditional media….

I think the bottom line is that, unlike conventional oil, there is more than enough coal at current prices to push us on the irreversible path to 1000 ppm of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and satisfy the world’s apparently insatiable demand for self-destruction.

If it wasn’t clear before, the next president is perhaps the only person in the world (other than the leader of China), who has any hope of providing the global leadership needed to save the climate.

Yesterday Fox News ran a segment on a yet-to-be-released poll by the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research. The poll states that 48 percent of “Americans wouldn’t be willing to pay even a penny more for gasoline” to combat global warming.

Fox jumped on the poll to fearmonger on the costs of combating climate change, saying any mitigation effort “is going to be painful” and framing it as a standoff between Congress and the American people:

The United States is a signatory to this UN climate change initiative, and Congressman John Dingell of Michigan says we have to come into compliance and do something, and the way to do that is to cause pain to people. If we want to stop global warming, and it’s an urgent situation like many claim it is, it’s going to be painful. [...]

But what we’re finding of course — and here’s the conflict: the American public is not going to take this lying down, and that’s where the conflict is going to come later on.

Watch it:

Fox’s report is — unsurprisingly — flawed for many reasons. The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, the global warming bill expected to reach the Senate floor this summer, does not call for a gasoline tax. The bill features a cap-and-trade system that would gradually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Though the bill does cover the transportation sector, it does not propose that the government impose a tax on gasoline.

Fox’s insistence that combatting climate change would “be painful” is simply another example of the channel’s incessant fearmongering on the topic.

In fact, even the Stephen-Johnson-led Environmental Protection Agency admitted in a report last week that cap-and-trade would barely affect economic growth, confirming many other estimates that show combating global warming is affordable. What’s more, the EPA report did not even take into account the economic benefits from emissions reductions, the enormous cost of inaction, or the significant greenhouse gas reductions already in place due to the 2007 energy bill.

Fox’s insistence that “the public won’t take this lying down” is particularly disingenuous. A BBC poll from November showed that 83 percent of the 22,000 people surveyed in 21 nations said they were willing to make changes in their lifestyles to address global warming. Closer to home, a 2007 poll found that 78 percent of Americans believe we must take action “right away” to mitigate the effects of climate change.