To: Traditional Media
From: Climate Progress
Subject: Some questions for McCain’s big energy speech tomorrow
Summary: Don’t believe the McCain mantra that he is a straight talker. He is just an equal opportunity panderer who keeps counting on you to let him have it both ways.
To pander to independents, McCain says he wants to require a 70% cut in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.
To pander to conservatives, he now says “I’ll call for lifting the federal moratorium for states that choose to permit exploration.”
[Questions for McCain: Did you know that even if the drilling you now support is incredibly successful and generates 800,000 barrels of oil a day many years from now, that would only not knock 2 cents a gallon off the price of gasoline! How can you sharply cut US fossil fuel emissions if you propose drilling for more fossil fuels?]
To pander to independents, McCain says he is for a cap-and-trade system to achieve his domestic CO2 emissions reductions.
But to pander to mandate-hating conservatives, he repeatedly denies that such a system is mandatory (see “McCain’s Double-Talk Express on Global Warming” and “John McCain is a compulsive doubletalker“). Just today he gave a true doublethink answer in his press conference:
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
