This is the third post in our investigative series on American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF).

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has completed his journey from “maverick” to the heart of the right-wing/Big Oil movement. His travels began last month when he abandoned his longheld opposition to offshore drilling. With increasing ease, McCain is shilling for the oil industry’s agenda. In today’s appearance before the Urban League, McCain said:

Last month, the President finally lifted the executive ban on offshore oil and gas exploration, and called on Congress to lift its ban as well. Lifting that ban could seriously lower the price of oil — and Congress should get it done immediately. We need to “drill more, drill now, and pay less at the pump.”

McCain is being “cruelly misleading” when he pretends ending the moratorium on Outer Continental Shelf drilling “could seriously lower the price of oil.” Only a month ago, McCain was honest about how useless it would be, saying “I don’t see an immediate relief,” just “a psychological impact that I think is beneficial.”

The old, straight-talking McCain has hopped a ride on the low-road express. McCain is raking in the Big Oil millions, and oil-industry lobbyists such as Nancy Pfotenhauer have taken control of the campaign. He’s using the “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” slogan of Newt Gingrich’s 527 corporation American Solutions for Winning the Future — the type of organization McCain once tried to ban — while Gingrich is in closed-door meetings with right-wing representatives and attacking Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) on Fox News. Rush Limbaugh counseled McCain to embrace the AWSF campaign on June 13, four days before McCain announced his support for offshore drilling:

It’s that simple. Drill here. Drill now. Pay less. We’re the United States of America. We can do it.

The day after McCain flipped, Rush gave his approval:

All right, all right, all right, drill here, drill now, pay less. Drill here. Drill now. Pay less. Folks, this is the issue.

Behind this common agenda is the same network of right-wing financiers that propelled Bush into office. There are 14 Bush Pioneers — the top fundraisers who bundled over $100,000 in contributions for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 — backing Newt Gingrich’s ASWF:

Fourteen Bush Pioneers, who funneled over $2 million to Bush’s election, have contributed over $4 million to Newt’s ASWF. Eight of those same right-wing money men are top McCain fundraisers, channelling $2 million into his coffers. Four — including top ASWF contributor Sheldon Adelson — are billionaires. Their agenda is all about “Winning the Future” for themselves.

UPDATE: In the question-and-answer period at the Urban League, John McCain dismissed the truth that lifting the offshore drilling moratorium couldn’t “seriously lower the price,” appealing to his talks with “the actual people that do the work, that are in the business”:

So I disagree with those experts and I’ve talked to the actual people that do the work, that are in the business that say within months and certainly within a very short time, we could have additional oil supply for this nation. So we ought to drill now.

Watch it:

Friends of the Earth: “By all appearances McCain has lost touch with reality.” The Sierra Club: “Senator McCain may ‘disagree with the experts,’ but that doesn’t make the facts go away.”

*if the nuke meets government regulations — a big if, as we’ve seen.

The effect of radiation is not a subject I blog on a great deal, although it is a subject I have studied a great deal. Indeed, my uncle, a former nuclear physics professor at MIT, started our family Radon testing business, which was sold off years ago.

I asserted that people should be worried about low doses of radiation, especially cumulatively over time. Charles Barton of The Nuclear Green Revolution commented, “Your low doses over time assertion has been repeatedly falsified by empirical studies.” Quite the reverse is true. As the National Research Council’s Committee to Assess Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation (!) reported definitively three years ago:

A preponderance of scientific evidence shows that even low doses of ionizing radiation, such as gamma rays and X-rays, are likely to pose some risk of adverse health effects, says a new report from the National Academies’ National Research Council…..

“The scientific research base shows that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial,” said committee chair Richard R. Monson, associate dean for professional education and professor of epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston. “The health risks — particularly the development of solid cancers in organs — rise proportionally with exposure. At low doses of radiation, the risk of inducing solid cancers is very small. As the overall lifetime exposure increases, so does the risk.”

The research is in fact based on empirical data. You can read the whole NRC report, the seventh in a series on this subject dating back decades, here.

Now to be other interesting question: From a radiation perspective, is it worse to live near a coal plant or a nuclear?

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The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a very good new website on global climate change. It offers a nice summary of the relevant science in a variety of areas: key indicators, evidence, causes, effects, uncertainties, solutions. The website is a good place to send people who are uninformed on global warming, but looking for basic information.

JPL has a very nice front-page banner with pulldown menus providing data on “Vital Signs of the Planet,” including Arctic sea ice, carbon dioxide, sea level rise, global temperature, and the ozone hole. Here is the expanded chart showing the recent 70% jump in sea level rise:

“The chart [above] shows historical sea level data derived from 23 tide-gauge measurements. The chart on the right shows the average sea level since 1993 derived from global satellite measurements, updated here monthly. Sea level rise is associated with the thermal expansion of sea water due to climate warming and widespread melting of land ice.”

If you go to Key Indicators page, you can run your mouse over the final data point, which shows that the trend continues. JPL gets their data from the University of Colorado, which has extended their plot through the end of 2008:

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I don’t normally recommend products — and I don’t want people sending me any samples, unless you are a manufacturer of plug-in hybrids. But I saw this in the Washington Post and couldn’t resist.

Smencils are “The world’s only gourmet scented pencils made from 100% recycled newspapers.”

Now I must confess I have never even used one. But the name alone is worth the price.

My one dispute with the Washington Post article that recommends smencils, “Planet-Friendly Buys for a Home Away From Home,” is that they see smencils as something you would give green college students. I don’t really see that. College students don’t use a lot of pencils. I see this more as something for green middle school students.

The WSJ‘s Environmental Capital blog is a must read. But what exactly were they thinking with this column:

So you think you’re being virtuous by trading in the SUV for, say, a Prius? What if, instead, you’re really sticking the next guy in line with higher pump prices?

Yes, the WSJ is revoking the law of supply and demand. Less demand translates into higher pump prices! How is this possible, you ask?

In the debate over why oil prices are so high, and where they’re going from here, there’s an intriguing idea making the rounds: The West’s sudden urge to kick the oil habit may run the risk of making oil even pricier in coming years.

The logic goes like this: Despite all the talk of “peak oil,” big producers in OPEC, and Russia and Mexico could tap 8 million to 10 million barrels per day of new oil — if they got the right market signals. That new supply would be enough to meet the world’s oil demand in the next decade, buying time to gradually shift over to a less oil-intensive economy without the whiplash oil-price volatility of recent months.

What? “If they got the right market signals”?? So, $130 a barrel is not the right market signal??? We’re to believe that OPEC, Russia, and Mexico are withholding oil that could provide them revenues exceeding $1 billion a day at current prices???? I lack sufficient question marks for this post. But it gets better:

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Great Paul Krugman column in the NYT today. And another absurd Charles Krauthammer column in the Washington Post today — yes, I know, that’s a dog bites man story (see Krauthammer’s strange denier talk points, Part 1: Newton’s laws were “overthrown” and Part 2: The real reason conservatives don’t believe in climate science).

They both teed off Nancy Pelosi’s statement that one of the reasons she was blocking a vote on coastal drilling was, “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet.”

Krugman understood that, notwithstanding the fact that offshore drilling would never have a significant impact on oil prices (see “The cruel offshore-drilling hoax“), she was talking about global warming: “Beyond that, Ms. Pelosi’s response shows that she understands the deeper issues behind the current energy debate.”

As Krugman points out, that point is utterly lost on Senator McCain, who has now become “a standard drill-and-burn Republican.” Krugman’s worry:

… if a completely bogus claim that environmental protection is raising energy prices can get this much political traction, what are the chances of getting serious action against global warming? After all, a cap-and-trade system would in effect be a tax on carbon (though Mr. McCain apparently doesn’t know that), and really would raise energy prices.

Exactly.

Needless to say, this point is entirely lost on Charles Krauthammer. Entirely.

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Massachusetts recently enacted a bill called the Green Communities Act to promote renewable energy with mandates an incentives. Massachusetts already had a Renewable Portfolio Standard, but this legislation doubles the adoption rate required, increases net metering for wind and solar from 60 kilowatts to 2 megawatts, and requires utilities to sign 10 to 15-year contracts for renewable energy. Masschusetts plans to have 4% renewables by 2009, increasing by 1% each year (e.g. 15% in 2020), with no cap. It allows utilities to put solar on their customers’ roofs.

The legislation also promotes efficiency with rebates for lighting and air conditioning, and mandates all utilitiy efficiency improvements that cost less than it does to generate power.

–Earl K.