McCain has been an opponent of renewable energy all his political life. Why?

1. He is a conservative — and that is what conservatives do (see “Who got us in this energy mess? Start with Ronald Reagan“).
2. The GOP’s ultra-rich big energy donors don’t like competition and dole out millions to get their way.
3. He has long been uncomfortable around cutting edge technology — witness his Internet illiteracy. As a former FCC chair put it, “Basically, John is a technological troglodyte, and proud of it.”

And yet in his speeches and ads and photo ops, McCain links himself again and again to the very energy sources that he has done everything to thwart.

Why does McCain pretend to love what he really hates, like some modern-day Iago to renewables’ Othello [campaign analogy intended]? Because the public understands that clean tech is a core solution to our energy problems, and no serious candidate for president could possibly campaign on McCain’s actual record.

Fundamentally, McCain hopes the public is as gullible as the traditional media. This election will determine whether he is right.

And make no mistake — McCain hates renewables as much as every other conservative ideologue. Tom Friedman has a rare MSM article, “Eight Strikes and You’re Out,” calling out McCain for missing eight straight votes on renewable tax credits, an article that details all the economic harm McCain’s votes have done to this burgeoning global industry — but hey, McCain would be happy to take a break from campaigning to push pointless coastal drilling to please his Big Oil masters funders.

But these eight missed votes are just the tip of McCain’s anti-renewable iceberg:

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Conservative members of the House have been frothing that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) adjourned the lower chamber of Congress for its traditional August summer district work period — branding it a “five-week vacation” — instead of letting them dictate the agenda. They wish to pass their drilling-centric energy bill, after having blocked numerous other pieces of energy legislation in June and July. Their strategy is to brand Pelosi as a dictator, with pro-drilling conservatives representing the will of “average American people”:

– Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI): “This is the people’s House. This is not Pelosi’s politiburo.”

– Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): “She’s gonna bring us back and not deal with it? The American people are gonna hang her.”

– Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC): “When the people of France were starving, they went to the queen and said, ‘The people have no bread.’ The queen’s answer was, ‘Let them eat cake.’ That is not the kind of answer we expect from the leader of the people’s house in the United States of America.”

– Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ): “There’s going to be a change in this policy, Nancy Pelosi notwithstanding. She can’t repress us forever.”

– Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO): “I can’t answer why she’s acting like a dictator.”

– Rep. Denny Rehlberg (R-MT): “Nancy Pelosi should not hold the American people hostage.”

– Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX): “In your mind, do you believe America is a democracy or a dictatorship?”

In fact, when they are not crying in the dark, it is conservatives who are acting like dictators. Conservatives in the Senate have filibustered an energy agenda supported by the majority of the American people — and of the Congress — over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Bush has declared his intent to veto such legislation over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

And, now, with an industry-friendly energy compromise crafted by the Senate’s self-dubbed “Gang of Ten,” the dictatorial conservatives continue their obstruction. As Gristmill’s David Roberts writes:

McCain has refused to support the compromise. House Republicans have refused to support the compromise. Rush Limbaugh and his band of dittoheads are going absolutely ballistic on the compromise, flooding the legislators responsible with angry phone calls and claiming that it’s going to sink McCain’s presidential campaign.

The only real failure of Pelosi’s tenure has been the lack of strong, mandatory legislation to reduce greenhouse gases passed out of the House. Somehow I don’t think the right wing will be complaining about that any time soon.

UPDATE: From Progress Illinois, Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL) joined the vilification of the Speaker of the House on a local radio show yesterday:

What the American people want is for us to work together to come up with solutions, not to have Nancy Pelosi being the dictator. This is a democracy.

UPDATE II: From Ari’s Freedom Switch, on August 11, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) compared Pelosi to Gorbachev, and himself to Reagan:

Ronald Reagan was a man of many quotes. One of his most famous was given in Berlin, while standing in front of one of the enduring symbols of communism: the Berlin Wall. Fed up with the silent suffering of millions of East Berliners, President Reagan demanded: ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’. Today we stand in the People’s House, where our public debate has been silenced and we also demand: Speaker Pelosi, turn on these lights and give us a vote!

The big energy lie of course is that either John McCain or the Republicans in Congress actually believe in an “all of the above” energy policy. You can read great posts about that from

• Dave Roberts at Grist, Republican rules: The media will not tell the public the real story on the energy clash in Congress, and
• Bill Scher at Campaign for America’s Future: For Conservatives, “All of the Above” Means “No Clean Energy.”
  

Here is Roberts:

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Okay, “scoops” may be a tad strong. But is it just a coincidence that the NYT published a long piece on the $2.5 billion geothermal heat pump industry, “With Energy in Focus, Ground-Source Heat Pumps Win Fans,” just a week after my post on “The ‘other’ geothermal grew 33% in 2006“?

Also, my GHP diagram was considerably more informative, though much less eye-grabbing, than the NYT photo:

For those interested in building such a system, the NYT piece does provide a nice link to all the government and utility incentives available around the country incentives for renewable energy installations — www.dsireusa.org. The piece also answer some questions that readers posed here — namely what is the payback for GHPs?

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June 2008 saw another sharp drop in vehicle miles traveled (aka VMT) according to the Federal Highway Administration’s monthly report on “Traffic Volume Trends.”

Americans drove 4.7 percent less, or 12.2 billion miles fewer, in June 2008 than June 2007 — beating the record-setting drop of March (see here).

Since last November, Americans have driven 53.2 billion miles less than they did over the same period a year earlier — topping the 1970s’ total decline of 49.3 billion miles….

The moving 12-month trend-line is startling and again makes clear $4 a gallon is the first (but not the last) genuine tipping point for U.S. drivers:

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