Posted on 11/16/2004 2:20:16 PM PST by Jenya
Election Over, McCain Criticizes Bush on Climate Change
Wasting no time distancing himself from President Bush on an issue that has long divided them, Senator John McCain yesterday called the White House stance on climate change "terribly disappointing" and said inaction in the face of mounting scientific data was unjustified.
Sen. John McCain campaigned with President Bush.
Two weeks after the end of a campaign in which he stumped for Mr. Bush's re-election, Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, is convening a Senate hearing today on the human effect on climate and what to do about it.
Mr. Bush, citing the cost to the economy and what the administration describes as the uncertainty of the science, has opposed restrictions on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases since early 2001, when he abandoned a pledge he made in his first presidential campaign to restrict carbon dioxide from power plants.
In contrast, for three years Mr. McCain has pushed for a bill he wrote with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, that would create the first, modest curbs on greenhouse gases.
"This is a very time-sensitive issue," he said in an interview yesterday.
Dana M. Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said that Mr. Bush saw climate change as a serious issue but that he favored using voluntary means to slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, as "a first step in an aggressive strategy to meet the challenge of long-term global climate change."
The focus of today's hearing, the last of Mr. McCain's six-year tenure as chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, will be rapid warming in the Arctic, the subject of a recent report by a panel of nearly 300 scientists. The report, commissioned by eight nations with Arctic territory, including the United States, found that rising temperatures had already eroded glaciers, sea ice and permafrost and could lead to vast changes in the region's environment and in global sea levels by the end of the 21st century.
The hearing is the latest of more than a dozen on human-caused global warming that Mr. McCain has convened during his chairmanship of the committee. The new chairman is expected to be Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican who has voted against Mr. McCain's bill but has often said that the warming climate poses a severe challenge to his state and particularly to indigenous Arctic cultures.
The hearings have been organized in part to build a case for the McCain-Lieberman bill, called the Climate Stewardship Act.
Mr. McCain said that the bill, which he describes as modest, had probably lost some support in the Senate because of the election results, but that he looked at this as a temporary setback.
"We got 43 votes," he said of the last vote on the bill, a year ago. "We may get less than that given the change in the Senate. But we need to get people on the record.''
Environmental campaigners and industry lobbyists have tended to agree that whatever the bill's short-term prospects in the Senate, it is very unlikely to pass in the House any time soon.
Mr. McCain said he had decided to agree to disagree with Mr. Bush on the issue during the campaign. But he strongly criticized frequent assertions by the White House, many Republican legislators and industry lobbyists that inaction was justified by uncertainty in the science.
For their part, advocates associated with industry say Mr. McCain has custom-tailored his hearings to play up the direst climate projections.
After a McCain climate hearing in September, for example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian group opposed to regulations as a solution to most environmental problems, described the gathering as "another pep rally to build support for his energy rationing legislation" and said it had "focused on junk science."
But Mr. McCain said yesterday that the evidence, which he called alarming, was clearer than ever.
With several other senators, he visited the Arctic fringe in Norway and Iceland in late summer.
"It was remarkable,'' he said, "going up on a small ship next to this glacier and seeing where it had been just 10 short years ago and how quickly it's receded.''
Particularly disturbing, he went on, is the rapid pace of warming.
"The Inuit language for 10,000 years never had a word for robin," he said, "and now there are robins all over their villages."
McLame & Pat. Sorry but I would vote Pat next election but NEVER McLame.
I'd vote pat also but our sanitation department hires direct.
Heck with mccain. Let him go stick his nose up nbc's a$$.
Heck with mccain. Let him go stick his nose up nbc's a$$.
He's back! I actually feel better when McCain is criticizing the President, then I know it is the real John McCain. He bothers me when he agrees with him -- keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.
McLame at it again - arrrggghh.... I am so sick of this idiot.
I keep wondering what sort of brainwashing/reprogramming the VietCong did to him in 'Nam....
Ay, yi yi.
I see where Arizona actually does have one Republican senator, though -- Senator Kyl.
But this guy... oy!
Dan
Hey John. Think about it this way - warmer weather might mean more strawberries. Delicious strawberries. You can put them on ice cream. If you have a lot of them, you can have more and it won't matter if a few get eaten by disloyal citizens. You won't even have to search for keys.
ohhhh . . . Good strawberries. On ice cream. All for you.
LOL!!! That kind of sums up my reaction as well! And to think someone posted the day after the election that McCain should run for President. :(
I must be losing it. I saw the headline and actually thought it was a joke.
Having pretty much made of mess of campaign financing, John McCain moves on to doing the same to the economy.
I'll bet they never had a word for television either so what's his point? Bush has it right when he says the science is unproven.
Well, in a way it is. It's about McCain.
The Senate hearing held by McCain was on briefly today, C-Span... The NASA guys were there lobbying hard for their work, modeling, observing and the Kyoto Treaty!
John McCain belongs on the Arctic fringe, he is the Arctic fringe.
I just listened to about 10 minutes of his earlier hearing today (on C-Span). He managed to get in 2 snide remarks about the President. I can't stand this man. It's not that he disagrees with Bush, it's the disagreeable way he constantly does so. Never did he manage make similar remarks about Kerry's policies, in fact he regularly jumped to his defense and portrayed him as a worthy opponent. I have no clue as to why he supported Bush.
Who?
BTTT!!!!!!!
Once a ho....
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