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Friends of the Earth Action ad against John McCain

Submitted by Matt on Sun, 04/27/2008 - 03:06.

I mostly like this ad from Friends of the Earth Action, released on Earth Day, slamming John McCain for what will certainly be a disastrous environmental policy should he be elected.

To be fair, I could support nuclear energy if we had a good way to dispose of nuclear waste. That's not a popular position to take, but I do feel that nuclear energy is a good option, but only after we figure out where to store the waste, or find a way to permanently neutralize it.

But that's not the point of the ad. The truth is, John McCain doesn't have a clue about the environment, and never will. Then again, John McCain doesn't have a clue about hardly anything, so what's new.

This is from the FoE Action press release:

“It is outrageous for Senator McCain to portray himself as tough on spending and as a friend of the environment, and then go out and push all this pork for corporate polluters. That’s not straight talk,” said Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth Action. “Instead of adding more pork for the nuclear industry, Senator McCain should be trying to cut the fat that’s already there.”

Blackwelder noted that McCain’s opponents in the presidential campaign, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have voiced support for a different approach to global warming—a cap-and-trade system that makes polluters pay for their pollution via a 100 percent auction of pollution permits. When the Lieberman-Warner bill came before the Senate’s environment and public works committee in December, Clinton offered an amendment to eliminate many of its giveaways by adding 100 percent auctions to the bill. Obama has spoken of his support for 100 percent auctions as a key difference between himself and McCain.

McCain’s attempt to add more polluter pork to the global warming bill is hardly the only recent strike against his environmental record. He also failed to show up for two votes within the last six months that would have promoted clean energy solutions such as wind and solar power; each of those measures failed by a one-vote margin, and the other presidential candidates showed up to vote.

“There is a wide gulf between McCain and the Democratic candidates on environmental issues and global warming,” Blackwelder said. “These ads are calling attention to that gulf with the hope of persuading McCain to start taking the legislative actions that are logically required to erase it. Opposing polluter giveaways in the Lieberman-Warner bill would be a good first step.”



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Good news!

You'll be pleased to learn that the nuclear waste problem has been solved. Spent fuel is being reprocessed, as it is in the UK, and more countries are setting up to do it, including the US. Reprocessing the wastes separates out the valuable uranium and transuranic actinides to use as fuel. The remaining wastes are only 3% of what was there before and lose their toxicity in much less time. chart] Many geologic places, such as caves or abandoned mines, could store those wastes safely. Besides that, proven technology exists to irradiate the wastes into other, shorter-lived materials. [source ] To deal with the wastes this way doesn't require any technological breakthroughs, just a political decision.

Although I am not a McCain supporter (at least not at this moment) I'd strongly recommend that anyone should look for better information sources than FoE. A stridently political organization like that could never be a reliable source of information.

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