San Francisco -- The McCain-Palin ticket gets basic facts about energy and the environment (and their own records) wrong so consistently that I'm issuing a challenge to illustrate the point. If anyone can find an important, consequential energy or environmental statement that McCain and Palin have gotten right -- besides the one I have identified below -- I'll send them a signed copy of my book Strategic Ignorance. (If more than one person submits the same true statement, the first one to do so will get a book.)
So far I've identified only one such statement: It is true that John McCain bucked his party's Senate leadership to sponsor, with Senator Joe Lieberman, a pioneering bill to limit global warming pollution through a cap and trade system.
Set against that single truth, though, I've compiled the following dozen examples of fundamental untruths:
- That offshore oil leasing now ("drill, baby drill") will yield additional oil supplies in the near term.
To get a copy of my book, find a McCain-Palin statement about energy and the environment that is both true and consequential. ("Alaska produces energy" is not a consequential statement, even though it is true; nor will I consider "we favor nuclear " consequential for this challenge.) It has to have been stated in person by Palin or McCain since McCain won the nomination, and it has to have been uncontradicted by the ticket since then. Website postings don't count but ads do, since McCain has to say "I approve of this message."
Send them to carl.pope@sierraclub.org, and I'll post the results here next week.
Incidentally, the title of my book refers to a concept in game theory -- that in certain "zero sum" games where someone has to lose, it can be possible for a player to do better for himself, and worse for other players, by refusing to learn as he goes along -- and that this strategy summed up George Bush's presidency. I am not suggesting that the McCain-Palin campaign is making similar, "strategic" use of their ignorance -- it's simply another example of a presidential campaign that, sadly, has become all tactics, with no strategy or vision at all.
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