Obama Election Watch

John McCain is fond of portraying himself as an environmentalist following in the footsteps of GOP President Teddy Roosevelt. But in fact McCain has a distinctly unfavorable record on environmental issues.

In 2007 McCain got a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters because he missed every vote that the group deemed was important to the environment. McCain defended his absence when key environmental votes were taken with the excuse that he was running for president and that he was on the campaign trail. But Barack Obama, who was also on the campaign trail for much of 2007, managed to return to Washington to vote on many of the key environmental proposals.

McCain’s inferior, and in many cases hypocritical, environmental record needs to be exposed, particularly in battleground states such as Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, and New Hampshire where the environmental issue is very high on the list of voters’ concerns.

Here are some details on McCain’s record:

• McCain has secured favorable property deals on federal lands for campaign contributors. Some of these deals included land in national forests and other open space areas that were important habitat for area wildlife.

• In 2005 McCain voted to cut $3.3 billion in funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and other clean water programs.

• Frequently, McCain’s record on environmental issues turns on the direction of the political winds. McCain has pushed land swap deals which have produced expansion of some critical habitats in return for granting developers approval for massive construction projects. Many of these developers had been McCain campaign contributors. Rob Smith, director of the Sierra Club in Arizona, told the Washington Post, “When the public trust intersects with private interests, he [McCain] has favored land development in every case.”

• When the endangered red squirrel got in the way of a McCain-favored construction project on Mount Graham in Arizona, McCain pushed to set aside Endangered Species Act protection for the animal.

• McCain now proposes to end a nearly three-decade federal prohibition against drilling on the continental shelf. History shows there is no such thing as safe drilling or safe pumping of oil in offshore areas that are vital to the economy and well-being of Florida and other coastal states. Even putting aside the possible environmental damage that may occur, offshore drilling would not have any significant impact on gas prices. It would be a decade or more before drilling in these areas produced any meaningful uptick in domestic supplies.

• In pushing his offshore drilling proposals McCain has claimed that there were no oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico during hurricanes Rita and Katrina. He is stating an untruth. Although the oil platforms were shut down prior to the hurricanes, there was significant leakage from damaged oil pipelines. Estimates of oil spilled from pipelines, refineries, and onshore storage tanks as a result of the hurricance range as high as 9 million barrels.

• The League of Conservation Voters rates John McCain as supporting the group’s position on legislation only 24 percent of the time during his tenure in the Senate. On the other hand, Obama’s rating is 86 percent.

• Over the last two Congresses, McCain has supported the legislative position of Defenders of Wildlife less than half the time.

• In 2005 McCain voted against a bill to require electric utilities to produce at least 10 percent of their energy from clean, renewable sources by the year 2020.

• In 2005 McCain also opposed legislation which would have required automakers to meet 40-mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency standards by the year 2015.

• Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, sums up the McCain record stating, “In his quarter-century in Congress McCain has demonstrated a pattern of voting with polluters and special interests instead of consumers and the planet.”

Publicizing McCain’s unfavorable environmental record is an important weapon for the Obama campaign in attracting swing voters in key battleground states. By letting the public know of McCain’s record, Obama can deny the GOP the ability to claim that McCain is an environmentally friendly, Teddy Roosevelt-type politician. Particularly, voters in key battleground states need to be made aware of McCain’s poor and often politicized record on environmental issues.

Once more, the fall election could turn on results in Florida. Florida is a state where there are millions of dedicated birders who are strongly opposed to GOP environmental policies that have enabled developers to cause destruction of millions of acres of bird habitats. A large number of voters in Florida, many of them GOP supporters, may be persuaded to shift their allegiance to Obama once they have viewed McCain’s environmental record.