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McCain on Cap-and-Trade

9:26 AM, Jul 11, 2008 • By STEPHEN F. HAYES
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Earlier this week, Larry Kudlow talked to a McCain adviser who told him McCain was moving away from his advocacy of cap-and-trade policies as a way to fight climate change.

...on deep background, this senior McCain advisor told me I was correct: no cap-and-trade. In other words, this central-planning, regulatory, tax-and-spend disaster, which did not appear in Mac's two recent speeches, has been eradicated entirely - even from the detailed policy document that hardly anybody will ever read.

So then I asked this senior official if the campaign has taken cap-and-trade out behind the barn and shot it dead once and for all - buried it in history's dustbin of bad ideas. The answer came back that they are interested in jobs right now - jobs for new energy production and jobs from lower taxes. At that point I became satisfied. Even though a McCain presidency might resurrect cap-and-trade, it will be a much different format. More important, the campaign is cognizant of the conservative rebellion against it.

Yesterday, McCain spokesman Jill Hazelbaker put out a statement saying that it was "totally false" that McCain was minimizing his support for cap-and-trade. Sadly, McCain's comments at a town hall in Michigan suggest that she is correct.

"I believe that human activity, which is generating greenhouse gases, is effecting the climate of our planet. And I believe that in the cap-and-trade system, which I believe would be good for our economy, would be a way of addressing the greenhouse gas emissions which there is palpable evidence all over the planet."

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