The men who would be President went head to head last night in Nashville, Tennessee. Here’s the long-distance information from their debate (transcript extracts from CNN).
First up, as noted by blog commenter Theropod, John McCain is still bashing planetariums. Having previously called Barack Obama’s support for one such venue “foolishness” he was at it again last night, saying:
He [Obama] voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?
Below the fold: more highlights from the debate include both candidates making noises about green energy and feedback.
McCain said, “We can work on nuclear power plants. Build a whole bunch of them, create millions of new jobs. We have to have all of the above, alternative fuels, wind, tide, solar, natural gas, clean coal technology. All of these things we can do as Americans and we can take on this mission and we can overcome it.”
Obama called for more energy efficiency and incentives for US made fuel-effiecint cars. He also called the development of clean coal technologies. On oil he backed offshore drilling and “telling the oil companies, that currently have 68 million acres that they’re not using, that either you use them or you lose them” although he did say “we have three percent of the world’s oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world’s oil. So what that means is that we can’t simply drill our way out of the problem.”
Feedback
Nature’s energy correspondent Jeff Tollefson says:
Last night’s presidential debate was enlightening. Energy repeatedly came up as a top priority for both candidates, even in the face of – and sometimes in response to – the economic crisis. Obama made it his top priority, above even health care, and McCain hammered on it several times as well. Interestingly, neither candidate really addressed the issue of greenhouse gas regulations. There was one question on the topic, and Obama cleverly avoided the issue by talking about clean energy; McCain talked about his climate legislation a bit but did a little dance of his own. Neither explicitly mentioned the need to cut greenhouse gases.
The take home message is that green jobs and energy security, as opposed to climate, are going to be the selling points for any kind of action on global warming moving forward. Politicians in Europe can talk about halting global warming as a primary concern, but that does not appear to be the case here, at least not right now in the minds of the candidates. And that’s fine as far as it goes, but it certainly puts environmentalists on the defensive against dirty domestic energy (think coal-liquefaction).
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During the town hall-style debate in Nashville, Tennessee, the candidates tied US energy development to their solutions for an ailing economy and overseas challenges, putting Russia, Iran and some Middle Eastern energy exporters on notice that cutting US and European reliance on their oil is a top foreign policy priority.
– Platts
Perhaps McCain’s sharpest attack on Obama came in his discussion of energy legislation that “was loaded down with goodies, billions for the oil companies.”
“You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one,” he said, pointing dismissively at Obama. This kind of impersonal dig was unusual in a presidential debate, especially for one between two senators, who normally address one another with particular decorum.
Obama, meanwhile, seemed to see innovations in energy use and production as critical to economic success at home and diplomatic advances overseas.
“We’re going to have to come up with alternatives,” he said, with the U.S. government “working with the private sector to fund the kind of innovation that we can then export to countries like China.”
– AP