McCain's Lonely War on Global Warming

By Bill McKibben, OnEarth Magazine. Posted April 1, 2004.

Matthew Stembridge graduated from Dartmouth College in May of 1999. He returned the next winter wearing red tights over orange long johns, a red knit stocking cap, yellow-painted galoshes that reached midcalf, and a red curtain -- his cape -- draped around his neck. "We were doing this global warming campaign for the presidential primaries, young people all across New Hampshire," says Stembridge. "I was Captain Climate, sent back from the future to educate our leaders so they could avert disaster."

Captain Climate made his debut the night in mid-January when Senator John McCain visited Dartmouth. "Someone saved a seat down front for me, and a couple of minutes before it was supposed to start I walked in. The news cameras all swung around in my direction. And then McCain walked in and came straight up to me. 'Hello, captain,' he says. 'Why don't you come up on stage with me.' He introduces me to his wife, Cindy. And then he raises my hand like we're in a boxing ring." About a week later, at another rally, Captain Climate was again in the audience. And this time, McCain announced from the stage, "I'm concerned about climate change. I'm going to do something about it."

And here's the odd thing -- he did. After Karl Rove finally managed to sink his candidacy, McCain went back to Washington and held hearings in the Commerce Committee on global warming. Real hearings, with real scientists. And then, last fall, he managed to force the first real Senate vote on actually doing something about the largest environmental peril our species has yet faced. The bill he drafted with Senator Joe Lieberman was modest to a fault, and it lost 55-43, but at least, 15 years after the issue first surfaced in the public consciousness, there'd been a vote. "We'll be back this year to do it again," he said when I talked with him in Washington earlier this year. "Campaign finance reform took us seven years. This may take longer, but we'll stay at it."

McCain's emergence as Washington's most important champion of global warming legislation raises some interesting questions -- about him, and about the rest of the Republican Party. Is he an isolated outlier or an early sign that some in the GOP might be ready to soften their anti-environmental stance? Since Republicans control most of the levers of our government, the answer to that puzzle may determine in turn whether America rejoins the world effort on environmental change or continues to drift off in its own orbit. McCain may have morphed into Captain Climate -- minus the red cape -- but for all his force of character, is even he powerful enough to turn Washington to his way of thinking?

In many ways, McCain makes an unlikely environmentalist, lacking among other things the strong sense of place that has turned so many people into passionate conservationists. Instead, he was the classic military child -- both his father and grandfather were Navy admirals -- and he made his own career in the service, eventually, of course, ending up in a North Vietnamese prison camp. When he finally hung up his uniform, he settled in Arizona only because it was the home of his second wife. "All my life I had been rootless," he says. In fact, the turning point in his first run for Congress in 1982 came when an opponent called him a carpet-bagger in one debate. "Listen, pal," he said. "I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."

Once he found a home, however, McCain seemed to grow taproots, deep down into the desert sand. He bought a retreat on Oak Creek, near Sedona. His favorite season there, he says, is the spring: "Lots and lots of flowers. Lots and lots of wildlife, especially birds -- wild ducks, quail, hummingbirds, yellow-billed cuckoos, which are very rare. A pair of black hawks. There are javelina, coyote. A cougar passes through once in a while. Deer, beaver. It's the most beautiful place on earth."

So maybe, if you were looking for the reason that John McCain has become the Senate's only western Republican to take environmental issues seriously, you could point to the pure power of landscape. "The ecology of the desert is very fragile. Obviously climate change could have a very serious effect there," he says.

Or maybe the seeds were planted earlier. Republicans often give lip service to the idea that they're "from the party of Theodore Roosevelt," but few are as devoted as McCain. Most environmentalists revere T.R. for the national parks and monuments and wildlife refuges he left dotting the country. But McCain admired him first for his military insight, his courage as a soldier, and his "deeply personal, almost spiritual, sense of patriotism." Those may sound like conservative virtues, but they turned Roosevelt into a crusader: He railed against the notion that private interest always trumps public good. Roosevelt believed, says McCain, that "base materialism tempted people to indolence and greed."

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