McCain's Power Outage

Contradictions and misstatements short-circuit McCain's energy policy pronouncements.

Viveca Novak and Justin Bank, Newsweek
factcheck.org
Updated: June 20, 2008

Summary
McCain has spent the week focusing on energy policy, making some surprising, and inaccurate, statements.

Among them:
He said that ending a moratorium on offshore oil drilling "would be very helpful in the short term in resolving our energy crisis." But according to a government report, offshore oil wouldn't have much of an impact on supply or prices until 2030.

McCain tried to paint Obama as an opponent of nuclear power, yet Obama has said he is open to nuclear energy being part of the solution and has supported bills that contained nuclear subsidies.

He has soft-pedaled the "cap" portion of his cap-and-trade proposal for greenhouse gases, even denying that it would be a mandate. The cap is a mandatory limit, however, and McCain even says so on his Web site.

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