Promoter of Green Patriotism Turns Away from McCain

As Republicans gather to officially choose John McCain as their presidential candidate, an influential New York Times columnist who has tirelessly promoted energy and environmental issues as patriotic under a new "green" branding, has given up on the Senator.

Thomas Friedman, author of Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America, said McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, a pro-oil drilling climate science skeptic, as his running mate negates any past maverick tendencies McCain displayed on energy issues.

"Given the fact that Senator McCain deliberately avoided voting on all eight attempts to pass a bill extending the vital tax credits and production subsidies to expand our wind and solar industries, and given his support for lowering the gasoline tax in a reckless giveaway that would only promote more gasoline consumption and intensify our addiction to oil, and given his desire to make more oil-drilling, not innovation around renewable energy, the centerpiece of his energy policy — in an effort to mislead voters that support for drilling today would translate into lower prices at the pump today — McCain has forfeited any claim to be a green candidate," Friedman writes today.

Here's more on Friedman's vision of the climate crisis and how transforming the economy to run on renewable energy is a daunting and necessary challenge:

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