John McCain played a central role in cap-and-trade legislation during the George W. Bush administration. Greens wants their McCain back

Over the years, Sen. John McCain has been known to change his views every now and then. Environmentalists hope this is one of those times.

Now that McCain has dispatched a conservative primary challenger and Arizona appears set to send him back to the Senate, climate advocates are optimistic they will soon regain one of their biggest champions.


The former GOP presidential candidate played a central role in forcing votes on cap-and-trade legislation during the George W. Bush administration. But McCain has been AWOL on the issue since losing the White House almost two years ago to Barack Obama, leaving his former allies without a powerful Republican voice as they sank on Capitol Hill.

Several environmentalists said they understand McCain’s political situation back home meant he couldn’t be a leader as he fought tea party favorite J.D. Hayworth. Even so, and despite the likelihood the window on cap and trade has closed, they’re hoping they get him back.

“There’s something to be said for making sure he lived for another day,” said David Jenkins, government affairs director at Republicans for Environmental Protection. “He’s not going to do very much for the climate fight if he’s sitting at home and J.D. Hayworth is sitting in the Senate.”

McCain’s climate record is well-established. He latched onto the issue after losing the 2000 presidential nod to Bush. To the dismay of GOP leaders, the Arizona senator demanded floor votes twice on legislation capping carbon emissions and, after losing badly, pledged to keep up the fight, just as he did on campaign finance reform.

“Over time, we will not be elected Miss Congeniality in the Senate, but we will win,” he said in April 2006.

But McCain backed away again after losing the White House in 2008. He lashed out when President Obama’s first budget blueprint assumed billions of dollars in new revenue from passage of climate legislation. He dubbed the House’s cap-and-trade bill a “monstrosity” because of the last-minute deals that Democrats cut to gain its passage.

And McCain repeatedly poked Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) by demanding that climate negotiations consider revisiting the Obama administration’s decision to shutter the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in the Nevada desert.

Multiple sources said McCain reassured them in private that he still believed in the climate issue. But he said he wouldn’t be at the front of the pack if Obama didn’t take the lead himself. And that meant staying on the sidelines even as two of his closest Senate friends, Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), struggled to find consensus.

“If Obama had been serious about this bill, the thing to do would have been to approach McCain and say, ‘We want to honor you on this,’” said an environmentalist in the middle of the climate debate. “But the notion John Mc­Cain was going to turn out in traffic with John Kerry and Lindsey Graham? Of course he’d say no to that. Anyone would say no to that.”

McCain spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan insisted last week that the senator wouldn’t change his tune on climate change now that he’s beaten Hayworth and moved on to the general election campaign against Democrat Rodney Glassman.

“Sen. McCain’s position remains the same: emphasizing the importance of nuclear power,” she said. “And obviously the key components of a real nuclear power program are reprocessing and storage, which this administration has failed to focus on, specifically by closing Yucca Mountain.”

Conservatives doubt McCain will come back to Washington next year espousing his previous views on climate change, including support for cap and trade.

“Sen. McCain was very pointed and direct in his criticism of all of the climate proposals this Congress,” said Andrew Wheeler, former Republican staff director of the Environment and Public Works Committee. “I would be surprised if he were to move back towards supporting cap and trade.”

Myron Ebell, a skeptic on climate science, predicts McCain will dabble in other issues sure to upset the right — just not global warming.

“Now that Sen. McCain has won the primary election by pretending to be a solid conservative, I expect he will return to type and find a fashionable liberal cause or two to promote and thereby gain the approbation of the establishment and particularly of the mainstream media,” Ebell said. “However, I doubt that one of those causes will be global warming. That’s because cap and trade has passed its sell-by date. Energy-rationing policies are dead for the next Congress. Sen. McCain will pick something that’s trendy rather than beating a dead horse.”

But others see McCain stepping back into the mix on climate, and some predict it with a hint of sarcasm.

“Frankly, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t flip-flop,” said Jennifer Johnson, a spokeswoman at the Arizona Democratic Party, which has joined Glassman in hammering McCain on what they say are shifting policy positions.

The day after McCain’s primary win, Washington Post blogger Stephen Stromberg poked fun at McCain by joking that he’d obtained a copy of the senator’s personal planner.

At the top: “Call Lindsey Graham. Explain that junk-mail filter trapped all those e-mails he sent me begging for help on climate change this year. Install junk-mail filter software so this excuse seems plausible.”

More seriously, Manik Roy, vice president of federal government outreach at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said he still is holding stock in McCain’s return to climate change because the senator didn’t join other GOP candidates in attacking the science of global warming.

“That, in this election season, actually makes him a little unusual,” Roy said. “It speaks to his continuing convictions on this issue.”

Chelsea Maxwell, a climate aide to former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), said McCain is well-positioned to play a role in the next round of the debate, given that the terrain is shifting away from comprehensive legislation and toward more piecemeal approaches.

“He was the original crusader,” she said. “We’re going to be looking for that big happy space in the middle to get things done, and that’s what he’s best at.”

Jenkins said he expects McCain to come back to the climate fold given the credentials he displayed on the issue during a heated 2008 GOP presidential primary. “Even some of the debates, when they didn’t ask a question about it, he’d make a point of bringing it up,” he said.

But he doubts McCain alone will be anywhere near enough to make a difference on climate legislation in the next Senate — which could include more GOP skeptics like Rand Paul from Kentucky and Joe Miller from Alaska.

“You need more than one Republican locking arms and moving forward to find a solution,” he said.