Jake Tapper’s political blog ran an amusing story detailing the happenings of a McCain campaign energy forum today. Clearly, advance didn’t properly vet the panelists and this guy snuck through.
The report:
During a roundtable discussion on energy security at Santa Barbara’s Natural History Museum, one of the panelists invited by the McCain campaign to sit onstage beside the candidate — disagreed with the Arizona senator’s energy plans and lambasted his nuclear energy proposal.
“I’m a little bit bemused that I ended up on this panel,” said Michael Feeney, chair of the Santa Barbara Land Trust, a non-profit conservation group.
He excoriated a proposal McCain outlined last Wednesday to build 45 new nuclear plants in the United States by 2030 and another 55 in later years.
“I don’t understand how it’s not compromising our environmental standards to propose a crash program to build more nuclear power plants when the industry has not complied with the federal law that requires there to be safe disposal for the radioactive waste,” Feeney said.
McCain responded by citing the example of nuclear technology in Europe and Navy ships powered by nuclear energy.
“My friend, the technology is there. The Europeans do it. I mean it’s safe. It’s being done. So, to think that that is going to require some pain on the American people economically when the Europeans– 80 percent of the French electricity is generated by nuclear power. They are doing fine,” McCain said to applause from the audience.
“It’s not a technological breakthrough that needs to be taken,” McCain said, “It’s a not-in-my-backyard problem, we have got to have the guts and courage, to go ahead and do what other countries are doing and they are reducing the pollution to our environment rather dramatically without any huge pain to anybody,” McCain said.
“And I’d like to have you respond but the United States Navy has sailed ships around the world for 60 years with nuclear power plants on them, we have never had an accident, we have never had a problem. And I think the world is safer, the world is safer due to the presence of the United States navy with nuclear power ships on them,” McCain said.
After this beatdown the panelist proceeded to sit down, cry and shit himself.
