Drill here, Drill Now. That’s the name of Newt Gingrich’s new petition to open oil drilling off of America’s coastlines.

Build 45 new nuclear plants by 2030 – that’s McCain’s plan to combat global warming.

They sound like simple solutions, right? In fact, they’re deceptively simple. And they’re not solutions at all.

No offshore drilling

What does drilling off America’s coastlines really mean? Will it help skyrocketing gas prices? The economy? You?

No.

According to predictions made by The U.S. Energy Information Administration last year: “Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017” if the moratorium on offshore drilling were lifted. The agency also estimated that U.S. oil production would increase by a mere 7 percent - about 200,000 barrels a day - by 2030, which would have an "insignificant" impact on oil prices.

So what will drilling do? It will:

• Expose whales and dolphins to potentially lethal seismic testing
• Open the possibility of oil spills on our beaches
• Line the pocketbooks of big oil companies, who are already sitting on top of 68 million acres of leased land that they aren’t drilling on at all, despite their “concern” about high oil prices

No more nuclear plants

McCain says that building 45 new nuclear plants by 2030 is a course of action “as difficult as it is necessary.” Well, he is right in one regard: It will be difficult. It takes billions of dollars and at least 10 years to bring a new nuclear reactor online.

But necessary? Hardly.

In fact, we don’t have 10 years to wait for clean energy to come online. Not that nuclear is all that clean: you still have to mine the uranium used in the reactors – and mining is a dirty, polluting process – and you have to store the nuclear waste somewhere – waste that can be around for centuries, sitting in a storage facility somewhere, susceptible to leaks. Meanwhile, we have solar and wind technologies, and several other renewable technologies, that are ready to be implemented on a large scale right now.

Which brings me to my next point: nuclear reactors cost so much, the utilities aren’t likely to build new plants unless they are heavily subsidized by the federal government. That’s billions upon billions of dollars that we could and should be investing in clean, renewable technologies – the real solutions to global warming and the true path to America’s energy independence.

So what am I asking of YOU? Well that’s actually plain old simple. Newt Gingrich has convinced more than a million people to sign his petition in support of offshore drilling. So I’m asking you to digg here, digg now. Then send a letter to McCain letting him know you're AGAINST false solutions. And if you really want to stop these false solutions from leading us astray, don’t stop there. Tell your friends about this action, send them this blog, ask them to get involved too.

Tell McCain, tell Gingrich, tell Congress: Don’t you dare drill here, don’t you dare drill here ever. And no new nukes! We demand real solutions to global warming!

Senator McCain, once lauded by environmentalists for breaking with the Bush Administration and the republican establishment by acknowledging the need to address climate change, has once again failed to offer realistic solutions to the climate conundrum.

In 2005, McCain larded up his climate legislation with billions of dollars in nuclear subsidies and lost support for his bill. His blind and unquestioning support for the nuclear industry cost him and this country the opportunity to pass climate change legislation.

(See David Corn’s article in Mother Jones, McCain’s Nuclear waste
http://motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/03/john-mccain-nuclear-waste.html)

Yesterday Senator McCain called for 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030. 

The Senator obviously hasn’t learned from his mistakes….

To address climate change, we need solutions that are fast and affordable and nuclear is neither. According to NASA’s climate change guru James Hansen, we have approximately 7 years to address  the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.  Senator McCain’s call for 45 reactors by 2030 ignores this reality.  Even if the Senator becomes President, it will be another decade before any new nuclear reactor in the US generates electricity.  Nuclear power will be too late to abate climate change.  

In addition, new nuclear plants are so prohibitively expensive they may never be built.
In December, nuclear corporations told Florida regulators that a new Westinghouse designed nuclear plant would cost between $12 and $18 billion dollars – more than double earlier estimates for the very same reactors.  [A new Areva designed nuclear plant could cost as much as $24 billion.]  That same month MidAmerican, a subsidiary of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, became the first corporation to postpone a new reactor.  After performing their due diligence review MidAmerican found that building a new reactor did not make economic sense.  

Energy experts ranging from MIT to the Rocky Mountain Institute recognize that energy efficiency and renewable energy are a much more effective hedge against global warming than nuclear power.

Estimates vary, but every dollar spent on efficiency and renewable energy goes 5 to 10 times further in displacing CO2 than a dollar spent on nuclear power.  Wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear power would put America and the world even further behind the climate curve ball. Its time for Senator McCain to get back on the “straight talk express” and provide real solutions to climate change that America can afford and implement before its too late.

-- Jim Riccio