9.5.2008 2:10 PM

Who's Got His Ear? McCain's Energy Advisers

The Pro-Drilling Vice President, the Economist, the National Security Hawk and the Climate Change Statesman

By Dan Shapley

A president is only as good as his advisers, and voters should remember that they elect not bestow power on a president, but also his team and his party.

Here's a look at McCain's advisers on energy and environmental issues.

Sarah Palin

McCain's choice for vice president is many things: a woman with executive experience who connects with everyday Americans. She's no environmentalist.

Sarah Palin supports drilling for oil wherever there is oil, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where McCain has said oil drilling should be off-limits, and offshore, where McCain also wants to drill, if states approve it.

She opposes the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species with Endangered Species Act protections, and has said she doubts global warming is caused by humans.

She has spoken in favor of McCain's "all of the above" approach to energy policy, and framed energy issues in national security terms. But to the degree that she is influential in a McCain administration, we could expect her to argue for increasing fossil fuel extraction, not transforming the economy to run on renewable or alternative energies.

R. James Woolsey

A former CIA director turned energy policy guru and clean tech investor, R. James Woolsey Jr. minces no words when it comes to the nation's energy situation. Dependence on foreign oil is a threat to national and economic security that won't go away until our dependence on oil goes away. The only solution, as Woolsey sees it, is investing in renewable and alternative energy, particularly in the transportation sector.

Woolsey is a founding member of Set America Free, which understands that even new domestic oil production won't reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil, since oil is a globally traded commodity, and which advocates for investments in alternative fuel and electric vehicles to eliminate demand for oil.

Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin

A former director of the Congressional Budget Office, and a professor, economist Holtz-Eakin is McCain's top policy advisor. Grist says he both has "a dauntingly long resume and a reputation among policy wonks on both sides of the aisle for fair-minded number crunching" and says he is "much more typical of the conservatives McCain is likely to find available to fill his administration".

John Raidt

Has advised McCain since 2000, and speaks about the nexus between energy, global warming and national security, about the benefits of cap-and-trade legislation to curtail carbon emissions, and about the international implications of U.S. climate change policy. To read more about him, see this transcript from a May 2007 Brookings Institution panel discussion.