VP candidates have strong differences on environment

Voters looking for stark differences between the two parties' tickets on environmental issues should turn to the No. 2 position.

While the distinctions between John McCain and Barack Obama are often shades of gray, it's far more black-and-white with vice-presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden.

Palin, the Republican governor of the nation's biggest oil producer, is an outspoken promoter of more oil drilling as a key to solving the country's energy woes. She, like many Alaskans from both parties, wants the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge opened to oil exploration — a hot-button issue for environmentalists and drilling advocates.

She also has been a skeptic about whether humans are contributing to global warming, though she has tempered that position since joining the McCain ticket. Last year, she told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, "I'm not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity."

Her administration also filed a lawsuit challenging the federal listing of polar bears under the Endangered Species Act, based partly on shrinking sea ice thought to be connected to climate change.

Since then, in an interview with ABC, Palin offered a qualified statement that "I believe that man's activities certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming."

Her positions on these issues are at odds with McCain. He opposes drilling in the Arctic refuge. And he was one of the first Republicans in Congress to warn that humans were part of a global-warming problem, and that U.S. action is needed.

Biden and Obama overlap far more.

While foreign affairs dominated Biden's Senate career, he has supported federal regulations aimed at cutting greenhouse gases 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. That's the same target set by the Obama campaign. Biden in 2006 helped sponsor a resolution calling on the U.S. to rejoin international climate talks.

In his recent debate with Palin, he called global warming "clearly man-made."

Biden has supported initiatives requiring more use of renewable electricity such as wind power, and co-sponsored a bill designating the Arctic refuge as protected wilderness off-limits to drilling.

Warren Cornwall: 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com