McCain's Clean Car Challenge

Senator McCain, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mayor Rudy Giuliani on a campaign stop in California

By aiming his message on a refocused American ingenuity and oil dependency he is targeting, choosing to stand firm on his environmental stance, refusing to give up any ground on it, but also realizing it is a different group of voters he has to appeal to than what he had previously been speaking to when he highlighted environmental policy.

By Citizen Correspondent Wyatt McIntyre

Date Posted: 06/23/08

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Continuing his energy tour, discussing solutions to the mounting issues surrounding America’s dependency on oil, both foreign and domestic, and the increased demand on the commodity, not just in the United States but globally, the Presumptive Republican Nominee Senator John McCain is calling for the development of a new car battery that “has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”

Meeting voters at Fresno State University in California, one of the states where the environment has increasingly become a concern and a priority voting issue, the Arizona Senator has called for a $300 million prize, roughly equating to a dollar for every man, woman and child in the United States, what he is calling “a small price to pay” to relieve the stress of oil dependency, for the developer of this new automobile battery that he hopes will alleviate the current reliance on oil that has caused considerable economic woe within the US, saying that this would “deliver a power source at 30 percent of the current cost.”

Focusing his remarks on a return to American innovation in order to solve the energy crisis, according to his prepared remarks released before the town hall, Senator McCain criticized what he considers waste and mismanagement in the current system, saying that for too long the American government has rewarded lobbyists and special interest, subsidizing them with money that should be better prioritized to actually finding alternative energy sources, summing it up as a policy that has created excessive failure.