Johnah McPalin has a new ad up in Michigan that promises to fix all that ails the American auto industry, but really just shows that McPalin doesn't understand either the problems with the American auto industry or global warming.
He says he'll provide loans in addition to the $25 billion from last December's energy bill for upgrading plants (paid for by the taxpayers in other states, per the Palin Plan) and extend current tax credits for ULEV cars. But the kicker is this one:
Offshore drilling to reduce the cost of gas and spur truck sales.
Say what? The primary reason the American auto industry is getting its cheese handed to it (beyond onerous health care costs that could be fixed by having a single payer health care system) is that they keep producing these monstrously huge Hummers and other stupidly big trucks while the Japanese, Korean, German and other companies are producing high-quality, reasonably sized cars that get half decent gas mileage.
But McCain wants to drill for oil to lower prices so Detroit can go back to building Hummers and selling them to corporate entities at tax-advantaged rates. That's a good thing? (We'll lay aside the painful reality that offshore drilling won't produce enough to actually reduce gasoline prices much, certainly not as much as increasing average fuel efficiency would be reducing consumption.)
And while he provides a sop to the low-emission vehicles, the tax credits he's talking about are on the consumer side and not the industry side. That'll benefit Honda and Toyota and Nissan with existing lines of cars that meet those standards as much if not more than Ford and Chevrolet and Chrysler. So the non-Michigan companies with existing lines benefit by sticking with their current models, and the Michigan companies have to totally retool to take advantage.
Which means that, while the country is trying to reduce greenhouse gasses, McCain wants to drill offshore so Detroit can keep producing trucks that make global warming all the worse.
That's not change we can believe in. /creepy grin