McCain oil plan relies on Middle East

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By Stephen Dinan

Sen. John McCain caps his weeklong push for U.S. energy independence with a trip Friday to Canada, but his own environmental plan discourages use of Canadian oil and drastically increases American reliance on oil from the Middle East and other potentially unfriendly places.

The presumed Republican presidential nominee called last year to expand California's low carbon fuel standard, which measures the amount of greenhouse gases needed to produce fuel and punishes use of "dirty" heavy crude oil in favor of conventional light crude or alternative fuels.

Expanding that plan nationwide would force U.S. refiners to buy less American and Canadian oil - which come increasingly from dirty sources like shale and tar sands - and instead use more oil from the Middle East.

"We are likely to increase our dependence on just those very countries we all worry about," said William Koetzle, senior vice president of public policy at the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank that promotes free-market solutions. "If you create disincentives for the use of Canadian oil, it'll have to be replaced with oil from another place, and that probably means oil from OPEC."

Mr. McCain, who just this week praised Canada as a secure source of oil, embraced a national fuel standard plan last year at a press conference with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mr. McCain has made his support for environmental issues a major part of his presidential campaign, and uses it as a key issue where he breaks with many other Republicans.

McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers responded with the following statement late last night:

"The concept behind California's Low-Carbon Fuel Standard is to use less oil in our transportation sector. Canada joined in to this agreement self-imposing emissions standards on the extracting of their oil resources. Ultimately, an international cap and trade system will allow us to regularize the system by which countries offset and reduce their emissions, but in the short term we should look for a cleaner and more efficient way to extra to oil resources from the tar sands."

The senator from Arizona has been outspoken about the need to end dependence on oil from dangerous places, but he is not the only one to embrace expanding California's standard nationwide. Sen. Barack Obama, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, last year introduced a bill in the Senate to do just that.

"Beginning in 2010, we will require petroleum makers to reduce the carbon content of their fuel mix 1 percent per year by selling more clean, alternative fuels in its place," Mr. Obama told the Detroit Economic Club in May 2007. "This proposal will spur greater production and availability of renewable fuels like cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel, and it will even create an incentive for the production of more flexible-fuel and plug-in hybrid vehicles that can use these clean fuels or charge up with renewable electricity."

A low carbon fuel standard looks at the entire greenhouse gas emissions it takes to drill for, transport and use fuel, known as a wells-to-wheels analysis.