Town Hall Debate - Environment: What would you do in your...

SEN. MCCAIN: (Laughs.)

MR. BROKAW: The next question does come from the hall for

Senator McCain.

It comes from Section C over here and it's from

Ingrid Jackson. Ingrid?

Question: Senator McCain, I want to know -- we saw that Congress

moved pretty fast in the face of a(n) economic crisis. I want to know

what you would do within the first two years to make sure that

Congress moves fast as far as environmental issues like climate change

and green jobs.

SEN. MCCAIN: Well, thank you.

Look, we are in tough economic times. We all know that. And

let's keep -- never forget the struggle that Americans are in today.

But when we can -- when we have an issue that we may hand our children

and our grandchildren a damaged planet -- I have disagreed strongly

with the Bush administration on this issue.

I traveled all over the world, looking at the effects of greenhouse

gas emissions. Joe Lieberman and I -- and I introduced the first

legislation, and we forced votes on it. That's the good news, my

friends. Bad news is, we lost. But we kept the debate going, and we

kept this issue to -- to posing to Americans the danger that climate

change opposes (sic).

Now how -- what's -- what's the best way of fixing it? Nuclear

power. Senator Obama says that it has to be safe or disposable or

something like that. Look, I've -- I was on Navy ships that had

nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is safe, and it's clean, and it

creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. And -- and I know that we can

reprocess the spent nuclear fuel. The Japanese, the British, the

French do it, and we can do it too. Senator Ob