Sen. McCain believes in much bigger government than I do. Who knew?

I don’t mean his endorsement of France’s nuclear strategy — although it is going to take a lot of government subsidies and mandates to get this country to build trillions of dollars worth of new nuclear plants by 2050, and McCain would have to force several states to build Yucca mountains-type storage sites (see “here“). Nor do I mean his embrace of a cap & trade that will subject most sectors of the economy to carbon regulations.

To a minor extent, I mean his embrace of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic offsets that will be “certified, measured, and verifiable” — since that will get the government in the business of measuring and monitoring everything else in the economy that isn’t in the cap, since offsets are, by McCain’s own definition, “credits for reductions made from sectors of the economy outside the trading system.”

But primarily he is a big government conservative because he loves adaptation, maybe more than he loves prevention, since his climate plan certainly won’t avert catastrophe. Adaptatation requires very big government — much bigger government than prevention does.

BIG GOVERNMENT ADAPTATION

In his speech (here), McCain spells out just the very beginnings of big government adaptation:

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