SANTA BARBARA — John McCain came to California promoting an array of ideas to spur the market for clean cars and otherwise reduce carbon emissions.
But in this coastal city, the site of a disastrous oil spill in 1969, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee was dogged by critics at nearly every turn for his recent embrace of offshore drilling.
During an environmental round table Tuesday morning at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, McCain endured a lecture on his new position from one of the panelists invited by his campaign -- an anomaly in a tightly controlled political effort.
Michael Feeney, executive director of the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, repudiated McCain's position on offshore drilling, as well his advocacy for building 45 nuclear power plants by 2030.
Before an audience of about 200, Feeney told McCain that he appreciated the candidate's rhetoric on balancing the nation's energy needs with environmental concerns, but that he didn't understand "how it's not compromising our environmental standards to propose a crash program to build more nuclear power plants."
In criticizing McCain's offshore drilling plan, Feeney said it would be unwise to "drain America's offshore oil and gas reserves as quickly as possible in the hopes of driving down the cost of gasoline" when it would take years before those resources could be extracted.
"We should be saving as much as possible the oil resources of this country, because we are going to need those for a long, long time to come, and we should be mostly focusing on reducing demand and improving efficiency," Feeney said.
Outside the museum, several dozen environmental protesters denounced McCain, who was finishing a two-day California swing. The protesters carried anti-drilling signs and photographs of the 1969 Santa Barbara spill, which emptied 3 million gallons of crude into the ocean and killed thousands of birds.
McCain didn't escape opposition to his drilling position even at his fundraiser Monday night at a luxurious Santa Barbara home with ocean views. Protesters gathered on two sailboats in the distance, shouting insults, and one of his own supporters at the fundraiser told him winning California was going to be "a tough haul" with his drilling stance.
