Cooler Heads in the GOP Crafting a platform that marries John McCain to the Republican base on environmental policy is a little like filing a lawsuit against yourself in which you only get to write one brief. By the time you’re done, you’ve scratched through so many lines and penciled in so many revisions that the document is barely legible. I wish I could show you my copy of the energy section of the 2008 Republican Platform’s working draft. You wouldn’t be able to read it, but you’d see what I mean. The first thing that’s scratched out is “Global Warming and” at the top of a section that used to read “Global Warming and Environmental Protection.” The energy subcommittee — whose task is to draft energy- and environmental-policy language of which the full Republican Platform Committee can approve — decided to strike the phrase “global warming” anywhere it appeared in the document, either replacing it with the more neutral “climate change,” or removing it altogether. The global warming vs. climate change debate was part of the effort to find a common ground between McCain, who believes that warming is an urgent threat that requires an aggressive reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, and Republicans who are skeptical of such claims....