Politico: Green skeletons lurk in GOP closets

[Patricia M. McBride]

This is going to be a very important aspect of the coming presidential race, and I have to agree, people will have to tread lightly because young people will not support someone who does not support clean air.  Just my personal thought, but I think it is going to end up being something that is a "by the degree" sort of thing, and personally, since we know global warming is a hoax, perhaps we ought to focus more on cleaner air than the game the UN is playing to rob one country to give to another country?  Just my thought though.

Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have warned about climate change. | AP Photos Close

 

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN | 1/2/11 7:03 AM EST

It may be heresy to conservatives, but a trip down memory lane shows nearly all of the top-tier Republican presidential contenders want to save the planet from global warming.

On the campaign stump, in books, speeches and nationally-televised commercials, aspiring GOP White House candidates such as Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have warned in recent years about the threats from climate change and pledged to limit greenhouse gases. Some have even committed the ultimate sin, endorsing the controversial cap-and-trade concept that was eventually branded “cap and tax.”

Now, as they prepare for a wide-open primary season, many of the Republicans are searching for ways to explain themselves to a conservative voting base full of hungry tea party activists and climate skeptics who don't take kindly to environmental issues so closely linked with Al Gore.

"They're in an odd place," Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, told POLITICO. "They better have an explanation, an excuse or a mea culpa for why this won't happen again."

Dig long enough and just about every Republican has a green skeleton in their closet. Many of them have their last presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, a longtime cap-and-trade enthusiast, to thank for it.

Hoping he'd get picked as McCain's running mate, Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, predicted in February 2008 that Congress would pass a comprehensive global warming bill within 12 to 18 months.

"I support a reasonable cap-and-trade system," he said. "I think it'd be good for the federal government to take that up rather than have states take it up as clusters of regions."

Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, appealed to a New Hampshire audience in October 2007 on moral grounds by saying he backed a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases and faulted the Senate for its unsuccessful efforts to pass legislation.

Even Sarah Palin has a YouTube moment. Just days after McCain picked her as his running mate, Palin told ABC News she believes human activities "certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming, climate change" and that "we’ve got to do something about it, and we have to make sure that we’re doing all we can to cut down on pollution." 

Palin – who has since referred to global warming as “snake oil science” – also touted her work setting up a sub-cabinet in her state government helping Alaskans get ready for melting permafrost, village relocations, rising seas and ocean acidification.

Several other top Republicans have called for government action on climate change as well.

Romney worked for two years as Massachusetts governor to cap greenhouse gases from power plants as part of a regional pact. Although he pulled the state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for economic reasons, Romney continues to express concerns about rising temperatures.

"I believe that climate change is occurring – the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore," Romney wrote in his 2010 book “No Apologies: The Case for American Greatness.” "I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich may have the hardest job explaining himself thanks to a 2008 TV commercial sponsored by Gore's Repower America campaign. Gingrich and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sit on a couch outside the Capitol and declare that while they don't often agree on issues, "we do agree our country must take action to address climate change."

Presidential contenders aren't the only ones who drank the McCain Kool-aid. "I think McCain is moving in a responsible direction," then-House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) told E&E News in May 2008. "Clearly the issue of climate change is on the minds of a lot of people. Humans clearly contribute to this. It just really depends on what kind of a cap-and-trade system, what kind of safety valves are in there."

The slate of 2012 Republican candidates have so far kept their powder dry when it comes to attacking each other publicly over global warming. But it's just a matter of time before that changes. Climate skeptics had a decent run in the 2010 midterms and took out some establishment Senate Republican candidates during the primaries, including Mike Castle in Delaware and Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.

Conservatives are well aware of the GOP candidates' remarks and past statements of other party leaders, including President George W. Bush, who in his eighth year in office embraced a small cap on greenhouse gas emissions. Now, they say mandatory emission reduction policies are undermined by unsubstantiated gaps in historical data and a secret conspiracy among scientists to make the problem out to be much worse than it is.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Capitol Hill’s most outspoken skeptic on global warming science, said he's keeping a close eye on the Republican candidates.

"Huckabee has been a little bit soft on the issue," he said. Of Gingrich, Inhofe noted, "He was on the stage with Nancy Pelosi at one time. I know he'd just assume people forget that, but at that point it appeared that side was going to win."

Prospective GOP candidates are sensitive to their awkward histories on the subject.

Huckabee last week went out of his way to issue a statement disputing interpretations of his 2007 remarks about cap-and-trade legislation after RealClearPolitics made a casual mention of his stance in an article profiling another possible White House GOP contender, Sen. John Thune (S.D.).

“In a recent Internet post, a contributor makes the claim that I supported cap and trade in late 2007 while running for president," Huckabee said. "To put it simply, that's just not true.”

But video of Huckabee's remarks widely available on the Internet makes it clear he was trying to appease greens on the global warming issue.

“I also support cap and trade of carbon emissions," Huckabee said during the Global Warming and Energy Solutions Conference in Manchester, N.H., a event which also drew appearances from McCain and two Democratic presidential candidates, Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich.

McCain has since denounced Democrats over their bid to pass cap-and-trade legislation, part of a strategy to counter conservatives during his own heated GOP Senate primary contest in Arizona. And many of the presidential hopefuls followed suit, including Pawlenty, Huckabee and Gingrich, who said in April 2009 that Obama's reelection hinged on the issue.

"I'd hope he'd sign something positive. I'd hope he'd sign something that was pro-solar, pro-wind, pro-biomass, pro-green coal, pro-nuclear. If he did that, it'd help him get re-elected," Gingrich said following a House hearing where he testified on a panel opposite Gore. "If he signs a trillion-dollar tax increase, I suspect it'll make it much harder for him to get re-elected because I think the economy would react to the tax increase."

Pawlenty backpedaled during a "Meet the Press" appearance this year and he's since had to fend off scrutiny from local reporters who recall how he tried to establish his reputation during the McCain campaign on green issues.

"Governor Pawlenty and many others considered cap-and-trade approaches, but concluded it's the wrong approach and doesn't support it," said Pawlenty spokesman Alex Conant. "Over the last couple of years he has fought to stop the Democrats' cap-and-trade proposals because they're bureaucratic, clumsy and hurt the economy."

Jim Connaughton, who served for eight years as Bush's top White House environmental adviser, said the slate of possible GOP presidential candidates are displaying collective amnesia in denouncing cap and trade when it "was the invention of conservative Republican economists as a better way to cut pollution than inefficient command and control regulations."

But Connaughton said he expects the contenders will end up reading from the same playbook.

"I think the majority of them would approach the issue much the same way as has been in the past," he said. "It's serious enough to treat as a matter of insurance. But any action needs to be economically sensible. You'll see those themes, notwithstanding the strong viewpoints on the right of skepticism and the strong viewpoints to the left on alarmism."

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, for instance, has challenged climate science during his past tenure as an oil industry lobbyist and chairman of the Republican National Committee, but said in a recent interview that the issue is more about economics than anything else.

"Whether you think climate change is manmade, whether you think it's inevitable, whatever your view of it is, there's things like we're doing in our state that are good economics, that are useful and they will reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Barbour said, citing the manufacturing of solar panels, energy efficient windows and fuel out of wood and coal.

Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the Republicans would be at odds with the mainstream scientific community by challenging the evidence surrounding global warming.

"Obviously that's a sad statement to have leaders in one of the two major U.S. political parties distancing themselves from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and virtually every U.S. and international scientific society that's looked at this issue," he said. "I can't speak to whether it's a winning strategy in a Republican political party, but I think it's a sad statement."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) drew conservative complaints by working with Democrats on the failed climate bill in 2009 and 2010. But he suggested that a tilt too far to the right could ultimately put Republicans on the wrong path, leaving them open to attacks of environmental insensitivity, headed into the general election campaign.

"If we go too far and we basically belittle those who believe the air should be cleaner when it comes to carbon pollution, then we risk alienating younger voters,” Graham said.

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