Romney has a problem – he USED TO care about the environment

  • Published on October 6th, 2011

mitt romneyMitt Romney, the uneasy frontrunner in the Republican Presidential race, has a problem.

He used to be a sane conservative who cared about people and the planet. And no matter how much he tries to act like a raving loony today, his past actions continue to bite him in the ass.

The Wall Street Journal goes into a good deal of detail on how aweful it is that Mitt the Flipper used to actually do positive things for the environment back when he was Governor of Massachusetts:

  • He hired Douglas Foy, one of the state’s most prominent environmental activists, to run four of the state’s agencies.
  • He was involved in negotiating regional climate change initiatives, like a cap and trade agreement with other states (he initially said it would “be good for business” but later ended up not signing on).
  • He not only put emissions caps in place on coal-fired power plants, he shut one particularly eggregious one down!  “With Mr. Foy by his side, Mr. Romney joined activists outside an aging, coal-fired plant in 2003 to show his commitment to the emissions caps. “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people, and that plant, that plant kills people,” he said.”

It then goes on to imply that Romney started backing down from that kind of environmental initiative… as soon as he moved from governing one of the most liberal states in the nation… to planning his run for President.

Forbes is even crueler:

  • He has gone from staunch advocate for taking onglobal warming to a climate change skeptic.
  • He once claimed he was a lifelong hunter, then said anyone who called him a hunter had “mischaracterized” him.
  • He supports clean energy, just not in the form of wind turbines off the coast of Cape Cod.

Now his Republican rivals are trashing him for flip-flopping fro Obama-lite to Mr Conservative – on climate change, on regulation (as well as such non-environmental issues as abortion and health care)

Rick Perry has been particularly harsh, if not terribly effective:

Mr. Perry made a point of saying the Romney administration had consulted Harvard University Prof. John Holdren on developing the regulations, and that Mr. Holdren is now science adviser to Mr. Obama. He said a second person working now for Mr. Obama had been a state environmental official under Mr. Romney.

… David Carney, chief strategist for Mr. Perry, called the new, broader critique of Mr. Romney “a crescendo” that was long planned. He said Friday’s speech was mainly an attack on Mr. Obama.

“It’s just that Romney and his folks are the architects of a number of Obama’s policies,” he said, linking Massachusetts to Washington’s “overregulation of the environmental realm.”

And here’s the new web-ad Perry has posted, using the WSJ article to attack Romney as a “Carbon Copy” of President Obama:

Perry has been swooning in the polls, and those attacks don’t seem to be making up any ground for him. But they do cement Romney’s position… as the front-runner for the GOP nomination that nobody in the GOP has any enthusiasm for.

And that, at least, is good news for the the environment.

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(Image of Mitt the Flipper AttributionShare Alike Some rights reserved by DonkeyHotey)

About the Author

Jeremy Bloom is the Editor of RedGreenAndBlue. He lives in New York, where he combines his passion for the environment with his passion for film, and is working on making the world a better place.