While the national media, with ample help from Team Mitt, keeps pushing Mitt as the inevitable GOP nominee, things like this keep popping up that suggest the next couple months could be rocky months for Team Mitt:
Governor Mitt Romney today announced that Massachusetts will take another major step in meeting its commitment to protecting air quality when strict state limitations on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants take effect on January 1, 2006. …
Massachusetts is the first and only state to set CO2 emissions limits on power plants. The limits, which target the six largest and oldest power plants in the state, are the toughest in the nation…
In addition to reaffirming existing stringent CO2 limits, the draft regulations announced today, which will be filed next week, contain protections against excessive price increases for businesses and consumers. They allow power generation companies to implement CO2 reductions at their own facilities or fund other reduction projects off-site through a greenhouse gas offset and credits program.
That’s just the tip of a Titanic-class iceberg totally capable of sinking Team Mitt’s ship. Here’s another Titanic-class iceberg Team Mitt will have to deal with:
In the development of greenhouse gas policy, Romney Administration officials have elicited input from environmental and economic policy experts. These include John Holden [sic], professor of environmental policy at Harvard University and chair of the National Commission on Energy Policy and Billy Pizer, and economist at Resources for the Future, an environmental policy think-tank based in Washington DC.
Ed nails it with this analysis:
In other words, the Romney administration in 2005 essentially did what Barack Obama’s EPA wants to do now. He imposed CO2 emission caps, the “toughest in the nation”, in an effort to curtail traditional energy production. Not only did Romney impose these costly new regulations, he then imposed price caps to keep power companies from passing the cost along to the consumer. As we have seen in RomneyCare, regulation and price controls eventually drive businesses into bankruptcy or relocation.
This isn’t what free market capitalists do.
Since this happened late in his single term in office, what assurance do voters have that Mitt is interested in reforming the EPA? Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry are interested in stripping the EPA of much of its ability to meddle with U.S. energy production. Their records are clear on this.
Mitt’s actions and statements don’t fit together. They’re more a contrast in opposites. Mitt’s said in his 59-point, 160 page economic plan that he’d “amend the Clean Water Act to prohibit the regulation of carbon.”
I’m betting that alot of GOP primary voters are interested in hearing when Mitt’s regulatory epiphany happened. In fact, I’m betting they’re skeptical that he’s had a regulatory epiphany.
This Titanic-class iceberg is heading right for Mitt’s ship. It’s exposing Mitt’s true colors. The worst news for Mitt isn’t that his colors are yellow. It’s that they’re green.
Technorati: EPA, Regulations, Carbon, Mitt Romney, Cap And Trade, Epiphany, John Holdren, Titanic, Green Jobs, Integrity Deficit, GOP, Election 2012
Back 2006 almost everyone bought the AGW theory because we and Romney did not know it had become a way to get grant money and we did not know they had been tweeking the data. So going back to 2006 when Bush, and many Republicans believed in the scientist is really silly.
Forgive me for not agreeing that “back in 2006, almost everyone bought the AGW theory.” There were tons of critics of AGW theory. Admittedly, there weren’t as many then as there are today but they were substantial in numbers.
Besides, Mitt’s fondness for AGW theory isn’t contained to 2005-06. It manifested itself in 2011. June to be precise:
It’s getting more difficult to argue that Mitt’s fascination with AGW was confined to 2005-06. Wouldn’t you?