Potential GOP Candidates Who Think Climate Might Be A Problem: Romney, Graham. Enjoy!

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It’s hard to imagine what Romney means by “real leadership” on coal emissions. Does he think President Obama is too soft on coal? That the EPA’s Clean Power Plan to reduce CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants isn’t “real leadership”? Some environmentalists say the EPA’s proposed rule doesn’t go far enough, but Romney is no environmentalist. During the 2012 campaign, Romney repeatedly attacked Obama in speeches and campaign ads for being too hard on coal. Campaigning in Ohio, for example, Romney accused Obama of “waging a war on coal.” “We have 250 years of coal,” he said. “Why in the heck wouldn’t we use it?” At one of their debates, Romney told Obama, “I like coal. People in the coal industry feel like it’s getting crushed by your policies.” In fact, in the very same October 2011 question-and-answer session in which Romney claimed that we don’t know the cause of climate change, he explicitly said, “the EPA should not be regulating carbon dioxide.” So has he changed his mind about that again too? If not, his call for “leadership” is just hot air.

But it’s still better for Romney to pander toward the reality-based middle than the irrational right wing. It’s tempting to just feel disgusted by Romney’s constant, totally shameless shifting. Instead greens should be pleased to see Romney standing up for sound science.

Likewise, they should be excited to see that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced that he has filed paperwork with the IRS to form “a testing-the-waters committee” to explore a presidential run. On Tuesday, Graham was one of only five Republican senators to vote for an amendment proposed by climate hawk Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) declaring that climate change is real and “human activity significantly contributes” to it. Graham, like Romney, is an oleaginous opportunist. He joined the negotiations over a possible cap-and-trade bill in 2009-2010 and demanded enormous concessions and payoffs for the oil, nuclear, and trucking industries as conditions of his support. Then he abandoned the bill anyway. Just a few months later, Graham joined his party’s ignorance brigade, saying, “The science about global warming has changed. … I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question.” Now that Republicans are feeling pressure to sound more serious on climate change, he’s swinging back to reality.

It is important that Republicans have presidential candidates who currently accept climate science. Without Romney or Graham taking up that mantle, there may not be anyone who will. That would be another step backward for a party that had multiple candidates who accepted climate science in 2008, and one, Jon Huntsman, in 2012. The other likely 2016 Republican contenders, except for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, have denied the scientific consensus or avoided the issue altogether. Kasich may not run, and Christie has been moving rightward on environmental issues.

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http://grist.org/politics/at-least-a-couple-gop-presidential-contenders-accept-climate-science-and-that-matters/