Mitt Romney is stacking his team with policy advisers from the George W. Bush administration ? and it has conservatives up in arms.
The Republican right cringes at some of the high-profile people Romney is leaning on for donations and advice, including three former Bush-era officials whose recent records include lobbying for Solyndra and advocating on behalf of cap-and-trade legislation and carbon taxes.
Continue ReadingRomney?s long-ago environmental associates are also causing him problems, with Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the conservative blogosphere reveling in 6-year-old news releases showing how two current Obama administration officials ? Environmental Protection Agency air chief Gina McCarthy and White House science adviser John Holdren ? once helped the former Massachusetts governor craft his climate change policies.
Most environmentalists don?t have pleasant memories of the Bush administration, but Republicans also recall how Bush signed into law a 2005 mandate requiring the nation to use billions of gallons of renewable fuels, or his buckling as a lame duck to the Democratic-controlled Congress by signing a 2007 law raising fuel economy standards.
Near the end of Bush?s second term, he?d even embraced a national goal for halting the growth of greenhouse gases.
Jim Connaughton, a key architect of the climate plan as chairman of the Bush White House Council on Environmental Quality, co-hosted a Romney fundraiser last month in Bethesda, Md., and Greg Mankiw, the chairman of Bush?s Council of Economic Advisers who later became an outspoken advocate for a carbon tax, helped craft Romney?s jobs agenda.
Another former Bush White House staffer, Alex Mistri, is also causing headaches for Romney. Mistri, now a?managing director of The Glover Park Group, registered earlier this year as a lobbyist for the now-infamous bankrupt solar company Solyndra.
?When you have people advising you who have supported a carbon tax, you can imagine that raises some concern,? said Dan Kish, a longtime Capitol Hill GOP energy aide who now works as senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research.
Of Romney, Kish added, ?It?s like a box of chocolates, you don?t know what you?re going to get. Frankly, there?s a bunch of people who are tired of getting a box of chocolates.?
On the campaign trail, Romney has said he?d reverse Obama-era environmental rules and would never back a unilateral cap-and-trade program. Speaking at a fundraiser Thursday in Pittsburgh, the GOP front-runner tried to plant himself in the global warming skeptics camp.
?My view is that we don?t know what?s causing climate change on this planet,? he said. ?And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.?
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