Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has repudiated his past support for a carbon cap-and-trade system to combat global warming, but the GOP presidential candidate's legacy in his home state is a clean energy-friendly landscape that Pawlenty crafted as an aggressive response to climate change.
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has repudiated his past support for a carbon cap-and-trade system to combat global warming, but the GOP presidential candidate's legacy in his home state is a clean energy-friendly landscape that Pawlenty crafted as an aggressive response to climate change.
Most prominently, Pawlenty successfully pushed for legislation requiring 25 percent of electricity generation in Minnesota to come from renewable energy sources by 2025, and supported the creation of a Midwestern cap-and-trade regime to bring down greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. At one point, he even led efforts by the National Governors Association (NGA) to merge the multiple regional climate pacts into a national cap-and-trade system.
Pawlenty was also an avid backer of renewable energy as a means to combat global warming, promoting, for instance, a “community wind” initiative that provides state backing to farmers who pool resources to develop wind projects on their land. The former governor also supported a “Green Jobs Investment Initiative” in the state as well as clean energy research. The “Green Jobs” idea excited renewable energy firms and advocates but was opposed by the state Chamber of Commerce.
But as opposition to a national cap-and-trade system and other regulatory options erupted in 2009, the emerging presidential candidate began to retreat. “I was wrong, it was a mistake, and I'm sorry,” Pawlenty said during a GOP candidate debate in May.
Although Minnesota is not a natural gas producing state, Pawlenty now speaks admiringly of the potential of shale gas to spark a “renaissance in energy” in this country, emphasizing in campaign speeches the energy security and economic benefits of gas much more frequently than he talks up renewables.
He has prominently opposed energy subsidies such as the ethanol tax credit, a tricky proposition in corn-rich Iowa, where Pawlenty's campaign faces a crucial test in the Aug. 13 Republican Straw Poll at Iowa State University in Ames.
However, as some conservatives have pointed out, Pawlenty boasted in 2007 that he had “doubled” the state requirement for ethanol in gasoline and was a strong supporter of both biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol as means to combat climate change.
And while his emphasis on renewables and clean energy technology tracks with priorities set by President Obama, Pawlenty has suggested eliminating the Department of Energy (DOE), the fulcrum of clean energy policy in the Obama administration.
Climate Change A Central Focus
Aggressive action to combat climate change was a hallmark of Pawlenty's tenure as governor -- the executive experience that he says qualifies him for the White House -- and seemed to inform his approach to a variety of issues such as clean energy incentives as well as his much-noted support for a carbon cap-and-trade system.
“If you unleash the requirements and incentives and attractive features of a market, people will respond to it,” Pawlenty said of cap and trade in 2007. “Some will respond by reducing pollution directly. Others will respond by buying credits or offsets in the marketplace, with the ultimate same net effect.”
Pawlenty and five other Midwestern governors agreed in 2007 to establish a regional carbon trading market; earlier that same year Pawlenty signed into law the requirement for 25 percent of electricity generation to come from renewables by 2025. Also in 2007, Pawlenty signed the “Next Generation Energy Act,” requiring increased efficiency by utilities and setting a goal of reducing the state's GHG emissions 80 percent by 2050.
As chairman of the NGA, Pawlenty launched the “Securing a Clean Energy Future” initiative, which among other elements called for “reasonable steps to reduce GHG emissions.”
In January 2008, Pawlenty began an effort to merge the various regional GHG initiatives into a single national cap-and-trade system. “Our hope is that in February or July, at the National Governors Association meetings, we'll be able to roll up many -- or most -- of those compacts into a national compact,” Pawlenty said on Jan. 28, 2008.
The NGA clean energy initiative promised to promote “non-petroleum based fuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel” and included a strong clean energy research and development component. The initiative received an $850,000 grant from DOE in 2008.
The previous year, Pawlenty and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) of Kansas -- now Obama's secretary of Health & Human Services -- launched a partnership with computer companies to purchase energy-saving products to reduce GHG emissions.
In 2008, Pawlenty proposed a system of low-interest loans to help small businesses and homeowners use renewable energy such as solar and geothermal. He suggested one element of the proposal was modeled on a European approach to promoting renewables.
“Believe it or not,” Pawlenty said at the time, “Germany's not exactly Florida in terms of its temperature, and they're making a go of it. They've got new generation solar, they're aggregating at a municipal level in some cases. Not just individual homeowners, and these types of financing mechanisms have spurred municipalities to undertake it at a community level. So we're open to both.”
That same year, he even did a radio ad for the Environmental Defense Fund urging Congress to act immediately to “cap” GHG emissions.
Governor's Outlook Changed In 2009
Dan Yarano, who chairs the energy practice at the Minneapolis office of law firm Fredrikson & Byron, says Pawlenty's first term as governor beginning in 2003 was “very progressive with respect to renewables.” In his second term, Yarano says, Pawlenty maintained his support for renewables but did not initiate any new climate efforts -- and most notably dropped his support for cap and trade in 2009.
That year, he joined with 20 other governors on a letter to Congress calling the cap-and-trade bill then being debated in the House “very burdensome on our economy.”
He also abandoned his support for the low carbon fuel standard contained in Minnesota's 2007 energy law.
Pawlenty's backtracking drew praise from local business leaders who felt the former governor went too far in his advocacy of climate action. “We had some respectful disagreements. We thought he got out too far in front [on climate change],” says Minnesota Chamber of Commerce President David Olson. “At the end of the day we were glad he dialed it back a bit.”
Environmentalists see his reversal as a betrayal that far exceeds the cautious pullbacks on climate change policy that fellow former Govs. Jon Huntsman of Utah and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts have executed on the GOP presidential campaign trail.
“He initiated the Minnesota Climate Change Action Group, he got the stakeholders together,” says one environmentalist in the state. “We were very pleased, he was very out front. . . . We've seen a complete about-face.”
Daniel J. Weiss of the Center for American Progress says the reversal was stunning. “Pawlenty governed like John Muir and he's running like ExxonMobil.”
Pawlenty now says his interest in cap and trade was provisional, at most. “We signed up to look at it, to review it, to study it, to join with other states to look at it,” he said during the May debate. “And we did. And what I concluded subsequently is it's a really bad idea.”
Pawlenty's supporters in the state say the country's economic collapse weighed heavily on the governor as he reconsidered the costs of climate control policies and dramatically shifted his position.
But the politics were clearly shifting too, and what had seemed inevitable early in 2009 -- federal legislation on climate change -- was the target of angry demonstrations at town hall meetings in the summer of 2009. Fierce opponents of climate change legislation, especially in the tea party movement, were in ascendency throughout the Republican Party and making life miserable for politicians who supported proposals such as cap and trade.
That has helped bring Pawlenty from advocating an aggressive set of climate policies to where he is today: questioning the human contribution to climate change and trying to ensure that his apologies for a past “flirtation” with cap and trade, in his words, are taken to heart by Republican primary voters.
Presidential Contenders 2012 is written by Charlie Mitchell, the former editor-in-chief of Roll Call and prior to that, a longtime reporter and editor for Inside Washington Publishers.