Marco Rubio faces attacks over past support for cap-and-trade, and several rivals have moved to the right on climate change
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| Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio campaigns Friday in Hillsboro, N.H. PHOTO: MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS |
Shortly after a conservative website on Wednesday posted 2008 footage of Sen. Marco Rubio backing a cap-and-trade program to combat climate change, his campaign roared back with a counterattack that included an entire web page aimed at debunking the video.
Mr. Rubio's muscular response revealed how toxic the issue of climate change has become in the Republican Party under President Barack Obama, who has sought to make reducing carbon emissions to alleviate global warming one of his signature accomplishments.
As speaker of the Florida House, Mr. Rubio did vote for a 2008 bill authorizing the state to come up with rules for a cap-and-trade plan, though he raised questions about its cost and effectiveness. A press release from the House Majority Office at the time described the bill as a "responsible response to concerns about global climate change."
But since running for U.S. Senate in 2010 as the conservative alternative to then-Gov. Charlie Crist, Mr. Rubio has questioned whether climate change is man-made, and opposed potential remedies like cap-and-trade that he says would hurt the economy.
Shifts by Mr. Rubio and some of his rivals on the issue recall an inconvenient past that many in the GOP would like to forget: Republicans, not Democrats, first championed market-based systems to control pollution, as a way to avoid more direct regulation.
Until 2008, many Republicans, including then-presidential nominee John McCain, supported cap-and-trade to address climate change. Once Mr. Obama won the White House, Republicans swiftly unified against nearly all of his initiatives, including a cap-and-trade bill that would have set limits on carbon emissions and allowed companies to trade pollution credits to comply.
Responding to what they call big-government overreach by Mr. Obama, many Republicans have moved to the right on several other issues as well, including illegal immigration, health-insurance mandates and the Common Core academic standards.
GOP candidates who had generally accepted the scientific consensus on man-made climate change, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, have said recently that it is unclear how much, if at all, humans are contributing to warmer temperatures.
"The climate is changing—it always has, that's not any news flash—and the outcomes of that are still not determined," Mr. Bush said in response to a question at a New Hampshire town hall in December. "To create policies for today that will have some impact for 50 years from now is almost destined to be wrong."
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| Then-Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio points to his official portrait in Tallahassee, Fla., in 2008. PHOTO: PHIL COALE/ASSOCIATED PRESS |
This view collides with a broad consensus among scientists that human activity is increasing the Earth's temperature, and that action is needed to soften the consequences. One question is whether the ultimate GOP nominee will have to moderate his position in the general election.
For now, that consistency of Messrs. Trump and Cruz has worked to their advantage, Republican strategists say, leaving rivals little room to outflank them on the right.
"You do much less damage to yourself politically if you just stay in one place," said Mike McKenna, a Republican lobbyist on energy and environmental issues.
In the March 2008 video leaked to the Breitbart News Network on Wednesday, Mr. Rubio calls a federal cap-and-trade program to address climate change "inevitable" and says Florida's Department of Environmental Protection should design its own plan. He would go on to preside over a unanimous vote in favor of directing the state's environmental agency to develop ground rules for companies to limit their carbon emissions, though Florida ultimately never adopted a cap-and-trade program.
"No bill comes through the House unless the speaker likes what's in it," said former Republican Rep. Paige Kreegel, who sponsored the bill as the chairman of the House energy committee. He has not endorsed a candidate in 2016.
Mr. Rubio has said the bill's requirement that the plan come back to the Legislature for approval was a backstop to ensure it would never happen. His campaign's new web page says that Mr. Rubio "successfully fought cap and trade in Florida," and that the video was "falsely edited," because it left out Mr. Rubio saying, "The way we're going to lower carbon emissions is not through government mandates."
Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, an outspoken critic of climate science, also released a statement defending Mr. Rubio, whom Mr. Inhofe had endorsed a few days earlier.
Meanwhile, the three Democratic candidates, including front-runner Hillary Clinton, have consistently supported climate-change science and pushed for more aggressive climate policies than Mr. Obama's. "There's hell of a lot more coherence among Democratic politicians than among Republican politicians on this issue," Mr. Mckenna said.
Polling indicates that most voters, especially Republicans, don't think the government should make climate change a priority. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from December, just 3% of GOP primary voters picked climate as the top issue the government should address, compared to 30% of Democrats and 11% of swing voters.
Climate change is expected to become a bigger issue in the general election, given the differences between the parties.
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