Ed Morrissey: Will Romney Hire Obama’s Climate-change Guru Holdren?; Updated: More From IBD

Posted on October 15 2011 – 4:52 PM – Posted by: Doug Brady

Ed Morrissey has written a great piece today at Hot Air which should give major pause to any conservative who’s entertaining the thought of holding his or her nose and voting for Mitt Romney in 2012.  It seems Romney’s record in Massachusetts in the area of energy is as suspect as his record in the health care arena.  As Governor, Romney did his best to drive up the costs of energy production for those producers unfortunate enough to have the audacity to rely on economic, proven methods of production:

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.

The result of these liberal policies, which would make Al Gore proud, was entirely predictable: Less energy production.  Morrissey explains:

So what has happened to Massachusetts’ electrical production since signing these regulations into law?  According to the EIA, whose latest data is for 2009, it dropped 18% in four years, from over 46 billion megawatt hours to 38 billion.  International imports, however, went from 697 million megawatt hours in 2006 to 4.177 billion megawatt hours two years later, and to almost 5 billion megawatt hours in 2009, more than twice the amount imported in any of the previous twenty years.

So, according to Romney, when energy prices are skyrocketing for Americans, the best remedy is to enact energy policy based on junk science which results in…less energy production. That’s just what we need, heh.  Romney, the self-anointed economic genius, has apparently forgotten the law of supply, and that price ceilings never, ever work.  All they do is create shortages (see Carter, Jimmy; 1970s).  Also of note, not only did Romney and Obama share advisors when crafting their respective health care mandates, but they also shared advisors when crafting these idiotic energy policies which inevitably drive energy production down and energy prices up, as Morrissey notes:

And who advised Romney on these regulations?  Why, none other than Obama’s chief science adviser, John Holdren:

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.

“Holden” here is Holdren, who co-chaired the NCEP in 2005.  This is the same John Holdren who wrote in favor of coercive government population-control policies in the 1970s, and who in 2007 suggested government-imposed redistribution as a cure for American exceptionalism.  The other adviser mentioned in this paragraph comes from a group which has among its top five donors in 2009 a familiar name — the George Kaiser Foundation.  Kaiser, one will recall, is a big Obama bundler — and the main investor in an outfit called Solyndra.

Morrissey ends his piece by asking the following rhetorical question:

If we’re looking for an alternative to the current administration’s partnerships with people like Holdren and Kaiser, shouldn’t we find a nominee that didn’t partner with either on energy policy?

Damn good question, and one those conservatives even considering a vote for Romney should be asking themselves.  Two of the biggest messes the next President will need to clean up are ObamaCare and our suicidal national energy policy.  What, specifically, in Mitt Romney’s background would lead anyone to believe he’d change either?  Just asking.  Read Morrissey’s entire piece here.

Update: Investor’s Business Daily has more on this latest revelation from Mitt’s recent liberal past:

Holdren has spoken in favor of such things as forced abortions, confiscation of babies, mass involuntary sterilization, bureaucratic regulation of family size, and a planetary regime to enforce climate regulation and population control.

Romney, speaking at a University of New Hampshire town hall on June 3, said: “I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world’s getting warmer. I can’t prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that.”

So do Holdren and Al Gore.

In June, Gore, on his blog, praised Romney’s climate stance: “While other Republicans are running from the truth, he is sticking to his guns in the face of the anti-science wing of the Republican Party.”

He agrees with Romney’s statement: “And so I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and the global warming that you’re seeing.”

This comes on top of the architect of Massachusetts health care reform (RomneyCare), M.I.T. economist John Gruber, talking about also being called on to fashion ObamaCare.

“The White House wanted to lean a lot on what we’d done in Massachusetts,” he said. “They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model.”

Read the whole thing here.

Article source: http://conservatives4palin.com/2011/10/ed-morrissey-will-romney-hire-obama%E2%80%99s-climate-change-guru-holdren.html