Florida GOP Senate hopeful Marco Rubio has been accused of flip-flopping on several issues this week, but the latest charge – that he's changed his tune on cap and trade – seems pretty evident.
The Times/Herald reports today that as leader of the Florida House in 2008, Rubio led the House to vote unanimously in support of directing the state's Department of Environmental Protection to develop rules for companies to limit carbon emissions.
But he told the Herald yesterday that the bill that was passed required that whatever move the DEP made, had to come back before the legislature, and that's when he'd stop it.
"It has worked out as it was designed to work out, which was to stop a cap-and-trade system in Florida," Rubio said yesterday.
He added,"We took the power out of his (Governor Crist's) hands and put it into the hands of the Legislature. If we passed no legislation, his executive orders would have become law."
But environmentalists in the state say that's hogwash.
Jerry Karnas is the Florida director with the Environmental Defense Fund. In speaking with CL this morning, he says that there is no state in the country – including California or those in the northeast that have implemented regional climate change initiatives – that have left it up to their governor to make such decisions on his or her own, which is what Rubio is contending.
And that's what DEP Secretary Mike Sole confirms, telling the Herald,, "An executive order would not have been able to implement a cap-and- trade system on its own. We needed the legislative authority."
Rubio used to not be so critical of cap-and-trade, by the way, as this video depicts from March of 2007:
Karnas says that many of the comments that Rubio said in private meetings with groups like his about climate change would not have sounded out of place coming from the mouths of such global warming advocates as Charlie Crist, Al Gore, Thomas Friedman or others who are concerned about climate change and what to do about it.
Meanwhile, Rubio's comments regarding the stimulus money has raised the hackles of some conservatives, and disappointed others, such as CL contributor and GOP political strategist Chris Ingram, who writes a blog post today called,"Is Marco Rubio just another politician?'.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2009.