The latest GOP primary polls may have rattled something loose in the Romney campaign. Mitt Romney, June 3, 2011:
Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney broke with Republican orthodoxy on Friday by saying he believes that humans are responsible, at least to some extent, for climate change.
“I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that,” he told a crowd of about 200 at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire.
“It’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors.”
That put Romney over with Jon Hunstman, and against what the majority of American voters believe. But not for very long, apparently.
“Do I think the world’s getting hotter? Yeah, I don’t know that but I think that it is,” Romney said, as reported by Reuters. “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.”
“What I’m not willing to do is spend trillions of dollars on something I don’t know the answer to,” he added. (emphasis added)
In June, Romney took a position that is not shared by a majority of Americans: Just 36% continue to believe in anthropogenic global warming, according to Pew Research. Romney’s flip comes just a day after Sen. James Inhofe, the leading global warming skeptic in Congress, announced that he will back Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the GOP presidential primary. If Romney flips on his support for ethanol subsidies, we’ll know that the polls really do have him and his campaign on the back foot.
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