Free Republic

General Electric has brushed aside the doubts leading Republican presidential contenders have raised about climate science. The US industrial and financial conglomerate said it had long seen climate change as a valid concern after an internal evaluation of the scientific case in 2005. (Snip) Observers have attributed the party’s shift since the last election to a range of factors, including the rise of the anti-regulatory Tea Party and fears about unemployment. Others suggest the change is due to fossil fuel interests using so-called super PACs – the new generation of political action committees empowered by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling...

Willard Mitt Romney these days could not be more explicit about abandoning President Barack Obama's carbon-dioxide restrictions. "Irresponsibly," Romney wrote in an Aug. 28 op-ed for Foster's Daily Democrat in New Hampshire, the Environmental Protection Agency "declared carbon dioxide, the same carbon dioxide that humans exhale, to be a 'pollutant' that poses risks to human health." He also observed: "Congress had the good sense not to compound our economic challenges by imposing cap-and-trade's extraordinary costs on the American people." Romney's website offers this carbon-friendly promise: "Mitt Romney will eliminate the regulations promulgated in pursuit of the Obama administration's costly and...

MANCHESTER, N.H. — In the first town hall of his freshly announced presidential campaign, Mitt Romney yesterday reaffirmed his view that global warming is occurring and that humans are contributing to it, a position that has been rejected in recent years by many Republicans as the issue has taken on a greater partisan tinge. After opening remarks in which Romney blamed President Obama’s policies for the new anemic hiring figures, the first questioner from the floor — a software developer from Hanover, N.H. — wanted to know the candidate’s position on climate change, an issue his opponents have generally avoided...