Romney Environment Push Is Fresh Target for His Rivals

From The Wall Street Journal:

Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, whose health-care record as governor of Massachusetts has left him struggling to win the support of conservative voters, now faces another point of vulnerability: his environmental record.

Just days after his 2002 election, Mr. Romney hired Douglas Foy, one of the state's most prominent environmental activists, and put him in charge of supervising four state agencies.

Mr. Foy had initiated a lawsuit that led to the cleanup of Boston Harbor and had worked to protect fishing grounds and seashores. Once in the Romney administration, he served as the governor's negotiator on a regional climate-change initiative and helped draft regulations to put emissions caps in place for coal-fired power plants.

With Mr. Foy by his side, Mr. Romney joined activists outside an aging, coal-fired plant in 2003 to show his commitment to the emissions caps. "I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people, and that plant, that plant kills people," he said.

Mr. Romney, while implementing the emissions caps, ultimately backed away from the regional climate-change agreement in 2005, a decision announced on the same day he said he would not seek re-election as governor, stoking speculation that he would run for president.

As a candidate, Mr. Romney has laid out an economic plan that would amend the Clean Air Act to exclude carbon dioxide from its regulatory purview and open U.S. energy reserves to more development.

In his five-year quest for the presidency, Mr. Romney has been bedeviled not only by his Massachusetts health-care plan, which mandated that most individuals purchase insurance, but also his shifts on abortion and gun control. In 2004, he signed an assault weapons ban for his state, although he now opposes most gun control. And he promised as governor he would keep his state's pro-abortion rights position, though now he opposes legal abortions.

Mr. Romney says that his health-care plan was good policy for Massachusetts, but that as president he'd work to overturn Mr. Obama's health-care law, which also includes an individual mandate.

Mr. Romney's approach to the environment as governor showed someone who was open to regulatory as well as market-oriented answers to environmental problems—while also willing to work with committed environmentalists and liberal Democrats.

From the start of his administration, Mr. Romney set out to reconcile a pro-business political bent with his state's liberal environmentalism, said Eric Kriss, a close confidante of Mr. Romney's from their days co-founding the private equity firm Bain Capital. During the Romney campaign for governor, Mr. Kriss consulted frequently with Mr. Foy.

"Doug was known as a pre-eminent conservationist," he said. "He was broad-minded, articulate, and he believed in the vision we all had, to combine environmental concerns with the need for housing and transportation infrastructure."

Mr. Foy was put in charge of commonwealth development, overseeing transportation, housing, environment and energy agencies, with combined annual capital budgets of $5 billion and more than 11,000 employees.

Mr. Foy, a political independent who votes Democratic, said he joined the Romney administration not to combat climate change but because the governor was promoting "smart growth'' measures and combining warring parts of the state government into a single entity that Mr. Foy would supervise.

He said that Mr. Romney's environmental record fits "the Republican tradition in Massachusetts'' of "fiscal conservatism and good governance, doing more with less."