Someone call the Ghost Busters: Marco Rubio’s been invaded.
ThinkProgress reports that at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, the presidential hopeful actually endorsed renewable energy. What?! Is this the same man who told ABC News that he does “not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it”? Apparently so.
In response to a question from the audience about what Rubio would do to create clean energy jobs, the noted climate denier replied, “Well, first, I would say to you that I want us to lead the world in everything. Let’s be number one in wind, and number one in solar, and number one in biofuels, and number one in renewables, number one in energy efficiency. Let’s lead in all of these things.”
OK, maybe he hasn’t been taken over by liberal specter. Rather, it sounds like Rubio is spouting the usual We’re number one! rhetoric that you cannot get away from in American politics. President Obama himself spouted this tired platitude in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close,” the president said, sounding like the steroid guy at my gym who flexes and whispers “most powerful man on Earth” to himself over and over while staring in the mirror.
Anyway, back to Marco “America the Great” Rubio, who also wants us to be number one in fantasy football, number one in Instagram followers, and number one in growing giant pumpkins. He might want the U.S. to be tops in clean energy, but he doesn’t seem to want to take any steps to make that happen. “I’m not going to interfere in the marketplace,” he said at the New Hampshire event. “The market’s going to decide which one of these we do more of than others.” Riiight. The market — and tens of billions of dollars a year in federal subsidies for fossil fuel companies.
Indeed, ThinkProgress notes that Rubio has “voted twice against legislation to extend energy efficiency and clean energy tax incentives aiming to encourage businesses to hire more workers.”
Rubio didn’t spend too long talking to New Hampshirites about renewables. He quickly shifted his focus back to the fossil fuels he loves. “All I’m saying is, there’s no way we’re not going to do oil and natural gas,” he said. “God has blessed this nation with these resources. It would be reckless and irresponsible not to utilize all of our energy resources.”
Rubio — who was recently endorsed by the Senate’s biggest climate denier — also promises that if elected president he would undo EPA regulations on both fracking and greenhouse gas emissions and permit more offshore drilling. He emphasized this at a campaign event in October, The New York Times reports — an event, by the way, that was hosted by a manufacturer of drilling equipment, leaving no doubt as to who his constituency is.
If Rubio was ever invaded by a ghost, it must have been back in 2008 when he said a federal cap-and-trade program was “inevitable” and called on the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to “design a cap-and-trade or a carbon-tax program and bring it back to the legislature for ratification”:
