Several attendees said they were shocked two years later, when Romney issued a stern rebuke of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.
Left turn on environment
Primary Tracker: See which presidential candidates are visiting the early states and where they are focusing their energy.
On the environment, Romney seemed interested in carving out an agenda largely in line with the state’s most fervent activists on the left.
After he took office in 2003, some state employees and activists were nervous about how the new governor would approach the climate-change issue. Massachusetts had already reached an agreement with other Northeastern states and some Canadian provinces on a plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Romney surprised them by taking a hands-on approach, personally helping craft a “Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan” that he unveiled in 2004.
He reorganized the state government to create the Office of Commonwealth Development — with the former president of the liberal Conservation Law Foundation, Douglas Foy, as its head — to better coordinate climate work and sustainable-growth activities among different agencies.
As he worked on the plan, according to people familiar with the process, he even overruled some objections by his chief of staff, who criticized the plan as potentially too left-leaning.
Romney backed incentives for buying efficient vehicles, tougher vehicle emissions rules and mandatory cuts in emissions linked to global warming.
The plan not only called for reducing the state’s overall greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2010 and cutting them another 10 percent by 2020, but it said that “to eliminate any dangerous threat to the climate . . . current science suggests this will require reductions as much as 75-85 percent below current levels.”
Sonia Hamel, who headed climate work for the state as special assistant to the Office of Commonwealth Development, said her former boss “saw the huge economic and environmental opportunities for the commonwealth inherent in the shift away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy.”
“When he was first governor of Massachusetts, Romney was very thoughtful about the development of our climate plan,” she wrote in an e-mail, adding that he was most enthusiastic about efficiency measures that would save money. “He dug into the details of proposed measures and spent many hours reviewing them with his staff and cabinet members.”
Romney did hedge his bets on one aspect of the report, however. Romney rewrote his cover letter the night before the report was released, emphasizing that it was a valuable plan, whether or not global warming was real.
“Rather than focusing our energy on the debate over the causes of global warming and the impact of human activity on climate, we have chosen to put our emphasis on actions, not discourse,” Romney wrote in the final version. “If we learn decades from now that climate change isn’t happening, these actions will still help our economy, our quality of life and the quality of our environment.”
Beyond the state climate plan, Romney repeatedly pushed to promote clean energy and cut the use of fossil fuels.
In March 2003 he pledged to buy up to $100 million worth
of electricity from renewable sources. That month, he declared, “the global warming debate is now pretty much over.”
Environmentalists were disappointed when Romney, late in his term, shifted course and pulled the state out of the regional greenhouse gas agreement.
Still, he appeared consistent on the global warming question as recently as June, when he officially launched his 2012 campaign. He said then that “the world’s getting warmer,” adding: “I believe that humans contribute to that.”
But last week, he appeared to back away from that stance, saying, “We don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.”
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