Pawlenty's Cap-and-Trade May Return to Haunt

Tim Pawlenty’s past support for cap-and-trade could come back to haunt him during his run for the GOP presidential nomination, the New Hampshire Union Leader reported Wednesday.

The former governor of Minnesota announced that he was forming a presidential exploratory committee on Monday. He’s already facing questioning about his support for strict climate change and renewable energy policies while serving two terms as governor.

Pawlenty answers questions about his environmental policies by describing them as a byproduct of leading one of the country’s most liberal states. He also said other conservative politicians have also backed some of the same policies that he did.

"As to cap and trade, almost everybody who's run has got the same problem," Pawlenty said last month during the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington. "If you look under the hood, you'll see that I, like everybody else potentially running, looked at it, flirted with it and then decided it was a bad idea."

"So have I changed by position? Yes," Pawlenty said at CPAC. "But I'm not going to be cute about it, hem and haw, be dippy and dancy about it. Just saying yeah, it was a mistake, it was stupid. It was wrong."