Mitt Romney’s team includes former policy advisers to George W. Bush. | AP Photos Romney friends give ammo to critics

Mitt Romney is stacking his team with policy advisers from the George W. Bush administration — and it has conservatives up in arms.

The Republican right cringes at some of the high-profile people Romney is leaning on for donations and advice, including three former Bush-era officials whose recent records include lobbying for Solyndra and advocating on behalf of cap-and-trade legislation and carbon taxes.


Romney’s long-ago environmental associates are also causing him problems, with Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the conservative blogosphere reveling in 6-year-old news releases showing how two current Obama administration officials — Environmental Protection Agency air chief Gina McCarthy and White House science adviser John Holdren — once helped the former Massachusetts governor craft his climate change policies.

Most environmentalists don’t have pleasant memories of the Bush administration, but Republicans also recall how Bush signed into law a 2005 mandate requiring the nation to use billions of gallons of renewable fuels, or his buckling as a lame duck to the Democratic-controlled Congress by signing a 2007 law raising fuel economy standards.

Near the end of Bush’s second term, he’d even embraced a national goal for halting the growth of greenhouse gases.

Jim Connaughton, a key architect of the climate plan as chairman of the Bush White House Council on Environmental Quality, co-hosted a Romney fundraiser last month in Bethesda, Md., and Greg Mankiw, the chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers who later became an outspoken advocate for a carbon tax, helped craft Romney’s jobs agenda.

Another former Bush White House staffer, Alex Mistri, is also causing headaches for Romney. Mistri, now a managing director of The Glover Park Group, registered earlier this year as a lobbyist for the now-infamous bankrupt solar company Solyndra.

“When you have people advising you who have supported a carbon tax, you can imagine that raises some concern,” said Dan Kish, a longtime Capitol Hill GOP energy aide who now works as senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research.

Of Romney, Kish added, “It’s like a box of chocolates, you don’t know what you’re going to get. Frankly, there’s a bunch of people who are tired of getting a box of chocolates.”

On the campaign trail, Romney has said he’d reverse Obama-era environmental rules and would never back a unilateral cap-and-trade program. Speaking at a fundraiser Thursday in Pittsburgh, the GOP front-runner tried to plant himself in the global warming skeptics camp.

“My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet,” he said. “And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO 2 emissions is not the right course for us.”

Romney aides don’t dispute that their candidate has relied on people with backgrounds shaded a bit greener than some in the party might prefer. But they insist he’s not changing his stance because of them.

“Like any serious leader, Gov. Romney takes counsel from a wide variety of perspectives before making his decisions,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said. “Having heard from all sides on the issue of climate change, he is firmly opposed to a cap-and-trade scheme or a carbon tax.”

One of Romney’s top economic advisers is Mankiw, who helped come up with a jobs agenda with 59 specific policy proposals, including “multi-year lead times before companies must come into compliance with onerous new environmental regulations” and the “review and elimination of all Obama-era regulations that unduly burden the economy.”

But not long ago, the Harvard economics professor was talking up a carbon tax in one of the most high-profile settings a policy wonk can get: The New York Times.

“In the debate over global climate change, there is a yawning gap that needs to be bridged,” Mankiw wrote in the September 2007 article with the headline “One Answer to Global Warming: A New Tax.”

“The gap is not between environmentalists and industrialists, or between Democrats and Republicans. It is between policy wonks and political consultants,” Mankiw wrote. “Among policy wonks like me, there is a broad consensus. The scientists tell us that world temperatures are rising because humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Basic economics tells us that when you tax something, you normally get less of it. So if we want to reduce global emissions of carbon, we need a global carbon tax.”

Romney’s financial contributors also have green baggage, including Connaughton and Mistri.

Connaughton was one of the few Republicans willing to speak out publicly during the first two years of the Obama administration in support of carbon caps, even offering ideas for how the White House could get a bill through the narrowly divided Congress. His remarks were made as an executive vice president for Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, a power company with a large nuclear portfolio that would stand to benefit from carbon limits.

Jeff Holmstead, a former Bush-era EPA official who supports Romney, said he didn’t think the former Massachusetts governor should be that concerned about leaning on people who in the past have advocated for climate policies.

“Anyone who’s been active at all in the public policy world has probably talked about the desirability of a carbon tax or how you might structure cap and trade,” said Holmstead, now an industry attorney at Bracewell & Giuliani. “I just think it’s a stretch to connect their past interest or even support to those things with Romney.”

But that’s not stopping Perry, who took a high-profile swing at Romney over climate change earlier this month with a 60-second Web video titled “Romney & Obama: Carbon Copies”— referencing a 2005 Massachusetts plan supporting carbon caps for power plants. (Romney later reversed his stance, citing economic concerns.)

Perry’s campaign is also bringing up McCarthy, the Obama EPA official driving a range of controversial air and climate rules, and Holdren, who now serves as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

McCarthy once was undersecretary for policy in Romney’s Executive Office of Environmental Affairs and helped develop Massachusetts’s first climate plan. From his perch at Harvard, Holdren was one of several academics who helped advise Romney on the climate change proposal.

“Leaders should be judged by the company they keep and the actions they take, so conservatives are right to conclude that Mitt Romney is wrong when it comes to energy policy,” said Perry spokesman Mark Miner.

Steve Milloy, of global warming skeptic blog JunkScience.com, took aim this week with a posting postulating that if Romney won, he could just keep McCarthy at the EPA. “Maybe he would even promote her to be administrator?” he wrote.

Meanwhile, Mistri of Glover Park helped Solyndra executives arrange meetings with top Capitol Hill lawmakers and reporters. Democrats and Republicans have complained that the Solyndra executives presented themselves in sound financial shape even as their company was privately teetering toward bankruptcy.

On Wednesday, Mistri attended a Romney fundraiser in Washington just two days after Romney used the Solyndra saga to unload on the Obama administration’s loan guarantee program.

RedState blogger Ben Howe took notice not just of Mistri’s connections with Solyndra, but also to other past Glover Park clients like Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, the AFL-CIO, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the United Federation of Teachers and the Campaign for Women’s Lives.

“So what would cause Mr. Mistri to be a donor to Gov. Romney, both directly to his campaign as well as through donations to Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC?” Howe wrote Wednesday. “Republicans, after all, stand against just about their entire portfolio. At least most Republicans do. Mitt Romney? Not so much.”

Connaughton, Mankiw and Mistri all declined to comment.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 5:10 p.m. on October 28, 2011.