Former Vice President Al Gore criticized Mitt Romney in a Wednesday "Al's Journal" blog post, questioning the presidential hopeful's approach to green jobs.
In a piece titled "Romney is 'Bus-ted' on Green Jobs," Gore wrote that Romney and fellow conservatives were blurring the truth on clean energy, pointing to "the recent bus tour on which the Republican candidate campaigned against green jobs in states where hundreds of thousands have been created."
Gore included a ThinkProgress piece that tackled Romney's stance on green jobs as the Republican presidential candidate was embarking on his six-state bus tour. In the article, Stephen Lacey wrote that Romney's skepticism on green jobs is misguided.
Romney, for his part, has criticized what he terms President Obama's overemphasis on green jobs. In an Orange County Register op-ed last year, he wrote that instead of Obama's green jobs plan, "we need a strategy to create an environment that is good for jobs."
He also called newly-created electric car manufacturing jobs "illusory," noting, "studies of Europe's green job experiments have found that each new green job destroys several other jobs elsewhere in the economy."
At the time, Lacey rejoined, "There are now 64,000 green jobs in [Romney's] home state of Massachusetts alone, according to a report released earlier this month by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. Hard to call that 'illusory.'"
Lacey added in his most recent piece, "According to 2010 data compiled by the Brookings Institution, there are 418,512 green jobs in the states on Romney’s bus tour."
Romney has addressed energy issues on the tour. According to Marion Patch in Iowa, "Emphasizing what he said is a need to produce more coal, oil and natural gas within U.S. borders, Romney contended that Obama pumped tens of billions of dollars into companies that donated to his campaign such as bankrupted, solar energy company Solyndra."
Gore laments Romney's criticism of Obama's energy policy, writing, "It should no longer be a surprise the lengths to which Mitt Romney and other conservatives will go to obscure truth in pursuit of their narrow ideology."
Last June, Gore praised Romney for "sticking to his guns in the face of the anti-science wing of the Republican Party" on his climate change position. But since then, Romney has flipped his stance, claiming, “We don’t know what’s causing climate change."
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