Pawlenty taps wind energy by holding up a wetted finger on climate change

The New York Times carried an article Monday about how Gov. Pawlenty’s take on climate change is “evolving.” He has become less the gung-ho environmental partner to Democrats at the state Capitol and peers across the Midwest and more a non-responsive and even glib antagonist to progress on energy issues. Says one unnamed Wisconsin official: “Pawlenty has gotten squirrelly, because he’s going to run for president and the Republicans are all over him to back off, and he has.”

Squirrelly, perhaps, but not squirrelized — until now. 

The story, from ClimateWire, contains a couple errors that Minnesota readers might catch. At one point the story suggests coal travels through Minneapolis on river barges; that hasn’t happened for years.

The writer also makes what’s becoming a common mistake: Assuming that the first time he heard T-Paw tell a particular joke was the first time the governor told it:

But Pawlenty appeared to break his silence on global warming last week. He used the term “climate change” to mock President Obama’s health-care initiatives at the GOPAC conference in Chicago.

“It appears that President Obama is making great progress on climate change,” the governor chided, according to Politico. “He is changing the political climate in the country back to Republican.”

In fact, Pawlenty has been using that line since at least the end of July.

But it doesn’t do much good simply to point out such misfires. No one would worry about Pawlenty trading away his principles for presidential-campaign momentum, if only our nation’s plentiful supply of news-media errors could be harnessed to wipe out environmental problems in certain states, like say, Minnesota and Arizona:

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