page_title: Tim Pawlenty
section_title: Energy policy and climate change
hierarchical_section_title: Tim Pawlenty / Governorship / Energy policy and climate change
caption_attribution_description: English: United States Postal Service vehicle advertising its use of E85 fuel, Winter Carnival parade, Saint Paul, Minnesota
context_page_description: Timothy James Pawlenty is an American businessman and politician. A Republican, he served as 39th Governor of Minnesota from 2003 to 2011. He served in the Minnesota House of Representatives, where he was majority leader for two terms. In 2011, he entered the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and was subsequently a leading contender to be a vice presidential nominee before serving as co-chair of the Mitt Romney campaign.
  Pawlenty was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota and raised in nearby South St. Paul. He graduated from University of Minnesota with a B.A. in political science and a J.D. His early career included stints as a labor law attorney and as the vice president of a software as a service company. After settling in the city of Eagan with his wife, Pawlenty was appointed to the city's Planning Commission and was elected to the Eagan City Council at the age of 28. He won a seat as a state representative in 1992, representing District 38B in suburban Dakota County. He was re-elected four times and was voted majority leader by House Republicans in 1998.
context_section_description: Minnesota has mandated a 10% mixture of gasoline and ethanol (gasohol) since 1997. Pawlenty has also lobbied the Governors' Ethanol Coalition to mandate higher ethanol use nationwide.
  Conservative Republican governors were not supportive of Pawlenty's presentation on clean energy to the governor's association, which he gave in cooperation with Ed Rendell, who was the governor of Pennsylvania and the National Governors Association's Democratic vice-chairman. With Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, Pawlenty was co-chair of the association's energy committee. The effort received "adamant opposition" from governors of oil producing states.
  In 2007, Governor Pawlenty signed the Next Generation Energy Act of 2007 into law and, along with six other Midwestern governors, the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Accord.   These directed state agencies to develop a plan to reduce greenhouse gases, and "develop a market-based and multi-sector cap-and-trade mechanism".  However, by 2009 Pawlenty had reversed his position and called cap-and-trade "overly bureaucratic" and a potential "disaster".  By 2011, Pawlenty's position had changed sufficiently to state "the weight of the evidence is that most of it, maybe all of it, is because of natural causes."
caption: A United States Postal Service vehicle advertising its use of E85 fuel during the Saint Paul Winter Carnival parade in January 2007.
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2007:01:27 15:11:02", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "192", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/160", "EXIF FNumber": "28/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2007:01:27 15:11:02", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2007:01:27 15:11:02", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "239925/32768", "EXIF ApertureValue": "162885/32768", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "-1/3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "85", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3456", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2304", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "9232", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "1728000/437", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "384000/97", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Manual", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}