At Politico‘s Arena, Americans for Prosperity vice president Phil Kerpen weighs in on Mitt Romney’s statement of belief in climate change. Americans for Prosperity’s activism was key in Gov. Chris Christie’s decision to withdraw New Jersey from a regional cap and trade program. Kerpen thinks that Romney may be thinking along the same lines as Christie: 

Mitt Romney’s new position follows the template recently established by Chris Christie when he announced he was a strong believer in catastrophic manmade global warming but would nonetheless withdraw the state from participating in a cap-and-trade program he deemed a failure. 

The new Christie/Romney position is the only logical one for someone who believes in global warming because no policy response yet proposed would have any discernible impact on atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide or on global average temperature. 

Needless to say, such pointless programs fail a cost/benefit analysis. The stronger form of this argument would be that even a policy response that would lower CO₂ emissions and the global average temperature would cost more than the benefits it would provide. 

Kerpen continues: 

This is a welcome change from the previous default blue-state Republican position of supporting disastrous energy taxes like cap-and-trade in the name of global warming. But the problem for Romney is that he is trying to campaign as someone considerably more conservative than a typical blue-state Republican.

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The big question now is: What specific policies does Romney support in the name of global warming, and what will they cost us? Those details remain to be seen.