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Will Pawlenty qualify ethanol support to fit VP bill?

Posted: July 14, 2008 at 10:03 AM CST

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is popular, charismatic and young. He’s from a northern state and he espouses just the sort of progressive conservatism that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona needs on his ticket.

It’s a perfect match, really … except for one thing.

McCain — despite his brief support for corn ethanol during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses — is, by and large, opposed to corn ethanol, and Pawlenty runs a state that produces close to a billion gallons of it.

While McCain has flip-flopped on ethanol, Pawlenty has been a consistently strong advocate for it, supporting a mandate for 20 percent of the state’s gasoline supply to be comprised of ethanol by 2013. Now that he’s on the shortlist for VP — and there’s good reason to think he is — Pawlenty might have to tweak his views on energy and ethanol just a little bit to fit in with McCain’s camp. That means he might have to say a few things most Minnesotans disagree with.

Pawlenty’s term as chairman of the National Governors Association ended over the weekend when the group met in Philadelphia. Before he handed the gavel over to incoming chairman Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (who is coincidentally a VP prospect for Obama), Pawlenty diverged a bit from the conservation and alternative energy talking points in his year-old Clean Energy Initiative, saying America needs to allow for new offshore oil leases and more nuclear power, according to the Associated Press. He’s even backing exploration and drilling in ANWR, an idea that’s not popular with most Minnesotans.

As Pawlenty reengineers his energy policy to more closely fit McCain’s platform, don’t expect him to forsake ethanol altogether, but expect some tweaking. He’s going to do what’s politically popular — and easy — diverting corn ethanol criticism to talk of next-generation biofuels like cellulosic ethanol. On Sunday, Pawlenty told his fellow governors that ethanol has been a "success story" for states like his. But he says he recognizes that it "has to now move to phase two.” Pawlenty says biofuels will be a big part of the nation's energy future but the type of biofuels will evolve and change.

That’s not necessarily bad. More support for cellulosic ethanol is a good thing, but not at the expense of selling corn ethanol down the river. It will be interesting to see if Pawlenty turns away from corn ethanol in the next few months. Stayed Tuned.

-Tom Bryan