Rubio was for acting on climate change, before he didn't understand it

From Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, commenting on Marco Rubio's pronouncements on climate change:

But if Rubio doesn’t believe the scientists, perhaps he might believe . . . himself. As the Miami Herald recounted, “As the leader of the Florida House in 2008, Rubio presided over a unanimous vote in favor of directing the state Department of Environmental Protection to develop ground rules for companies to limit their carbon emissions.” The following year, Rubio described a cap-and-trade system as “inevitable” and pronounced himself “in favor of giving the Department of Environmental Protection a mandate that they go out and design a cap-and-trade or a carbon tax program.”

According to the Herald, Rubio “hired a leading climate change expert” — eek, a scientist! — “from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to advise lawmakers.”

Rubio claimed the following year that he was actually engineering a plan to stop cap-and-trade, but that was hardly a credible explanation for a convenient flip-flop as he ran in the Republican primary against then-Gov. Charlie Crist, a cap-and-trade advocate.

Since then, Rubio has moved from disclaiming scientific expertise to deriding it. “I’m not a scientist. I’m not qualified to make that decision,” Rubio told the Herald in December 2009 when asked whether climate change was the result of human activity. Climate change, by the way, isn’t the only issue on which Rubio punted to scientists: When GQ asked in 2012 how old the Earth is, Rubio demurred, “I’m not a scientist, man.”

GOT THAT RIGHT, MARCO!!