Mitt Romney once believed the answer to higher gasoline prices was more fuel-efficient cars

Mitt Romney once believed the answer to higher gasoline prices was more fuel-efficient cars:

Keeping track of Mitt Romney₁ versus Mitt Romney₂ is reaching the point where we need a distributed computing project running 24/7.
The latest Romney incarnation has been taking President Obama to task for his energy policies, using rising gasoline prices as the cudgel and promoting drillbabydrill as the solution, all the while saying the president is a backer of higher prices. He's pointed, for example, to an interview in 2008 with John Harwood of CNBC in which Obama said:

"The only way we're going to deal with these high gas prices is if we change how we consume oil and that means investing in alternative fuels. It means that we are raising fuel efficiency standards on cars; that we're helping the automakers retool."

Quite right as far as it went. While gasoline prices always have a seasonal component and are affected by speculation and manipulation over the short term, the dwindling supplies of conventional oil combined with increased global demand for the stuff is ultimately going to drive the price higher no matter how much tough-to-get, expensive-to-process unconventional oil becomes available. Efficiency, alternatives like electric vehicles and more reliance on upgraded mass transit are not just going to be options, but necessities.
And guess what? Mitt Romney₁ was saying the same thing back in May 2006 when he was governor of Massachusetts and told the Patriot Ledger he opposed a suspension of the gasoline tax, saying the better approach would be to build more fuel-efficient vehicles. A month later, he was on Charlie Rose with Judy Woodruff and said:

"Look, if we could somehow magically wave a wand over our automobile fleet and replace all of our cars with the current best technology, 35 mpg-type technology, we'd be saving an extraordinary amount of oil,"

And then there was Mitt Romney₁ in 2004 pushing the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan, which acknowledged the reality of climate change and promoted energy efficiency as one means to cut emissions. Not that this deterred him from urging his wife to give up the Caddies.
That was then. Now we've got Mitt Romney₂, who not only has nothing to say about increasing efficiency but also is publicly skeptical of climate change.
Once he finally gets the Republican nomination and begins the shift back toward capturing independents, perhaps we'll see the competition between Mitt Romney₁ and Mitt Romney₂ start including Mitt Romney₃, a guy who supports something besides sinking drill bits in every acre. We'll have to track his new pronouncements by running those distributed computers in reverse.