NEWS

Gingrich drops skepticism on global warming

04/11/2007

By Alan Wirzbicki

The Boston Globe

WASHINGTON—In a Capitol Hill debate about global warming touted by its moderator as a "smackdown" between former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, Gingrich praised Kerry's recently released book about environmentalism, acknowledged that global warming is real, and offered what amounted to an unexpected apology for his party's inaction on curtailing greenhouse gas emissions.

"I'm not going to stand up here and defend our failure to lead," said Gingrich, who is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and plans to release a book in the fall burnishing his environmental credentials. "There has to be a green conservatism."

The standing-room-only debate, staged yesterday in an ornate Senate hearing room, offered an indication that even diehard conservatives like Gingrich, who stepped down as speaker in 1998, are abandoning their skepticism on global warming. As recently as two years ago, Gingrich ridiculed the notion that humans are causing the earth to warm, but yesterday he said the evidence was "sufficient."

"We have now passed the tipping point of that argument," he said yesterday. The former Georgia congressman even allowed that he agreed with "about 60 percent" of "This Moment on Earth," a recently published book Kerry co wrote with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

But if the debate was proof of the emerging political consensus that global warming is for real, it also showed that profound disagreements remain over how to tackle the problem. In his remarks, Gingrich proposed giving polluters tax incentives to reduce their carbon emissions voluntarily, an approach Kerry derided as inadequate.

"That's like saying, 'Barry Bonds, go investigate steroids,' " shot back Kerry, who favors a government-imposed limit on emissions and a system that would allow businesses to buy and sell credits entitling them to release a certain amount of carbon pollution into the atmosphere.

"There is no single environmental crisis that has been met in the United States voluntarily," Kerry said.

Both men agreed the problem was increasingly urgent, citing a new report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that said rising temperatures and sea levels were linked to the growing quantity of greenhouse gases emitted by cars, power plants, and factories. Without a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the panel warned, 20 percent to 30 percent of plant and animal species could face extinction.

Gingrich criticized the limit proposed by Kerry and said the senator's policy was to create a "level of pain" to compel businesses to cut their emissions, whereas he said he wanted to create a "level of pleasure" through tax breaks that would give incentives to polluters to develop new carbon-reducing technologies.

Among conservatives yesterday, reaction to Gingrich's performance at the debate ranged from puzzled to outraged, and several bloggers accused the former speaker of betraying the GOP by caving to the environmental lobby. A critical post on the website of the conservative magazine National Review was titled, "There goes Gingrich '08?"

Gingrich is due to publish a book called "A Contract with the Earth" in the fall, outlining his environmental beliefs.

Jim DiPeso, the policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, a group that seeks to steer the GOP toward more eco-friendly positions, said Gingrich's conversion "shows that the broader climate debate may have crossed a significant threshold."

"Here you have the leader of the Gingrich revolution up against the prototypical Boston liberal, and they did not disagree on the fact that human-induced climate change is happening," DiPeso said.

The criticism from conservatives, he said, was predictable because many Republicans have come to see climate change as a partisan issue. "They think that Gingrich has become an apostate, drunk the Kool-Aid, and gone over to the dark side. If I were Newt Gingrich, I would wear that criticism as a badge of honor," he said.

For his part, Kerry said he was cautiously encouraged that more prominent Republicans are beginning to accept climate change as a serious issue.

"It's important to have a conservative leader saying, 'I accept the science and I accept the urgency and we need to do something,' " Kerry said after the debate.

Still, he questioned whether the newfound willingness by some conservatives to address global warming is sincere.

"Words can come fast and furious in Washington," he said.