Fresh Loaf

Emory grad, former West Georgia prof and all-around party animal Newt Gingrich, when not busy playing coy about a run for the White House, likes to write books. Usually they’re about the Civil War or have self-help titles — Winning the Future, Restoring the Dream — but now he’s got a new tome out about saving the environment.

The book, A Contract with the Earth, espouses an anti-regulation, pro-technology approach to moving toward a cleaner environment.

Bravo, Newt, thanks for caring! But Joe Romm at ClimateProgress — he no likey. (Emphasis Romm’s.)

You may be surprised that Newt calls himself an environmentalist, given that he co-authored and then worked to enact the anti-environmental Contract with America. Oh, but Newt now claims:

I don’t think that the environment was a central focus of the Contract With America. I don’t think that it was bad for the environment. I don’t know of a single thing in the Contract that was bad for the environment.

I think Salon had to pause in the interview at that point to allow Newt to douse the flames that began engulfing his trousers. In fact, the CWA was a clever, stealthy attack on the environment as detailed by NRDC in a lengthy analysis (summarized here), by the Sierra Club, and by the National Wildlife Federation, which wrote at the time: “Taken as a whole, the House plan constitutes the broadest and deepest attack ever mounted against laws that protect public health, the environment, natural resources and wildlife.”

The only thing more gut-busting than Gingrich claiming that the CWA and related legislation wasn’t bad for the environment is his newfound embrace of technology as the answer to climate/energy problems.

Recall that in the 1990s, the Gingrich Congress tried to shut down the Department of Energy, slash all clean energy research (including biofuels), stop the joint government-industry effort to develop a superefficient car, and zero out all programs aimed specifically at reducing greenhouse emissions and accelerating technology deployment (for some history, see my 1996 Atlantic Monthly article and this 1997 article).

Well put. He goes on to stab a bunch of holes in Gingrich’s “incentives” idea — rewarding companies that produce cleaner technologies with huge tax breaks — and brands him as the politician who has done the most to undermine America’s leadership in clean technology since Reagan. Worth reading.

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Tags: ClimateProgress, Global-Warming, Newt-Gingrich.