Conservatives are celebrating that influential Detroit lawmaker Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), the former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, argued Friday that “nobody knows” that a cap on global warming pollution amounts to a “great big” tax. Questioning Vice President Al Gore, Dingell argued that Congress needs to choose between “cap and trade” and an “energy tax” to finance a green recovery:

We’ve got to finance this and we’ve got to enforce it. Cap and trade is one mechanism, an energy tax is another. Every economist says that a carbon tax is a better, more efficient, fairer way of doing it. The Europeans have had two, maybe three fine failures in their application of cap and trade. How do we avoid the mistakes that they made? And how do we come up with something that gives us the best? Nobody in this country realizes that cap and trade is a tax, and it’s a great big one! I want to get a bill that works — how do we choose the best course?

Watch it:

Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), the National Review, the Drudge Report, and other right-wingers have seized on Dingell’s comments. Rep. Mike Pence’s (R-IN) spokesman pushed the comments to Politico, claiming: “Chairman Dingell agrees with what Republicans have been saying all along: the Democrat cap and trade bill is a national energy tax on working families.” However, Dingell has proposed both carbon-tax and cap-and-trade legislation to stop giving polluters the right to continue polluting for free.

Vice President Gore responded that both a carbon tax and market-based cap can address the climate crisis while strengthening the economy:

I have for twenty years supported a CO2 tax that’s given back to the people so that it’s revenue-neutral but accomplishes the desired effect. But I’ve never proposed it as a substitute for cap and trade. I’m in favor of both. And the number of countries that have done the best job of addressing the climate crisis and strengthening their economies have in fact put both in place. But I believe the cap-and-trade approach is the essential first step partly because it is the only basis on which we can envision a truly global agreement, because it’s very hard to imagine a harmonized global tax.

Countries like Denmark, Norway, and Holland which have both a carbon tax and cap-and-trade are indeed weathering the global recession much better than countries like the United States. In fact, Denmark is both the most taxed country on earth and the best country for business in the world.

It is our nation’s dependence on polluting fuels that acts as a tax on society — “a great big one.” As corporations pollute for free, everyone else pays for the disease, asthma, heat waves, droughts, floods, storms, sea level rise, and economic and national insecurity that results. Dingell has spent his political career misguidedly fighting pollution and efficiency standards on behalf of the domestic automotive industry, putting Detroit on the verge of bankruptcy. As millions of Americans understand, it’s time for Washington to repower America with laws that reward work instead of pollution.

60 Minutes this Sunday takes on clean coal — or lack thereof (see “Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?“).

The reporter, Scott Pelley, and the producers definitely know their stuff.  They interviewed me for about an hour a few months ago, so I have no idea what parts they’re going to use.  Jim Roger of Duke will be on it.  I think Hansen also.

Interestingly, on the House panel today with Gore, former GOP Sen. Jim Warner of Virginia dissed the coal industry’s clean coal ads and said, “we know clean coal is not around the corner.”

Warner urged passage of Waxman-Markey and said “future generations will look back” on what Congress does here:

This is serious business. This particular moment in history is crucial.

Hear!  Hear!

Andy Revkin has a must-read NYT piece, “Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate.”

Turns out the Global Climate Coalition, an anti-action lobbying group floated by fossil fuel industries, ignored its own climate scientists while spreading disinformation about global warming. An internal report stating that the human causes of global warming “cannot be denied” fell on the deaf ears of Coalition leaders.

The amazing 14-year-old document totally trashes the standard arguments by deniers –  including Richard Lindzen and Pat Michaels — that are still used today. After a long analysis of “Are There Alternate Explanations for the Climate Change Which Has Occurred Over the Last 120 Years?” they conclude:

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UPDATE:  Video of Gore testimony here.

Al Gore has delivered an excellent piece of testimony before The House Energy and Commerce Committee, which I reprint below.  The entire hearing is quite fascinating, and I’ll blog on other pieces.

The Nobelist and former VP gives the bill an even stronger recommendation than I did!  And he is on record in support of a 350 ppm target!  But he is certainly right that whatever final version of the climate bill gets voted on by the House and Senate will be the most consequential legislation that the vast majority of members will ever vote on, the one that history will ultimately judge them on, given that a failure to solve this problem inexorably leads to Hell and High Water.

Gore has a very nice review of the recent (grim) science and the clean energy opportunity, which I highly recommend reading in its entirety:

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On the House floor on Earth Day, April 22, 2009, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) argued that the threat of manmade global warming doesn’t make any sense because “carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of nature”:

Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can’t even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that’s on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that — that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth.

Watch it:

Rep. Blumenauer (D-OR), later in the evening, demolished Bachmann for “making things up on the floor of the House”:

My good friend, the gentlelady from Minnesota, doesn’t think there are any problems with the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s interesting to listen to her say that something that was naturally occurring simply couldn’t be harmful, ignoring the fact that we have the highest concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 2/3 of a million years.

The consensus of the scientific community — not people making things up on the floor of the House — is that this has been profoundly influenced by human activity, starting with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, where we started consuming huge quantities of coal, burning fossil fuels, accelerating that over time. The consensus of the scientific community is that this is in fact a serious problem.

Furthermore, attempting to repeat the goofy denier talking point that carbon dioxide makes up only a fraction of the atmospheric content and thus isn’t of concern, Bachmann errs wildly. She claims that carbon dioxide makes up “three percent of the atmosphere,” when in fact it only comprises 0.04% — off by a factor of a hundred. As Blumenauer pointed out, CO2 levels are significantly higher than they’ve been throughout human history. Only a hundred years ago, CO2 concentrations were only 0.03%. Of course, when it comes to the greenhouse effect, only global warming gases are relevant. And carbon dioxide is the predominant greenhouse gas.

But Bachmann hasn’t ever been one to let her political rants be constrained by the facts.

Transcript: Read more

Memo to Post:  Please fire editorial page editor Fred Hiatt or at least to give him something to read about CSP (World’s largest solar power plants with thermal storage to be built in Arizona) and plug-in hybrids and what real experts know about both wind power (see Bush DOE says wind can be 20% of U.S. power by 2030 “” with no breakthroughs) and the future of electricity  (FERC chair on new nuclear and coal plants: “We may not need any, ever.”).

You’d think that after the major hit to their reputation from the repeated publication of lies and misstatements by columnist George Will, that Washington Post editors would stop publishing such crap on their op-ed page.  You’d be wrong.

Today, two long out-of-touch energy “experts,” James Schlesinger and Robert Hirsch, write in “Getting Real on Wind and Solar“:

Why are we ignoring things we know? We know that the sun doesn’t always shine and that the wind doesn’t always blow….

Solar and wind electricity are available only part of the time that consumers demand power….

Realistically, however, solar and wind will probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S. power.

Rubbish.  And this is the part of the article that is actually intelligible.

The Post‘s blurb on the piece says, “Solar and wind power’s limits are clear, two experts say.”  And yet these experts — and the Post‘s editorial editors and fact-checkers — are stuck in the 1970s, apparently utterly unaware of the most basic recent developments in energy:

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Update: Gingrich testimony is here.  He has the nerve to start with a quote from George Orwell and then utter the most Orwellian statement of our time, “it should be no surprise that I care deeply about and am committed to the protection of our environment.”  He repeats the utterly debunked abuse of an April 2007 MIT analysis that has nothing to do with Waxman-Markey:  “With this glorified, $1-2 trillion new energy tax, expect utility bill increases up to $3,128 per year per household.” His climate plan calls for massive oil drilling in ANWR and elsewhere — quite a carbon reduction strategy.  And he urges, “The Congress should immediately pass a stand alone bill that cuts off any appropriations funding to the EPA that would be used to regulate carbon dioxide.”

Former Sen. John Warner’s House testimony at 10 am EST today on the Waxman-Markey bill (webcast here) is news because Warner was pretty much the only mainstream conservative senator to break ranks in the last Congress and support serious climate action.

Nobelist Al Gore’s testimony with Warner today is also news.  Heck, just last week Michael Shellenberger, President of The Breakthrough Institute, was sniping “Gore has been notably silent during the cap and trade debate.”

Now, in an effort to get some media star on their side as a counterweight, the House GOP — which is unlikely to see a single of its members vote for the final bill (see “House GOP pledge to fight all action on climate“) — they have added Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as “a last-minute addition” in the panel after Warner and Gore, as E&E News PM (subs. req’d) put it.

Gingrich is “” and always has been “” pro-pollution. His 527 is bought and paid for by the oil companies (see here).  Yes, some have been suckered by his fake eco-rhetoric.  But notwithstanding Andy Revkin’s claim that Gingrich is part of a “move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy” or the We campaign’s Gingrich-Pelosi couch-fest on climate, Gingrich has never stopped pushing hard for standard conservative screw-the-climate solutions (see Eco-Gingrich says, “Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay More.”).

Indeed, I can think of no single politician since Ronald Reagan who has done more to set back America’s leadership in clean technology than Newt Gingrich.

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