No single politician since Ronald Reagan has done more to set back America’s leadership in clean technology than Newt Gingrich.

National Zoo plaque [click to enlarge, credit: J. Maskit]

Emperor Newt is pro-poison, that’s for sure (see “Gingrich proposes abolishing EPA” and Report Details How Fox News Fueled Newt Inc. and Pushed His “Drill Here, Drill Now” Agenda).

So it’s no surprise, he is also anti-antidote.  In the 1990s, the Gingrich Congress tried to shut down the Department of Energy, slash all clean energy research, stop the joint government-industry effort to develop a superefficient hybrid 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).

He didn’t succeed — but he did stop the significant expansion of clean energy funding Clinton-Gore had begun.  And he did force the DOE to sharply scale back its programs aimed at clean energy deployment and GHG reduction.

A decade later he tried to pass himself as a friend to the environment.  In 2007, he wrote A Contract with on the Earth.  As I wrote at the time, if you look up the word ‘Orwellian’ on Wikipedia — “An attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past” — there should be a picture of Newt’s new book.

He suckered a lot of folks.  There’s this classic interview in Salon, “Give Newt a chance” — it is definitely all the Newt that is fit to print.

To cut to the chase, readers will not be surprised that a conservative pretending to care about the environment adopted the anti-regulation, pro-technology approach suggested by GOP strategist, Frank Luntz, and popularized by his protege, George Bush (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah”).

Since Gingrich continues to push this misdirection, I’ll excerpt some of my earlier posts on Newt.

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Obama rejects Keystone XL – but we can’t stop here.

Related Post:

• Al Gore slams Obama for Failing to Take on “the Merchants of Poison,” Compares Media to Pro Wrestling Referees

The Best “Austerity” is Cutting Energy Costs

by Trevor Winnie, reposted from Clean Edge

A rising attitude of austerity has been sweeping the nation for some time now, with the loudest voices putting near term deficit concerns in front of commitment to long term economic growth. But a temporary spike in government spending might be the most effective way to boost demand for goods, services, and labor in the face of lingering U.S. economic malaise – and at a relatively low cost.

Boosting investment in infrastructure – namely our energy system, telecommunication networks, and roads and rails – has long been the remedy argued for by bright minds like Nobel laureate economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, and Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein.

“Because of the recession, construction materials are cheap. So is labor. And your borrowing costs? They’ve never been lower. That means a dollar of investment today will go much further than it would have five years ago—or than it’s likely to go five years from now,” explained Klein in an October 2010 Newsweek Op-Ed. “So what do you do? If you’re thinking like a CEO, the answer is easy: you invest.”

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