Two years before policital unpopularity forced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to abandon cap-and-trade legislation regulate carbon emissions, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., praised the idea of “mandatory carbon caps” combined with tax incentives, and said that then-President Bush should have led the charge to implement such a policy.
“I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good,” Gingrich said during a PBS interview on February 15, 2007. “And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.”
Gingrich also said that Bush should have kept his campaign promise to implement carbon caps. “If [Bush] had instituted a regime that combined three things I just said — mandatory caps, a trading system inside the caps, as we have with clean air, and a tax incentive to be able to invest in the new technology and to be able to produce the new technology — I think we would be much better off than we are in the current situation,” Gingrich suggested.
When asked “what was it that convinced you that global warming was a real and pressing problem?” Gingrich said that “the weight of evidence of evidence over time [convinced me] that it’s something that you have to be careful about. ” He added that “the conservative approach [to global warming] should be to minimize the risk of a really catastrophic change.”
Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas, called attention to the PBS interview in a press release Saturday evening, no doubt attempting to revive conservative criticism of Gingrich’s apparent past support for policy positions that would mitigate global warming, most notably when he participated with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in an advertisement saying that “our country must take action to address climate change.”
Pressed about that PBS interview during an event in Iowa this evening, Gingrich said, “I’ve never favored cap and trade, and in fact I actively testified against it.”
He also displayed more uncertainty about global warming, during an interview last month, then he did during the PBS interview or the Pelosi ad. “I actually don’t know whether global warming is occurring,” he during an appearance on Fox News’ Center Seat. He also said that he did not believe in global warming at the time that he shot the ad with Pelosi.
“No, I back then said — look, I’m an amateur paleontologist . . . the earth’s temperatures go up and down over historic, over geologic times, over and over again,” Gingrich explained. “So, I’m agnostic. But what I am saying, I would say to all my conservative friends, don’t assume automatically that the entire National Academy of Sciences is wrong; and I would say to the National Academy, don’t assume that a vote by renowned scientists is necessarily [the] truth.”
You can read the transcript of the PBS interview here. You can watch video of the Center Seat interview below.
