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What is Green Conservatism? Newt and Callista explain a new way forward for a cleaner environment without growing the power of government.
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Newt's passion for the Environment
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 Newt has liked animals and zoos since he was a little boy. His relatives used to take him to the Hershey Zoo, the Philadelphia Zoo and the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
When he was ten he went to the Harrisburg City Council and made an appeal for a zoo for Pennsylvania’s capital city. As a teenager, Newt wanted to be either a zoo director or a vertebrate paleontologist.
As a young college professor, he coordinated the Interdisciplinary Program on Environmental Studies at WestGeorgia College. Newt and Callista visit zoos and museums everywhere they go. Newt has visited nearly 100 zoos around the world. Callista is catching up.
See a list of Newt & Callista's favorite zoos, with pictures, at Gingrich Productions.com
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Energy Policy Should Rest on Incentives, Not Punishment
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Instead of making energy cheaper, which would help create jobs and save Americans money, President Barack Obama wants to impose an energy tax on every American. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study from 2007 estimated that this type of energy tax could raise costs for a family of four by more than $3,500 by 2015. The Obama administration’s own budget director is on record predicting around a $1,300 increase in the price of energy for the average American from these higher taxes. As a candidate, Obama himself recognized the pain this would cause every American, saying, “Under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” Instead of raising energy taxes and punishing domestic energy production, America should be expanding its own energy supplies and finding ways to lower the cost of energy for every American. This can be accomplished with a smarter policy of incentivizing energy solutions instead of punishing energy use.
Read the rest of Newt's op-ed
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Audio: Newt on the Environment
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Newt on prizes and incentives to encourage breakthroughs in environmental and energy development; individual innovation may pave the way to America’s energy future In November 2007, Newt met with Jeffrey Sachs at the New York Public Library to address some of the issues surrounding energy policy, incentives and a global shift away from a carbon-based energy system. Having dealt with these concerns in his recent book A Contract with the Earth, Gingrich asserted that an important way to induce innovation is to offer incentives to individuals for reaching technological breakthroughs that enable the world to create and make use of energy sources with minimum impact on the environment. There is much potential in the harnessing of individuals’ knowledge and creativity, as Newt explains in the audio clips below:
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On the climate change scandal
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by Newt Gingrich
Two stories have broken in the past few days that should give Congress further pause before it ever again takes up energy tax legislation that justifies the destruction of millions of American jobs based on the supposed urgency of meeting the challenge of global warming.
Emails obtained by hackers from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit show a deliberate attempt by several leading climate scientists to manipulate data sets in order to show warming trends. They also paint an ugly picture of a willingness on the part of these influential scientists to suppress research that calls into question the accuracy of supposed warming trends.
This embarrassment was trumped by the even more damaging revelation that the Climate Research Unit had years ago destroyed its original raw data sets that it collected from weather stations around the world that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) then relied on to formulate its conclusions about global warming. All that the Climate Research Unit now has is “value added data,” which supposedly controls for variables. However, without the original data, the accuracy of these adjustments can no longer be verified by other scientists.
These twin scandals raise serious questions about the integrity of the scientific process in the field of climate research as well as the accuracy of the underlying data that provides the rationale for the cap and trade energy tax legislation that the House approved last June and that the Senate is now considering.
In response to these recent revelations, Congress should open an investigation into the degree of bias in the climate change community (including the journalists that report on the topic) toward suppressing research that shows slower or negligible global warming trends, or points to different causes than greenhouse gasses. It should investigate whether worthy scientific studies contradicting the global warming conclusion have been suppressed from peer reviewed literature. If Congress is going to consider legislation based on supposed scientific consensus, it has every right to conduct inquiries into whether that consensus is genuine.
Furthermore, Congress should allocate resources to reassemble raw weather data from around the world and make it publicly available so independent scientists can verify the legitimacy of the “adjusted numbers” of the Climate Research Unit. The United States – indeed, the world, deserves an answer as to whether the adjusted data used by the IPCC (and Al Gore, with whom they shared the Nobel Prize in 2007) can be trusted. If the Climate Research Unit’s adjusted numbers cannot be trusted, the IPCC needs to explain how the exclusion of such unreliable data from its scientific analysis affects the IPCC’s current conclusions and recommendations about global warming.
I have always warned against the dangers of the politicization of climate science and, in the face of conflicting scientific claims, have advocated a strategy of prudence, not panic when it comes to meeting the challenge of climate change.
I support market driven measures to promote the rapid development of cleaner sources of energy as a positive good that America should pursue -- not only for the environment, but also for our economy and our national security.
I oppose big government measures like the proposed energy tax legislation passed this year by the House and pending in the Senate, because it is a jobs killer that would destroy wealth. Also, it would in the long run be detrimental for the environment, as less wealth leads to less technological innovation, which has historically been essential to meeting environmental challenges.
Anyone interested in learning more about a pro jobs, pro science, and pro environment energy policy should read my books, A Contract with the Earth (co-authored with Terry Maple) and Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less: A Handbook for Slashing Gas Prices and Solving the Energy Crisis.
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Entering the Arena:
Why Conservatives Must Engage in the Environment-Energy Policy Debate
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican and a conservationist, once said “It’s not the critic who counts [but] the man who is actually in the arena;” the man who “knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions” and “shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
For over 30 years, when it comes to the environment, most conservatives have been critics; we’ve been missing from the arena, and we’re paying the price.
It’s long been clear that we’re paying the price politically. Anti-environment conservatism can’t win elections in the northeast or on the coasts.
And now it’s clear we’re paying the price in terms of one of the most consequential public policy challenges we face: Energy independence. A conservatism that refuses to intellectually engage on the environment can not win arguments over energy...
What conservatives too often narrowly – and mistakenly – dismiss as “environmentalism” really encompasses four very real, parallel challenges:
READ THE REST AND COMMENT
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Bad Policy Is Fueling the Energy Crisis
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NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Apr 13, 2009
by Newt Gingrich Let's be clear: our energy crisis is not due to a lack of American energy resources. We have more coal than any other country in the world. There are 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas lying undeveloped offshore. Shale-oil reservoirs in parts of Colorado and Utah could hold upwards of 1 trillion barrels of oil—more than three times the proven reserves in Saudi Arabia. Nuclear power is a clean source of energy that produces zero carbon emissions. It generates 20 percent of America's electric power today, and with the right investment could generate far more. Instead, America is suffering from an artificial energy crisis, one that is the product of our government's policies, not despite them. The federal government should also develop a package of incentives to encourage clean-energy innovation. This should include a series of tax-free prizes to accelerate innovation in developing clean-coal technologies, as well as a $1 billion tax-free prize for the first hydrogen car that can be mass-produced at a reasonable price. We should make the wind- and solar-power tax credits permanent to provide long-term stability to these growing industries and develop long-distance transmission lines to move the massive amounts of wind power in the Great Plains to urban areas. We should also pass an open-fuel standard for 95 percent of the new cars sold in the United States, allowing the construction of flex-fuel vehicles (FFVs) that can run on a variety of fuels, including ethanol. Finally, America should implement a loser-pays rule for lawsuits against any energy company. This would guarantee that any lawsuit brought against an energy developer was not done solely to slow down the process through the courts.
Read the entire op-ed here *BREAKING NEWS* MORE BAD POLICY
According to American Solutions, On Friday, April 17th the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared that carbon was a threat to public health and safety, likely ensuring that carbon dioxide will be regulated as a pollutant. While 2 out of 3 Americans do not support the passage of a cap-and-trade plan to regulate carbon emissions, the EPA is still set to impose a tax on carbon that will raise the price of energy, transportation, and virtually every item that requires energy to be produced for businesses and consumers alike. It will be the 21st Century version of taxation without representation. Watch Newt discuss the problems with cap-and-trade below:
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We Have the Power, hosted by Newt and Callista Gingrich, highlights America's need to tap into our abundant energy resources, including the vast amount of oil and gas in the Outer Continental Shelf and Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). It also explores our alternative energy resources such as hydroelectric power, wind power, oil shale, natural gas, gas hydrates, hydrogen, biofuels, solar power, clean coal and nuclear power. As Americans we have the power. The time to act is now. Produced by Citizens United and Gingrich Productions. Trailer:
Watch below and learn about our recent success with our movement towards energy independence, thanks to the help of over 1.3 million Americans!
Get the Facts: Why a Drill Here, Drill Now Approach Will Help America Pay Less at the Pump
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