We’ve seen how GOP conservatives want to cleanse their party of moderates -- see “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 1: Conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy.”  Even Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), an American Conservative Union “Senate Standout,” among the 20 most conservative U.S. Senators in 2008, is being attacked for even daring to engage in bipartisan efforts to solve our climate and energy security problem (see Teabaggers try to “flush” Graham out of GOP, calling him “traitor” and “RINO” and “wussypants, girly-man, half-a-sissy”; Graham responds, “We’re not going to be the party of angry white guys”).

Well, Senator, not only does Glenn Beck say “I’m going to stick with the angry people,” Mike Pence, chair of House GOP Conference, sides with Beck (see here).

If you need further proof that there’s a growing purity test for GOP nominees for national office, that the angry people are taking over the party, consider this bombshell from New York:

A moderate Republican whose candidacy for an upstate New York Congressional seat had set off a storm of national conservative opposition, abruptly withdrew on Saturday, emboldening the right at a time when the Republican Party is enmeshed in a debate over how to rebuild itself.

The candidate, Dede Scozzafava, said she was suspending her campaign in the face of collapsing support and evidence that she was heading for a loss in a three-way race on Tuesday involving Douglas L. Hoffman, running on the Conservative Party line, and Bill Owens, a Democrat.

As TP reports, “big tent” and “establishment” Republicans -- such as Gingrich, the RNC, and the NRCC -- backed Scozzafava whereas “purists” -- such as Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and Bill Kristol -- backed Hoffman.

What test did Scozzafava fail:

Ms. Scozzafava had been under siege from conservative leaders because she supports gay rights and abortion rights and was considered too liberal on various fiscal issues.

Hoffman, on the other hand, is one angry guy, as this New York Post op-ed he wrote last week makes clear:

Taxes, the deficit, red tape, and regulation are breaking the back of the nation, mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren.

Americans have had enough and are vocalizing their anger in town hall meetings and on the streets of Washington. They are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore!

That’s why I am running. I am one of them!

Yes, he’s one of the angry few.

This is the political story of the week with huge implications for climate action and the entire progressive agenda.  In the very short term, it may make it difficult for some “moderate” Republicans to engage in a serious bipartisan effort to preserve a livable climate and end our dependence on oil (see “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 3: RNC Chair Steele withdraws support for Rep. Kirk over his vote on climate and clean energy bill“).

The pressure on Lindsey Graham will no doubt continue to be enormous, though at least in his case he’s not up for reelection until 2014.  Fortunately the few remaining moderate environmental voices in the Republican Party are speaking out for him (see here).  If you want to thank Lindsey Graham for reaching across the aisle to address the climate problem (click here).

In the medium term, however, the GOP’s internecine warfare is almost certainly a good thing for progressives, as even Newt Gingrich understands:

Yet other prominent Republicans expressed concern that Ms. Scozzafava’s decision seemed likely to unsettle the party going into next year’s midterm elections, raising the prospect of more primaries against Republican candidates that they deem too moderate. Party leaders -- including Mr. Steele and Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker -- had argued that local parties should be permitted to pick candidates that most closely mirror the sentiments of the district, even if those candidates vary from Republican orthodoxy on some issues.

“This makes life more complicated from the standpoint of this: If we get into a cycle where every time one side loses, they run a third-party candidate, we’ll make Pelosi speaker for life and guarantee Obama’s re-election,” said Mr. Gingrich, who had endorsed Ms. Scozzafava.

“I felt very deeply that when you have all 11 county chairman voting for someone, that it wasn’t appropriate for me to come in and render my judgment,” he said. “I think we are going to get into a very difficult environment around the country if suddenly conservative leaders decide they are going to anoint people without regard to local primaries and local choices.”

Ms. Scozzafava, a state assemblywoman and former small-town mayor, was nominated this summer by Republican county leaders who quickly found their choice second-guessed by the party’s conservative wing. Many officials in the district, a vast expanse from the Vermont border through the Adirondacks to Lake Ontario, were deeply resentful of the outside involvement.

“They’re trying to bang 435 elections across the United States into the same mold,” said James Ellis, chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party. “It’s a detriment to democracy.”

Yes, it’s true, that the effort by Rahm Emanuel and other Democratic leaders to build up a working majority by reaching out to moderate candidates means that progressives don’t always get precisely the legislation they’d write by themselves.  But the point is, without a working majority, you don’t get to write legislation at all, and you’d certainly never end up with the biggest increase in clean energy funding in U.S. history -- bigger than all of the previous increases combined.

If Obama is a two-term president and we can maintain working majorities throughout both terms -- then we have a serious chance of making the transition to a clean energy economy and averting catastrophic global warming.  Thanks to the angry conservatives, that outcome just became a bit more likely.

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This post was originally published on the website of the Center for Public Integrity and is reposted on Grist with CPI's kind permission.

The world’s largest coal company and one of the nation’s top fossil-fueled power companies are among the leading donors so far this year to Newt Gingrich’s political advocacy group, which has been fighting climate legislation on Capitol Hill with a “Stop the Energy Tax” phone-in campaign to Senate offices.

Peabody Energy, the St. Louis-based coal giant, gave $250,000 to American Solutions for Winning the Future in February, putting it atop the Gingrich-led group’s big contributors for the first half of 2009, according to the nonprofit’s newly filed report at the Internal Revenue Service. Peabody also gave American Solutions the same amount in 2008. The firm’s chief executive, Greg Boyce, has publicly expressed doubts about global warming, so it is not entirely surprising that Peabody would support an issues advocacy group that is going all-out against the climate bill.

More surprising, perhaps, is the $100,000 donation in May from American Electric Power, of Columbus, Ohio. Though the company is either the largest or second-largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. power industry, AEP has voiced support for the climate bill passed by the House. Although the company would like further changes in the bill on greenhouse gas targets and timetables, company spokesman Pat Hemlepp confirms AEP supports climate legislation, and says the company is not in step with Gingrich on the issue.

“AEP gives funds to a variety of organizations that have views on issues that for the most part align with our company’s views on the issues,” said Hemlepp. “That doesn’t mean that all the organizations’ views align with ours.”

In particular, he said AEP strongly agrees with American Solutions’ advocacy on development of more domestic energy resources. “Some of their positions on climate we don’t necessarily agree with, but they are also involved in health care and economic issues and since some of their positions align with ours we thought it was a good place to put some money,” Hemlepp said.

AEP Chief Executive Mike Morris himself had been a leader in the utility industry in talking about the greenhouse gas problem as a member of the Pew Center’s Business Environmental Leadership Council. AEP was a founding member of the first U.S. voluntary greenhouse gas emissions reductions system, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX); and it exceeded the targets it set under that program to reduce its carbon emissions, mostly through energy efficiency measures.

AEP had not joined the business-environmental coalition most active in lobbying for the legislation, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, although the company released a statement earlier this year saying it was “in basic accord with most of the principles of USCAP today.”

Gingrich, on the other hand, has been a vocal opponent of what he calls the “cap-and-trade energy tax,” railing against it in frequent appearances on Fox News and recently at a news conference at the National Press Club. American Solutions also ran TV ads against the climate bill the week that it closely passed the House.

In addition, American Solutions has boasted on its web site that phone calls to House member offices ran “as much as 19-to-1” against the bill, and has urged its supporters to call offices at the Senate, slated to take up the bill in September.

Numerous conservative groups and TV commentators have joined in urging phone calls to Capitol Hill. Joe Romm, a former Clinton administration energy official who writes the Climate Progress blog for the Center for American Progress, reports that Senate offices are receiving hundreds of calls daily against the climate bill.

Altogether, American Solutions took in $8.1 million in contributions in the first half of 2009, about 45 percent, or $3.7 million, from donations of less than $200 (meaning the donors’ names did not have to be reported under IRS rules). But three of the six largest donations came from companies that would be directly affected by climate legislation.

Vince Haley, vice president for research and policy at American Solutions, says the contributions from the fossil fuel industry haven’t dictated the agenda for the organization, but “it has certainly attracted people who agree” with the group.

“We’re happy to take money from any organization that agrees with our positions,” he said. “And what you see is a dynamic where the more vocal we are, and more effective we are, the more support we get.”

Haley says with the Senate vote coming up, “I’m sure American Solutions will be quite engaged in working to stop the energy tax.”

As a 527 nonprofit issues advocacy group that does not campaign for or against candidates, American Solutions is not subject to federal campaign finance law or its prohibitions on accepting donations directly from corporations. But it is required to regularly report contributions and expenditures to the IRS. American Solutions — which gained notoriety for its “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign last year, was the third largest 527 group in the 2008 election cycle, taking it $22.7 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Although the group calls itself nonpartisan and even “tri-partisan,” many of large donors last year were big GOP contributors, as the Center for Public Integrity detailed in a special report.

Gingrich himself had said one of the reasons that he chose not to embark on a presidential run in 2008 was to devote time to American Solutions; but he has raised his profile this year, and in interviews has left the door open to a future run for high office.

David Donald and Tuan Le contributed to this post.

Download full list of contributors here.

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Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, write in "What Palin Got Wrong About Energy":

Whether it was the debate over the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund law or any other landmark environmental law, one pattern has always been clear: Time and again, pessimists -- often affiliated with polluting industries -- predicted job losses and great costs to taxpayers. Each time, our environmental laws have cleaned the water we drink, the air we breathe and the communities we live in at far lower cost than initially expected.

Recall that Palin, who quit her governorship Sunday, is so ignorant of energy, so practiced at repeating falsehoods, that in September, during the campaign, the Washington Post itself gave her its highest (which is to say lowest) rating of "Four Pinocchios" for continuing "to peddle bogus [energy] statistics three days after the original error was pointed out by independent fact-checkers."

But that didn't stop editorial page editor Hiatt from running a piece by Palin filled with bogus information attacking climate action and clean energy action.  And it didn't stop Newt Gingrich from claiming in the clip above, "Her knowledge of the energy issue is very real."

Boxer and Kerry respond to her rhetorical bomb-throwing and lack of knowledge of the issues:

Palin argues that "the answer doesn't lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive!" The truth is, clean energy legislation doesn't make energy scarcer or more expensive; it works to find alternative solutions to our costly dependence on foreign oil and provides powerful incentives to pursue cutting-edge clean energy technologies.

Palin asserts that job losses are "certain." Wrong. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and American Clean Energy and Security legislation will create significant employment opportunities across the country in a broad array of sectors linked to the clean energy economy. Studies at the federal level and by states have demonstrated clean energy job creation. A report by the Center for American Progress calculated that $150 billion in clean energy investments would create more than 1.7 million domestic and community-based jobs that can't be shipped overseas.

Palin seems nostalgic for the campaign rally chant of "drill, baby, drill." But she ignores the fact that the United States has only 3 percent of the world's proven oil reserves, while we are responsible for 25 percent of the world's oil consumption.

In fact, the governor's new refrain against global warming action reminds us of every naysayer who has spoken out against progress in cleaning up pollution....

Well, Palin isn't like every other pro-pollution naysayer -- surely she's the only one ever to voluntarily quit the governorship of a state halfway through her term.

Take the acid rain program established in the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. The naysayers said it would cost consumers billions in higher electricity rates, but electricity rates declined an average of 19 percent from 1990 to 2006. Naysayers said the cost to business would be more than $50 billion a year, but health and other benefits outweighed the costs 40 to 1. Naysayers predicted it would cost the economy millions of jobs. In fact, the United States added 20 million jobs from 1993 to 2000, as the U.S. economy grew 64 percent.

The carefully crafted clean energy bill that we will present to the Senate, building on the Waxman-Markey legislation passed by the House, will jump-start our economy, protect consumers, stop the ravages of unchecked global climate change and ensure that the United States -- not China or India -- will be the leading economic power in this century.

By creating powerful incentives for clean energy, it will create millions of jobs in America -- building wind turbines, installing solar panels on homes and producing a new fleet of electric and hybrid vehicles.

It will also help make America more secure. A May report by retired U.S. generals and admirals found, "Our dependence on foreign oil reduces our international leverage, places our troops in dangerous global regions, funds nations and individuals who wish us harm, and weakens our economy; our dependency and inefficient use of oil also puts our troops at risk."

We do not charge that Palin wants to keep sending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas annually to import oil from countries that, in many cases, are working to harm Americans and American interests around the world -- or that she wants another nation to lead the way to the innovative clean energy solutions that will be eagerly gobbled up by the rest of the world. But those would be the tragic results of the do-nothing policies she has espoused. Our nation's approach to energy must be balanced and must provide incentives for all the available clean energy sources to help reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Palin has proven she is unfit -- and unwilling -- to govern a single state.

That said, I applaud her taking position of leadership in the climate and clean energy debate -- one always wishes for the lamest of opponents.  So Gingrich's endorsement of her is especially timely.

Here is more from Think Progress on Gingrich's remarks:

At a National Press Club event on Wednesday, a questioner asked Newt Gingrich -- head of a corporate-funded group American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF) -- whether or not he would consider "running with" Sarah Palin in 2012. Gingrich demurred on 2012, but the former House Speaker went on to praise the soon-to-be-former Governor of Alaska as a future conservative leader on energy issues:

GINGRICH:  "Her knowledge of the energy issue is very real. And if you do start to see energy prices go back up I think there will be a pretty big interest in what she has to say about how we can use American energy -- keep the money here in America and the fact that bowing to a Saudi king is not a substitute for energy policy."

Following Palin's July 3rd resignation announcement, Bill Kristol speculated that she was resigning because she had "probably accomplished most of what she was going to get done as governor," which begs the question: what does Palin seek to accomplish in her post-gubernatorial career? Between Gingrich's recent hints, the six mentions of energy in her resignation announcement, and her recent hackneyed op-ed on cap-and-trade in the Washington Post, Republicans may be moving to position Palin as their new leading voice on energy.

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Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

“Why did Rick Boucher vote to kill Virginia jobs?” Newt Gingrich’s coal-powered front group, American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF), asked this incendiary question of the coal-district Democrat in a full-page advertisement in the Roanoke Times. The ad, acquired by the Wonk Room, claims Boucher voted “for new energy taxes on every Virginian” when he supported the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) in the House energy committee last month. ASWF goes on to cite terrorizing statistics about “Boucher’s new energy tax”:

Boucher’s new energy tax would:

1. Kill 1,105,000 American jobs per year on average

2. Increase electricity rates 90%

3. Increase gas prices 74%

4. Increase an average family’s annual energy bill by $1,500

5. Send U.S. jobs to China and India

These figures are drawn from a repeatedly discredited study by the Heritage Foundation, who used an unrealistic economic model to examine the effects of a cap-and-trade system that does not resemble the comprehensive clean energy provisions of Waxman-Markey. In reality, independent experts from the Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency have found that the clean energy legislation will:

– Decrease electricity bills 7 percent

– Improve the budgets of the poorest 20 percent of Americans

– Cost between 22 to 48 cents a day for the average American household

– Cut global warming pollution and oil dependence

And these studies didn’t even take into account the economic benefit of averting catastrophic climate change. Furthermore, creating powerful standards for global warming pollution and clean energy create good American jobs, not kill them. Boucher’s vote was a down payment on a national investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency that would dramatically reduce U.S. global warming pollution, would create 45,000 jobs in Virginia, and create 1.7 million jobs every year.

ASWF’s attack exposes the conflict occuring within the American energy industry. From his perch in the energy committee, Boucher won significant concessions on behalf of the coal industry in the legislation. Some companies — like the coal-powered utilities Dominion Resources, American Electric Power, and Duke Energy — recognize that the United States must pass comprehensive climate legislation now, and have heralded Boucher as a champion of their interests. However, Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, is bankrolling the dishonest attacks of Gingrich’s group and the National Mining Association.

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American Solutions for Winning the FutureThe people who brought you the “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” energy plan have launched a new TV ad opposing the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, or, as the new 30-second spot calls it, the “national energy tax.”

American Solutions for Winning the Future, a group founded by former House speaker and Republican “ideas man” Newt Gingrich, will begin airing the ads on TV tomorrow. The ad shows the 1940 footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge twisting, heaving, and buckling in a windstorm, then collapsing.

"Factories closing... businesses failing... families hurting," says the narrator. "Now Congress is about to make things dramatically worse by passing a new National Energy Tax."

"We'll lose more jobs, pay more for gas and electricity -- pushing our economy to its breaking point."

The ad doesn’t cite its sources for those dire conclusions. It’s probably not the Congressional Budget Office’s evaluation of the cap-and-trade portion of Waxman-Markey. That report concludes the bill would cost only about $175 per year per household, as Daniel Weiss writes. And it doesn’t include the bill’s other sections designed to further cushion consumers from higher energy prices.

The ad asks viewers to call their members of Congress and tell them to oppose the bill, which could receive a vote as early as this Friday. It fails to note, moreover, Gingrich's own gigantic flip-flop on the climate issue (remember the Nancy and Newt ad?). (Update: Check out this fine "Gingrich vs. Gingrich" switcheroo chart on his changing philosophies from Media Matters.)

On the plus side, the Tacoma bridge footage is pretty cool. But the metaphor could use some reengineering—the message seems to be, “In these times when nothing is going right, it’s no time to start doing things differently.”

Watch the video:

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"Ich bin ein Berliner" - not!

The other intellectual leader of the GOP - the one whose first name isn't Sarah - summed up the narrow minded and ultimately self-destructive "every-country-for-themselves" mentality of the modern conservative movement Monday.  Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was keynoting the biggest GOP fundraiser of the year for the Senate and House Republican campaign committees - standing in for the dithering Alaska governor (see WP's "Palin Sideshow Spotlights Cracks in the GOP."

l had thought the Republican National Convention's chant of "Drill baby, drill" was the moment the Republic died.  But if Republicans and conservatives continue blocking strong U.S. climate and clean energy legislation - and thwarting the international action needed to prevent this gravest of all threats to citizens of every country - then this statement by Gingrich might top it.

Gingrich's self-defining and self-defeating statement was doubly ignorant from a historical perspective.  First, he was attacking Obama for remarks that President Reagan himself had made a quarter-century ago, which CNN itself failed to report in its coverage of Gingrich's remarks.  As Media Matters explains:

[CNN's] Crowley and Allen reported that the line was a jab at President Obama, but failed to report that former President Ronald Reagan made similar remarks. In a July 2008 speech in Berlin, Germany, Obama described himself as "a citizen - a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world." In a June 17, 1982, speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Reagan similarly said, "I speak today as both a citizen of the United States and of the world."

Indeed, if you go to the link, Reagan actually opened his UN remarks with those words.

Second, to compound the historical ignorance of Gingrich, who is often mistakenly viewed as the GOP's "big ideas" guy, Obama was famously delivering this speech in Berlin in July 2008 - close to the 45th anniversary of Kennedy famous June 26, 1963 Berlin speech.  Everyone expected him to make some sort of nod back to Kennedy, especially since, as Obama himself noted, he has the pedigree:

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen -- a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father - my grandfather - was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

Hardly black helicopter or world government stuff.

Let's end with the remarks that inspired Obama, indeed, that inspired the everyone in the world - except Gingrich and his ever shrinking cohort of conservative compadres:

Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum [I am a Roman citizen]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner'... All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!'

l am a proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.  Those who don't see themselves as both are free to leave.

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Debate on the House climate bill got heated on Friday as Al Gore and Newt Gingrich -- two lightning-rod political figures -- testified before the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Gingrich came crying foul that Congress is poised to begin regulating Jacuzzis, while Gore – you guessed it! –testified to the urgent need to pass an aggressive bill to address the climate crisis.

Veeping it real

Former Sen. John Warner and former veep Al Gore.Gore told the committee that they are discussing "one of the most important pieces of legislation ever introduced in Congress."

"I believe this legislation has the moral significance equivalent to that of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s," said Gore, before delving into some of the current and projected impacts of a warmer planet. His testimony overall focused on the ways that a climate bill could spur new industry and create a more stable economy, in addition to protecting life on the planet from the effects of climate change.

"The U.S. needs to act "not next year, this year," he said. "Each day we continue on our current path, America loses more of its competitive edge. And each day we wait, we increase the risk that we will leave our children and grandchildren an irreparably damaged planet."

Former Republican Sen. John Warner (R), who last year cosponsored the Senate's Climate Security Act, appeared beside Gore to make the point that climate change is a nonpartisan issue

"This particular moment in our history is critical. Future generations will look back at this day in the future, and see what we did, and maybe what we didn't do," said Warner. "There is a desire among broad cross sections of the American people to do something. They want it done."

He also stressed the need to act as soon as possible. "It's only going to get tougher and more complicated for future Congresses," said Warner.

But the committee's Republican members paid little heed to Warner's words and spent the bulk of the day questioning whether humans are causing warming, and maligning the climate bill as an energy tax. (One member even questioned whether Gore was trying to profit from climate policy.)

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), one of the committee's resident skeptics, dismissed Gore's warnings as "alarmist predictions." "Some of the phenomena that you indicate are obviously occurring ... but to lay that at the feet of global warming is not in line with the science," said Barton.

Gore, undeterred, used this as an opportunity to highlight the article on the front page of Friday's New York Times that explains how a fossil-fuel industry group hid the findings of its own scientists, who determined that climate change was in fact happening.

"With all due respect, I believe you've relied on sources whom you've trusted who have given you bad information," Gore told Barton. "The largest corporate carbon polluters in America, 14 years ago, asked their own people to conduct a review of all of this science. And their own people told them, 'What the international scientific community is saying is correct, there is no legitimate basis for denying it.' Then, these large polluters committed a massive fraud -- far larger than Bernie Madoff's fraud."

"They are the Bernie Madoffs of global warming," Gore continued. "They ordered the censoring and removal of the scientific review that they themselves conducted, and like Bernie Madoff, they lied to the people who trusted them in order to make money. These corporations ought to apologize to the American people for conducting a massive fraud for the last 14 years."

Other Republicans offered similar skeptical comments, including Rep. Michael Burgess of Texas. "No one who has come before this committee, from a scientific basis, has shown us the smoking gun that mankind is causing this to happen," claimed Burgess. "Anything can be proven if you're willing to take the time with the numbers."

Later in his remarks, Gore challenged the skeptics. "Not too long from now, the next generation is going to look back at the early part of this century and ask one of two questions. Either they'll ask, 'What were you thinking? Didn't you hear the scientists? Why did you prefer to listen to some outlier quack that got money from these carbon polluters that were engaged in a massive fraud? Why didn't you listen to the global scientific community?" said Gore.

"Or they'll ask a second question, the one I want them to ask: 'How did you find the moral courage to look past the short-term problems of the day and rise to solve a problem that some said was inconvenient to address?'"

Nothing Newt under the sun

The day's second star witness, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, didn't express outright skepticism that climate change is caused by humans, but did suggest that it might not be as bad as some have predicted -- and that even if it were, the government shouldn't be trusted to do anything about it.

"Make no mistake about it: This bill amounts to a one to two trillion dollar energy tax levied on a struggling economy, which is destructive and wrong," said Gingrich. "An energy tax punishes senior citizens. It punishes rural Americans. If you use electricity, it punishes you; if you use heating oil, it punishes you; if you use gasoline, it punishes you. This bill will increase your cost of living and it could kill your job."

(If you're experiencing some cognitive dissonance, yes, this is the same Newt Gingrich who last year sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi and claimed, "Our country must take action to address climate change." That was before he went on to do that whole "Drill here, drill now, pay less" thing.)

Gingrich spent much of his testimony decrying the bill, claiming it would turn the energy secretary into a "Jacuzzi czar" because it directs the Department of Energy to set higher energy-efficiency standards for products like hot tubs. "The difference between being liberal and conservative in America ... is whether you think consumers should decide the kind of Jacuzzi they should have rather than the government," he said.

He criticized the "federal bureaucracy" for doing a poor job of setting appliance standards in the past, and for failing to follow through on energy policy -- though the failures he cited were all from the Bush era.

Gingrich went on to say that he thinks climate change is happening, but he accused Gore of making "deeply misleading assertions" and challenged figures on future sea-level rise and decline of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

He also argued for more studies of the problem. "On the facts of climate change, we need a national inquiry," said Gingrich. "I want to invite Vice President Al Gore to participate in a nonpartisan inquiry, and I'd love to have this committee agree to help sponsor it, so that every high school and college campus this coming October could have a discussion about the facts."

"There is a sufficient debate over facts ... that would be very useful to have," he continued. "I think there is no evidence we need to rush to a massive energy tax increase."

What, then, did Gingrich propose? Among "reasonable, affordable steps that might work," he listed increased domestic oil and gas drilling, expanded use of ethanol and nuclear energy, and development of "clean coal" technologies.

Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee chair and co-author of the climate bill, clearly grew annoyed with Gingrich. "When the American people hear statements that you have made, they get scared. Which is exactly what I think is intended," said Waxman. "I believe that you are trying to give us a false choice. Our economic future and clean energy are inextricably intertwined. The economy that will grow the fastest in this century will be the one that makes the greatest investment in new energy technologies."

"Your ideas are not bold," he continued. "They’re a repeat of the old scare tactics."

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) quoted Gingrich in a 2007 Frontline interview in which he said that cap-and-trade was something he "would strongly support."

"I think many people will ask what happened to the old Newt Gingrich," said Inslee. "We expected an optimist, someone who believes in the creative power of the American economy, but we've had a sudden attack of pessimism that we can't solve this problem."

Now what?

After three full days of testimony from 69 different witnesses, committee leaders must now get down to the tough work of hammering out the details of the bill, so the full committee can begin offering and voting on amendments to it -- a process likely to start next week.

In order to pass the bill out of the committee, the authors will have to sate the committee's moderates, who have circulated a lengthy list of suggested changes. They want a reduction of the renewable electricity standard, free giveaway of many carbon credits to electric utilities, and lower standards for new coal-fired power plants. Their list also suggests lowering the bill's overall goal for reducing emissions by 2020, from 20 percent to 6 percent.

These proposals to make the legislation less stringent will likely not sit will with Waxman, bill coauthor Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and the committee's other more liberal members. But Waxman indicated that some deal-making will need to happen to get a bill passed.

"To succeed, we're going to have to bridge interests between environmentalists and industries, Democrats and Republicans," Waxman said during Friday's hearing.

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Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change

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Cash for Clunkers brought us ... more clunkers!

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

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Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change

Why won’t Lisa Jackson/Nancy Sutley visit a mountaintop removal site?

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It’s Getting Ha! in Here: Maria Bamford

Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix

Gore on The Daily Show

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Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Enlightenment thinking

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Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!

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It’s Getting Ha! in Here: Maria Bamford

Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix

Gore on The Daily Show

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

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Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 4

Saudis want aid if world cuts oil use

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

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‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

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Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!

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Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix