Gore takes his global-warming battle to Congress
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Calls for taxing big polluters, emission freeze
By John Donnelly
Boston Globe Staff
March 22, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Former vice president Al Gore, in an emotional return to Congress yesterday, declared that the "planet has a fever" requiring urgent and comprehensive action to reverse global warming, including putting a freeze on carbon dioxide emission levels and taxing big polluters.
Gore, who arrived along with his wife, Tipper, in a new hybrid sports utility vehicle, faced strong rebukes from some Republicans who doubt that global warming has become a crisis. But Democrats and many Republicans welcomed him, and some in the GOP agreed that Congress must find ways to counteract the rise of the earth's temperatures.
Sitting next to 12 cardboard boxes filled with petitions and postcards from 516,000 people asking Congress to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and craning his neck to see over a sea of photographers and cameramen, Gore often sounded like a university professor giving a science lecture that delved into details of the composition of greenhouse gases. And at times he sounded like a revivalist preacher from backcountry Tennessee, arguing that Congress now faced moral choices.
"A day will come when our children and grandchildren will look back and they'll ask one of two questions," he said. "Either they will ask what in God's name were they doing? . . . Or they will say, 'How did they find the uncommon moral courage to rise above politics and redeem the promise of American democracy?' "
He said that the human contribution to global warming constituted a "planetary emergency."
Gore, 58, who won the popular vote for president in 2000 but lost the disputed electoral tally to President Bush, appeared soon after an Academy Awards appearance in which his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," won two Oscars, and at a time when many Democrats are clamoring for him to run for the presidency in 2008. Gore has said repeatedly he has no plans to run.
Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee whose father served with Gore's father in Congress, twice referred to the former vice president as "president." He also told Gore, "Welcome home."
Several long-term House Republicans, including former speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, Bob Inglis of South Carolina, and Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland praised Gore for his work on global warming. Bartlett said, "It's possible to be a Republican and not be an idiot" on the issue.
Gore's 10-point plan included a carbon tax and freeze on carbon dioxide emissions. He also said the United States must be part of a global treaty to dramatically reduce worldwide emissions; place a moratorium on US coal-fired power plants that cannot capture and sequester emissions in the future; build an "electranet" that allows people to create power from the sun, wind, or other sources and then sell the electricity to the grid; ban incandescent light bulbs; and rapidly increase fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks.
The Bush administration opposes any mandatory measure to limit carbon dioxide emissions, saying it would greatly harm the economy and put companies at a competitive disadvantage. Instead, it favors voluntary emission reductions, increasing the production of ethanol as an alternative fuel, and gradually raising fuel-economy standards on vehicles.
Hastert told Gore: "I agree with you that human activity and economic development impact on the environment," but he also raised questions about adding regulation to control carbon dioxide emissions. "A lot of these recommendations are more regulations and more taxation," Hastert said.
Some Republicans told Gore that he had greatly exaggerated or presented wrong conclusions on scientific studies relating to global warming.
Representative Joe Barton of Texas said Gore was "not off just a little, you're totally wrong" in "An Inconvenient Truth" when he said that, over a 600,000-year period, as carbon dioxide emissions rose temperatures rose correspondingly. Barton also said Gore exaggerated the potential rise of sea levels due to global warming; Gore said it could rise by more than 20 feet, while the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report forecast a rise of at most 23 inches.
Gore agreed that due to "wobbles" in the earth's orbit, temperatures have risen or fallen due to its distance from the sun, not necessarily due to carbon dioxide levels. But he said scientists have known for 180 years that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere, and that the rise in such gases has led to a string of some of the hottest years on record starting in 1990, according to modern record-keeping.
"If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor," Gore said. "If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is a flame retardant. You take action."
If the floating Arctic ice sheet "goes completely, is gone, we will have the biggest heat sink on the planet," he said, describing a vast open ocean that absorbs heat, instead of white ice that reflects 90 percent of the sunlight back into the atmosphere. That development, he said, would then contribute to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the release of methane from previously frozen soils; methane traps far more heat than carbon dioxide.
Representative Edward J. Markey , the Malden Democrat and chair of a newly created committee on global warming, called Gore a "prophet" for holding the first hearings on global warming two decades ago.
After the hearing, Markey said of Gore: "He's no longer a prophet without honor. The world has changed. The public has changed. Today was a good example of how even many Republicans were agreeing with him and discussing how to deal with it."
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