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Building on an idea that seems to have originated with Newt Gingrich, Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has spent the past few weeks calling for the Environmental Protection Agency to be abolished. In the June 13th GOP debate, Bachmann said she would pass the “mother of all repeal bills” to target “job-killing regulations.” She indicated that she’d start with the EPA, and added that it “should really be renamed the job-killing organization of America.”

But a new poll from the conservative-leaning Rasmussen** finds that an overwhelming majority of likely voters, including more than two-thirds of independents, disagree with Rep. Bachmann. When asked whether they “favor or oppose abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency,” 61% of likely voters indicated that they are opposed:

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Newt Gingrich is a very smart, very intellectual kind of guy. Not only does he hold a Ph.D., but he professes to love science. In May 2002, after leaving Congress, he could be found calling for a tripling of the budget of the National Science Foundation. 

Just look at this 2008 Slate exchange, discussing Gingrich’s plans to use market mechanisms to address global warming:

I  identify with it. While Gingrich and his revolutionaries were running the congressional show in the 1990s, they dismantled their own scientific advisory office, the Office of Technology Assessment. Then they held show hearings to cast doubt on the science of climate and the science of ozone depletion.

They loved science—except when they didn’t.

Now Gingrich is back again, as a possible GOP presidential candidate. And he is calling for nothing less than dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency.

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At a green business conference on Monday, Al Gore admitted that his support for corn ethanol subsidies was a mistake. This news comes weeks before tax credits are up for renewal.

U.S. tax breaks for ethanol make it profitable for refiners to use the fuel even when it is more expensive than gasoline.  Total ethanol subsidies reached $7.7 billion last year according to the International Energy Agency. In fact, biofuels worldwide received more subsidies than any other form of renewable energy.

Gore argued that “It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for [U.S.] first-generation ethanol”.  Giving extraordinary subsidies to first generation feedstocks was a mistake, he says.  “The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.”

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A high profile group of academics, including Dr. John Robinson, UBC’s top sustainability expert and a lead author on three reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), co-wrote a column in the Vancouver Sun today accusing the BC NDP of “intellectual dishonesty.” The group goes on to compare the BC NDP and their leader Carole James to “‘Climate “skeptics’ — people who doubt, despite the mounds of evidence, that climate change is a problem worth addressing…”

Robinson and company write:

“Climate ‘skeptics’ — people who doubt, despite the mounds of evidence, that climate change is a problem worth addressing — are less prevalent today, but they been replaced by purveyors of a new myth: people who tell voters that we can solve the climate change problem without the need for any change in how we live our lives.

In B.C., Carole James and the NDP are these new mythmakers. The BC NDP promise to “axe the tax,” should they win the provincial election, while accomplishing all the same goals with no cost to BC taxpayers, is nothing short of intellectual dishonesty.” (my emphasis)

Read the whole op-ed here: Debunking myths about the B.C. carbon tax

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Global Television’s Chief political correspondent Keith Baldry has published an opinion piece today on the BC NDP’s stance on the carbon tax and climate change.

Baldry writes:

“The NDP’s opposition to the carbon tax — a position that is the starting point for its entire platform — appears to be based on two reasons: it was unpopular when it was introduced last summer because the price of gasoline was so high at the time, and it was a B.C. Liberal creation, so therefore it must be bad.”

Here’s the entire column: NDP sells environmental soul

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Of the many daunting challenges facing the next president, few loom larger than climate change.

Though the languishing economy will likely dictate his administration’s immediate priorities, many of the president’s long-term objectives will be shaped by the prism of energy and the climate. Yet, for all the talk of energy independence and a green economy, we still know very few specifics about what a President Barack Obama or President John McCain would do during his first term to tackle the climate issue.

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