In 2008 Newt Gingrich appeared in an ad for wecansolveit.org, Al Gore's climate change organization that became Repower America. Now that climate change has no constituency in the Republican party he's changed his tune dramatically. This weekend at CPAC Gingrich called for the elimination of the EPA and the end of anti-pollution laws that limit coal mining and offshore drilling. Republicans with a memory aren't buying Newt's conversion from the 2008 ads.
The reaction from some conservative commentators was swift and harsh. “Intellectually incoherent,” said Myron Ebell, the director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Asinine,” a blogger for the American Spectator opined.Newt's in the worst place for a politician. Democrats aren't going to trust Gingrich, who spent the last year and a half killing any regulation of pollutants that contribute to climate change. Republicans see an opportunist who garnered himself free publicity for himself in 2008 by appearing in an ad for Al Gore sitting next to Nancy Pelosi.
The negative reviews focused on two stumbling blocks that Mr. Gingrich, who is weighing a presidential bid, faces with the activist base of the Republican Party: ethanol and climate change.
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Meanwhile, despite his opposition to the Democrats’ 2009 cap-and-trade bill, his past advocacy for action on global warming also puts him at odds with Tea Party supporters, the vast majority of whom say they doubt that climate change is occurring at all and declare that carbon dioxide emissions pose little or no threat to the climate.
“I don’t think former speaker Gingrich is to be trusted on this issue,” Mr. Ebell said.
The quote that Gingrich can never escape in a Republican primary is, "but we do agree, our country must take action to address climate change." That's a sentence that has a very real meaning, one that the big oil funded tea-party activists aren't going to like to hear in 2012.