Gore, Gingrich debate the Earth’s future

WASHINGTON — Al Gore paused during his descent from atop the Democratic stairs toward a witness table where he and an old rival, Newt Gingrich, were to debate the very future of Planet Earth. He glided over to a former aide and grinned.

“Just like old times,” Gore said.

Not for Gore and Gingrich. A lifetime ago, the Democratic vice president and the Republican House speaker sparred from constitutionally equivalent pinnacles of power. Close to a decade after leaving government life, Gore and Gingrich returned Friday to the House hearing separate and unequal.

Majority Democrats made sure of it. When Republicans late in the week offered Gingrich as their witness for the opening bipartisan panel, Democrats running the House Energy and Commerce Committee refused to allow the face of the 1994 Republican Revolution share the witness table with their Nobel-and-Oscar-winning “Goreacle.”

Gore’s on-camera partner, Democrats decided, would be the recently retired Sen. John Warner of Virginia — a Republican, yes, but one who agrees with Gore that the climate change legislation now before the panel should become law.

Gingrich would wait in an anteroom until Gore and Warner concluded their remarks and had left the hearing. Then, he had the unenviable task of following the other two, alone, at the witness table.

There, at their respective times, Gore and Gingrich reveled in their wonkish comfort zones.

“I have read all 648 pages of this bill,” Gore bragged, a boast that would surprise no one who caught his teacher’s-pet performance in the 2000 presidential race. “It took me two transcontinental flights on United Airlines to finish it.”

Gore endorsed the bill.

Gingrich said that he read a bit more than 200 pages, until he got to a reference about a jacuzzi. That was enough, Gingrich said, calling the legislation an energy tax and permission to grant more power to what it labeled as an efficient agency, the Department of Energy.

Both men settled comfortably back into the camera-hogging, hyperbolic styles they had honed on Capitol Hill.

Gore transitioned from global statesman back to contentious politician several times. He routinely took up all of the allotted time for an answer, turning to give Warner a chance to speak long after a red light had gone on signaling time had expired for that particular question.

When Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, asked Gore to explain the cost of the legislation, Gore ignored him. Instead, he held up The New York Times and summarized an article that happened to appear that morning supporting his contention that some corporations had ignored their own research indicating that humans caused global warming. Barton asked him to answer the question about cost. Gore again held up the paper and summarized the story.

He then compared Barton to Bernard Madoff, who swindled investors out of $50 billion, prompting Barton to interrupt Gore: “I’ve never talked to Bernie Madoff.”

“I’m not saying that you have,” Gore replied.

He continued, challenging opponents of the legislation to “find the moral courage” to support it and the “moral imagination” to accept the problem.

He lectured the panel on “the reality of the world today,” pointing out that, “I gave my slide show to the Indian Parliament.”

Taking a seat after Gore and Warner had said their farewells, Gingrich read from a statement he had released on his Web site earlier in the day. He opposes the legislation and proposed instead a 38-point plan he called “green conservatism.”

Ever the history teacher, he told a story about the Viking King Canute — Gingrich’s namesake, he said — who tried and failed to push back the ocean in an attempt to show his supporters that he was not, alas, all-powerful.

“This is a hint,” Gingrich said. The bill, he added, shows “failure to learn the lesson” of King Canute — if in fact the authors, or anyone else present, had ever before heard of Canute. (Gore had already left.)

The prospect of actually reducing carbon as outlined by Democrats and President Barack Obama?

“A fantasy,” Gingrich declared.