Gore takes warming warning to Congress

WASHINGTON - Al Gore spoke out on his signature issue Wednesday, telling Congress that the world faces “a true planetary emergency” unless it dramatically and immediately reduces emissions that most scientists tie to global warming.

In a return he described as emotional, the former vice president testified before House panels that it is not too late to deal with climate change “and we have everything we need to get started.”

Gore advised lawmakers to cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases 90 percent by 2050 to avert a crisis. Doing that, he said, will require a ban on any new coal-burning power plants — a major source of industrial carbon dioxide — that lack state-of-the-art controls to capture the gases.

‘A sense of hope’
He said he foresees a revolution in small-scale electricity producers for replacing coal, likening the development to what the Internet has done for the exchange of information.

“There is a sense of hope in this country that this United States Congress will rise to the occasion and present meaningful solutions to this crisis,” he said. “Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it’s a challenge to the moral imagination.”

Gore favors a “cap-and-trade” program for the U.S. economy, not just specific sectors such as electricity or manufacturing, which would set an overall limit on warming emissions but allow industry to meet the target by trading pollution allowances.

“Trust the market, make it work for us,” he said.

Gore gained international recognition with his Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” as perhaps the leading spokesman on dealing with global warming. At the hearing, he was flanked by cardboard boxes that he said contained some 516,000 letters calling for congressional action to counter global warming.

Skeptics question science, costs
But several Republicans sharply questioned Gore's recommendations.

“A lot of those recommendations are more regulations and more taxation,” said former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, although he added that he agrees with Gore that the scientific debate on climate change is over. “I think we can find answers to use the coal energy, to use the natural gas we have.”

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, a former chairman of the House energy committee, questioned scientific evidence from Gore’s popular film and said cutting carbon dioxide emissions would “provide little benefit at a huge cost,” particularly to major coal-producing and coal-burning states.

“You’re not just off a little, you’re totally wrong,” Barton said as he challenged Gore’s conclusion that carbon dioxide emissions cause rising global temperatures. Barton and Gore’s exchange grew testy at one point — Barton demanding that Gore get to the point and Gore responding that he would like time to answer without being interrupted.

“Global warming science is uneven and evolving,” Barton said.

House lawmakers later heard from Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician who has become a leading critic of Gore's. In his prepared testimony, Lomborg argued that “statements about the strong, ominous and immediate consequences of global warming are often wildly exaggerated.”

“Climate change is not the only issue on the global agenda,” he added, “and actually one of the issues where we can do the least good first.”

Gore said the climate issue should not be a partisan or even political issue. “I just returned from the United Kingdom, where last week the two major parties put forward their climate change platforms,” he said. “The Tory and Labour parties are in vigorous competition with one another — competing to put forward the best solution to the climate crisis.”

He said he saw a limited role for carbon-free nuclear power, which the Bush administration has promoted, because the plants are expensive to build and “only come in one size: extra large.”

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