Newt Gingrich Wants to Eliminate EPA, Once Backed Efforts to Fight Climate Change

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who is inching closer to a presidential run, told a meeting of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association that he wants to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Like other leading Republicans, Gingrich says that the EPA’s life-saving oversight is too burdensome for businesses, calling the agency “a job-killing, centralizing engine of ideological litigation and regulation that blocks economic progress at every turn.” He wants to replace it with an agency that is more friendly to business, asserting that the “EPA’s current attempts to regulate greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, and thereby the entire American economy, is the latest and definitive proof that the EPA has gone well beyond its original mandate.”

But the potential presidential candidate may want to remember his advertisement for the Alliance for Climate Protection, the group founded by Al Gore, where he joins Nancy Pelosi to call for action against global climate change. Now that the GOP has become the party of climate change denialism, it’s no wonder that Gingrich is now calling for the elimination of the EPA.