Rep. Barton, Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had a strong statement/commentary on Al Gore’s testimony that can be found here. This was a line that a lot of people will remember, I think:

You just gave us an idea for a straight CO2 freeze, if I heard you correctly. I think that’s an idea that’s flawed. If you take that literally, we can add no new industry, nor new cars and trucks on our streets, and apparently no new people. People are mobile-source emitters. Every person emits 0.2 tons of CO2 a year, so an absolute true freeze would be no new industry, no new people, and no new cars.

But in fact the next few lines are the substantive ones. Just what would we want from a global warming policy?

I think we need to approach any legislative initiatives in this area with an eye on four basic principles: We want to be sure it actually helps the environment; we want to keep the lights on at an affordable price; we want to keep the American economy strong and American jobs here, and we can’t get out in front of what is technologically possible at the current time.

Kyoto – which Gore endorsed – would do little to help the environment. Taxes and cap and trade will raise prices and turn lights off. Unliateral restrictions not matched by America’s competitors would harm American competitiveness and almost certainly move jobs – and their concomitant emissions, remember – overseas. And much of the technology Gore talks about is years away; carbon capture and storage, for instance, is at least ten years away from practical deployment. As a study in Science magazine in 2002 concluded, “CO2 is a combustion product vital to how civilization is powered; it cannot be regulated away.”