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Updated 6:30 AM EDT; Saturday, September 19, 2009 A Contract With The Earth 
Oil on canvas, Thomas Nash, 2000.
Email discussion with Newt Gingrich, Newt Gingrich: I want to start by saying that I believe we need an entrepreneurial, science and technology oriented approach to the environment, and that most Americans agree with that. If you go to our Web site, and pull up the Platform of the American People, you will see that a majority of Democrats, independents, and Republicans all agree that entrepreneurs can do more than bureaucrats to solve environmental challenges. LoD Response: If citizens leave development of our communities up to Newt Gingrich and the decadent capitalist entrepreneurs, with or without the supervision of the corporate Government sphere, we will have more of what we now have: a social, political, and ecological disaster. The crucial ethical component of social and developmental designs are the needs and interests of citizens. Citizens must be in control of development. However, Mr. Gingrich starts his comment with an evaluation of resolving environmental challenges that is limited to the designs of entrepreneurs and bureaucrats, without the crucial participation of citizens. That's how the continuing disaster of development starts. Newt Gingrich: I think the tragedy has been that conservatives have been unwilling to spend the time and energy to debate the left on which will produce the better outcome. For example, if you are really worried about carbon loading of the atmosphere...if the United States produced the same percentage of our electricity from nuclear power as the French, we would take 2.2 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere a year, and that one step would be 15 percent better than the total Kyoto goal for the U.S. LoD Response: In his website for American Solutions, Mr. Gingrich proposes the way to reduce America's dependency on foreign oil : “Even with all of the red tape and law suits we have experienced, nuclear power is still the cheapest way to make electricity.” However, the facts disclose this statement is absolutely baseless. The promise of cheap atomic energy was a false promise. In the United States Nuclear Power has proved to be a financial fiasco. By 1985, Forbes magazine reported that “the failure of the U.S. Nuclear-power program” was “the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.” JACQUES COUSTEAU AND SUSAN SCHIEFELBEIN, THE HUMAN, THE ORCHID, AND THE OCTOPUS 230-235 (Bloomsbury, 2007) ( (highly praised reviews). These financial concerns may, alas, have more to do with the questionable civil and political opposition to Nuclear Energy, if James Lovelock's perception proves accurate, than any financial problems related to the generation of Nuclear Energy. Moreover, the cost of building and operating nuclear power plants leaves unresolved the problem and cost of waste disposal, and dismantling all the nuclear power plants after they've reached their mandatory retirement age. Everyone in government, military, and industry knew from the beginning that, by virtue of being constantly irradiated, reactor walls would grow brittle, that each entire plant would have to be disassembled, its parts disposed of, after only thirty years. Who will pay for the dismantlement of commercial plants? Who will offer their property for burial of those reactors that have been built and are rebuilding? The question of who will pay to dispose of reactors—especially if the answer is our children—is a poignant and passionate one. Unfortunately, for the moment, it is also moot. No one can yet resolve the problem of who will pay to dispose of high-level radioactive debris because no one has yet resolved the question of what to do with it. Cousteau and Schiefelbein, infra, at pp: 230- 235. James Lovelock easily disposes of these arguments:
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