Beauty contest

Now John Kerry and Newt Gingrich are parading in their environmentally friendly swimsuits, with SUVs crawling along behind, just out of sight, carrying their secret service guards and briefcases:

As recently as two years ago, Gingrich ridiculed the notion that humans are causing the earth to warm, but yesterday he said the evidence was "sufficient."

"We have now passed the tipping point of that argument," he said yesterday. The former Georgia congressman even allowed that he agreed with "about 60 percent" of "This Moment on Earth," a recently published book Kerry co wrote with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

But if the debate was proof of the emerging political consensus that global warming is for real, it also showed that profound disagreements remain over how to tackle the problem. In his remarks, Gingrich proposed giving polluters tax incentives to reduce their carbon emissions voluntarily, an approach Kerry derided as inadequate.

"That's like saying, 'Barry Bonds, go investigate steroids,' " shot back Kerry, who favors a government-imposed limit on emissions and a system that would allow businesses to buy and sell credits entitling them to release a certain amount of carbon pollution into the atmosphere.

"There is no single environmental crisis that has been met in the United States voluntarily," Kerry said.

Are all politicians going to compete in this absurd parade?

Nope. Here's Czech president Vaclav Klaus talking to the Cato Institute. He calls environmentalism a religion, and likens it to communism.

New Europe in action.