HELP!!! We are facing
a $50,000 shortfall from now until December. With money getting
tight for so many people, the number of new BC Paid Subscribers
and BC Contributors is way down. Please become a BC
Paid Subscriber, or send what you can as a BC
Contributor. Already a BC Paid Subscriber? Login
to see if it's time to renew or if you can contribute a little
extra Click
Here! Thank you for helping to keep BlackCommentator online
for you.
The current issue
is always free to everyone
If
you need the access available to a
and cannot afford the $50 subscription price, request a complimentary
subscrpition here.
Al Gore has returned to the political spotlight
in exalted fashion with a Nobel Peace Prize in hand, propping
himself up for a potential presidential bid in 2008. Front and
center in Gore’s new rhetorical entourage is the state
of nature, and in particular, global warming. And while Gore
may be delivering an important message about the fate of our
fragile ecosystems, one must be weary of the messenger’s
past. For Gore’s own environmental record leaves much
to be desired.
Al Gore’s reputation, as the Democratic
standard bearer of environmentalism, dates back to the early
1990’s when his book, Earth
in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,
outlined the perilous threats to the natural world. Gore also
showboated his green credentials at the Rio Earth Summit in
1992, which garnered the newly minted Senator great respect
among Beltway greens, who praised him for his willingness to
take sides on controversial issues. While serving as vice president
under Bill Clinton, Gore was put in charge of the administration’s
environmental portfolio, but had little to show for it.
As the Center for Public Integrity writes in
their book, The
Buying of the President 2000,
“Personally and professionally the vice president has
profited from Occidental largess. To this day he still draws
$20,000 a year from a land deal in Tennessee brokered between
his father and [former Occidental chairman Armand] Hammer. The
total amount is more than $300,000.”
This relationship between Hammer, who was close
with Al Gore Sr. as well, matured greatly during the late 1980s
while Gore served in the Senate, including Kenneth Lay style
trips on Hammer’s private plane and monster campaign contributions.
Oil companies during the 20th Century, reports
the Center for Public Integrity, “have tried unsuccessfully
to obtain control of two oil fields owned and operated by the
federal government: the Teapot Dome field in Casper, Wyoming,
and the Elk Hillsfield in Bakersfield, California.”
When Clinton and Gore took office in 1992, that
was about to change. Perhaps only outdone by George W. Bush’s
connections to Big Oil, Al Gore pressed President Clinton to
approve handing over these public lands to the oil companies.
The land, managed by the Navy, had held emergency oil reserves
since 1912.
It took five years of lobbying on behalf of Big
Oil, but Gore and Occidental [Petroleum Corp.] were victories.
In the fall of 1997 the Energy Department sold 47,000 acres
of the Elk Hill reserve to Occidental.
Continues The Center for Public Integrity:
It was the largest privatization of federal
property in U.S. history, one that tripled Occidental’s
U.S. oil reserves overnight. Although the Energy Department
was required to assess the likely environmental consequences
of the proposed sale, it didn’t. Instead it hired a private
company, ICF Kaiser International, Incorporated, to complete
the assessment. The general chairman of Gore’s presidential
campaign, Tony Coelho, sat on the board of directors.
The very same day the Elk Hills sale was announced,
Gore delivered a speech to the White House Conference on Climate
Change on the “terrifying prospect” of global warming,
a problem he blamed on the unchecked use of fossil fuels such
as oil.
Other than his alleged environmental convictions,
Gore was a political coward when push came to shove in Washington.
During Clinton’s campaign for president in 1992 Gore promised
a group of supporters that Clinton’s EPA would never approve
a hazardous waste incinerator located near an elementary school
in Liverpool, Ohio, which was operated by WTI. Only three months
into Clinton’s tenure, the EPA issued an operating permit
for the toxic burner. Gore raised no qualms. Not surprisingly,
most of the money behind WTI came from the bulging pockets of
Jackson Stephens, who just happened to be one of the Clinton/Gore
top campaign contributors.
Perhaps Al Gore’s greatest blunder, during
his years as vice president, was his allegiance to the conservative
Democratic Leadership Council and their erroneous approach to
environmental policy. Gore, like Clinton, who quipped that “the
invisible hand has a green thumb," extolled a free-market
attitude toward environmental issues. “Since the mid-1980s,
Gore has argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces
of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological
entropy now bearing down on the global environment,” writes
Jeffrey St. Clair in Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green
to Me: The Politics of Nature. “He is a passionate
disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate
technopilia.”
Then came the first of the Clinton administration’s
neoliberal wet dreams: NAFTA. After the passage of NAFTA, pollution
along the US/Mexico border dramatically increased. And Gore
should have known better; NAFTA allowed existing environmental
laws in the United States to be undermined. Corporations looking
to turn a profit by skating around enviro statutes at home moved
down to Mexico where environmental standards and regulatory
enforcement were scarce.
These follies were followed by Interior Secretary
Bruce Babbitt’s destructive deal with the sugar barons
of South Florida, which doomed vast acreage of the Everglades.
Then Gore and Clinton capitulated to the demands of Western
Democrats and yanked from its initial budget proposals a call
to reform grazing, mining, and timber practices on federal lands.
When Clinton convened a timber summit in Portland, Oregon, in
April 1994, the conference was, as one might expect, dominated
by logging interests. Predictably, the summit gave way to a
plan to restart clear-cutting in the ancient forests of the
Pacific Northwest for the first time in three years, giving
the timber industry its get rich wish. Gore, again, said nothing.
Forests under Clinton and Gore’s watch
didn’t fare all that well. The Clinton administration’s
Salvage Rider, known to radical environmentalists as the “Logging
without Laws” rider, was perhaps the most gruesome legislation
ever enacted under the pretext of preserving ecosystem health.
Like Bush’s “Healthy Forests” plan, Clinton’s
act was chock full of deception and special interest pandering.
“When [the Salvage Rider] bill was given to me, I was
told that the timber industry was circulating this language
among the Northwest Congressional delegation and others to try
to get it attached as a rider to the fiscal year Interior Spending
Bill,” environmental lawyer Kevin Kirchner says. “There
is no question that representatives of the timber industry had
a role in promoting this rider. That is no secret.”
In fact, Mark Rey, a former lobbyist for the
timber industry and head of the United States Forest Service
under Bush, authored Bush’s forest plan and Clinton’s
salvage bill while working as an aide for Republican Senator
Larry Craig of Idaho. “Like Bush’s so-called ‘Healthy
Forest Initiative,’ the Salvage Rider temporarily exempted
salvage timber sales on federal forest lands from environmental
and wildlife laws, administrative appeals, and judicial review,”
contended the Wilderness Society.
“The Salvage Rider directed the Forest
Service to cut old-growth timber in the Pacific Northwest that
the agency had proposed for sale but subsequently withdrew,
due to environmental concerns, endangered species listings,
and court rulings. Bush’s initiative also aims to increase
logging of old-growth trees in the Pacific Northwest.”
Clinton and Gore, during their time, could have
exercised presidential authority to force the relevant agencies
to abandon all timber contracts that stemmed from the Salvage
Rider. But they never flexed their muscle and instead sat by
as the forests were subjected to gruesome annihilation.
An example of the ruin:
Thousands of acres of healthy forest land
across the West were rampaged
Washington’s Colville National Forest
saw the clear cutting of over 4,000 acres
Thousands more in Montana’s Yaak River
Basin
Hundreds of acres of pristine forest land
in Idaho
The endangered Mexican Spotted Owl habitat
in Arizona fell victim to corporate interests
Old growth trees in Washington’s majestic
Olympic Peninsula — home to wild Steelhead, endangered
Sockeye salmon, and the threatened Marbled Murrelet —
were chopped with unremitting provocation by the US Forest
Service
And the assault on nature continued with Gore’s
blessing.
Around the same time, Clinton and Gore, after
great pressure from the food industry, signed away the Delaney
Clause, which prohibited cancer-causing pesticides and ingredients
to be placed in our food products. And after pressure from big
corporations like chemical giant DuPont, the Clinton administration,
with guidance from Gore’s office, cut numerous deals over
the pesticide Methyl Bromide, despite its reported effects of
contributing to Ozone depletion.
As for Gore’s pet project, global warming,
he did little to help curb its dramatic effects while handling
Clinton’s enviro policies. In fact, Gore and Clinton made
it easy for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to back out of the
Kyoto Protocol by undermining the agreement in the late 1990s.
It was during the winter of 1997 when Vice President Gore, who
was in direct control of Clinton’s environmental policies,
flew to Japan to address the international delegation about
the US’s position on the Kyoto Protocol. Gore and Clinton
had just come off an election victory and it was time to pay
back the big oil and gas companies who had handed over $6 million
to their party the year prior.
Gore warmed up his attentive audience by affirming
that Clinton and the US public believed the Earth was in peril
and that all global citizens must act swiftly to save it. But
in typical Gore doublespeak, he declared the United States would
not support the agreement because it did not ask enough of developing
nations, even though the US is the leading polluter in the world.
As Gore put it then, “Signing the Protocol,
while an important step forward, imposes no obligations on the
United States. The Protocol becomes binding only with the advice
and consent of the US Senate.”
Gore soon returned to Washington, only to reiterate
his message that the Clinton administration would not put the
Kyoto Protocol before the Senate. “As we have said before,
we will not submit the Protocol for ratification without the
meaningful participation of key developing countries in efforts
to address climate change,” he said.
It was at that moment when Clinton and Gore ruined
any chance of the Kyoto Protocol being honestly debated in Washington.
Later in November of 1998, Gore “symbolically” signed
the accord, likely to appease his environmental pals like the
Sierra Club’s Carl Pope.
But the Vice President’s tepid gesture
couldn’t have carried less weight. The Clinton administration,
with Gore’s guidance, refused to allow the Republican-controlled
Senate to decide on the Kyoto Protocol for themselves. Gore
advised Clinton not to send the Protocol to the Senate to be
ratified. The blame could have burdened the Republican Party,
not the Democrats and the Clinton administration. But instead,
the buck stopped with Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Predictably,
President Bush followed their lead.
And there you have it. It was Mr. Global Warming
himself who first tried to kill off the Kyoto Protocol.
And the list goes on.
So while Al Gore flies around the country and
overseas, with trophy in hand, to preach to the masses about
the dangerous effects of global warming and its inherent threat
to life on Earth — you may want to ask yourself whether
the hypocritical Gores of the world are more a part of the problem
than a solution to the dire threat to climate that surrounds
us all.
Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident
Voice and author of Left
Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush
(Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair,
the editor of the forthcoming Red State Rebels, to
be published by AK Press in March 2008. Click
here to contact Mr. Frank and Dissident Voice.
If you send us an e-Mail
message we may publish all or part of it, unless you
tell us it is not for publication. You may also request
that we withhold your name.