[R-G] AL GORE'S POLLUTED ENVIRONMENTAL RECORD

[Nicholas Morcinek]

JOSHUA FRANK - 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. . .

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 neo-liberal 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 acreages 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. . .

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. "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 said
at the time. "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." Sadly,
Gore stood by his promise. . .

So while Al Gore flies a polluting jet around the country and overseas
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 climate that surrounds us all.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/June06/Frank06.htm




Lilla Watson:
"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine,
then let us work together."