JOSHUA FRANK: Al Gore the Environmental Titan?

[Tace]

By Joshua Frank -- World News Trust

Al Gore has returned to the political spotlight in exalted fashion, 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 1990s when his book Earth in Balance 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.

Other than his alleged environmental convictions, Gore was politically timid 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’s 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.”

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http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=3628

[OKNancy]

1. Yet another Democrat bashing article by this pseudo-intellectual

dirt bag.
Frank has nothing nice to say about ANY Democrat.
NONE!

[ladjf]

2. A desperate attempt to discredit the most potentially power

politician in the Country.

Gore's biggest political strengths come from his positions on the environment and his early opposition to the Iraq war. Those are the target points for the right wing attackers. They will fail. Why? Because Gore staked them out long ago, before they were generally accepted. That makes them all the more powerful.

[ladjf]

3. "Al Gore the Environmental Titan?" Yes!

Joshua Frank: Writer Titan? No!

[hatrack]

4. Joshua who?

:eyes: