http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6234461/site/newsweek/In the Balance
Gore has finally found his campaign voice and he’s using it to batter Bush over the environment WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Melinda Henneberger
Newsweek
Updated: 4:08 p.m. ET Oct. 12, 2004Oct. 12 - At a hotel in Boston the other night, Al Gore gave a little slide show about global warming. He was laid-back, funny—and absolutely terrifying, delivering a stump speech on behalf of our poor old planet that everybody ought to hear.
Eloquent as he was, the pictures told the story: There, in the first shot, is Earth as seen from space on Christmas Eve, 1968, in the photo that launched the environmental movement. Then come pictures of the snows atop Kilimanjaro, decades ago and then now, melting so rapidly that in 20 years at the outside, there will be none left at all.
There’s the ice receding before our eyes from Glacier National Park, a spot that “within 20 years will be the park formerly known as Glacier.” In one shot, we see buildings collapsing in Alaska as the Permafrost melts, and in another, arctic ice that in 40 years has thinned 40 percent. It’s the same story in Antarctica, a disintegrating ice shelf. Here, too, is melting water rushing off of Greenland—which were it to plop into the ocean, would raise the sea level by about 23 feet.
“Every mountain glacier in the entire world is melting right now,” Gore says. “They say, “Oh, this is a cyclical matter,’’’ Gore adopts a mock professorial tone as he points to a chart showing a relatively puny medieval warming period. “But glaciers do not really care about politics.”
We don’t have that luxury, though. And neither, of course, does he, though he calls himself “a recovering politician, on about Step 9.” This talk, however, is so not about him, as the kids would say.
Essentially, it is about the self-destructiveness of our denial these days, the hottest days in history: A frog, he notes, will just sit in a slowly heating pot of water until he either cooks or is rescued-though if that frog were placed directly into boiling water, he would of course jump right back out.
Yet with an optimism that’s pretty moving, in light of his own situation and ours, he insists that it’s not too late or too hard to turn down the heat if we move quickly to regulate CO2 emissions—as Bush promised to do during the campaign of 2000, but did not.
Women’s suffrage, civil rights, the fall of the Berlin Wall—all of those goals once seemed impossible, too, he says. “So don’t tell me we can’t solve this, and that’s what this presidential campaign is all about.”
In the weeks ahead, Gore will be stumping for his successor as the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, in states where environmental concerns are particularly high. “We went to the Senate on the same day in ’84,” he says of Kerry, “and there was no senator who had a better record on the environment. By sharp contrast, I say without fear of any contradiction, George Bush has been the worst president for the environment is history, bar none.”
For this crowd of several hundred donors to Environment 2004, a fund-raising group hoping to sway voters in four swing states, Gore doesn’t have to elaborate on the specifics of the Bush record on the environment.
But to re-cap, Bush distanced himself from a 2002 report by his own experts allowing that, as most serious scientists had insisted for many years, humans are to blame for global warming. This August, the administration finally did concede that natural causes could not explain the Earth’s rapid warming since 1970s, and that emissions from smokestacks and cars were the culprits. Bush still has made no effort to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.
The president also supports first-time drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the only remaining Arctic region where drilling is still off-limits. His energy bill offers tax breaks and regulatory relief to the coal and oil industries. He supports major changes in the Endangered Species Act, arguing that it has created problems for ranchers and farmers. He has proposed altering the Clean Air Act to allow utilities to expand without installing new pollution controls, as long as they don’t surpass their own highest levels of pollution over the last decade.
He wants to open 20 million acres of national forests to logging, and repealed Clinton’s rule banning road construction in many forested areas. Superfund clean-ups are down by 50 percent since Bush took office, and future projects are to be paid for mostly by taxpayers instead of polluters. And his “Clear Skies” bill, a name Kerry derided as “Orwellian” in the last debate, is widely regarded by his environmental critics as a step backward.
At that debate, in St. Louis last week, Bush himself did not seem thoroughly convinced as he asserted, “I guess you could say I’m a good steward of the land.” (While he was on the subject, the president also said, “Now, I’m going to tell you that what I really think is going to happen over time is technology is going to change the way we live for the good of the environment. That’s why I proposed a hydrogen automobile—hydrogen-generated automobile”—a statement that, coming from Gore, would have been seen as a literal claim that he had himself dreamed up the idea of inventing such a vehicle.)
In closing his 45-minute presentation in Boston, Gore shows one last, majestic shot of Earth. “We don’t have any other home, so our job is to keep our eyes on the prize.”
When he is finished, the audience is slightly stunned, and walks out talking about how they’ll never forget this night. Somebody says maybe delivering this environmental S.O.S. is the former vice president’s true calling. He’s so full-throated now, so sure of himself in this campaign, that maybe this was the thing he was meant to be doing all along? Nah…
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
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