Some environmentalists say Gore has been more passion than action

By Scott Allen, Globe Staff, June 20, 1999

You'd have to go back to Teddy Roosevelt, who set aside millions of acres for national parks, to find a presidential candidate with environmental credentials like Al Gore's.

While Republican front-runner George W. Bush got his first major briefing on global warming this spring, Gore's study began in the 1960s at Harvard University, where he learned at the knee of the man who invented the theory.

Gore made the environment the centerpiece of his 1988 campaign for president, when rival Jesse Jackson said Gore's dissertations on the state of Earth made him sound like the "national chemist." But defeat only spurred Gore to write a best-selling book on how to save the planet.

Today, Vice President Gore is the environmental point man for the first administration run by men who call themselves "environmentalists." As perhaps the most influential environmental policy maker in the world, Gore helped push issues such as global warming to the center stage of American politics.

Yet, as Gore begins his second run for the White House, he faces a rebellion from the one group whose support many thought he should have sewn up long ago: environmentalists. Gore's passion for nature may rival Roosevelt's, but critics say he has too often squandered opportunities to produce tough policies.

Gore and Clinton "talk very big rhetoric and actually propose very little in terms of action. It's what I would call the school uniform solution to environmental problems," said Phillip E. Clapp of the National Environmental Trust, one of Gore's most vocal critics on the environment.

On issues from saving swordfish to logging in national forests, environmentalists say the administration has chosen modest compromises over Gore's tough principles.

When it comes to global warming, for instance, Gore "understands the science at a level that few, if any, politicians ever have. On the other hand, he needs to engage with people on the policy," said Michael Oppenheimer, senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund in New York.

Some prominent environmentalists say privately that Gore can't take their votes for granted, and nonpartisan groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund are talking to several candidates in hopes of building bridges to the eventual winner.

The criticism from environmentalists, in the form of big newspaper ads and open letters expressing "disappointment" in the vice president, angers Gore loyalists. They say that Gore has had to contend with a Republican Congress and skeptical White House advisers who make bold environmental measures difficult. Even so, they say, the Clinton administration has done more for the environment than any other in recent history.

They say that today's environmentalists seem to forget the not-so-distant past when former President Reagan symbolically tore the solar panels from the White House roof or when Vice President Dan Quayle tried to relax environmental standards to help industry. Now, say Gore boosters, environmentalists can always count on a sympathetic hearing from Gore.

Gore "has dramatically moved the bar" in protecting the environment, said Katie McGinty, until recently the director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "We would not have . . . an international game plan to save the world from disruptive climatic changes if not for Al Gore's leadership."

She was referring to an international treaty, called the Kyoto Protocol, that Gore brokered in 1997.

Some criticism of Gore may have been inevitable because of expectations Gore created through his 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance," which portrayed a global environmental crisis. Gore called for making environmental protection "the central organizing principle for civilization," and called global warming "the most serious threat we have ever faced."

But Gore's passion has often not been matched by action. The Clinton administration has proposed few measures to control the United States' burning of oil and coal, the leading human source of gases that contribute to global warming. And Gore icily rejected environmentalists' urging that the Kyoto Protocol be sent to the US Senate so that American commitments would become binding.

"Name a senator who would support me," Gore told the leaders of several environmental groups last summer.

Gore argues that he wants to steadily advance environmental causes without creating a polarizing debate, a mistake that he says the administration made in 1993 by trying to slap a new tax on coal and oil. Congress swiftly rejected the so-called BTU tax, and the fight has poisoned administration efforts to win support for policies against global warming ever since.

Critics, however, suspect Gore's caution is driven by his presidential ambitions. Gore himself has cited his "tendency to put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously." With Republicans already seizing upon passages in Gore's book for evidence of extremism, Gore may not want to give them more ammunition.

"Nobody thinks he's insincere," said John Passacantando of the Washington-based environmental group Ozone Action. "The criticism is more that he and his staff are letting the fearmongers circumscribe his political agenda, limiting him on environmental issues to small potatoes."

By all accounts, Gore is that rare politician who thrives on the scientific and technical details of environmental issues, surfing the Web or calling scientists directly for the latest information. Even Gore's cocktail party conversation often turns to issues such as stabilizing global population.

As a result, Gore is formidably well-informed, as he demonstrated a couple of years ago when he very publicly tutored President Clinton on the ecological role of phosphorous in Lake Tahoe, Calif.

"I would always come out of his office well briefed," joked McGinty, even though she was supposed to be doing the briefing.

Gore, in contrast to many politicians-turned-authors, actually wrote "Earth in the Balance," which he described as a "spiritual journey" following his 1988 defeat and an accident that almost killed his son. In it, Gore compared mounting environmental problems to the years before World War II, suggesting that failure to take strong actions could produce an environmental disaster to rival the war with Hitler.

Some observers said Gore gave an overly gloomy assessment. Journalist Gregg Easterbrook says the book doesn't note US environmental progress until page 82, even though the air and water are measurably cleaner than a few decades ago.

The book's first half "might have been ghosted by Chicken Little," argues Easterbrook in his own book, "A Moment on the Earth."

Indeed, Democrats worried during the 1992 election that the vice presidential nominee's views could open the Clinton-Gore ticket to charges of extremism. Gore "equates the failure to recycle aluminum cans with the Holocaust -- an equation that parodies the former and dishonors the latter," wrote Democratic National Committee staffer Jonathan Sallet in a 1992 memo trying to anticipate GOP attacks.

But Gore caught the rising wave of environmental concern in the United States, as the record-hot 1980s and disasters such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill convinced many that his grim assessment was right. Left-leaning Mother Jones magazine dubbed Gore "the Green Knight" as he took office and brought on former staff members to take the administration's top two environmental posts.

Within months, environmentalists were criticizing the administration for not doing enough, and offering litmus tests for Gore to "prove" his commitment. Even when the administration beat back Republican efforts to weaken environmental laws in 1995, Clinton still got a "21 chainsaw salute" from activists angry that he signed a measure allowing logging on federal land with little environmental oversight.

In 1997, environmental groups pressed Gore to support stronger limits on air pollution by mocking Gore's fondness for Rachel Carson, author of the seminal book "Silent Spring." As officials signaled they would reject the smog and soot standards, environmentalists complained about "Al Gore's Silent Spring" because he had not spoken up.

Gore finally backed up EPA Administrator Carol Browner, and Clinton endorsed the new standards, but Gore was angered that activists had publicly tried to divide him from his boss.

"I'm disappointed that they do those things," said Browner, Gore's former Senate chief of staff. "You can't find a better, more committed public leader on protecting our environment than Al Gore."

To some degree, environmentalists are only doing what every advocacy group does: demanding more. Even Gore's harshest critics acknowledge that the Clinton administration has been much better for their cause than the Republican administrations that preceded it. For example:

-- Clinton created a 1.7-million-acre national monument in Utah and committed the government to the world's biggest environmental restoration project in the Florida Everglades.

-- He drastically reduced logging on federal lands, including spotted-owl habitat in the Northwest and Alaskan rainforest.

-- He put up $1 billion for so-called clean energy research this fiscal year, and the federal government is working with the auto industry to develop an 80-mile-per-gallon car.

Yet, for each achievement, people like Clapp of the National Environmental Trust list occasions where Clinton and Gore fell short: The air cleanup at national parks that takes 60 years to be fully effective; the Midwestern coal plants that are still exempt from key pollution standards; the ban on new roads in the wilderness that may be lifted soon.

Most important, environmentalists say the administration has not curbed the United States' world-leading emissions of carbon dioxide, the main "greenhouse gas." The administration won't come close to meeting its goal of returning to 1990 emissions levels by next year; instead, the country is expected to be about 13 percent over.

Now, with Gore's declaration of his candidacy last Wednesday, policies will be seen through the lens of presidential politics. Some political strategists warn that Gore is already too closely identified with the environment -- the only cause Gore was significantly associated with in a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll -- and that he should emphasize other concerns such as education.

However, environmentalists say they could back another candidate if Gore avoids their issues. Some note that Democratic challenger Bill Bradley has a higher lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters than Gore. And Bush recently met with leaders of the Environmental Defense Fund, announcing not long afterward that he now believes global warming is real.

"What people are saying to Gore is that, 'For better or worse, Al, you are the environmental candidate in everybody's eyes right now. For you to run away from it, it hurts you,' " said Denis Hayes of Seattle, the cofounder of Earth Day.

Gore staffers say their man won't duck environmental issues, but he won't get shaken up over threats, either. After years of "disappointing" environmentalists, he doesn't await their approval.

As Browner of the EPA put it, "He's human. It can't feel very good. On the other hand, he believes in what he is doing."