The Environment in Campaign 2000

...Not that Bush differs in these matters from the Republican center of gravity...

...As Chris Foreman of the Brookings Institution has pointed out, none of the dozens of environmentaljustice grievances examined by the EPA has been found to deserve relief under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discriminators from federal funds...

...The Web site of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) offers a biography of the vice president that calls him a "staunch DISSENT / Summer 2000 • 35 THE ENVIRONMENT IN CAMPAIGN 2000 advocate for environmental reforms" and features a celebrity profile of actor Rob Reiner describing Gore as one of his "environmental heroes...

...THE TREND toward market environmentalism did not begin with Clinton...

...If the Democrats were to retake the House, these policy controversies would play out in a Gore presidency stripped of one of Clinton's great luxuries...

...After what has been described as an agonized weighing of the political ramifications, Gore did fly to Kyoto at the eleventh hour to prod the stalling climate negotiations, earning praise from the big Washington environmental groups involved in the talks...

...A decidedly new-economy feature of microchip manufacturing is that much of it has been outsourced...

...negotiating stance typically aims to protect American corporate interests first: the biodiversity treaty was opposed as giving inadequate attention to corporate property rights, and the administration demanded that any climate agreement include extensive rights for polluters to purchase emissions reductions overseas so as to lessen the pressure to make basic changes at home...

...Yet even if these sensible measures had found their way into policy with Gore as their champion, they fall far short of a systematic program to address the problems identified in his book...

...Perhaps because of this, opponents and critics alike turn to the vice president's popular 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, for insights into the nature of his environmental concern...

...The conventional wisdom may be right...

...None of this is to suggest that the outcome of the election makes no difference...

...Does he agree with current WTO rules that force proponents of environmental regulation to meet a Herculean standard of incontrovertible THE ENVIRONMENT IN CAMPAIGN 2000 proof of environmental harm, or would he favor shifting the burden of proof onto those who would gut the regulations...

...The U.S...

...Gore's brand of environmentalism is very much a product of the 1980s...

...High-tech industries may constitute the brave new economy on Wall Street, but they have a decidedly old-economy habit of toxic pollution...

...Environmental Defense (known until recently as the Environmental Defense Fund) has been on board all along, lauding the vice president's anti-sprawl proposals and repeatedly providing green cover for the administration on free-trade policy...

...A fourth key area, linking the domestic and international spheres, is the oil-cars-war link described above...

...Nor will pinning down candidate Gore be done by major national environmental organizations...

...This pattern follows the conventional wisdom, which says that voter concern about the environment is widespread but relatively soft...

...Both Gore and Bush lift a rhetorical shovel amid the media spectacle of Earth Day...

...What to Do...

...Gore's environmental supporters point out that he is only the vice president, that he serves under a president who has raised the art of political expediency to new heights, and that the Republican Congress limits maneuvering room...

...Gore called for new taxes on greenhouse gas emissions and the use of "virgin" materials, tighter fuel-economy standards, and accelerated phase-out of ozone-destroying chemicals...

...Friends of the Earth, the U.S...

...He opposes even the modest aims of the Kyoto climate agreement, favors free trade in genetically modified foods, and has argued that environmental regulations constitute the taking of private property...

...A decade after they burst on the scene, movements for environmental justice—ranging from communities of color fighting toxic facilities to farmworkers battling the health effects of pesticides— remain the best hope of infusing environmentalism with a consistently progressive ethic...

...Rising military involvement in Colombia is packaged as part of the drug war—yet surely it is no accident that Colombia and neighboring Venezuela provide the United States with more than two million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products, more than Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined...

...Gore is pressed in Ohio about an unfulfilled 1992 campaign promise to block an incinerator near an elementary school...

...If pressing for commitments now can help set the terms of the post-election fight, what are the commitments for which to press...

...Yet by most accounts Gore has been centrally involved in the crafting of environmental policy...

...Trade Representative's office would be required to assess the environmental impact of trade agreements—as if such assessments, coming from an office with a free-trade mandate and ideology, would not be a foregone conclusion...

...If it would be naive to put too much hope in a Gore presidency, it would be cynical to see no difference on green matters between Gore and Bush...

...Gore has already opened the door a little...

...The one episode sometimes cited as a Bush accomplishment—a bill imposing tougher air-quality standards on older factories that were previously exempted by grandfather clauses—came in the wake of an EPA threat to cut off federal highway funds for non-compliance with clean-air requirements...

...Proof of this is the hodge-podge of measures recommended for the "U.S...

...Only Friends of the Earth—which embarrassed Gore by slamming the administration's record and coming out for Bradley before the primaries—consistently takes the gap between Clinton-Gore rhetoric and accomplishment as its starting point...

...The new thinking had positive effects in that it focused the attention of environmentalists on questions of political economy and drew them into social and ecological worlds beyond America's borders...

...KEN CONCA is an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland...

...But the issue of toxics provides a good illustration of the limits of market environmentalism and new-economy boosterism...

...By contrast, Jimmy Carter sought to clear away environmental "red tape" during the energy crisis, and Clinton shepherded NAFTA and the WTO against any threat of meaningful environmental constraints...

...EDF gave the Clinton administration a "B for effort" on trade issues simply for announcing that the U.S...

...Nor have the tracking devices at the chronically underfunded EPA kept pace with the hundreds of new chemicals now in widespread use...

...Both candidates recognize this...

...Perhaps fearing that the "ozone man" label will return to haunt him, perhaps confident that Bush's sorry record leaves the green vote captive, Gore has avoided sketching a comprehensive environmental platform...

...Gore's record on environmental issues is a more tangled tale, combining his years in Congress, his public claims to be an environmental advocate, a major book on the topic, and eight years as a key voice on environmental matters within the Clinton administration...

...role" in global environmental protection...

...Thus far the club has been content to lead the campaign debunking Bush's allegations of environmental accomplishment...

...Would he carry the debate to the public and expend the political capital needed to win those fights...

...When the political stakes have been perceived to be high, as in Kosovo, NATO expansion, or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the administration has wielded the powers of office to get its way...

...And to its credit, his administration has sometimes tried to turn the market rhetoric of polluters against them, as in the effort to raise fees for mining, grazing, logging, and oil drilling on public lands from nineteenth-century levels to something nearer twenty-first-century market value...

...They seem inclined to get Gore elected and hope that his knowledge and their access will place him on the green side (at least as they see it) more often than his New Democrat instincts will push him the other way...

...Despite Dan Quayle's anti-regulatory Council on Competitiveness, Bush the elder signed amendments that strengthened the Clean Air Act...

...A third important avenue is a specific commitment to comply with global standards...

...But the order lacks any statutory basis, and thus has no teeth...

...This dubious frame led to quick defeat in Congress, and a chastened administration soon found a safer path, conveniently free of free-market logic, providing more than a billion dollars in subsidies to Detroit, ostensibly for the purpose of developing more fuel-efficient vehicles...

...Would he match his zeal for the virtual infrastructure of the Internet with a real infrastructure of efficient public transit...

...The book contains a surprisingly strong indictment of the spiritual bankruptcy of a consumerist, growth-oriented society—but it presents an undifferentiated, society-wide critique that ignores the specific actors and interests behind the problem...

...IT REMAINS unclear whether the combination of Nader's presence, the growing movement against corporate globalization, an array of progressive congressional candidates, and the inadequacy of Gore's tepid "livability" agenda can overcome these inertial tendencies...

...Certainly we have seen a decline in serious discussion of environmental matters, with the limited debate that does occur largely cordoned off from questions of power, profits, and accountability...

...The media seem disinclined to dislodge him from this comfortable space...

...The mounting wave of anti-globalization politics, and the struggle to tilt it Nader-leftward or Buchanan-rightward, may attract new voters in key states...

...IT IS IN THE international arena that the gap between administration rhetoric and action has been the largest...

...A year later, he faced down the Republicans on appropriations riders seeking to gut the EPA's enforcement powers and Arctic wilderness protection...

...The Basel Convention was amended in 1994 (over strong U.S...

...If so, why would he expect similar arrangements to work on a global scale within the WTO...

...a penchant for technical fixes...

...Earth in the Ballots There is also Gore's personal record to consider, beginning with his days as an ambitious young member of the House who pushed hearings on Love Canal...

...EPA's Toxics Release Inventory showed a slight emisTHE ENVIRONMENT IN CAMPAIGN 2000 sions decrease from semiconductor manufacturers between 1988 and 1995—touted as evidence of an improving, self-policing industry that deserved regulatory relief to boost international competitiveness...

...DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 37...

...His move to exploit the growing frustration with sprawl and gridlock—through a "livability" agenda pitched to suburban swing voters—makes it possible to draw out the deeper connections among the work-time-income trap, corporateinspired consumerism, the mailing of America, and the obstacles to genuinely sustainable livelihoods for millions of Americans...

...Meanwhile, air-quality and fueleconomy standards remain riddled with loopholes big enough for America's burgeoning fleet of sport-utility vehicles to drive through...

...Favored policy instruments include market mechanisms for the buying and selling of pollution rights, regulations that replace specific requirements for pollution control with more general outcomeoriented standards, and attempts to foster dialogue between industry and amenable environmentalists...

...But there never was a serious political program...

...The new interest in "reform" may focus attention on the connection between campaign contributions and donor interests, as in several skirmishes from the primary season...

...But ratification of the amendment by enough parties to bring it into force has been undermined by the threat of a challenge under WTO rules...

...Clinton signed an executive order directing the EPA to take into account the distribu36 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 tive effects of pollution across different social groups...

...Clinton, apparently with Gore's prodding, used environmental concerns in early 1995 to reverse the momentum of the Contract with America...

...Al Gore hits George W. Bush in California for his stance on offshore oil drilling...

...But it also strengthened a tendency to see the problem as one of planetary systems management...

...But it lacks a political program that goes beyond general exhortation and institutional tinkering...

...Delay and obstruction on these agreements stands in marked contrast to the push for accords that actively weaken environmental protections...

...As the campaign stands today, no major candidate since Ronald Reagan has been more closely tied to large polluters or less committed to a serious platform on environmental protection...

...He remains on safe ground, tweaking Bush and stoking the desires of swing-voting suburban commuters for a "livability" agenda on sprawl, transit, and green spaces...

...Nor does the claim of congressional obstruction hold much water...

...On environmental matters, it was only too happy to stoke the public's fears when it served an immediate purpose in the political tussle with Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress...

...Even the one case where the United States has historically displayed something akin to leadership, the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer, has seen dangerous slippage...

...Ronald Reagan proved to be a THE ENVIRONMENT IN CAMPAIGN 2000 fundraising godsend for the larger organizations, and "global issues" of climate change, the rainforests, ozone-layer destruction, and the loss of biodiversity were potent mobilizers of donations...

...Would a Gore presidency push serious energy conservation in the transportation sector as a way to protect public health, reduce pollution, and demilitarize U.S...

...Unable to provide NRDC with a favorite environmental quote, Reiner opined, "Maybe that's the problem with the environmental movement: we don't have enough flashy, pithy quotes...

...But it underscores an important lesson: strong public concern mobilized by effective political organizing and pressure from below are the keys to genuine environmental protection...

...But a decade of comforting claims that we can protect the environment while "growing the economy" has driven environmentalism from the ranks of issues thought to shape voting choices...

...Bush's record is not complicated: he has halted the acquisition of public lands in Texas, campaigned actively against the Endangered Species Act, and replaced restrictions on development with brokered deals not subject to public scrutiny...

...The record is unsteady and episodic, but does contain consistent themes: extensive knowledge of the issues, seemingly real concerns tempered by expediency, and a preference to frame the problem as one of spiritual crisis and techni32 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 cal fixes while skirting hard questions of accountability, interests, and economic power...

...energy policy...

...foreign policy...

...What follows is not a complete agenda, but rather a set of specific suggestions that link concerns for environmental protection with core progressive themes: social and economic injustice, political unaccountability, the use of public power for private gain, and the limits of liberal tinkering in the face of these ills...

...This allows for quicker adjustment to the stream of new chemicals used in semiconductor fabrication...

...The Sierra Club is a tougher sell, given that it has an active membership base instead of just a fund-raising list...

...The latest report identifies seventy-seven environmentally harmful federal programs in energy, public lands, water, agriculture, and transportation...

...The next administration will face key decisions on issues ranging from global climate change to endangered species to the environmental effects of trade...

...The United States has failed to ratify almost all the most important international environmental agreements of the past decade, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Basel agreement on the hazardous waste trade, the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, and the international decertification accord...

...The administration has worked for a so-called "free logging" agreement under the World Trade Organization (WTO)—even though the ban on log exports has been a key means for several developing countries to slow clear-cutting and create incentives for more sustainable forestry...

...With its emphasis on global issues, technical detail, and win-win opportunities among well-intentioned stakeholders, the vice president's brand of environmentalism is very much a product of these trends...

...Seeing no profit and much peril in making serious commitments to an energetic, progressive brand of environmentalism, Gore will slam Bush's record, make narrow pitches to swing voters, and otherwise avoid the topic...

...Another problem with the market paradigm is that it stops short of "externalities" New Democrats don't want to address...

...It lauds activists such as the martyred Brazilian Chico Mendes and Wangari Matthai, an organizer of tree-planting campaigns among rural Kenyan women, praising them as "a new kind of resistance fighter"— but pays no attention to the labor and democracy struggles that those activists put at the center of their grassroots environmentalism...

...By blaming an obstructionist Congress for lack of action on the green front and beating back the most egregious assaults on existing environmental regulations, Clinton gained green cover for some decidedly antienvironmental policies...

...Consider the combustible link between oil, cars, the military, and U.S...

...As of this writing, little has been done to extract such public commitments...

...Amid the buzz about reform, the stories follow the trail of political contributions and the geography of frontline states...

...Would Gore as president demand a timetable for Senate votes on the key environmental treaties the United States has refused to ratify...

...the key is not an anti-growth agenda but growth trajectories that can be sustained within nature's limits...

...The administration, citing the need for "flexible" regulation in rapidly innovating industries, has advanced programs such as the agreement the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) struck with Intel in 1996...

...Nixon signed more pieces of landmark environmental legislation than any president since Theodore Roosevelt—despite apparently believing that the first Earth Day was a Soviet plot (falling as it did on Lenin's birthday...

...There is a glaring market distortion here: the failure of gasoline prices to account for the enormous costs of both pollution and foreign policy militarization...

...A decade after the Gulf War, America is consuming and importing oil in record amounts, with a large slice of the Pentagon budget spent on a military posture designed to keep the oil flowing...

...It is hard to read the book and dismiss it as empty rhetoric—but just as hard to read it as a blueprint for a sustainable, socially just political economy...

...During that decade America's environmental movement shifted much of its attention away from the domestic clean air and clean water struggles that produced the landmark legislation of the 1970s...

...Would he strengthen currently anemic funding levels for pollution monitoring, enforcement, and the prosecution of environmental crimes...

...Only a small slice of the electorate will vote its green passions, and it is assumed to be a captive constituency of the Democrats...

...A central question in the run-up to November is whether pressure from a variety of sources— environmentalists, labor, local candidates, community movements, the progressive media— can force candidate Gore into commitments that change the terms of the post-election struggle...

...As Bill Bradley stressed during the primaries, Gore the legislator received only middling ratings from environmental groups and lacked a signature legislative accomplishment...

...His book provides a reflective, informed, and often passionate account of threats to the planet and its people...

...One crucial domain is the struggle to make environmental protection and enforcement meet standards of socio-economic justice...

...Should Detroit be subsidized to develop more fuel-efficient vehicles on its own timetable, or required to comply with stronger fuel-economy and pollution-control standards that are easily achievable with existing technology...

...objection) to impose a ban on the trafficking of hazardous waste from the DISSENT / Summer 2000 • 33 THE ENVIRONMENT IN CAMPAIGN 2000 industrialized world to the global South...

...Major Silicon Valley manufacturers have shifted production to foreign facilities that lie beyond EPA's reach or to smaller factories in the American Southwest that fly under the radar screen of EPA monitoring...

...WTO rules also undermine national environmental policies by setting a nearly impossible standard for "proof" of environmental harm...

...The vice president's critics have stressed that his sense of urgency on environmental matters has since grown muted and tactical...

...Under this deal, Intel was no longer required to seek prior EPA approval for "routine" changes in production processes, so long as a production facility's overall emissions record was acceptable...

...It would also be useful to hold the vice president's feet to the fire on the efficiency rhetoric of market environmentalism...

...Pinning Gore to the kind of specific commitments that Clinton was able to dodge in 1992 and 1996 will not in itself yield an environmental presidency, but it could help to keep a progressive environmental program in play after the election...

...The book calls for a "global Marshall plan" to help the poor countries of the world find a greener development trajectory—but avoids serious discussion of the global trade and financial architecture that virtually ensures resource plunder...

...Americans have strong latent anxieties that can be triggered by oil spills, nuclear accidents, rainforests in flames, toxics in the water, a hole in the ozone...

...The majors seem to be falling in line, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm...

...Those pressures are needed whether progressive voters ultimately swallow hard and pull the lever for Gore, fall in behind Nader, or stay home in favor of local struggles...

...Soon after he beat back the Contract challenge, Clinton signed a disastrous appropriations rider allowing accelerated timber extraction on public lands under the guise of "forest salvage...

...He would later face criticism from the same quarters, as the administration failed to develop a plan to implement even the modest commitments made at Kyoto...

...In the domestic arena, this translates into a more flexible, businessfriendly approach rooted in a New Democrat notion of public-private "partnership...

...More generally, the hyperliberalization of trade through the WTO undermines existing international regulations...

...As Jan Mazurek has shown in a carefully detailed study of the industry, however, even these modest gains are illusory, largely the product of bookkeeping artifacts and inadequate monitoring...

...As a senator he refused to support ratification of the biodiversity treaty, arguing that it might hurt the interests of American pharmaceutical firms, and thereby giving President Bush green cover to oppose signing it...

...History shows that both parties can be moved by such tactics, and that both are fully capable of ignoring a progressive green agenda if not pressed in that direction...

...But if they can, what should the agenda be...

...a pollution of poverty existed alongside a pollution of affluence...

...The problem is 34 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 that these maneuvers have been purely tactical and therefore just as easily reversed...

...According to the League of Conservation Voters, Bush's appointments to state environmental commissions have been criticized for "strong ties to chemical, oil, and real estate interests, and in some cases their relationships to businesses regulated by the commissions...

...Houston is now the smog capital of America, with oil refineries and other polluting industries the largest culprits...

...The core premise has been that we could have economic growth and environmental protection at the same time...

...At the same time, powerful new arguments about "sustainability" began to emerge: not all forms of economic growth were equally damaging to the environment...

...Public Interest Research Group, and several other groups have launched a series of "Green Scissors" reports that target federal pollution subsidies...

...There are twenty-nine Superfund sites in Silicon Valley, more than any other comparably sized area of the United States...

...The threat of military intervention has become the primary working instrument of U.S...

...and a discomfort with messy underlying problems of social inequality, concentrated power, and narrow interests masquerading as the public good...

...Does the vice president's "livability" agenda for the suburbs address the hidden crisis of livability in urban and rural areas in the wake of corporate flight, downsizing, and public disinvestment...

...DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 31 THE ENVIRONMENT IN CAMPAIGN 2000 The Record Obscured by the politics of environmental anecdote are the actions, positions, and political debts that foreshadow developments in a Bush or Gore presidency...

...Does candidate Gore support a statutory link between Clinton's executive order and the Civil Rights Act...

...The presence of Ralph Nader may force Gore to compete for the green vote...

...The administration has instead delayed the phase-out for an important class of ozone-harming chemicals, dodged the question of fuel standards, and avoided any discussion of taxes since the BTU tax fiasco...

...Does he accept the growing consensus that the NAFTA side agreements on environmental protection have been ineffective...

...The Clinton-Gore environmental record is not unlike the administration's overall pattern: rhetorical pronouncements that feel the Earth's pain, "New Democrat" repositioning in the domestic sphere, and subordination of any foreign policy agenda to international trade and investment...

...Despite this aid, Detroit is some years away from selling such a vehicle, while Honda and Toyota are beginning to market them in the United States this summer...

...foreign policy...

...What specific steps would a Gore presidency take to ensure that the EPA and the Department of Justice act as aggressively on enforcement of environmental law and prosecution of environmental crimes in minority communities as they do elsewhere...

...These small but hopeful opportunities come at a critical juncture for American environmental policy...

...Nevertheless, there are a few wrinkles in Campaign 2000 that may create space for a more substantial airing of a green agenda...

...Trade sanctions—one of the few tools of environmental regulation that consistently get the attention of governments—are effectively no longer available as a policy instrument...

...Here one finds a mixture of genuine insights and generalized platitudes...

...local chapters tend to be wary of compromise by the Washington office and inclined to air out national political strategy in public debate...

...But history shows that, even though environmentalists may act as a captive constituency of the Democratic Party, environmental politics is not similarly captive...

...These programs, ranging from support for the nuclear and coal industries to the paving of logging roads on federal lands, dole out nearly $50 billion in outright subsidies or expenditures that serve private interests...

...Which of these programs would remain in the first budget Gore sent to Congress...

...And Gore has earned his own reputation for expediency...

...The strongest international environmental agreement to date, on protecting the stratospheric ozone layer, came during Reagan's second term...

...The administration delayed the phase-out of methyl bromide, an important ozone-destroying chemical, and opposed tougher rules favored by the Europeans...

...the bizarre flirtation of many liberals with John McCain ignored a legislative record that earned a lifetime rating of 20 percent from the League of Conservation Voters...

...During Clinton's first year in office the administration tepidly proposed a small gasoline tax—justified not as a way to break the oil-cars-war link, reduce pollution, and protect public health, but rather as a deficit reducer and global-warming measure (hence the wonkish label "BTU tax...

...The effectiveness of his environmental maneuvering against the Republicans undercuts claims of impotence, even as its cynicism undercuts claims of commitment to environmental protection...

...neither competes for the serious green vote that is assumed to belong to Gore...