How is Gore looking these days? Did he keep the beard?!
Beard is gone. And it seems like he's trying to appear more natural, less stiff. He came out for Earth Day with guns blazing and got a surprising editorial rebuke from the Post for his efforts.
Clearing the Air
Tuesday, April 23, 2002; Page A16
ONCE UPON A time it was Labor Day that kicked off the political season. But this year you could hear the starting gun on Earth Day. Former Vice President Al Gore took the occasion to assail President Bush's record on the environment. Echoing environmental lobbyists, he declared that "polluters" are "pretty much in charge of the energy and environment policies of this administration . . . threatening to take us back to the days when America's rivers and lakes were dying, when the skylines were some days not visible because of the smog, and when toxic waste threatened so many communities around America."
Zounds. Pretty scary stuff. But on the issue of air pollution, for example, the debate is about the scope of future improvements in air quality that is already substantially better than it was 10 years ago. Where caps might be set for power plant emissions or how the administration enforces requirements for new pollution controls on old power plants are important questions and worthy of serious debate. But they are questions of how best to achieve future gains, not whether overall air quality is going to roll back to the levels of the past.
Similarly, it's true that President Bush has taken a wrong tack on global warming. Before abandoning the flawed Kyoto protocol, he should have had better alternatives in place than the voluntary program he laid out in February, and he should have stuck with his promise to cap carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. But President Clinton came around to endorsing carbon caps only in the closing days of his administration, and never seriously attempted to put them in place. That was a late decision, just like the one to impose tighter limits on arsenic in drinking water, of which Mr. Gore also reminded us yesterday. The Bush administration was roundly clubbed for reviewing that end-of-term decision, even though, again, the question was about how much to lower current standards, not about raising limits then in place. In the end, his administration stuck with exactly the standards its predecessor had proposed, but that didn't stop Mr. Gore from erroneously asserting yesterday that the Bush administration "thought that maybe there wasn't enough arsenic in the drinking water . . . they actually had a proposal to increase the levels that would be permitted."
That kind of distortion doesn't help the debate, nor does the demonizing of industry that seems to be part of the current green pitch. Plenty of companies have willfully damaged the environment, and environmental advocates play an important watchdog role in making sure that public resources aren't abused or manipulated for private gain. But it's also true that, given past gains in cleaning the nation's air and water, the next set of advances is going to require complex decisions and difficult trade-offs. We agree that Mr. Bush is leaning the wrong way as he approaches a number of those. But as those decisions are debated, both sides will be better served by rhetoric that stays grounded in reality.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
