Environmental Trendiness (and Hypocrisy)
In the past, Al Gore has made his environmental positions a big part of his message, notably in his book “Earth in the Balance”, which sold well. We don’t critique candidates’ policy positions, but some of that may come back to haunt him by making him look extreme, trendy or hypocritical.
Gore runs the risk of being shown up as a hypocrite, the way Mike Dukakis was in 1998 after Boston Harbor’s pollution problem was exposed.
One example is the Pigeon River in North Carolina and east Tennesee. The Champion International paper mill has pumped tons of chemicals and byproducts into it for years, turning it the color of cofee and adding a sulfurish smell. Gore campaigned hard against this pollution and lobbied the EPA to crack down. But in 1987, as Gore started running for president the first time, he was pressured by 2 politicians whose support he craved for the North Carolina Super Tuesday primary. Terry Sanford (then a Senator) and Jamie Clarke (North Carolina congressmen) lobbied him hard to ease up on Champion. Gore did, writing to the EPA again and now asking for a more permissive water pollution standard. Sanford and Clarke endorsed him, and Gore won the state handily.
Another example is a Gore family property that has been mined for zinc and germanium for decades. The Vice-President and his dad, the late Senator Albert Gore, Sr., obtained the land in a very favorable deal with the late Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum. Gore, Sr. was heavily supported by Hammer financially, and carried his water in the U.S. Senate.
Back in 1972, when zinc was discovered across the river from the Gore family land in Carthage, TN, Hammer sent engineers out and offered $20,000 per year for a mineral rights lease on some property owned by a church that had been willed the land. Instead, they wanted to sell and Hammer won a bidding war to buy the land for $160,000. He then sold it to Gore Jr. and Sr. for the same amount, and immediately started leasing the land back from him for the same $20,000. Lynwood Burkhalter, who in the 70s was president of the company that assumed this lease from Occidental Petroleum, called the payments “extraordinarily large.”
Mining is, of course, a very messy business environmentally. The mine itself hasn’t been that bad. Republicans have claimed that it’s polluting the local drinking water, but according to the Wall Street Journal those problems “are actually very minor.” However, the Journal notes that the plant in Clarksville TN, which processes the Gore minerals, is a federal Superfund site contaminated with cadmium and mercury, posing “a threat to the human food chain.”
There’s also a damning quote about cutting down Yew trees to make a promising cancer treatment that we used to include in our Gore quotes section. Except that the really embarrassing part – which we got from an editorial in the Austin, Texas American Statesman – turns out to be distorted and out of context. The full quote, which is still a little odd, is:
“The Pacific Yew can be cut down and processed to produce a potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of lung, breast and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly die. It seems an easy choice – sacrifice the tree for a human life – until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated, that only specimens more than a hundred years old contain the potent chemical in their bark, and that there are very few of these yews remaining on earth.” - Gore, in “Earth in the Balance”, p. 119
The distorted version puts a period after “for each patient treated,” as if the ratio of trees to humans was what bothered Gore. In reality, his point is that treating all current cancer patients would destroy all of the trees, leaving none of the drug for future cancer patients.
