The profile of Al Gore in NYT Magazine contains, amidst other good stuff, some interesting backstory about Gore's experiences with the Alliance for Climate Protection, as well as his experiences in the Clinton administration. Forthwith, a couple of longish excerpts.
First, on the Alliance:
In mid-2005, he began talking to members of "the green group," as the environmental lobby is collectively known, about marshaling a popularizing effort. ... Gore was the obvious candidate to lead the crusade. But the Al Gore of September 2005 was not the Saint Albert of today. That Al Gore was a harsh partisan, and all too apt a symbol of the hectoring, holier-than-thou stance of the environmental movement. "It was not clear then that having him headline this was the best strategic approach," says an official who now works with Gore, "but they didn't want to say that to him, because he was their friend and ally. It was painful. It was like, 'Maybe we need more balance.'" Gore tried to solve the problem by seeking to attract a Republican as a partner, but one candidate after another turned him down. And so, in December of that year, the board of the Alliance for Climate Protection was established -- without Al Gore.
The decision obviously rankled. When I asked Gore why the alliance had taken so long to get in gear, he blurted out, "Because I wasn't chairman of it." This actually appears to be true. In the ensuing months, according to one of the alliance's founders, "nothing happened, nothing happened and then nothing happened. It was like the spaceship had gone around to the other side of the moon." Meanwhile Gore continued to proselytize the heathens, gaining adherents by the hundreds and thousands.
...
"An Inconvenient Truth" erased the taint of partisanship from the Gore persona. By last fall, he had become the chairman and prime mover of the Alliance for Climate Protection. He hired a C.E.O. and began thinking about strategy.
I tell you, that story fills me with confidence in the mainstream environmental movement!
And then there's this on the Clinton years:
Finally, when he became Bill Clinton's vice president, he had the chance to raise the issue at the highest levels. This proved to be a time of tremendous frustration.
After the Republican House and Senate victories of 1994, environmental groups, and their allies in Congress and the White House, were forced to fight a desperate rear-guard action to protect core legislation, including the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. Real progress on issues like gas-mileage standards and the development of alternative fuels was next to impossible. "We got slam-dunked on almost every issue," as Kathleen McGinty, former head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, recalls; "and not just by Republicans but by Democrats as well." She and other former aides give Gore high marks for steadfastness in the face of massive resistance. But the resistance came not only from the business lobby and their allies in Congress but also from some of the administration's own top officials. As Gore himself recalls: "It was seen as an arcane, hobbyhorse issue: We'll indulge Vice President Gore, and let him do his thing yet again, and then we'll get back to what we know is the serious stuff."
This internal clash came to a head in 1997, with negotiations over the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions, which the business community, and above all the energy industry, vehemently opposed. Timothy Wirth, a committed environmentalist and then under secretary of state for global affairs, assembled a bipartisan advisory group of a dozen or so senators to build support for the treaty. "I could not get a single White House official to come to any of these meetings," Wirth recalls. "They would not identify themselves with Kyoto." Wirth planned to assemble a range of such groups, as he had with earlier pacts; but the White House took over the process before he could do so and made no outreach effort. "It was a goddamn scandal," Wirth says. "It was horrible." Wirth stepped down a few weeks before the treaty was to be finalized.
Gore was quite taken aback when I relayed Wirth's remarks. "He's not talking about me," he said. "I don't know who he's talking about." But he also adds: "If I had been president, would I have bent every part of the administration and every part of the White House to support this? Yes, I would have. Does that translate into criticism of President Clinton for not doing this? No. I was vice president, not president." Or maybe Gore would rather not do the translation. When the international negotiations looked as if they were about to collapse, in part owing to American resistance, Gore suggested that he fly to Kyoto to demonstrate Washington's commitment. David Sandalow, who worked on environmental affairs at the National Security Council, recalls a meeting with a dozen advisers "in which nobody recommended he go, with the range of opinion running from neutral to strongly against." Gore went anyway. "His arrival was galvanizing," Sandalow says. (Others are less convinced.) Gore returned in triumph -- and instantly encountered, he recalls, "resistance in the White House to even signing it, much less submitting it to the Senate for ratification." Gore used his last dram of political capital to persuade Clinton to sign the Kyoto pact; it was never sent to the Senate, where it surely would have died an ugly death. The Clinton administration thus surrendered without firing a shot. For Gore, it was a humiliating denouement.
Woulda coulda shoulda.
Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
Is John Broder embarrassed to have a baseless hit job on Gore under his byline?
Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:02 pm
21 May 2007
The views of Gore are so antithetical to that of Americans, that he himself admits that even while "in" office, he essentially was "out" of office!
Now he's whining about why he sat on his butt for 8 years while he could have been doing something. Oh, also, why did he wait until 2004 to then do something?
I mean, can you really trust the guy?
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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Whiskerfish Posted 6:45 pm
21 May 2007
Grist might do well to look into IFAW and where their money goes (hint: start by finding the property value of their founder, Davies', mansion in Florida) and then have a long, hard think about continuing to run their advertising.
Whiskerfish
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caniscandida Posted 7:11 pm
21 May 2007
Pity, though, is it not, if organizations professedly concerned with the welfare of wildlife come to be believed to be no more than false, slick, money-collecting operations.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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Billhook Posted 10:50 pm
21 May 2007
in response to your irony:
"I tell you, that story fills me with confidence in the mainstream environmental movement!"
I'd report that the same perverse outcomes occur here in Europe.
Certain influences withing the MEM here are dead set against the global climate policy framework of Contraction & Convergence,
for reasons that have not been made clear in 15 years' debate,
which has now resulted in a bizarre statement by one such influence
at the recent UNFCCC session in Bonn.
John Lanchberry of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds)
and strategist for the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition [SCCC],
has finally confirmed that SCCC will afterall not have a 'position'
on the future of global climate policy
as the movement apparently cannot agree what the position should be.
"We do not think," he said in Bonn earlier this week, "that it is
helpful to have an organising principle in this matter."
Which neatly ignores the reality that principle always precedes practice,
whether by design or by default,
and the operating principle that Lanchberry is promoting is that of appeasement.
And these organizations mop up hundreds of millions of £s/yr !
With freinds like these, who needs Exxon ?
Regards,
Bill
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Steven T Posted 11:53 pm
21 May 2007
Prediction: If the future is like the past, some of the most important global warming reforms of the next few decades won't come primarily from environmental activists.
Grist could play a useful role by providing greater coverage of the environmental movement's inner workings. However, it would need to be done carefully. What I don't have in mind is the cynical, "holy crap" story that feeds people's sense of apathy.
Rather, what is needed is coverage that points to what is wrong but in a way that also sheds light on more successful alternatives. The overarching goal isn't to denounce but to help people learn more effective ways of organizing in an increasingly complex and fast-paced political environment.
Truth be told? We're all bozos on this bus, because the challenges we face are unprecedented. There is no road map to where we need to go.
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Whiskerfish Posted 5:30 am
22 May 2007
Enviro stuff is very difficult to do. You've got to balance a zillion different things and there will be more screw-ups than successes. But there are some organisations like, dare I say it, IFAW, that really take the piss from their donors. If you look at the salaries some folks at the top end are getting paid, and the obsessive secrecy around them, you've got to get really suspicious.
There's a difference betwen raking in the dollars and getting something done, but it seems that loads of organisations rank their effectiveness on the money they bring in and not the minds they change. Nowadays we have professional environmentalists that have no particular knowledge or love for nature, and that really scares the hell out of me.
So, Mr Roberts, how about a no-holds-barred look at IFAW, one of the largest animal welfare/'conservation' organisations on the planet? Find out how much they spend annually on chartering private Gulfstream jet trips... What Fred O'Regan, the current head honcho, thought of his childhood pet dog... How much they paid their founder, Davies, so they could carry on using his name and image to raise money after he left... and what Davies is doing now, along with David Barrit, spindoctor to South Africa's biggest fraudster, Brett Kebble...
The answers are out there, and some are rather easy to find.
Whiskerfish
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caniscandida Posted 7:28 am
22 May 2007
I am very glad that Revkin did NOT ask him something like, "Can we assume that a President Hillary Clinton would share your environmental agenda and make direct use of your current involvement in these matters?"
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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