Environmentalists Describe a Cautiously Green Gore

Almost every environmental lobbyist in the capital has a story about Al Gore.

There was the time they sought tougher regulations on energy use, and the vice president told them: “The people haven’t given us permission to lead on this issue.” Or the time they asked him to push legislation on global warming, and he dismissed them with: “You guys don’t have a single vote in the Senate for this.” Or the battle for new clean-air regulations when Gore hesitated for months before finally coming down--privately--on the environmental side.

For years, Gore’s highest profile has been his standing as an environmentalist. His most passionate stands have been on the dangers of automobile emissions and global warming. He wrote a book that called the automobile “a mortal threat to the security of every nation” and compared environmental destruction to the Holocaust.

But in office, the Al Gore who sounded like a crusading prophet has acted as a careful, pragmatic politician. Most environmentalist leaders still say Gore is the best vice president they’ve ever had; most environmental organizations have endorsed him for president. But they also complain about how cautious he has been.

“We wish he had been bolder,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, a Gore supporter. “I wish he would pass more often, instead of sticking with his running game.”

Others are harsher. “The Clinton-Gore administration has been excellent on the soapbox, excellent at talking about global warming--but in practice, the United States has been almost the most counterproductive nation, a leader of the forces of delay,” charged John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA.

When a reporter relayed those complaints, Gore smiled wanly, arched an eyebrow and warbled: “You always hurt the one you love.”

Billed by Republicans as an Extremist

The vice president can afford some ironic detachment. A year ago, Republicans threatened to paint him as an environmental extremist and force him to defend his goal of making the internal combustion engine obsolete.

Instead, it’s GOP candidate George W. Bush who’s on the defensive, saying it’s not his fault that Houston’s air is the most polluted in the nation. In polls, voters say they like Gore’s views on the environment better than Bush’s by a wide margin. Even in Michigan, a closely contested state where Republican Gov. John Engler has called Gore a threat to jobs, polls show the vice president in the lead.

Gore’s record on the environment echoes his approach to many other issues: rhetorical zeal, a wonkish enthusiasm for the details of policy--and practical caution when political risks arise.

“He always wanted to be out front on the environment when it was free, but he never wanted to cross the line when it wasn’t,” said a former aide to President Clinton who asked not to be identified. “It wasn’t black and white. It was shades of green.”

Gore’s passion for the environment is genuine; even his critics agree on that. In an interview on the campaign trail, he bristled at the question of whether he has done everything he could for his favorite cause.

“You think I’m not passionately committed to this?” he demanded. “That’s one of the main reasons I’m in this race.”

Asked what issue he would do more on, he answered emphatically: “Well, global warming. . . . That’s one of my missions. That’s one of my missions.” This time, his voice was neither ironic nor detached.

“And, you know, it’s fair game for them to say, ‘We didn’t get everything and we’re going to hold you responsible for that.’ ”

It is as if there are two Al Gores: Gore the eco-visionary, who worries about the polar icecap melting and wants to stop burning fossil fuels; and Gore the politician, who needs to win Michigan and cannot afford to be seen as an enemy of the automobile.

The solution is a third Al Gore: Gore the technologist, who finds solutions to environmental problems not in citizens’ sacrifices but in the ingenuity of American invention.

In June, candidate Gore proposed an ambitious list of federal grants and tax incentives to stimulate the adoption of energy-saving technology, from tax credits of up to $6,000 for motorists who buy hybrid vehicles to bigger tax breaks for power utilities that reduce emissions--a potential $148 billion over 10 years.

He knows some of his political advisors don’t think he should spend much campaign time on it. But his eyes light up when he talks about it: “A plan that actually does dramatically transform the way we use energy in America and the way we reduce pollution. . . . A way for U.S. business and labor to dominate the economy of the 21st century the way we dominated the economy of the 20th century.”

“We’ve got the answer,” he said. “ . . . We can clean up pollution, make our power systems more efficient and more reliable, and move away from dependence on others--all with no new taxes, no new bureaucracies and no onerous regulations.”

That techno-fix seems a long way from “Earth in the Balance,” Gore’s 1992 book, in which he wrote: “We must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization . . . an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy.”

Gore’s goals haven’t changed since 1992, but his tone and timetable have. His term as vice president began with expansive environmental ambitions--but quickly ran into stinging setbacks:

* When Gore campaigned as Bill Clinton’s running mate that year, the two Democrats promised to raise the federal fuel efficiency standard for automobiles from 27.5 miles per gallon to 40. But the auto industry and its supporters in both parties rallied against the idea, and Clinton backed away from the fight. Instead, he and Gore sought a technological fix: a research initiative with the automobile industry to develop an 80-mpg “new generation vehicle.” The research is underway--but the fuel efficiency standard remains unchanged.

* In 1993, Gore tried to make environmental efficiency part of the administration’s economic plan, with an energy tax that would have fallen heavily on coal and fossil fuels. But business groups and energy-producing states rebelled, and the plan died.

* In 1994, the Democrats lost both houses of Congress to conservative Republicans, most of them strongly opposed to tougher regulation. Environmentalists went on the defensive.

Gore managed to put the environment back on the White House agenda by billing it as a political plus. “I have the issue that will separate the Republicans from the American people,” he told Clinton, displaying polls that found Americans deeply worried about the issue (although they were more concerned about clean drinking water than global warming). Clinton made saving the environment part of his 1996 campaign platform, along with Social Security, Medicare and education.

In Gore’s second term, the question was: How hard would the administration push the GOP Congress for tougher environmental regulations?

In 1997, EPA Administrator Carol Browner pushed for new, stronger air quality standards to limit smog and soot in industrial cities. Democratic mayors and governors in the Rust Belt--allies Gore would need in his presidential campaign--pushed back. The vice president was quiet for months; some environmentalists carped about “Al Gore’s silent spring.” The Sierra Club printed up postcards for its members to send to Gore, urging him to act. In the end, Gore backed the tougher standards--but only after making his environmental allies worry.

Later that year, Gore faced a choice on his most heartfelt issue, global warming. In Kyoto, Japan, negotiations on a worldwide agreement to reduce emissions were deadlocking. The European Union was asking for deeper cuts than the administration wanted, China and developing countries were asking to be exempt, and Republicans in Congress were denouncing the whole idea.

Political aides told Gore to stay out of the fight. Environmentalists pleaded with him to rescue the process. Gore flew to Japan and spent two days negotiating a compromise. The plan committed the United States to reduce production of greenhouse gases by about one-third from projected levels by 2012.

The Senate said it had no intention of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol--and it still hasn’t. But Gore won credit from environmentalists for preventing the negotiations’ collapse and for committing the United States to meet international targets some day.

Auto Industry Appeasement

There was a political cost in some key industrial states. The head of Michigan’s Chamber of Commerce said the pact “would have a catastrophic effect on the Michigan economy.”

Gore reached out to automobile executives, energy firms and Rust Belt officials. In a speech that was months in preparation, he told the Detroit Economic Club that the auto industry was “on the right track--for our economy and for our environment.”

“For all our successful research to find cleaner technology, real progress depends on the industry’s ability to make and sell cost-effective, competitive products,” he said.

“We must meet the challenge of global warming. . . . But we must act with common sense and realize that most of the solutions will emerge from industry. Private-sector innovation can help us stop global warming--without economic cooling.”

Some environmentalists winced. “We wanted [Gore] to be blunter about the fact that the auto industry wasn’t using existing technology,” said the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope.

But Pope was also understanding.

“Gore went out to build a foundation to make this big, risky problem more manageable,” he said. “Confronted with a big leap, he builds himself a platform to make it less of a leap. The bad news is, it takes longer that way. The good news is, it doesn’t wash away with the tide.”

For years, the auto industry moved only slowly toward Gore’s goal of low-emission vehicles. But the vice president got good news in July, when Ford Motor Co. announced that it plans to voluntarily improve its products’ fuel efficiency by 25% over five years.

In the interview on the campaign trail, Gore said he believes Americans are ready for tougher measures to curb global warming.

“I’ve been working on this for almost a quarter-century now. And I’m in the position of somebody who’s been out there and saying, ‘Hey, guys, hey hey hey, look at this, look at this; we have got to do something about it,’ ” he said.

“There are passages in my book, from nine years ago, to the effect that we will go through a period of several years where the evidence is clear to the scientific community and to any in leadership positions who take time to immerse themselves that we have to act, but the public will take more time to believe it, to absorb it--but then it will flip.

“What happens is, the evidence arrives first; but then you have to disseminate the information, make a case. And then you reach a point where you cross a threshold, and the same people who say, one day, ‘Why are you talking about this?’ will say the next day, ‘Why haven’t you done something about this?’ And we’re real close to that point right now. Real close.”

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Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.