News Release

The Environment: Behind the Rhetoric

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PATTI GOLDMAN
A managing attorney with Earthjustice Defense Fund, Goldman said today: “Differences between Bush and Gore include the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, which came up in the debates. There are also differences in the priority and strategies for recovering Pacific salmon…. Gore favors having labor and environmental protection in trade agreements while Bush has not come out for those, but Gore’s position will not solve some of the fundamental problems…”
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TIM HERMACH
Founder of the Native Forest Council, Hermach said today: “Gore is getting the endorsement of some national environmental groups only because they are so afraid of George W. Bush, and so intimidated by the Gore campaign’s where-else-can-you-go attitude.”
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NIAZ DORRY
Greenpeace campaigner Dorry used to live in East Liverpool, Ohio, where Waste Technologies continues to operate an incinerator. She said: “During the 1992 election Al Gore promised to close down the incinerator, which is just 400 yards from an elementary school. But it has been nothing but delays and broken promises.” Today activists held a protest at the EPA in D.C. with a school bus impaled by a mock incinerator smokestack.
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JOE BROWDER
A longtime Everglades activist in Florida, Browder said: “Vice President Gore, while talking anti-sprawl, has been doing his best to move jobs and industrial activity away from Miami to farm land between two national parks to benefit a group of real estate speculators that he is politically close to.”
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HARVEY WASSERMAN
Author of The Last Energy War: The Battle Over Utility Deregulation and senior advisor to the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Wasserman said today: “Bush is right when he says that Clinton-Gore have failed to have an energy policy. Unfortunately, Bush’s own energy policy is oil, oil, oil. Gore bragged that he would put his environmental record against Ralph Nader’s. Gore may be better than Bush, but neither are on the same planet as Nader, whose credentials define the term ‘green.’ Clinton-Gore is now demanding that the Kyoto accords include emission credits for nuclear power, which would in effect subsidize nuclear power as a ‘cure’ for global warming. They’re flirting with more Chernobyls here.”
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JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Co-author of Al Gore: A User’s Manual and a specialist in the environment, St. Clair said today: “Bush’s environmental record is anemic, but most of the problems which he has exacerbated in Texas have at their core laxities of the Clinton-Gore EPA. Clinton and Gore have done more harm to the environment than Presidents Bush and Reagan did. This isn’t because they are to the right of the Republicans, but because public interest groups fought Reagan and Bush and abetted Clinton and Gore in their sellouts to chemical companies, timber giants, real estate developers and the energy conglomerates. It was Clinton-Gore that was able to enact NAFTA and GATT; it’s questionable whether a Republican president could have done that for big business.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167