TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101292/1012330.000

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                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 57

The Green Factor


Does protecting the planet destroy jobs? Bush says yes, Clinton
says no, and their running mates fight it out on the stump

By EUGENE LINDEN


    What happened to the "Environmental President"? In 1988
Vice President Bush vowed to combat the greenhouse effect with
the "White House effect," and mercilessly attacked Michael
Dukakis for his failure to clean up Boston Harbor. But last
June, President Bush played Scrooge at the Earth Summit in
Brazil. In September he visited timber country in the Pacific
Northwest, where he promised to lift a court-imposed injunction
that has halted logging in federally owned ancient forests. His
Interior Department is planning to open national forests to
private strip mining. What happened between 1988 and 1992?
Politics happened.

    While the Administration has not entirely abandoned its
green appeal -- White House officials claim that Bush has done
more for the environment than any other President since Teddy
Roosevelt -- the re-election team is betting that U.S. voters
will put their anxiety over the economy ahead of their worries
about the planet. Thus the Bush campaign is attempting to paint
Bill Clinton as a hostage to environmental extremists who would
sacrifice American jobs to mollify the tree huggers. Point man
in this assault: Vice President Dan Quayle. His main target:
Clinton's running mate, Al Gore.

    Clinton, for his part, is betting that concern for the
environment is more than a fad. He has assigned Gore the mission
of delivering the message that working to preserve the biosphere
can create rather than cost jobs. Clinton and Gore contend that
sound environmental policies can be an engine of growth that
will help the American economy compete with Germany and Japan
in the 1990s.

    The different ways the two camps use environmental issues
reflect their divergent visions about the forces that will shape
America's future. The Democrats argue that environmental
decisions should be an integral part of economic planning. The
Republicans seem to be saying the country should address
environmental problems only when it can afford to. Nowhere do
these differences emerge more sharply than in the attitudes of
the vice-presidential contenders.

    Senator Gore, who led the congressional delegation that
attended the Earth Summit in Rio, is the Senate's most committed
and knowledgeable environmentalist. Last spring Houghton
Mifflin published Gore's best-selling Earth in the Balance:
Ecology and the Human Spirit, a call for Americans to take
urgent action in the face of a global ecological crisis.

    Vice President Quayle, by contrast, argues that existing
programs to improve the environment are more than adequate, that
the state of America's air, water and forests is getting
better, and that further improvements will come at the expense
of jobs. Quayle plays a major policymaking role in this area as
chairman of the President's Council on Competitiveness, an
eight-member panel that, in the name of reducing government
impediments to business, has worked to loosen environmental
regulations on everything from wetlands to air pollution. The
council was influential in persuading President Bush, virtually
alone among world leaders, not to sign a treaty to protect
endangered species at the Rio conference. The Administration's
argument: that the treaty would harm the U.S. biotechnology
industry.

    In taking aim at the Democrats' environmental policies,
Quayle ridicules Gore's book as "their manifesto." As described
by the Vice President, Earth in the Balance is a collection of
lunatic proposals that calls for a $100 billion giveaway to the
Third World, recommends new taxes that would put millions out
of work, compares capitalists to Nazis and calls for the
elimination of the internal-combustion engine. "It's all pretty
bizarre stuff," said Quayle in a speech in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, last August. "This is a view detached from reality and
devoid of common sense."

    In his book, Gore does call for new taxes -- but only to
replace old ones. The idea is to tax ordinary workers less while
making polluting industries pay the true costs of their
activities. The $100 billion figure is not a suggested giveaway
but merely a computation of what the post-World War II Marshall
Plan to reconstruct Europe would cost in today's dollars. The
reference to Nazis is a greatly stretched interpretation of
Gore's comment in the book that the failure in the past to heed
the distress signals coming from the planet is analogous to the
failure of the outside world to realize the seriousness of the
German threat after Nazis destroyed Jewish homes and synagogues
during the Kristallnacht rampage in 1936.

    Gore also argues that during the next 25 years the U.S.
should develop a more efficient alternative to the
internal-combustion engine. It is hard to see why this is any
more bizarre than sanctifying a 19th century technology as the
core of American prosperity. "If Bush and Quayle want to pretend
that 25 years from now our global competitors will be using the
same technology on automobile engines that we are using today,
they are kidding themselves," says Gore.

    In Grand Rapids, Quayle attacked Gore for supporting
congressional efforts to raise average fuel economy from 27 to
40 m.p.g., a move, Quayle argued, that would cost 300,000 jobs
nationwide. This figure, taken from a study by the Motor Vehicle
Manufacturers Association, is based on the unrealistic
assumption that everyone now making a car that gets less than
40 m.p.g. would be put out of work. In contrast, a study to be
released this week by the American Council for an
Energy-Efficient Economy contends that improving fuel economy
to 40 m.p.g. would lead to a net gain of 70,000 jobs by the year
2000. Howard Geller, executive director of the council, says
fuel economy creates jobs by spurring the development of
efficient new technologies for automobiles and putting money
from gasoline savings into the hands of consumers. These gains,
adds Geller, will more than offset job losses in the oil
business.

    Gore says the jobs-vs.-environment argument is based on
the same flawed logic that caused American businesses to
disregard business guru W. Edwards Deming's seminal ideas on
quality in past decades. "American manufacturers assumed that
market forces had already perfectly balanced quality against
cost and that any improvements would hurt the bottom line," says
Gore. "Deming took his ideas to the Japanese, who proved that
you could simultaneously improve quality and profits and
proceeded to steal markets from American companies." Gore argues
that Bush is now making the same mistake with pollution. The
Japanese, already more energy efficient than the U.S., recognize
that excessive pollution is a sign of inefficiency and that
reducing pollution can help make industry more competitive. For
Gore the real job of a competitiveness council would be to
foster similar efforts to develop efficient technologies in the
U.S.

    President Bush also has attacked Gore on the
jobs-vs.-environment issue. During a visit to Colville,
Washington, last month, he chastised the Senator for advocating
protection of the spotted owl, which is endangered because 90%
of its old-growth forest habitat has been cut. "It's time to put
people ahead of owls," he said, and mockingly challenged Clinton
to endorse Gore's book.

    Though that message was obviously meant to appeal to
Western voters, Bush may have miscalculated its effect. While
he was applauded by the region's timber workers, many other
Westerners realize that the issue of preserving the remaining
fragments of old-growth forest is more complex than owls vs.
lumberjacks. George Atiyeh, a former timberman and
fourth-generation Oregonian, left the business after watching
what clear-cuts have done to the Oregon landscape. "Either my
eyes were lying, or I was kidding myself about logging being
sustainable," he says. From the air, Oregon's national forests
look far worse than the rain forests of Rondonia, Brazil, which
has become a symbol of the wanton destruction of the Amazon.
Atiyeh argues that automation and exports have cost far more
jobs than the protection of endangered species has. Between 1980
and '88 the amount of timber cut in western Oregon increased 19%
while timber employment fell 14%. The Administration's hard line
on the environment does not appear to be winning many votes --
and may even be hurting the Republicans. In a TIME/CNN poll of
likely voters taken in late September, half the respondents said
the loss of jobs because of environmental regulations was a "big
problem." Yet when asked to choose between protecting the
environment and protecting jobs, 48% chose the environment while
36% chose jobs. Forty percent of those questioned said they
would be less likely to vote for a candidate if they disagreed
with his environmental position even if they agreed on other
major issues.

    That could spell trouble for the President, whose
credibility on the issue is not high. When asked whether they
felt Bush lied when he said he would be the "environmental
President," 60% said yes. The figures were larger among baby
boomers (62%) and independents (63%). Even among Republicans,
40% of those polled said he lied about his intentions.
Ironically, the more Bush hammers at the jobs-vs.-environment
issue, the more he seems to convince voters that he never meant
to carry out his earlier promise.

    Bush's advisers may have begun to weigh the political
risks of their hard-line stance on environment. Last week White
House chief of staff James Baker vetoed a proposal by Quayle's
Competitiveness Council that would have allowed businesses to
use town dumps as disposal sites for certain hazardous wastes.
Administration spokesmen have also begun to back away from
another Competitiveness Council proposal that would vastly
decrease the acreage now protected by wetlands legislation. The
timing of all this could be coincidental. But it may be that,
in the final stretch of his re-election campaign, Bush has
concluded that one endangered species he would like to protect
is his own presidency.