Captain Planet for veep

But before the facts were known, Love Canal had prompted Al Gore to sponsor the Superfund law, which may well cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars without measurably improving anyone's health or safety. This law requires the EPA to identify hazardous-waste sites and then to oversee their cleanup at nearly any cost. Under Superfund, any company or municipality that might have dumped some garbage even negligible amounts--in a site is potentially liable for the whole cost of the cleanup of the site. A deluge of litigation has resulted as financially strapped companies and cities try to blame each other for the problems at any given Superfund site; a recent Rand Corporation study showed that about 80 per cent of the money spent on Superfund has gone to pay lawyers' fees. While the EPA has identified some 1,200 "hazardous waste" sites scattered across the country, only 109 have been cleaned up, at a cost of more than $15 billion. Nevertheless, Gore doggedly insists, "I think that the basic design of [Superfund] was sound."

In the 1980s, Gore found new and even scarier hobgoblins. He believes that the world is running out of food and non-renewable resources; that topsoil erosion is destroying America's farms; that an "ozone hole" threatens all life on earth; that carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere will inevitably lead to increases in surface temperatures. For Gore, all of these problems are manifestations of one great global ecological crisis--a crisis so grave that we must now "change the very foundation of our civilization." In his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, Gore declared that "the task of saving the Earth's environment must and will become the central organizing principle of the post-cold-war world."

Consider the "ozone hole." In February, NASA hyped reports that such a hole might open over the Northern hemisphere in the spring, allowing in damaging levels of ultraviolet rays. NASA's ozone scare was showcased on the front cover of Time, and Gore thundered on the Senate floor: "We have to tell our children that they must redefine their relationship to the sky, and they must begin to think of the sky as a threatening part of their environment." Gore demanded that the chemicals implicated in ozone destruction be phased out earlier than scheduled; his resolution passed the Senate 96 to O. Stung by the vote, President Bush rushed the ban of the refrigerants known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) forward from the year 2000 to the end of 1995. Then in May, NASA admitted that no ozone hole had in fact opened over the Northern hemisphere. Time buried the admission in two lines in another story. And Gore was on to the next crisis.

Gore also firmly believes that the world is running out of non-renewable resources and food. The fact is that never before have mineral resources been so plentiful and so cheap. Since 1970, the average price of all metals and minerals has fallen by 40 per cent, even according to the leftish World Resources Institute. Proven reserves of oil, gas, and nearly every mineral increase each year. Food is also more plentiful and cheaper than ever before--the real prices of corn, wheat, and rice have fallen by more than half since 1950, even as the world's population doubled. As to topsoil erosion, at current rates of erosion and with no technological progress, it would be a century before American farmers' productivity would be reduced as much as 2 per cent.