Guest Perspective/Ralph Lopez
Let's just hold our horses on Al Gore being drafted for president and all that, now I'm seeing the ads on DailyKos. I have all the respect for what he has spent the last few years doing, but he has a lot to atone for. The Clinton administration was not exactly green, and it cut deals with big timber, big cattle and big mining. Gore personally undermined the 1998 Kyoto talks by insisting on only 5 percent reduction in greenhouse gases (to 1990 levels) rather than the full 15 percent the Europeans were ready to sign. Time Magazine's Tony Karon wrote in his 2000 article "Why America's Close Election Is Bad News for a Warm Planet":
"...the Clinton administration's approach to the Kyoto climate change treaty has been, from the outset, to dilute and evade it as far as possible. Gore's negotiating team at the 1998 Kyoto talks managed to haggle the Europeans down from requiring a 15 percent reduction from 1990 emission levels to 5 percent. Then, when it came to negotiating how to implement the treaty, one of Washington's pet mechanisms was the trading of pollution rights...Al Gore wasn't about to become the candidate urging Americans to trade in their SUVs for battery-powered cars..."http://www.time.
Whatever you think of him, Americans got exactly what they bargained for by not voting for only honest man, Ralph Nader. I did not support Nader in 2004 but I did in 2000. At that time there really wasn't much difference between Dem. and Repug, and no one including Nader knew what a psycho Bush would turn out to be.
I'm not saying this should disqualify Gore from running for president. He has obviously taken something to heart. But I'd like an apology or explanation for his administration'
Ralph Lopez blogs at http://ralphlopezwo
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