ABSTRACT
As my title suggests, these comments are addressed to one of the most dismal spectacles that the Clinton Administration has served up—the case of the Disappearing Ozone Man, as David Corn described our vice president in the pages of The Nation 1 The “Ozone Man” was the moniker used by George Bush on the campaign trail of 1992 to direct ridicule upon the erstwhile gentle Green giant from Tennessee and his environmentally-minded constituency, reviled by the same Bush as “the spotted owl crowd.” Even for those with low expectations for a Clinton presidency, his association with Gore was expected, at the very least, to bear some kind of harvest for the environmental movement, invited into the corridors of power for the first time. Nothing, it was reasoned, could possibly be worse than the widespread damage wrought by Dan Quayle's Council on Competitiveness in its four years of procorporate butchery. Even with their critics holding their fire, it took the Clintonistas (as they are termed, incredibly enough, by movement conservatives) less than a year to dispel all illusions of an emergent Green government. Each new attempt to revise existing environmental legislation was currently being weakened in Congress, with the apparent assent of Clinton and Gore. Even the most worshipful of the army of Clinton environmentalists came around to agree that it is better to have no new environmental regulation at all than to risk enfeebling the current laws (especially big-hitter legislation like the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and Superfund) by rendering them vulnerable to the principle of voluntary compliance, habitually favored by Clinton in matters of regulation. Under the terms of the GATT trade agreements, enthusiastically brokered by Clinton, many of the U.S.'s basic environmental laws—the Marine Mammal Protection Act, Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards, the Magnuson Act and Pelly Amendment regulating overfishing, the Nuclear Non—Proliferation Act, Food and Water Safety laws, dozens of California laws on emissions, dangerous additives, recycling and waste reduction, and laws in every state that limit toxic substances in packaging—can be challenged as barriers to free trade by countries with virtually no environmental legislation of their own. Thirty years of hard-won achievements in the field of consumer and environmental protections, along with hopes of future advances, have been endangered with a stroke of Clinton's Gatt pen.
