New Soldier in Gore’s Radical Green Brigade

Former CIA Director John M. Deutch is slated to be President Clinton’s new science advisor, according to reports in the journal Science and the Washington Post. The Science article describes Deutch, now an MIT chemistry professor, as “a veteran of Washington politics.” In the Clinton administration, that’s a euphemism for someone who jumps as high and often as Vice President Al Gore tells him to. Consider Deutch’s involvement in Gore’s green internationalist agenda.

In April 1996, Secretary of State Warren Christopher announced that henceforth, environmental concerns would become coequal with national security and economic issues in U.S. foreign relations. Several major initiatives were part of this policy, including international agreements and conventions, strategically distributed largess from the State Department and Agency for International Development and new “environmental hubs” at selected U.S. embassies, which would promulgate the environmental gospel according to Gore.

To create and sustain the base of information necessary to justify his views, Gore enlisted the resources of the intelligence community. In a speech at the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles last July, Deutch, coordinator of all U.S. intelligence activities, signed on. “I intend to make sure that environmental intelligence remains in the mainstream of U.S. intelligence activities,” he said. “Even in times of declining budgets, we will support policymakers.”

Gore’s influence has been manifest repeatedly in foreign policy issues that have scientific, technological or environmental components. He has directed his minions in various government departments to pursue an international agreement that would delegate to various “green” international organizations authority to regulate “hazardous chemicals.” The new system would lump together chemicals of low intrinsic toxicity with pesticides, industrial lubricants and other more toxic substances--and thereby make the former guilty by association.

Gore has been skillful at involving many government agencies in his schemes. The AID has provided a kind of “slush fund” for the schemes of radical environmentalists. The agency’s foreign aid funds are being used to undermine market economies abroad and put American businesses at a competitive disadvantage. In Indonesia, for example, AID gave more than $1.3 million to the local chapter of Friends of the Earth (virtually its entire operating budget) for its campaign against New Orleans-based Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold. The environmental organization accused the mining company of polluting an Indonesian river, destroying crops and inciting military attacks on civilians. None of these accusations has been substantiated. In addition, through U.S. environmental activists, Friends of the Earth successfully lobbied the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a federal agency that promotes business abroad by insuring companies against the risk of nationalization, to cancel Freeport’s $100-million policy.

Domestically, Gore has led an assault on entire sectors of American industry, including pesticides and biotechnology. The Environmental Protection Agency’s licensing of new and improved chemical pesticides has shrunk to a trickle while the agency has placed regulatory roadblocks in the way of biotechnology research and development that could provide biological alternatives.

None of this is surprising in view of Gore’s deep antagonism to science and technology. In “Earth in the Balance,” Gore repeatedly uses the metaphor that those who believe in technological progress are as sinister as the perpetrators of the Holocaust. “But for the separation of science and religion,” he writes, “we might not be pumping so much gaseous chemical waste into the atmosphere and threatening the destruction of the Earth’s climate balance.” But for the separation of science and religion, we might still be burdened with the notion that the sun and the planets revolve around the Earth.

To neutralize Gore’s influence, the White House needs someone with scientific stature, integrity and independence. There is no reason to expect, however, that Deutch as science advisor would have a sudden attack of independent thinking. The current advisor, Jack Gibbons, seems to have been picked solely for his ability to say, “Yes, Mr. Vice President.”

The president’s science advisor should be unafraid to tell the truth about the emperor’s--or the vice president’s--new clothes. Despite Deutch’s impeccable academic credentials, it is not clear that he passes that test.