smog and soot. Supposed to have been issued within five years after amendments were made to the Clean Air Act in 1990, these standards were finally released after the American Lung Association sued the EPA and the court ordered the agency to act. Browner’s proposed standards were far stricter than anticipated, and her announcement set in motion a public hearing process that would culminate in President Clinton’s decision to accept, reject, or modify the new standards.
In other words, the future of the Clean Air Act regulations would be decided through the political process. And rather than trusting Bill Clinton and Al Gore to do the right thing, national groups led by the Sierra Club and the national network of state and local Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) built a national campaign to pressure the Clinton administration to do the right thing. In contrast to the WTI struggle, this battle made Al Gore a public target. Gore had long claimed to be an environmentalist (this was a decade before he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change), and his personal relationships with environmental leaders had protected the Clinton administration from attacks despite repeated betrayals during much of its first term. The willingness of national environmental leaders to sacrifice green interests in exchange for continuing invitations to the monthly Al Gore power breakfast symbolized the inside-the-Beltway approach to national politics that grassroots activists condemned.
When Gore was silent about the new standards, some suspected that the leading contender for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination feared alienating organized labor and Democratic mayors and governors in the Midwest, who did not want the new clean air regulations adopted. These suspicions were heightened when a May 30, 1997, unbylined news brief in the Wall Street Journal claimed that pressure was mounting on the EPA to “ease proposed antipollutant rules.” Reporting that the White House had “privately ordered EPA head Browner not to sign the tough regulations until weaker measures got another look,” the brief added that “environmental groups complain Browner hasn’t gotten support from Gore, her former boss.” Would environmental groups adopt the fearand-loathing route of grassroots activists and make Gore publicly responsible for the regulations, or would they follow the “Don’t blame Al, he’s our friend” approach that had brought failure in the past?11
The answer was soon revealed. On June 3, 1997, Kathryn Hohmann, the Sierra Club’s director of environmental quality, launched the organization’s “Where’s Al?” Northeast tour. Speaking from New Hampshire, the site of the first primary for Gore’s expected presidential bid, Hohmann told Reuters News Service: “We’re here to say ‘come out, come out wherever you are.’ Our goal is not to bash someone, but there are some very large shoes he needs to fill in leading environmental causes.” Hohmann’s “Where’s Al?” tour sent a message to the presidential aspirant that his environmental credentials were on the line in the clean air campaign. It also used the Club’s Northeast chapters to build local media pressure on the region’s politicians to formally endorse the new standards.12
The strategy of focusing on Gore soon paid off. The lead story in the Sunday, June 1, issue of the New York Times, “Top EPA Official Not Backing Down on Air Standards,” had the subtitle “Gore’s Voice Could Be Pivotal in Contentious Baffle over Tighter Pollution Rules.” Noting that Gore would play a “major role—probably the decisive one—in deciding whether to back up Ms. Browner,” the article reaffirmed Hohmann’s argument that the clean air outcome would affect “how enthusiastically environmentalists support his presidential effort in 2000.”
U.S. PIRG’s Gene Karpinski was given the front page of the most widely read edition of the nation’s most influential newspaper to state: “Since this is the top priority issue for the national environmental community at this time, any weakening of public health protection by the White House would certainly be a huge negative for Vice President Gore that would not be forgotten.” A June 5 USA Today story on clean air noted that Gore “has been particularly conspicuous in his low-key role,” and quoted Paul Billings of the American Lung Association, who said that “the silence from the White House has been deafening. There’s a Gore watch out. We can’t find Al.”13
The pressure on Gore intensified. On Sunday, June 22, a front-page, unbylined story in the New York Times, “Environmental Groups Say Gore Has Not Measured Up to the Job,” further explored the issue. “Organizations that have sided with the vice president throughout his public career,” the article stated, “are now using extraordinarily blunt language to warn that ‘green’ voters might abandon him in the Democratic primaries in 2000 unless he delivers now.” Deborah Callahan of the League of Conservation Voters found it “perplexing” that the vice president would “step back from providing the leadership” that she and her colleagues expected. Phillip Clapp of the National Environmental Trust told the Times that “the failure of the White House to provide any leadership on the clean air standards raises real questions about what real environmental progress Vice President Gore can point to in claiming the mantle of the environmental candidate in the year 2000.”
But the article also noted that complaints about “Al Gore’s silent spring” had begun to bring results. It stated that Gore had recently moved to act “behind the scenes” to ensure that the clean air decision would satisfy environmentalists. Environmental groups’ adoption of the fear-and-loathing approach would soon bring victory.
“I Think Kids Ought to Be Healthy”
On June 25, 1997, President Clinton announced his approval of virtually every aspect of Browner’s original Clean Air Act proposal. Ironically, while the president was making his announcement at a fundraising dinner, three members of the PIRG’s Nashville canvass were outside wearing gorilla suits and holding signs saying “See the smog,” “Hear the EPA,” and “Speak up for Clean Air.” When the organizers learned that Clinton had used the Nashville event to announce support for the standards, they changed their messages and were shown on television with a sign reading “Thank you, Mr. President.” Calling Clinton’s action “one of the most important environmental decisions of the decade,” the New York Times reported that the administration credited the intervention of Al Gore, “after lobbying by environmental groups,” for resolving the “fierce behind-the-scenes battle” over the standards. Environmentalists’ aggressive targeting of the vice president had clearly paid off, and it was no coincidence that Gore was present for the president’s announcement and that it occurred in the presidential aspirant’s home state.14
OBAMA AND THE KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE
The Clean Air Act campaign’s grassroots mobilizing strategy provided a road map for the movement’s future. After eight years of the anti-environmentalist presidency of George W. Bush, environmentalists’ next chance to hold a president they politically supported accountable occurred when Barack Obama took office in 2009.
Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama got off to a good start with environmentalists. During 2009–10, when Obama enjoyed large Democratic majorities in Congress, he increased fuel efficiency standards twice and made significant investments in clean energy. His EPA took hundreds of administrative actions that got little media attention but made a big difference to the environment. Some criticized Obama for failing to enact a broad climate change bill during these years, but getting such sweeping new regulations through the Senate during a recession was likely beyond even the most aggressive president’s ability. It was not until 2011 that environmentalists saw Obama as clearly backtracking on his green agenda, and it would be the Keystone XL pipeline that would test their ability to challenge the president with a fear-and-loathing approach.
Little known to most Americans prior to 2011, TransCanada’s proposed seventeen-hundred-mile Keystone Pipeline XL extensions would transport synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen from the Athabasca Oil Sands in northeastern Alberta, Canada, to multiple destinations in the United States, including Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. A report by the Natural Resources Defense Council in March 2011 concluded that it would bring “dirty fuel at high cost, lock the United States into
