[corp-focus] Al Gore, Corporate Welfare Environmentalist

[Robert Weissman]

Al Gore, Corporate Welfare Environmentalist 
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Gas prices are rising and the threat of global warming looms ever larger.
Al Gore, what have you done to wean the United States from its oil
dependency? 

Asked a related question in a recent debate with Bill Bradley ("We sent
our armed forces to the Persian Gulf in 1991 to return a country to its
owners. Now we see higher gas prices. What will you do to ensure this does
not happen again?"), Gore responded: 

"We have an interest in being less dependent on sources of oil from a
region that is, over time, vulnerable to instability. I helped to put in
place a program called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles,
which commits the big three automakers in our country to getting new
vehicles into the marketplace that have three times the efficiency of
today's vehicles." 

It was telling that Al "Earth in the Balance" Gore would point to the
relatively obscure Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV),
the epitome of what might be called corporate welfare environmentalism. 

The Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) is a
public-private partnership between seven federal agencies, 20 federal
laboratories, and the big three automakers -- General Motors, Ford and
what is now Daimler Chrysler. 

PNGV's main long term goal is to develop a "Supercar," "an environmentally
friendly car with up to triple the fuel efficiency of today's midsize cars
-- without sacrificing affordability, performance or safety." 

It is hard to imagine an industry less in need of government support for
research than the highly capitalized auto industry. Ford pulled in profits
of $5.4 billion in the first three quarters of 1999. GM earned $4.8
billion over the same period. The government is supporting research that
the industry could easily do on its own (and, to some extent, is doing
apart from the PNGC initiative), and should be mandated to undertake to
meet tougher environmental standards. 

How is it that the competitors in the oligopolistic auto industry are able
to undertake a joint research undertaking? The PNGV program gives
participants an effective exemption from antitrust laws. 

Defenders of such collaborative efforts love to invoke the legendary
example of the Manhattan Project, but the evidence is overwhelming that
innovation -- especially in the commercial sector -- is more likely to
result from competition in research and development. 

Oligopolistic collaboration is prone to all kinds of pitfalls, from
bureaucratic sloth to corrupt suppression of research -- as the auto
industry's own history makes clear. 

In the 1960s, the Justice Department filed suit against the automakers for
product fixing -- for refusing to introduce air quality enhancing
technologies. Among other claims, the Justice Department alleged that the
U.S. automakers and their trade association had conspired "to eliminate
all competition among themselves in the research, development, manufacture
and installation of motor vehicle air pollution control equipment." 

Now the Clinton-Gore administration has stamped its official imprimatur on
the industry's preferred anti-competitive coordination of environmental
research. (The administration's happy-talk calls it "pre-competitive.")

Maybe today's auto industry is different than the auto industry of the
1960s. Or, maybe not.

Above all, the PNGV initiative has served during the Clinton-Gore
administration as a smokescreen behind which the automakers hide to
protect themselves from more stringent air quality standards. 

"Cynics think that the PNGV was simply a politically astute 10-year
reprieve for the domestic auto industry from threats of higher Corporate
Average Fuel Efficiency standards," writes Earth Day founder Denis Hayes
in his new book, The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair. 

Deployment of existing technologies could dramatically enhance auto fuel
efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the automakers -- who
have waged a decades-long crusade against mandatory fuel efficiency
standards -- choose not to make these technologies widely available. 

And the PNGV program does not even require the deployment in mass
production of the technologies it seeks to develop. 

The leading innovators in fuel efficiency have been Toyota and Honda,
which do not participate in the PNGV program. 

"By 2004, the PNGV hopes U.S. manufacturers will be able to produce a U.S.
vehicle that has roughly the same characteristics as the
already-on-the-market Toyota Prius," Hayes notes. 

"Actually," Hayes writes, "the most likely 2004 PNGV vehicles will be
inferior to the Prius in one important regard: they will probably use
diesel instead of gasoline engines. ... Sadly and ironically, the cars
produced by the decade-long, multiple-billion-dollar PNGV effort may be
banned from California -- the nation's largest automobile market --
because they cause too much pollution." 

No such criticism is voiced by the corporate welfare environmentalists in
the Clinton-Gore administration. They are eagerly planning to launch
21st-Century Truck Initiative, a public-private partnership for truck
manufacturers modeled on the PNGV. 


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
Courage Press, 1999, http://www.corporatepredators.org)

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman