THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Santa Monica, California)
For Immediate Release
September 24, 2000
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO CALIFORNIA LEAGUE OF CONSERVATION VOTERS EVENT
Private Residence
Bel Air, California
1:45 P.M. PDT
THE PRESIDENT: Well, Ruth has given me a lot of gifts over the years,
mostly tapes of great old rock and roll songs. (Laughter.) But I'm very
grateful for this.
And I want to thank you, Ruthie, and Fran Diamond and Wendy James. I
thank Rampa Hormel and Hilda Solis for their leadership. I really want to
thank Carol and Phil for letting us come to their home on this beautiful,
beautiful day and share it. (Applause.)
I thank all the officials that are here, those who have been
introduced. But I want to say again to all these congressional candidates
-- Michael Case, Susan Davis, Gerrie Shipske -- of course, Hilda -- and my
long-time friend, Jane Harmon. Thank you for running for the Congress, to
give it back to the American people and to give our natural heritage back
to the future. (Applause.)
I want to thank you for this award but, more importantly, for your
leadership on environmental and resource issues. I basically have always
thought presidents shouldn't get awards. I thought that the job was reward
enough. But, you know, as I get ready to move out -- (laughter) -- this
will look really wonderful in my home. So I do thank you. (Laughter.)
The work we have done on conservation is among the things I'm most
proud of as President. Ninety-four years ago today -- exactly today --
Theodore Roosevelt designated America's very first national monument,
Devil's Tower in Wyoming. He set us on a path of conservation a century
ago that we are working to make stronger.
For more than seven years now, Al Gore and I have fought to do that --
most of the time with a Congress that was very hostile to our environmental
objectives. We believed always that we could grow the economy and improve
the environment. And we believed, in a larger sense, that if we didn't
deal with the big challenges of climate change and other pollutions, that
economic growth would turn in on itself, sooner or later anyway.
So over the last eight years we've cleaned up three times as many
toxic waste dumps from neighborhoods as the two previous administrations
did in 12. (Applause.) We've taken the most dramatic steps to improve the
quality of air in a generation. (Applause.) We've also improved the
quality of our water and our drinking water with major new legislation. We
made record investments in science and technology designed to reduce the
threat of global warming.
You heard Ruth say some of the things we have done in California.
We've had the national monuments designed to preserve the redwood forest,
the coastal lands and waters. We had a big conference on preserving the
oceans on the Monterey Peninsula. A couple of years ago, we've begun to do
some significant things to try to recover the quality of the oceans,
particularly those that are near us.
There is a dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico the size of the state of
New Jersey today because of pollution and runoff that will have significant
adverse impacts on marine life over the long run if we don't do something
to deal with it.
I was honored to create the national preserve in the Mojave Desert and
to expand the Pinnacle Monuments, as Ruth said. We've done this from the
Grand Canyon to Yellowstone to the Florida Everglades. And we do have
already set aside over 40 million roadless acres.
Today, we took another big step by protecting almost 800 acres of the
southern gateway to Big Sur. (Applause.) I'll never forget the first time
I saw it 30 years ago. It's a coastline we value not just for its
breathtaking views, but as a home for endangered species like the steelhead
trout and smith's blue butterfly. And thanks to funds provided by the
Lands Legacy Initiative the Vice President and I have worked for, for the
last several years, we are able to make this gift to the future.
I want the national government and every community in our country to
be able to have the resources to make gifts like this well into the future.
That's why I have asked Congress to provide permanent funding for our open
spaces and pass the conservation reinvestment act, CRA, that would
significantly boost our Lands Legacy Initiative.
The House passed it with over 300 votes, and now we are trying to get
it through the Senate. If any of you can help us, I'd really appreciate
it. (Laughter.)
I want to mention just a couple of other things too. First, one more
time, even in the teeth of an election, even in the face of evidence that
the overwhelming majority of the American people support a strong
environmental policy, Congress is larding up these bills, these
appropriation bills with anti-environmental riders. And the theory is that
if you can just put enough amendments on enough bills, that eventually all
us Democrats will get veto fatigue and it'll be three hours and 15 minutes
before the polls open and everybody will want to go home to vote, at least,
if not to campaign -- and so they'll be able to pass their
anti-environmental agenda.
Now, I say that, first, to ask the Congress if they want to go home
and campaign to take the anti-environmental riders off the bills, because
I've got nowhere to go and I'm not running for anything. (Laughter.) And
I'd be happy to stay there until election day. (Applause.)
But, secondly, I want to emphasize how important these congressional
races are. Every House seat and every Senate seat -- although, at least to
me, some Senate seats are more important than others. (Laughter.)
Let me just tell you what the lives of members of Congress are like.
Okay. It's late September, there's an election in early November. People
want to go home, they want to be with their constituents. The party that's
in the majority gets to decide what is voted on in the committees, gets to
have the votes to add these anti-environmental riders, in this case. And
they hope that at some point you just keep putting these bills out and
there's a defense bill. Do you want to be against defense two weeks before
the election? There is an education bill that might have
anti-environmental riders. Do you want to be anti-education? And a health
bill.
There may even be a good bill for the EPA and a decent budget, but
it's all larded up with this stuff. Do you want to be in the position of
voting for this? Now, if we had about 12 more members of Congress who were
pro-environment and we could organize the committees, this would not
happen. This is a big, big, big deal. (Applause.)
Let me just make two other points. You know, some people in the other
party have continued to try to distort some of the things that the Vice
President said in his book, "Earth in the Balance." But even the oil
companies now admit that all those years ago he was right and they were
wrong about climate change.
The 1990s were the warmest decade in a thousand years, we now know.
And we know that an extraordinary amount of the warming of the climate is
due to human activity, and we know that if we don't do something about it
sometime in the next three to five decades it will substantially change the
pattern of life here in our own country.
The sugar cane fields in Louisiana, the Everglades in Florida could
flood; agricultural production could be forced upward in America; and whole
massive stretches of farmlands could be dramatically less productive; and
all of the other things that you know very well could happen.
I've already seen the change in the biodiversity on the Pacific Coast.
When I was on the Monterey Peninsula, I saw some small microscopic, almost,
animal life in the Bay, that just 40 years ago was 20 miles south at its
northernmost point. So I'm seeing all this happen. And I just want to say
that I'm working hard to deal with the present energy problem. But the
real issue is, how are we going to grow the economy, and save the
environment over the long run?
Today, there are technologies available off the shelf that would
dramatically boost productivity in America and increase output per energy
input. If you don't believe me, go look at that low income housing project
out in the Inland Empire in San Bernadino, where they cut power use by more
than 50 percent by simple, off-the-shelf technologies. I have been trying
for three years to get Congress to give tax credits to accelerate research
and development into conservation technologies and alternative fuels.
(Applause.)
And to increase investment in that kind of research and development,
and to give tax credits to consumers and to businesses to buy conservation
technologies and employ alternative fuels. Now, that's another reason you
need more people in the Congress, because the President, if his party
sticks with him, even if their in the minority, can stop bad things from
happening -- although as I just explained, it gets tougher as you get
closer to the election.
But if you want good things to happen, and you believe, as I do, that
there's a world of environmentally responsible potential growth out there,
by investing in and betting on the fact that we can reverse the tide of
climate change without all going back to the Stone Age to live, the way the
other side talks.
Now, you've got a big choice here. And every House seat and every
Senate seat and this White House matters. Because, unlike some areas --
I've got to give it to the other side, they've been quite forthright here,
and I appreciate it; they've been very, very honest in saying, I disagree
with Bill Clinton, I disagree with Al Gore; vote for us, we will repeal the
43 million roadless acres in the national forests; vote for us, we will
relax the air standards, they're too hard and they're going to slow the
economy down too much; vote for us, we will reexamine all these national
monuments.
And I could give you lots of other examples. So it's not like we
don't know what the deal is here. And that's good. Because that's why you
have elections, so people can make choices.
But I want to say to you, it's been a great honor for me to work in
the environmental area. I'm glad to know that we've had the strongest
economy in history with cleaner air, cleaner water, safer food and more
land set aside than anybody since the Roosevelts. I'm proud of that.
(Applause.)
But the huge question out there, hanging out there, is whether or not
we will create out of this information technology revolution a
post-industrial form of energy use, even for manufacturing, if we will
unlock the last chemical step keeping us from using biofuels in an
efficient way.
The scientists that work for the Department of Agriculture say, you
know, you can't really take ethanol too seriously now because it takes
seven gallons of gasoline to make eight gallons of ethanol. But they are a
short step away from a chemical advance that would enable us to make eight
gallons of ethanol from one gallon of gasoline. Think about it. That
would be the equivalent of 500 gallons of gasoline, 500 miles to the gallon
in modern cars. We're so close. And you have to decide.
We need people in the White House and in the Congress that understand
the future and are committed to making sure that we get out of denial here
-- or, as my daughter's generation says, it's not just a river in Egypt.
(Laughter.)
And this will not be a headline issue here. Most people say this
election is about the Medicare-drug issue or the patients' bill of rights
or whether the Republican nominee's tax cut plan is too big, especially
when you compare it with privatizing Social Security, you add them up and
we're back in deficits. All those things are real important.
But I'm telling you, 50 years from now, our generation will be judged
on whether we met the challenge of climate change. And it is not necessary
for us to go in a hut and quit making a living to do it. The technologies
are there, are right on the verge of there. We can increase productivity,
we can grow this economy and we can do it. You've got to decide, help them
get elected, and help Al Gore and Joe Lieberman.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
END 2:00 P.M. EDT
President and First Lady | Vice President and Mrs. Gore
Record of Progress | The Briefing Room
Gateway to Government | Contacting the White House | White House for Kids
White House History | White House Tours | Help
Privacy Statement