In my latest reading of Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,
Al Gore talked about a Global Marshall Plan for the environment. This
came up in the 1992 Vice-Presidential debate, as Dan Quayle referred to
page 304 of Gore's book to say that Gore supports the federal government
spending $100 billion "for environmental projects in foreign countries"
(Quayle's words). I checked page 304 (assuming my edition of the book
has the same pagination as the one that Quayle read), and the
only reference that I saw to $100 billion was when Gore said that the
U.S. spent 2 percent of its GNP between 1948-1951 on the Marshall Plan,
and today that percentage would amount to $100 billion. I
could not tell if Gore believes that we should spend that much, however,
for Gore talks about why the U.S. would be reluctant nowadays to launch
something like a Marshall Plan (i.e., the budget deficit, post-Vietnam
discouragement in assuming global leadership).
In terms of how
Gore defined his proposal in the debate, he said: "What I have called
upon is a cooperative effort by the US and Europe and Asia to work
together in opening up new markets throughout the world for the new
technologies that are necessary in order to reconcile the imperatives of
economic progress with the imperatives of environmental protection."
Indeed, Gore did talk about technology in my latest reading of his
book. For example, he proposed something like the Strategic
Defense Initiative for the environment, which he calls the Strategic
Environment Initiative (SEI); while Gore was a critic of SDI, he
recognized that it resulted in technological and scientific innovations,
and he wonders if something similar could be done in a systematic
pursuit of environmental-friendly technology.
Gore also
discussed encouraging literacy and contraception in the Third World, to
help the environment and to control over-population. This discussion
was interesting. Gore talked about George H.W. Bush's record of support
for contraception as a solution to over-population before he became
President, yet Gore maintains that Bush became resistant to promoting
contraception in the Third World as President out of a desire to appease
his anti-abortion constituency, specifically the part that is opposed
to birth control. Gore does not believe that opposition to
abortion has to entail opposition to contraception, for there are many
opponents of abortion who are fine with contraception, and the use of
contraception can lead to fewer abortions. Gore also appears to believe
that common ground can be found with the Catholic church, for
"Spokesmen for the Holy See have repeatedly signaled that although the
Church's formal view is not likely to change, it will not block others
who wish to promote contraception, and it is anxious to play a vigorous
role in addressing the other factors that help to hasten the demographic
transition" (page 316).
I said in an earlier post that I would
discuss Gore's view on world government. Gore touched on that in my
latest reading. Essentially, Gore regards world government as
unfeasible, and he states that "The administrative problems
would be gargantuan, not least because the inefficiency of governance
often seems to increase geometrically with the distance between the seat
of power and the individuals affected by it" (page 301; conservatives
have long made this point in arguing that state and local governments
are more suitable to handle a number of domestic concerns than is the
federal government). Instead of world government, Gore
supports "international agreements that establish global restraints on
acceptable behavior but are entered into voluntarily----albeit with the
understanding that they will contain both incentives and legally valid
penalties for noncompliance" (page 302). How is this different from
world government? Perhaps it's different in the sense that individual
nations get to implement the global restraints, rather than for those
restraints to be implemented by an international authority.