"For me, a commitment to the environment has always run deeper than politics. We have to do what's right for our environment, because it involves all of our lives - from the simple security of knowing that our drinking water is safe, to the more ominous thinning of the ice caps at the top of the Earth." - Al Gore

As author of the critically-acclaimed Earth in the Balance, Al Gore has made the environment his signature issue. He has challenged America to make the next ten years the Environmental Decade - making unprecedented progress in cleaning our air, water and soil; cracking down on polluters; developing cleaner sources of energy and curbing the risk of global climate change; protecting our forests, rivers, public lands, and wildlife; and encouraging smarter growth and livable communities. Al Gore is proposing a new Energy Security and Environment Trust - a bold and unprecedented commitment to achieve an even more prosperous economy, powered by cleaner, more reliable energy, in a healthy, truly livable environment. He knows that choosing between the economy and the environment is a false choice - in the long run, we can never have one without the other.

CURTAILING GLOBAL WARMING AND ENSURING CLEAN AIR

National Energy and Environmental Security Trust Fund: Al Gore has issued a bold challenge to the nation: develop and deploy the best technologies to reduce our dependence on unreliable imported sources of oil; protect the country from the threat of climate change and disruptions in electrical power; and make our air and water cleaner to stop the spread of health problems such as asthma caused by pollution. He is proposing to create a new National Energy Security and Environment Trust Fund that would provide tax breaks and other financial incentives for businesses and families to develop new technologies that stimulate economic growth, create new jobs, and clean up the nation's air and water.

• Ensuring Clean and Reliable Sources of Electricity: Al Gore's plan would ensure clean and reliable sources of electricity by enhancing our nation's capacities to reliably generate and distribute electricity and by providing market-based incentives to clean up aging power plants. To strengthen the nation's power infrastructure, Gore's plan would:
• Offer tax credits for producing electricity from renewable and alternative sources of energy.
• Enhance the reliability of the electricity transmission grid through mandatory standards and support for technological upgrades of transmission infrastructure to improve efficiency.
• Promote expanded exploration for cleaner burning natural gas.
• Offer tax incentives to encourage electrical generation assets serving commercial and residential sites.

Gore also believes we need long-term solutions to reduce our reliance on imported oil and help ensure a cleaner environment. To achieve this goal, Gore has issued a new Technologies for Tomorrow Challenge that will help fund a variety of projects by power plants and industries that promise to dramatically reduce climate and health-threatening pollution. Financial support under this competitive challenge would be tied as closely as possible to the actual performance of pollution-reduction efforts. Gore would also develop an integrated multi-pollutant approach to address the challenges to our environment and energy security posed by old power plants and large industrial energy users. In addition, Gore has proposed incentives to encourage the private sector to develop innovative energy and transport-related technologies and bring these technologies to market. To help monitor the success of projects supported by the Trust Fund and ensure accountability, Gore proposes to measure and verify emissions reductions and make the results available to the public.

• Promoting New Energy-Efficient Technologies: Al Gore believes that smart use of tax credits will ensure that people can afford energy-efficient cars, trucks, building equipment, homes and household appliances - helping not only to clean-up our environment but also to reduce America's dependence on unreliable foreign sources of oil. That is why he has proposed offering American consumers tax breaks and other financial incentives to purchase energy-efficient products, including hybrid electric/gasoline engine vehicles and solar home-heating equipment. Gore's initiative will spur the creation of new jobs, and make our nation the world's leader in manufacturing a new generation of clean cars, trucks, SUVs, and buses.
• Keep America Moving Initiative: Al Gore is committed to giving us more choices as we travel within and between our communities. Gore's new Keep America Moving Initiative will expand the transportation choices available to the American people by investing in alternatives such as light rail, high-speed rail, mag-lev, and cleaner, safer buses. As President, Al Gore will invest in clean, comfortable, and convenient transportation technologies that will encourage economic development, enhance the mobility of the American people, reduce traffic congestion, build more livable communities, and reduce our dependence on unreliable foreign sources of oil.
• Ratifying the Kyoto Protocol: Al Gore strongly advocates the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol - the climate change treaty that he helped to negotiate in Kyoto, Japan. The Protocol includes a legally-binding emission reduction target for the United States of 7% below 1990 levels by the years 2008-2012. That target represents a significant reduction in emissions from where we otherwise would be, on the order of a 25% reduction. Al Gore has emphasized that ratification of the Protocol, and achieving these reductions, will require that all of the provisions of the Protocol - including market-based mechanisms like emissions trading, joint implementation, and the Clean Development Mechanism - are in full force and effect, and that key developing countries are meaningfully participating in this effort. Al Gore strongly opposes and will fight vigorously against Republican efforts to stop action that combats climate change.
• Supporting New Technologies to Curtail Climate Change: Al Gore supports a multi-year effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by investing in renewable energy and next-generation energy-efficiency technology. Al Gore supports the Administration's Climate Change Technology Initiative (CCTI) to develop and deploy renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies for buildings, transportation, industry, and utilities, and to research ways to improve coal and natural gas efficiency and carbon sequestration. This initiative will help level the playing field with other sources of energy.
• Fighting for Strong Environmental Standards: Al Gore will continue to fight a recent U.S. Circuit Court decision that would block the implementation of the Administration's 1997 comprehensive standards to reduce soot and smog levels. These standards would prevent up to 15,000 premature deaths a year and improve the lives of millions with respiratory illnesses. An adverse ruling on this case could have a profound impact on both air quality and the entire structure of environmental regulation for years to come.
• Protecting the Ozone Layer: As he wrote in Earth in the Balance, the depletion of the ozone layer poses a strategic threat to the ecological fabric upon which we depend and to people directly through exposure to harmful ultraviolet rays. That is why Gore has worked to promote U.S. leadership with regard to implementing the Montreal Protocol, one of the most successful environmental treaties ever signed. Under the Clinton-Gore Administration's leadership, the U.S. has tripled its funding for the Montreal Protocol Fund since 1992. The Protocol, and our work to implement and expand on it both at home and abroad, are beginning to heal the delicate stratospheric ozone layer. As President, Gore will increase funding for the Montreal Protocol Fund to continue the phase out and transition away from ozone-depleting chemicals.

PRESERVING OUR PUBLIC LANDS AND NATIONAL TREASURES

Al Gore believes we have a sacred duty to act as responsible stewards of our public lands. As President, he will continue the Administration's efforts to increase the diversity of lands held in trust for future generations, ensuring that wilderness areas and other national treasures receive appropriate designation and protection, strengthening partnerships with state and local governments in oversight of public lands, and demonstrating that the lands now under public ownership are being managed to the highest standards of natural resource stewardship.

This vision can be achieved while honoring the historical connection that communities in the West have had with federal lands and strengthening our partnerships with the communities in the West and across the nation whose future prosperity will directly depend on our improved stewardship of these federal lands.

• Building on a Strong Record of Success: America has extended historic new preservation for open spaces and protection for natural treasures during the Clinton-Gore Administration, which created new national monuments to protect spectacular red rock canyon lands in Utah and giant Sequoia forests in California, and protected critical wildlife habitat and biodiversity in Oregon and Washington. The Administration developed a bold plan to help restore the Everglades ecosystem and ensure safe, clean water for South Florida - a federal-state partnership that can be emulated throughout the country to protect our environment. The partnership resulted in the protection of millions of acres of pristine forest lands and new protections for our nation's beaches, coasts, and ocean resources. It created and improved nearly 120 national parks, trails, rivers, and historical sites. And it pioneered the use of government/landowner partnerships, balancing protection for natural resources with private property rights and economic development. As President, Gore will fight to block Republican efforts to roll back the environmental progress we have made.
• Maintaining Our National Parks: While we expand protections to new lands, Al Gore knows that we cannot neglect places already in the national trust. Our national parks are invaluable ecologically. They are also a shining achievement of our democracy, welcoming some 270 million visitors every year. As President, Gore will marshal the resources needed to address the pressing repair and maintenance issues facing our parks.
• Stopping Commercial Exploitation of the Arctic Refuge: Al Gore strongly opposes oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Tapping the Arctic Refuge would not only be environmentally damaging, but also shortsighted - only deferring the real need to address this nation's long-term energy security, while forever despoiling an irreplaceable national treasure. As President, Gore will do everything in his power to ensure that the Arctic Refuge remains undisturbed.
• Blocking Offshore Oil and Gas Drilling in Sensitive Areas: Al Gore will fight to expand the moratorium on oil and gas drilling off the coasts of Florida and California - making sure that no new drilling takes place in these sensitive areas.
• Expanding Protected Wilderness Areas and National Monuments: As President, Gore will seek to expand protections for threatened ecosystems on federal landholdings through wilderness and national monument designation in sensitive federal areas that are now under-protected.
• Full Funding for Land and Water Conservation Fund and Lands Legacy: Al Gore will also increase funding to acquire new lands for protection under the Antiquities Act and Lands Legacy initiative, and continue to support full funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Al Gore will ensure that all such areas are managed for the benefit of future generations.
• Protecting our Forests: From the first days of the Clinton-Gore Administration, Al Gore has fought to reform the U.S. Forest Service and to ensure that our forests are protected. He helped lead the Administration's effort to implement the Pacific Northwest Forest plan, which protected millions of acres of priceless old growth forests.
• Building on the Administration's Roadless Areas Plan. Al Gore strongly supported the Administration's interim moratorium on new road construction on 43 million acres of roadless areas in America's National Forests. As President, Gore will fight Republican efforts to block the roadless initiative on behalf of special interests. Then Gore will go further and ensure that there are no timber sales and no new road building in these roadless areas - both in the Lower Forty-eight and in Alaska's Tongass National Forest. Commercial logging of forest lands is not the only threat to the integrity of our National Forests. Logging and development of private lands within our forests can threaten the ecological integrity of federal lands. That is why Gore supports the Administration's Lands Legacy initiative to help provide funding to bring threatened tracts of private lands within National Forests. He is calling on Congress to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund to acquire key inholdings in our National Forests such as the "checkerboard" inholdings in the Central Cascade range of Washington State. In addition, through grants to states for land acquisition and the Forest Legacy Program, Gore will lead the fight to provide states with funds needed to protect forested lands outside of National Forests through state leadership.

As President, Gore will instruct the Forest Service to preserve our nation's forest areas for their naturalness, for old growth forests and ancient groves, for clean water and wildlife, and for outdoor recreation including fishing and hunting.

• Protecting Wildlife: Al Gore understands the importance of biodiversity. The rate of species loss after the enactment of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1973 speaks both to the importance of the law's goals and the need to improve and strengthen our efforts to administer the law. Al Gore has helped initiate the most concerted effort in the history of ESA to make the law work. After years of neglect and a host of legislative efforts to undermine the law, we have begun to achieve the recovery of major species, such as the bald eagle and peregrine falcon. Just as importantly, we have protected millions of acres of habitat needed to save species from the brink of extinction, while enlisting the voluntary participation of private landowners in habitat protection measures under ESA.
• Al Gore is committed to saving and restoring salmon stocks in the Pacific Northwest. The Clinton-Gore Administration has already taken significant steps toward that goal, initiating model federal-state partnerships and establishing a new Hanford Reach National Monument along the Columbia River - announced by Gore earlier this year - which will protect the area where more than 80 percent of the Chinook salmon spawn. As President, Gore will ensure that the federal government work with states, local governments, tribes, and private landowners to develop a balanced approach to restoring the salmon runs - ensuring that any plan to restore salmon has broad regional support, is fair to the area's taxpayers, and balances the environment and the economy. Neither the extinction of the Pacific salmon nor severe economic dislocation are options.
• By promoting Habitat Conservation Plans (HCPs), Gore will ensure comprehensive ecosystem protection for habitats that support threatened and endangered species and press for significant funding increases so that the Fish and Wildlife Service has the resources needed for sound implementation of ESA. We must better manage federal lands to ensure species protection, integrate ESA requirements into other federal regulatory and management programs, and commit targeted federal resources to support both habitat and species restoration efforts.
• Al Gore will also fight to protect and expand the National Wildlife Refuge System. These refuges are the world's greatest system of lands dedicated to the conservation of fish and wildlife. The opportunity for compatible recreational uses are among the important benefits that flow from this purpose. As President, Gore will continue to work with sportsmen and environmentalists to protect and strengthen the possibilities for "priority public uses" of the refuge system - including hunting, fishing, wildlife observation, photography, and environmental education. Outdoor lovers will reap the benefits of our work for generations to come.
• Promoting Balanced Use of Public Lands: Al Gore understands the importance of sustainable, balanced commercial use of our vast system of public lands. There is a public trust that should be managed wisely to preserve the public interest in preserving our natural heritage and natural resource base. As President, Gore will insist on a reasonable return to the public when private mining, grazing, and other activities take place on public lands, while ensuring strong environmental standards for commercial operations and requiring adequate reclamation of mining sites.
• Al Gore supports efforts that would employ and re-train local residents in family wage jobs to restore and maintain National Forest lands. Accordingly, he will direct the Secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, Labor, and Commerce work to develop a comprehensive economic mitigation approach for dislocated timber workers.
• Al Gore will continue to support reform of the Mining Act of 1872. This law, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant and effective today, allows patents for hardrock minerals on public lands to be mined for $2.50, or $5 per acre. Since taking office in January 1993, the 1872 Mining Law has required the Dept. of the Interior to sign 40 mining patents, deeding away publicly owned resources valued at more than $15 billion to individuals and private mining companies. In return the taxpayers received a little more than $24,000.
• Florida Everglades: Saving the Everglades is an ecological imperative and is also essential to ensuring adequate water supplies for the people of South Florida. For the last seven years, Gore has championed efforts to protect and preserve Everglades National Park and the other valuable natural resources of South Florida in the nation's largest ecosystem restoration project. He has led the Administration's fight to secure substantial funding for historic partnerships to protect critical lands, ensure increased fresh water flows to the Everglades, and improve water quality through the use of sound science. As part of this effort, Gore announced last summer a comprehensive plan to restore the Everglades ecosystem, the nation's largest ecosystem restoration program in history. Just this year, the Administration proposed legislation to authorize the plan as part of the Water Resources Development Act. As President, Gore will continue to work with Congress to help pass the best possible Everglades protection legislation.

SMART GROWTH AND LIVABLE COMMUNITIES

In some communities, unplanned sprawl and poor development decisions have compromised the American tradition of development that enhances civic life and family well-being. As President, Gore will work to help communities meet this challenge - not through a top-down federal role, but by giving communities more choices and more of the tools and resources they need to preserve green spaces, ease traffic congestion, promote regional cooperation, improve schools, and enhance economic competitiveness - so communities can grow according to their own local values.

• Smart Growth Through Transportation: Gore's Keep America Moving Initiative will build provide additional federal grants to build, extend, and modernize light rail, subway, and other mass transit systems, and to support a fleet of cleaner and safer buses in our communities. Gore will also continue to support state and local efforts to ease congestion and reduce air pollution through high-occupancy vehicle lanes, improved mass transit, bicycle and pedestrian paths, and other measures.
• Better America Bonds to Protect Open Spaces: To leverage funds through local partnerships, Gore proposed in 1999 the Better America Bonds program, which will help provide funding to combat sprawl, as part of the Livable Communities initiative. Gore has also worked to promote environmentally sound "brownfields" legislation and to secure funds for the Lands Legacy initiative to provide state and local governments with needed funding for local parks, greenways and open space.
• Community Empowerment: Through innovative strategies such as the Empowerment Zone initiative to attract private investment to distressed communities, and the agreement Gore announced last year under which the nation's homebuilders will build one million new homes in urban America over the next ten years, Gore has and will work to promote investment and redevelopment in historic and distressed neighborhoods. And as part of his Keep America Moving Initiative, Gore's plan would provide grants to Amtrak and communities to improve rail stations in cities and small towns - restoring them as vital economic centers across America - and improve safety around transit stops to make public transit a more viable choice for Americans.
• Regional Cooperation for Smarter Growth: Issues like traffic, air pollution, and jobs don't recognize defined borders, and neither should our solutions. Gore will continue to work to bring communities together by providing new planning and mapping tools to help them to grow cooperatively, according to local values and shared goals.

CLEAN WATER

Throughout his career, Gore has supported efforts to improve the quality of our nation's waters. As a Congressman and as a Senator, Gore voted for clean water legislation and supported funding for the federal clean water program. As President, Al Gore will seek to strengthen - and will continue to fight attempts to weaken - the Clean Water Act. Al Gore will increase funding for clean water programs, tighten standards, and ensure a more comprehensive watershed approach to improve water quality.

PROTECTING OUR PEOPLE FROM INDUSTRIAL AND TOXIC WASTE

• Al Gore's Plan to Clean Up and Redevelop Brownfields: Al Gore has long championed efforts to clean up and redevelop "brownfields" - abandoned industrial sites contaminated by toxic wastes - in economically disadvantaged communities. Gore is calling on the Congress to pass bipartisan legislation that would build on the Clinton-Gore Administration's successful brownfields program and increase the number of brownfield sites that would be cleaned up and redeveloped. This legislation would provide revolving loan accounts, grants, and appropriate liability relief to assist communities, developers, and businesses to clean up brownfields. In addition, Gore is calling on Congress to permanently extend the brownfields tax incentive, which allows environmental clean up costs for properties to be written off in the year they are incurred. The tax incentive is scheduled to end in 2001.
• Superfund Cleanup: As a member of Congress, Gore was one of the first to tackle the issue of toxic waste by calling hearings in 1979 that revealed illegal dumping of billions of pounds of toxic chemicals. As a direct result of these hearings that Gore held, the "Superfund" law, which has helped clean up the worst environmental problems in the country, was created. Cleanup (other than long-term groundwater treatment) is complete at over 500 of the nation's 1300 Superfund sites and is underway at more than 500 others. As a result of reforms put in place by the Clinton-Gore Administration with Al Gore's support, EPA has been able to complete cleanup at three times as many sites during the Administration tenure as were cleaned up in the entire 12 years of the Reagan and Bush Administrations.

Gore has defended the Superfund against efforts in the last three Congresses to roll back cleanup standards, weaken the "polluter pays" principle under which polluters have directly paid for cleanups at more than 70% of Superfund sites, and decrease the environment's protection from toxic threats. Gore has also supported the reinstatement of the taxes that support Superfund, but Congress has held the taxes hostage to its unacceptable "reform" proposals. The multi-billion dollar windfall that oil and chemical companies have received as a result of Congress' failure to continue the Superfund taxes is a national scandal, and threatens to severely limit the ability of EPA and other Federal and State agencies to address toxic sites. As President, Gore will fight to restore the federal funding and "polluter pays" principles to enable EPA to continue cleaning up America's toxic waste sites.

• Supporting Communities' Right to Know: Al Gore strongly supports community right to know provisions. Under the Toxic Release Inventory, we have expanded the number of chemicals that have to be reported and the number of businesses that have to report in the U.S. At the federal level, we can and will widen public access to environmental data. The Environmental Protection Agency's web site alone is now being accessed by 600,000 people a year. In the years ahead, we have to expand the right to know in every area where pollution of any kind threatens public health. In addition, Al Gore will explore the application of Right to Know to the activities of US companies operating abroad.
• Fighting for Environmental Justice: Historically, low-income and minority communities have borne a disproportionate share of the pollution, and Vice President Gore and the Administration were the first Administration to tackle the problem. As President, Al Gore will continue to work so that people everywhere are not at risk from environmental hazards simply because of their economic status or the color of their skin. Al Gore will also continue the drive to spur new investments in low-income and minority communities through brownfields redevelopment, expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, and designation of Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities.

PROMOTING LAND CONSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENTALLY-SOUND AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES

• Al Gore understands that productive agriculture goes together with good stewardship - the two are not in conflict. Successful farmers know that protecting and conserving their soil and water are the keys to sustainable profits. That is why Gore will continue to work for increased funding for incentives to farmers who voluntarily adopt comprehensive plans to curb erosion and protect water supplies from pesticide and nutrient runoff, to expand the Conservation Reserve Program that establishes protective buffer strips along waterways, and to assist farmers with conservation and environmental efforts. These initiatives will provide needed financial support to our family farmers as well as tremendous environmental benefits for the American people. In addition, Gore supports providing estate tax relief for landowners who transfer properties near cities, parks, or wilderness areas to conservation uses.

SAFEGUARDING OUR OCEANS AND COASTS

• Prohibiting Oil and Gas Drilling Off the Coasts of Florida and California: Al Gore will fight to expand the moratorium on oil and gas drilling off the coasts of Florida and California - making sure that no new drilling takes place in these sensitive areas.
• Coastal and Reef Protections: The Clinton-Gore Administration has launched new actions to restore fragile coral reefs, protect our coasts from the risks of offshore oil development, strengthen our national sanctuaries, and protect dolphins and other marine mammals. As President, Al Gore will uphold the moratorium on new offshore leasing through 2012 and continue the ban on new leasing in existing national marine sanctuaries. He will work to continue the successes in reversing the dramatic declines in many marine mammal species such as the gray whale, humpback whale, California sea lion, and Atlantic and Pacific harbor seals. He will also continue the Administration's efforts to expand research into the major causes and consequences of coral reef damage and strengthen efforts to protect and restore reefs.
• Rebuilding Depleted Fisheries: Al Gore believes that we must rebuild declining fisheries and require that all fisheries be managed in a sustainable manner to prevent overfishing. Long-term economic and environmental interests both require prudent measures to ensure the long-term sustainability of our fisheries. We should seek the full participation of fishing communities in meeting our conservation objectives and minimize adverse impacts on those communities. If necessary management measures adversely affect communities, then we must provide economic assistance to those communities to help them make a successful transition to sustainable fisheries management. And we must work with other nations to ensure that foreign competitors are not defeating the steps we take domestically.
• Supporting the Ban on Commercial Whaling: Gore supports the international ban on commercial whaling in the International Whaling Commission (IWC). As President, Gore will remain committed to fighting to maintain the ban on commercial whaling in the IWC and blocking any "backdoor" efforts by Japan and Norway to resume commercial whaling by decreasing protections for whale species under the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Gore will also continue to fight against any efforts by Japan and others to expand "lethal research" whaling under the scientific research loophole in the IWC. And he will work to expand on his leadership in creating landmark sanctuary protections for whales under the IWC by advocating new sanctuary protections under that body.

GENETICALLY-ENGINEERED FOODS

• As with any new technology, Al Gore believes we must carefully weigh the risks and benefits of genetically modified organisms, particularly with respect to food safety and potential environmental impacts. Gore supports the Administration's initiative, announced in May 2000, under which the government will work with stakeholders to create reliable testing procedures and quality assurance programs for differentiating non-bioengineered commodities to better meet the needs of the market.
• To increase consumer information, Gore supports new guidelines for voluntary labeling of bioengineered products to facilitate consumer choice. After a comprehensive review, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommended additional regulatory safeguards and research to identify and control any potential risks to the environment and food safety. Gore strongly favors implementing NAS recommendations and continuing to evaluate and improve our regulatory system, on an ongoing basis, to ensure that we can realized the benefits of biotechnology while guarding against undue risk to food safety and to our environment.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

• Al Gore has consistently advocated and will continue to advocate reforms of the WTO and new international measures to protect the global environment. Trade negotiations should include both labor and environmental components in the fabric of resulting trade agreements. As President, Gore will insist on the authority to enforce workers' rights and environmental protections in negotiations.
• In addition, Gore has supported work to build new international environmental agreements restricting trade in hazardous pollutants, raising environmental standards for development finance, exporting credit agencies, and bringing environmental issues into the forefront of our trade and foreign policies. Most recently, in November 1999 Gore announced a new Executive Order to require careful environmental review of all major trade agreements. In addition, he has advocated a range of initiatives to improve the transparency in WTO decision making by creating greater opportunities for public information and involvement, including urging the WTO to permit amicus briefs and open proceedings.
• Gore believes that, in the case of any given trade dispute, we need to develop appropriate mechanisms to engage members of the public in the process of determining whether a certain measure taken by a foreign government protects the environment, or whether it is designed with undue protectionist intent. A combination of enhanced public input through restructured advisory committee mechanisms and a rolling process of environmental assessments will help ensure our trade policy supports strong environmental measures both at home and abroad.

CREATING JOBS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH WHILE PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT

Al Gore believes it is essential to protect the environment in ways that also create jobs and protect economic growth by working closely with industry in a spirit of collaboration, not conflict; forging creative new public-private partnerships in areas such as fuel-efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions, and tourism and recreation; and emphasizing creative measures and flexibility whenever possible to meet crucial public health and natural resource challenges. For example:

• When conflict arose in the Pacific Northwest over the endangered spotted owl, Gore worked to craft a forest plan that protected the species while putting the timber economy on sound footing.
• Gore joined with America's automakers to create the Public/Private Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles - to help industry efforts to triple the fuel-efficiency of today's vehicles without increasing cost or reducing quality and safety. Gore's new National Energy and Environmental Trust Fund will further that initiative by helping businesses develop, market and implement clean energy technologies, and helping consumers afford cleaner homes and vehicles.
• Gore also led several successful initiatives to create jobs directly through environmental protection, such as through clean-up of abandoned, contaminated urban "brownfields" property to clear the way for new development and jobs.

Source: Al Gore for President 2000 Web Site