Sierra Club chief rips GOP on environment

Thursday, Aug. 10, 2000 | 10:06 a.m.

The top man at the nation's largest environmental organization said Wednesday that the likely Republican slate for federal office -- from president to Congress -- would be bad news for the state's air, land and water.

Carl Pope, executive director of the 630,000-member Sierra Club, was in Las Vegas to address the United Steelworkers of America annual convention.

He used the visit to urge people to vote with the environment in mind, to support Democratic candidates for Congress and Al Gore for president.

Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush's choice for running mate, Dick Cheney, was a "revealing process," Pope said.

Although Bush has said publicly that science, not politics, should guide the establishment of a nuclear waste dump in Nevada's Yucca Mountain, Cheney voted to strip the scientific scoping requirements, Pope said.

Yucca Mountain, he warned, might become a "sacrifice site" as has been recommended for the Nevada Test Site northwest of Las Vegas. The problem with radioactive sacrifice sites, places written off for any direct human use, is that they tend to contaminate the water around them, Pope said.

Yucca Mountain is "a sacrifice site that may migrate," he said.

Pope identified urban growth -- or sprawl -- as another significant environmental threat to Las Vegas. Despite some good trends, such as relatively high housing density, growth of the urban region in the Las Vegas Valley has exploded with negative consequences, Pope said.

He said he keeps satellite photos of Las Vegas in 1975, 1985 and 1995 "as an emblem of what's going wrong" here and nationwide.

"Las Vegas is famous, or infamous," for sprawl, Pope said. "Whenever you're growing this fast, there are going to be problems."

Both developers and the region's primary employers, the casinos, should help pay for the infrastructure needed to handle the growth of the region, he said.

"In a strong economy -- that's the time to get tough" on everybody contributing to urban sprawl, Pope said.

The Sierra Club, which raised $6.5 million to support environmentally friendly politicians in the 1998 elections, is focusing on getting people involved in conservation issues, he said.

People can make a big difference, Pope said.