AL (MR. GREEN) GORE, GETS A SIERRA CLUB SNUB

Vice President Al Gore came in for some pretty stiff criticism last week from an unusual source: his longtime allies in the Sierra Club.

The whole flap, reported by the Associated Press, provides a useful glimpse into the fever swamps of left-wing extremism on the environment.

The reason we can say this is that candidate Gore is incontestably the strongest environmentalist ever nominated by one of the two major parties for national office. For years, Gore has made a positive fetish of environmental extremism, even publishing a 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance." That piece of work (re-issued with a new Gore foreword this spring) rings with loopy environmental extremism such as Gore's assertion that "the internal combustion engine is the greatest enemy of mankind" and that it must be eliminated altogether in a few short years.

Gore has been responsible in the current administration for stocking the Environmental Protection Agency with his proteges, notably EPA director Carol Browner. The Clinton-Gore-Browner EPA has never seen a new regulation or fee that it didn't like.

Still, even this isn't enough for the Sierra Clubbers.

"With this legacy, no real environmentalist could ever endorse Al Gore," board member Michael Dorsey wrote gravely in an e-mail memo to his fellow Sierra Clubbers.

Dorsey's grim message was echoed by 87-year-old David Brower, the Sierra Club's executive director in the 1950s and 1960s. "I urged when I resigned" from the Sierra Club board this month "that they support Ralph Nader," said Brower. Nader is the Green Party's candidate for president.

The same week the Sierra Club e-mail was revealed, Gore was out pledging never to allow drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to huge, untouched oil fields rivaling those under the Arabian peninsula. This despite the fact that drilling has been going on for more than 20 years in Alaska with no discernible damage to native caribou herds.

As gasoline heads toward $2 a gallon this summer, motorists and voters will have many occasions to ponder the costs of greener-than-thou environmental extremism.