WHERE IS OUTRAGE OVER GOVERNMENT'S MANDATE OF GASOLINE ADDITIVE?

Some of my colleagues in the House and Senate Republican leadership held a press conference Thursday morning to call for Gov. Mel Carnahan to ban the gasoline additive methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE. This follows letters sent earlier to the same effect by U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft and U.S. Rep. Jim Talent, the Republican nominee for governor. Here is a known carcinogen brought to a drinking-water supply near you by -- the government! MTBE was mandated as a result of the federal Clean Air Act of 1990. This one was brought to you by our friends in the environmental protection business to the applause of an uncritical national news media that saw this as a major advance for environmental purity.

Just imagine if a Republican administration had been slow to ban such an additive. Clinton-Gore attack dog James Carville, who is living proof that life exists on other planets, would arrive to demonize Republicans as monsters out to poison our water supply and kill our children.

Or better yet, just imagine if a small business -- say, a car dealer or auto body shop -- had introduced MTBE. Our friends from the Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Natural Resources would descend on the hapless business owner, slapping ruinous daily fines running into the thousands of dollars until the violation stopped. But let the government do it to us, and there seems to be none of the sense of urgency at stopping it that you always get from the government regulators. And mostly deafening silence from the national media at this government-created problem. Readers of this column know of small business persons who have been sued, fined, ruined and driven to an early grave for far lesser threats to environmental purity. A colleague told me of a Southwest Missouri car dealer who recently had DNR descend on him for leaving two drums of waste from his paint shop out on a concrete pad. There was no leakage, no contamination into any water supply, nothing but a failure to secure the drums the way DNR wanted. The fine, which would have caused less financially healthy businesses to close their doors: $38,000.

Farmers, ranchers and landowners know what too many city folks don't: Vice President Al Gore is the most extreme environmentalist ever nominated to national office. Gore's 1992 book ("Earth in the Balance") is literally bananas, calling, among other things, for the elimination of the internal combustion engine as the greatest enemy of mankind and the environment. On the stump in New Hampshire this winter, appealing to greener-than-thou left-wing Democratic voters, Gore vowed that the only thing wrong with that characterization was that his timetable for eliminating gas and diesel-powered engines wasn't soon enough. Footage has been squirreled away by GOP operatives for ads this fall in auto-producing states such as Michigan, Ohio and Missouri, to say nothing of auto-dependent states from sea to shining sea.

By itself this crazy book should defeat him. If Gore is elected this fall, expect four to eight years of an environmentalist reign of terror on our great American producing class. These are the stakes.

Meanwhile, where is the outrage over what government's mandating of MTBE?