Progressive Nation

June 7th, 2005

When The Fox Guards The Henhouse

In the NYTimes today:

A White House official who once led the oil industry’s fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved.

For example,

a sentence in an October 2002 draft of a regularly published summary of government climate research, “Our Changing Planet,” originally read: “Many scientific observations indicate that the Earth is undergoing a period of relatively rapid change….”

In places where uncertainties in climate research were described, Mr. Cooney added qualifiers like “significant” and “fundamental.”

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. What a great choice.

The past is a good guide for the future in this case because it isn’t the first time where Bush tries to leave no lobbysits behind. In Bush’s failed Clear Skies Act that was to replace the landmark Clean Air Act, lobbysits actually wrote important parts of the bill. Lobbyists with a clear conflict of interest were appointed. I’m not against lobbyists, nor am I a radical environmentalist tree hugger, but what happened to common sense?

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