Bush the Editor

Hearings yesterday on CSpan featured this:

Congressional committee hearings in the US have confirmed a concerted effort by the Bush Administration to doctor scientific evidence supporting human induced climate change.

The former head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Phillip Cooney, told the House committee on oversight and government reform that he routinely watered down reports on climate change to ensure they fell into line with the Bush Administration views.

“My sole loyalty was to the President and advancing the policies of his administration,” Cooney told the committee.

Documents made available show that in 2003 Cooney and other Bush staff made 181 changes to a climate change strategy paper to play down the scientific consensus over climate change, and the role of human greenhouse emissions in it.

The changes also played up possible benefits of global warming and replaced some government agency findings with those of the American Petroleum Institute, Cooney’s former employer, which argued the uncertainty of climate science. Cooney now works for oil giant ExxonMobil.

The Environmental Protection Agency objected to the changes but Cooney said they must be made and in exactly the wording he wanted.

Committee chairman, Democrat Henry Waxman, said the testimony proved their was a systematic attempt to distort the debate over climate change.

NASA climatologist Dr James Hansen also testified before the committee and reiterated earlier claims that the White House had tried to silence his warnings over the greenhouse threat. Press releases were being doctored by White House staff, Hansen said.

"The effect of the filtering of climate change science during the current administration has been to make the reality of climate change less certain than the facts indicate, and to reduce concern about the relation of climate change to human-made greenhouse gas emissions."

Carbon News