"Consequences, schmonsequences, as long as I'm rich"
(Daffy Duck)

The rogue decisionmakers in the Bush administration will be dead and buried when the consequences of their global warming policies will truly hit their children and grandchildren with full force. That the Earth is warming and the consequences will be potentially catastrophic and irreversible is enough to scare any rational person who cares about the future and our way of life, not the mention the poor people around the world who may bear the brunt of global warming even though they had nothing to do with the disasterious policies causing this environmental problem.

Investigative reporters are showing again and again that the Bush administration is knowingly doctoring the science and the reports in an effort to play down the effects of global climate change. The reason for this is probably that drastic measures to deal with global warming now will certainly undercut the profits generated by the energy companies who've been playing footsie with President Oilman and his deputy, Dick Cheney, who has taken the lead in orchestrating this shell game.

A recent report in Rolling Stone shows that these secretive practices are very real and confirm, if nothing else, that when foxes are assigned to watch the hen-house, the foxes will slaughter the hens. The environmental task forces working in the Bush administration are heavily staffed from the oil industry lobby. The conflict of interest does not have to be spelled out any further. Oil industry lackeys make a lot of money by polluting the environment, and strict controls on pollution will affect corporate profits and undermine their philosophy of government, i.e., let big business do whatever it wants. Bush administration apologists may argue that it takes oil industry experts to fully understand environmental science and policies. If that's the case, why not throw in a few people from Greenpeace or the Sierra Club? It's laughable even to suggest that environmental activists would have a seat at the table in this corrupt and rouge administration.

Here are some highlights from the Rolling Stone article, "The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration to Deny Global Warming":

An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration scientists and climate-policy officials - confirms that the White House has implemented an industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate polluters.

"They've got a political clientele that does not want to be regulated," says Rick Piltz, a former Bush climate official who blew the whistle on White House censorship of global-warming documents in 2005. "Any honest discussion of the science would stimulate public pressure for a stronger policy. They're not stupid."

Bush's do-nothing policy on global warming began almost as soon as he took office. By pursuing a carefully orchestrated policy of delay, the White House has blocked even the most modest reforms and replaced them with token investments in futuristic solutions like hydrogen cars. "It's a charade," says Jeremy Symons, who represented the EPA on Cheney's energy task force, the industry-studded group that met in secret to craft the administration's energy policy. "They have a single-minded determination to do nothing - while making it look like they are doing something."

. . .

As he shaped climate policy, Cheney took his cues from the Global Climate Coalition, an alliance of anti-Kyoto polluters that included the top lobbying arms of the oil and coal industries. In June 2001, the administration dispatched Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of state for global affairs, to address the GCC at the headquarters of the American Petroleum Institute. In her speech, Dobriansky was glad to give the industry crowd credit for the president's decision to withdraw from the international treaty designed to slow climate change. Her talking points from that day read, "POTUS rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you."

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act also reveal that Dobriansky had received a copy of the GCC's "21st Century Climate Action Agenda," a game plan crafted by polluting industries that calls for "a new approach to climate policy" focusing on "voluntary actions" rather than mandatory limits on greenhouse gases. On February 14th, 2002, Bush gave a speech at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that laid out his policy on global warming for the first time. The speech was a Valentine's Day gift to polluters, officially enshrining the GCC's agenda, almost point for point, as the White House's climate policy.

. . .

To direct the White House's spin on global warming, [Jim] Connaughton [chairman of the President's Council on the Environmental Quality] appointed Philip Cooney as his top deputy. Cooney had the right experience for the job: He worked as "climate team leader" for the American Petroleum Institute. In 1998, the API took part in an industry coalition that created the "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan." The plan, recently entered into evidence by the House Oversight Committee, maps out an elaborate disinformation campaign to prevent "precipitous action on climate change." The strategy was to sow doubt about global warming, disseminating industry-funded research to challenge "the science underpinning the global climate change theory."

Now, with Cooney in the White House, the industry had its own anti-climate man running the disinformation campaign. As the "action plan" directed, Cooney set out to censor the EPA's science on global warming and inject the industry's denialist positions into government documents. "They decided they didn't need to win the debate on climate," says Piltz, the former official who exposed Cooney's tactics. "They just had to leave an atmosphere of uncertainty about it and dissipate the will for political action."

Highlighting the corporate lobby's influence on White House environmental policy, Cooney watered down a report on global warming which, left alone, made it clear that warming was a serious problem caused by human activity and that immediate measures are necessary to deal with the problem. But even after Cooney watered down the report, the media still interpreted the report to suggest that global warming was a serious problem. How did the Bushies deal with this bad publicity? Another corporate flunky, Myron Ebell, was advising Cooney on damage control:

Cooney was frantic over the story in the Times. "We tried to put some qualifiers on that chapter in the report," Cooney told him. "We'd take the text from EPA, and then we'd add a sentence like, 'We don't really know if this is really happening.' So we tried to do it, but I can see now that we made a total mess of it."

Ebell's advice to Cooney is contained in a e-mail dated June 3rd, 2002. "Thanks for asking for our help," he wrote. "I know you're in crisis mode. . . . I want to help you cool things down, but after consulting with the team, I think that what we can do is limited until there is an official statement from the administration repudiating the report."

That repudiation came the very next day. President Bush himself dismissed the report, saying it had been "put out by the bureaucracy."

Finally, according to Rolling Stone, which reviewed documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the task force in the White House organized to obstruct any changes in climate change policy relied on studies underwritten by the very corporate interests that stood to gain from this policy.

Internal documents uncovered by Rolling Stone reveal that Cooney did far more than edit scientific reports to suit the administration's point of view. Just as neoconservative hawk Douglas Feith funneled false intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs to the vice president, Cooney steered industry-sponsored junk science on global warming to Cheney. "What disturbed me most," [former Environmental Protection Agency head] Whitman says, "was the administration's record of taking the most extreme of the science - what I call the 'political science' - and giving it the same weight as the real science."

The most egregious example of cooked intelligence was a study underwritten in part by the API, Cooney's former employer. The study, which purported to show that the twentieth century was not unusually warm, was authored by two astrophysicists, both of whom were on the payroll of the George C. Marshall Institute, a climate-denial group funded by ExxonMobil and now headed by Bill O'Keefe, Cooney's former boss. The paper's publication in a minor German journal in January 2003 quickly created a scandal, with the editor in chief and three other editors resigning in shame after acknowledging that the paper was fundamentally flawed and should never have been published.

"It was sham science," says McCarthy, the Harvard scientist. "It's almost laughable, except that this study was held up by the administration as a definitive refutation of the temperature record."