I read the an article the other day in the online version of the June 2007 Rolling Stone magazine, “The Secret Campaign of President Bush’s Administration to Deny Global Warming,” by Tim Dickinson.
While I am not an especially politically-minded person, nor politically savvy, I found myself disturbed by some questions with which each American should concern themselves. However, I also want to point out the importance of remembering that while Rolling Stone is a very reputable source, I by no means believe that they or any other media source has all the facts.
The article begins with this quote:
“That’s a big no. The president believes…that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.”
-Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary responding in May 2001 to whether Bush would ask Americans to curb their first-in-the-world energy consumption
The immediate problem with this statement for those people who do believe that the world is under environmental threat is that if we don’t change our way of life, there won’t be any remnants of the “American way of life” left. Is a few extra years of excessive luxury worth leaving a planet in shambles to our successors?
After the world’s top climate scientists released a report on global warming concluding that the planet is indeed heating up and humans are in fact a direct cause, the developed nations of the world began to act, or at least take the report to heart – except for the government of the United States. Dickinson writes:
“It’s not every day, after all, that the leading scientists from 120 nations come together and agree that the entire planet is about to go to hell. But the Bush administration has never felt bound by the reality-based nature of science—especially when it comes from international experts.”
It is important that some key players and events be introduced before continuing. In the beginning there was Christine Todd Whitman, the administration’s first chief of the Environment Protection Agency (EPA). When Whitman sat down with President Bush shortly after his inauguration to discuss the independence of the EPA from the CEQ—the Council on Environmental Quality, ‘a policy arm of the government.’ Bush replied by asking, “What’s CEQ?”
Vice President *** Cheney assumed control of the CEQ shortly after. Two weeks in, ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol sent Cheney a fax demanding a ‘housecleaning of the scientists in charge of studying global warming.’ And it was done. Each and every scientist on Exxon’s list was replaced. Cheney continued to revise the President’s energy policies with his oil buddies at his side. Put very simply by Jeremy Symons, a representative of the EPA on Cheney’s energy task force:
The ideology is simple: You don’t put limits on greenhouse-gas pollution, because that might put limits on coal and oil--and that would hurt industry’s performance. Everything flowed from that.
At one point, Dickinson reports, Vice President *** Cheney proceeded to tell ABC News that there was no definitive evidence that human beings are responsible and that we should not just throw a quick policy together to ‘solve’ the problem.
Why have the ‘powers that be’ in America decided that they are above science? The denial of the reports is concerning enough, but we have come to find (and this is no secret anymore) that the government not only denied the reports, but changed them in an attempt to create doubt among the public as to the seriousness and reality of the Earth’s state of being.
Cheney has no personal incentive to place people in power who would work toward a cleaner, more sustainable energy. It’s common knowledge that Cheney was Chief Executive Officer and Chairmen of the Board for the Halliburton Company from 1995-2000. This puts Cheney’s alliance undeniably to the oil business. As Cheney took climate policy into his own hands, he worked closely with the Global Climate Coalition, made up of anti-Kyoto oil and coal industry lobbyists. These very people are said to be responsible for Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol. They also wrote the “21st Century Climate Action Agenda” which became the President’s new environment and energy plan. According to the article, the plan would actually cause greenhouse gas emissions to increase 34% by 2030 while “vaguely” promising to cut the “intensity” of carbon emissions by 18% over ten years. Not only that, but Bush provided $700 million to fund technologies that may “someday reduce emissions.” This exorbitant amount of money was untraceable by government auditors.
How should the American public feel about environmental and energy policy being placed under the control of supporters of the oil and coal industries? And what does it mean that our President is willing to do so? Especially when it appears that Bush himself paid little if no attention to the policies set in front of him.
Apathy may be a running theme here, or rather morbid humor. After a report came out, underwritten partly by the API (American Petroleum Institute), that denied that this century was unusually warm, one of the White House energy advisers, now a lobbyist for API, Matthew Koch, replied to an email from another energy policymaker connected to the oil industry: “What??!! I want to grow oranges in the Arctic!”
But it makes you feel rather cozy to know that the future of the planet, and thus humankind, is a big joke to those in charge. Then again it is not their future that they are apathetic about. They care very much about their own, hence the do-nothing policy floating around the White House. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to put someone in charge of energy and environmental policy who had something to gain by increasing the use of non-fossil fuel-based energy in the United States? The problem with *** Cheney in charge is that he has everything to gain by ignoring reports on global warming. And considering that he plans to retire from politics at the end of the term, he doesn’t even need to worry about popularity with the public.
I recommend reading the article in Rolling Stone, it sheds some light onto the reasoning behind our absence in the global cooperation for a cleaner, cooler world.
Read the full article at:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/15148655/the_secret_campaign_of_president_bushs_administration_to_deny_global_warming