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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The planet's getting hotter, ecosystems are going haywire, government scientists know it -- and still the president denies there's a problem. Guess which industry continues to fuel his campaign?
Sep 10, 2004 | Don't expect President Bush to discuss global warming -- the world's most serious environmental problem -- on the campaign trail in the next eight weeks. The former oilman from Texas doesn't dare alienate his friends in the fossil fuel and auto industries, prime purveyors of global warming. Bush still refuses to admit that burning Chevron with Techron in our Jeep Grand Cherokees, not to mention megatons of coal in our power plants, has brought us 19 of the 20 hottest years on record since 1980.
"You're talking about a president who says that the jury is out on evolution, so what possible evidence would you need to muster to prove the existence of global warming?" says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author of the new book "Crimes Against Nature." "We've got polar ice caps melting, glaciers disappearing all over the world, ocean levels rising, coral reefs dying. But these people are flat-earthers."
In fact, Bush's see-no-evil, hear-no-evil stance on global warming is so intractable that even when his own administration's scientists weigh in on the issue, he simply won't hear of it.
In a report sent to Congress at the end of August, government scientists argued that the warming of the atmosphere in recent decades cannot be explained by natural causes but must include such human sources as energy consumption and deforestation. It's a conclusion that a consensus of the world's climatologists reached years ago but that Bush has ignored throughout his presidency.
When the New York Times quizzed Bush about why his scientists had shifted their positions on what caused global warming, he appeared entirely ignorant that they had. "I don't think we did," he said. When tipped off to the paper's coverage of the report, he added: "Oh, OK, well, that's got to be true." Maybe he really doesn't read the newspapers. His aides then assured reporters that, no, this report wouldn't signal any change in his policies around climate change.
In other words, Bush will continue to delay regulatory action related to global warming, while pledging to invest in more study of the issue in the name of "sound science," before doing anything about it.
"The Bush administration has been playing whack-a-mole trying to beat back its own scientists on global warming; every once in a while they miss one," says Jeremy Symons, who worked at the Environmental Protection Agency in 2001, when the president reneged on his campaign promise to regulate global-warming pollution -- a move, Symons says, done for "no reason other than to appease polluters."
"The strength of the science is overwhelming and it's reflected in this new report," adds Symons, now climate change program manager for the National Wildlife Federation. "It doesn't leave the administration anywhere to hide about the fact that it's not doing anything. The science hasn't changed, but when it comes to policy the Bush administration still has its head in the sand."
It's a repeat of a situation early in Bush's presidency, when he asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into global warming and they found that it is happening and is likely caused by such human activities as burning fossil fuels. The response? The administration just continued to call for further study and even infamously censored mentions of the harmful impact of global warming from a federal environmental report.
"Since the first time President Bush has marginally said global warming could be real, he has delayed, denied or tried to derail any advancements to address it," says Betsy Loyless, vice president for policy for the League of Conservation Voters, which has endorsed John Kerry for president in 2004.
The Bush administration has refused to allow climate experts to even participate in climate policy discussions, asserts Rosina Bierbaum, a former director of the White House science office. Rather than consult with its own scientific advisors when devising a strategy on climate change, the White House constructed a plan primarily from conversations with the National Economic Counsel.
"I wasn't asked anything," says Bierbaum, now dean of the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment. "In fact, I was told to stop sending weekly science updates to the White House, as had been the tradition with the previous administration."
