A former oil industry lobbyist edited the Bush administration’s official policy papers on climate change to play down the link between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, it was reported on Wednesday.
Documents released by a watchdog group, the Government Accountability Project, show that as chief of staff for the White House council on environmental quality, Philip Cooney, watered down government scientific papers on climate change and played up uncertainties in the scientific literature. Cooney is a law graduate and has no scientific training.
The Bush aide had performed a similar role in his previous job for the American Petroleum Institute, a lobby group representing oil giants and focused on countering the virtual consensus among scientists that man-made emissions are rapidly heating the planet.
”Cooney’s still doing his old job for the American Petroleum Institute,” said Kert Davies, the US research director for Greenpeace. ”It’s the American Petroleum Institute working within the White House.”
The newly released documents, printed in the New York Times, show handwritten notes by Cooney deleting paragraphs and editing others drafted by government scientists.
He inserted ”significant and fundamental” before the word ”uncertainties” in a section assessing the solidity of the evidence for climate change.
Cooney also introduced the word ”extremely”to the sentence: ”The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult.”
The White House spokesperson, Scott McClellan, defended Cooney’s editing role as ”part of our inter-agency review process. There are more than a dozen agencies involved in the inter-agency review programme,” he said.
However, it is customary for scientific papers to be edited by other scientists.
Davies said that Cooney’s influence on White House policy went further than manipulating documents, describing him as a ”gatekeeper” for White House policymaking on climate change, helping to determine whose views were heard. One of the anti-Kyoto advocates Cooney consulted on policy was Myron Ebell, at the business lobby, the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
In one e-mail from June 2002 acquired by Greenpeace, Ebell wrote to Cooney saying: ”Thanks for calling and asking for our help … it’s nice to know we’re needed once in a while.”
Ebell said Cooney had telephoned him to cool conservative tempers over an administration document which appeared to lend weight to conventional climate change science.
Ebell said he knew Cooney well and denied he had become an agent for the oil industry inside the White House.
”When he works for the president and the CEQ [Council on Environmental Quality] he pursues their policies, regardless of what he did for the American Petroleum Institute,” Ebell said.
Bush administration policy on global warming has generally echoed the approach advocated by the oil lobby, emphasising doubts over climate change science and focusing on the need for further research.
In his first few months in office, President George Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol on climate change, which advocated global cuts in emissions, and at Tuesday’s White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the president underlined the importance of further research.
”I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but we lead the world when it comes to millions of dollars spent on research about climate change,” he said. ”It’s easier to solve a problem when you know a lot about it.” – Guardian Unlimited Â