Bush
Fries Climate Change
B y Derrick
Z. Jackson
Boston Globe
20 June, 2003
UNDAUNTED BY accusations of cooking the books for war, President Bush
deep-fried the data on global warming.
The New York Times reported
yesterday that the White House took a draft report on the state of the
environment by the Environmental Protection Agency and deleted critical
portions on climate change. The White House knocked out references to
studies that directly mentioned industrial pollution and vehicle exhaust
as contributors to global warming.
The administration took out
a phrase that said, ''Climate change has global consequences for human
health and the environment.'' It replaced it with gobbledygook. The
White House wrote, ''The complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections
among its components make it a scientific challenge to document change,
diagnose its causes, and develop useful projections of how natural variability
and human actions may affect the global environment in the future. Because
of these complexities and the potentially profound consequences of climate
change and variability, climate change has become a capstone scientific
and societal issue for this generation and the next, and perhaps even
beyond.''
Bush is trying to fry climate
change until the issue is seemingly so tough to comprehend that Americans
dismiss it. Two and a half years into his presidency, this recipe has
worked magnificently. In the first few months of his presidency, Bush
let EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman tell the world that the
United States took seriously the carbon dioxide emissions that are such
a major source of global warming. But when Bush himself spoke, it was
either to back out of the Kyoto global agreement on climate change or
reverse a pledge to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Bush said he needed
to wait until he had ''sound science'' on the subject.
Over the months, evidence
continued to mount in scientific journals that global warming could
have dramatic and potentially catastrophic results for coastlines and
cause a spread of disease. The evidence was so overwhelming that the
2001 report by the National Research Council that Bush himself commissioned
said, ''Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a
result of human activities.'' The report later said, ''Global warming
could well have serious adverse societal and ecological impacts by the
end of this century.'' The report warned that temperatures and sea levels
will continue to rise even under conservative scenarios. It also supported
a full assessment of global warming lest anything less ''may well underestimate
the magnitude of the eventual impacts.''
Since then Bush, with his
campaign coffers lined with fossil fuel energy interests and his administration
bursting with oil connections, has done his best to suppress the magnitude
of the possible impacts. Late in 2001 the council added a report that
said global warming may increase the chance of abrupt climate change,
changes that could place poor countries at particular risk.
Then, a year ago, Whitman
sent a report to the United Nations that reconfirmed that ''human activity''
is a real cause of the greenhouse effect. While the first victims of
global warming are assumed to be poor people in low-lying countries,
this report predicted a crazy quilt of long-term disruptions and destruction
of ecosystems throughout the United States, from the drying up of ponds
in the Midwest to the disappearance of forests in the South to the death
of fish in the Pacific Northwest.
Bush crumpled all those reports
and threw them into his political incinerator. He embarrassed Whitman
even more definitively, saying: ''I read the report put out by the bureaucracy.''
This was obviously too much for Whitman to take. She recently announced
her resignation and is leaving her post next week. So giddy over having
gotten rid of the one person who showed at least minimal concern for
the environment, the White House now appears to be depending much more
upon so-called facts from organizations who have obvious reasons to
dismiss global warming, such as the American Petroleum Institute.
With the neutering of the
EPA report, it should make one wonder. This deletion of data on climate
change should raise even more questions as to whether Bush cooked the
books for war. Bush is in the control of oil interests in Washington.
With the presence of our troops, President Bush for practical purposes
now controls the oil of Iraq.
America's lust for oil hangs
so ominously around the invasion of Iraq and in the denial of the impact
of global warming that facts from intelligence agencies and scientific
journals have become meaningless. One day, the dismissal of the facts
will come back in a disastrous way. Bush and the United States may have
the oil now. Meanwhile, the planet is cooking and frying.
© Copyright 2003 Globe
Newspaper Company.