Bless Us Kyoto for We Have Sinned

"I believe in censorship," Mae West, the steamy star of the Silver Screen, once said. "I made a fortune out of it."

Philip A. Cooney may not have Mae West's sex appeal, but his attitude toward censorship is making people blush all the same.

This week, the New York Times reported that Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, doctored several government reports on global warming to play down the links between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Prior to his role in the Bush administration, Cooney had been the "climate team leader" and lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute.

With his masterful hand, "the earth is undergoing a period of rapid change" became "the earth may be undergoing rapid change." The causes of global warming went from being "difficult" to assess to "extremely difficult." Whole sections of reports addressing reduced snowpack and the melting of glaciers, for example, were nixed altogether. The pattern prompted Rick S. Piltz, who coordinated federal global warming research under the Bush administration, to resign in March because the administration's political meddling made it impossible to run a credible science program.

Cooney's raison d'edit was obvious: to prevent these government climate change reports from suggesting that there is anything approaching scientific consensus on global warming. His playbook, of course, comes from the Bush administration's top pollster, Frank Luntz. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly." Luntz wrote in a now famous memo to Republican officials about the environment. "Therefore, you need to make lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

When asked by the New York Times to respond to evidence of Cooney's censorship, the White House answered, "We don't put Phil Cooney on the record. He's not cleared as a spokesperson." Spokesperson? No. Copy-editor? Yes.

Interestingly, just one day before Cooney's antics came to light, President Bush, in a joint appearance with Prime Minister Tony Blair, bragged about how America leads the world when it comes to global warming research. Of course, it's hard to get people to admire your fancy shoes when your foot is in your mouth.

The bigger question, of course, is why the Bush administration would put a paid apologist for the oil industry in a top environmental post in the first place. As Mae West once said, "It don't mean a thing if you don't pull a string."

Source: Sierra Club, RAW: The Uncooked Facts of the Bush Assault on the Environment, 06/09/2005

Does this surprise anyone? No really, does this surprise anyone?

Well, this here little fact might. According to CNN.com, good old Phillip "Editor in Chief" Cooney has resigned as chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality and has accepted a job with Exxon Mobil starting in the fall. There´s been no comment made on what kind of a position he´s accepted. Kind of makes you wonder if any of these big shots have any kind of moral integrity.