Imagine if you will a thought crossing George Bush’s brain (it’s a hypothetical so please suspend your disbelief) regarding the issue of global climate change. I imagine it might go something like this:
Nope, no global warming issues here. Nosiree. Can’t find a one. Maybe study it a little more just to make ever’ body happy. Yeah. But not let that interfear with oil drillin. Or treaty makin’. Or carbon emitting fedral reg-you-lashuns. Cuz that would be wrong. Bad fer the economee. And bad fer my base.
Now imagine you are a political appointee, the Bush administration’s top official at the Environmental Protection Agency, and you know the President doesn’t want to be bothered with any inappropriate facts regarding the consequences of man made climate change. What would you do? Well, probably something exactly like this:
WASHINGTON: The White House has reportedly buried a report prepared by scientists which detailed a rising death toll from heat waves, fires, disease and smog.
Environmental advocates have accused the Bush Administration of delaying the release of the 149-page report so that it could avoid regulating greenhouse gases.
They claimed that the Bush Administration has worked to discourage a link between public health and climate change, fearing this would compel the government to regulate greenhouse gases
It’s not as if Bush had to actually convey this message to anyone at EPA. They all know very well what the administration’s policy on the environment and carbon emissions is. Call it the “do nothing” approach. And to allow this “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” policy to work, well, sometimes you just have to fail to tell the whole truth. You have to ignore the facts, or at least those facts which would force you to do something about the reality of anthropogenic climate change which Mr. Bush and his friends in the “Energy Industry” prefer not to acknowledge. So, as the good Bushie that you are, you employ a strategy I call sinnning by omission. Even if that means suppressing and denying the opinions of your very own EPA scientists:
“Risk (to human health, society and the environment) increases with increases in both the rate and magnitude of climate change,” said the scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Global warming, they wrote, is “unequivocal,” and humans are to blame.
“This document inescapably, unmistakably shows that global warming pollution not only threatens human health and welfare, but it is adversely impacting human health and welfare today,” said Vickie Patton, deputy general counsel for the Environmental Defence Fund. […]
On Friday, the White House dismissed the scientists’ findings, when it said the Clean Air Act was the wrong tool to control global warming pollution and said that a new law, which dealt solely with global warming, was needed.
Stephen Johnson, the EPA chief, said through a spokesman that although he knew “the science is clear, and that climate change is a significant issue,” he did not want to make a “rash decision under the wrong law”.
Yes, God forbid anyone in the Bush adminstration ever be accused of making rash decisions. Perish the thought.
