The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today released a report 16 months in the making, "Political Interference with Climate Change Science under the Bush Administration."
No need right now to get into what took so damn long. Or what will be done about the findings. Or why, sadly, there was really nothing new generated in the molasses crawl that led to this document. But despite its slow arrival and lack of any fresh news, it does provide "official" evidence in one place, adding to the long list of information we already have on the Cheney-Bush regime's continuing efforts to excise or reword anything they don't like when it comes to climate science documents.
As noted on the Oversight committee's Web page:
In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed an internal "Communications Action Plan" that stated: "Victory will be achieved when ... average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science ... [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’" The Bush Administration has acted as if the oil industry’s communications plan were its mission statement. White House officials and political appointees in the agencies censored congressional testimony on the causes and impacts of global warming, controlled media access to government climate scientists, and edited federal scientific reports to inject unwarranted uncertainty into discussions of climate change and to minimize the threat to the environment and the economy.
What a shock! A pair of oil men at the top of the U.S. government favored their pals in the oil industry? Say it ain't so.
From the report itself:
Like some of his colleagues at NOAA, Dr. James Hansen, a climate scientist and Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space studies, was prevented by political appointees from giving a press interview about climate change. On December 8, 2005, a National Public Radio (NPR) journalist requested an interview with Dr. Hansen about global warming. The request e-mail was sent to Leslie Nolan McCarthy, a career civil servant in the Goddard Institute’s public outreach office. According to Ms. McCarthy, about a week earlier, a career public affairs officer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate named Dwayne Brown told her that "there were ‘heavy politics’ at NASA Headquarters and that the ‘only emphasis is to not make President look bad.’ He also said that he had ‘never seen this as bad.’"
Within two hours of Ms. McCarthy’s receipt of the NPR interview request, George Deutsch, a political appointee in NASA’s press office, sent an e-mail to Dr. Colleen Hartman, a Deputy Associate Administrator at NASA. He wrote: "We discussed it with the 9th Floor, and it was decided that we’d like you to handle this interview." At a March 19, 2007, Oversight Committee hearing, Mr. Deutsch testified that the "9th Floor"referred to NASA Press Secretary Dean Acosta.69 When asked whether he was "telling Dr. Hansen’s staff to tell him that the higher-ups didn’t want him to be on National Public Radio," Mr. Deutsch told the Committee: "That’s fair." According to Mr. Deutsch, the press secretary’s main concern was "hitting our messages and not getting dragged down into any discussions we shouldn’t get into."
The next day, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail to Ms. McCarthy stating: "Senior management has asked us not to use Jim Hansen for this interview." Sixteen minutes later, George Deutsch and Dwayne Brown left Ms. McCarthy a voicemail "in which they said that they did not want Dr. Hansen to do the NPR interview."
As Ronald Reagan once said, "Facts are stupid things." For Reagan, it was a misquote. But for Mister Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney, the phrase long ago became public policy.