Climate Progress

I’m sure this does not come as a big shock — but it isn’t the President. Still, Rolling Stone has unearthed “thousands of pages of internal documents” detailing the full extent of the malevolent role played by the Vice President — hey they don’t call him Vice for nothing!

It is no secret that industry-connected appointees within the White House have worked actively to distort the findings of federal climate scientists, playing down the threat of climate change. But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove.

The article is coincident with the launch of a 20,000-word, 4-part series by the Washington Post delving into Cheney’s power, how he spies on White House staffers, and how “Stealth is among Cheney’s most effective tools.”

What kinds of things did Cheney do on climate?

Cheney personally stalled Bush’s campaign pledge to regulate global warming:

In September 2000, Bush pledged to place caps on carbon emissions. In response, Cheney armed the White House Committee on Environmental Quality with industry heavyweights. Thereafter, “a CEQ memo concluded Bush’s promise to regulate CO2 ‘did not fully reflect the president’s position‘ and that ‘it would be premature at this time to propose any specific policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming.’” The authors stated that “the current state of scientific knowledge about causes of and solutions to global warming is inconclusive.”

Yup, scientists don’t have a clue about the cause or the solution to global warming

This is a sad story, really, how one man almost single-handedly set back the nation a decade on climate action — a decade we could ill afford to lose.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 6:53 pmand is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.