http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=4391&method=full
Bush
White House Charged With Conspiracy With Private Think
FROM MAINE ATTORNEY GENERAL STEVEN ROWE
Aug. 11, 2003
MAINE,
CONNECTICUT AGs CALL ON ASHCROFT TO INVESTIGATE
WHITE HOUSE ROLE IN LAWSUIT
Email suggests conspiracy
between White House and conservative think tank.
In a letter sent today,
Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe and
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal called on United
States Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate whether
officials at the White House Council on Environmental Quality
(CEQ)
solicited a conservative Washington think tank to sue the federal
government in order to invalidate a government document warning
of the impacts of global warming.
The two state attorneys
general obtained an email document
through a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed
a great intimacy between CEQ and the Competitive Enterprise
Institute (CEI) on strategizing about ways to undermine
the United States' official reports and the authority of
its officials.
(The Competitive Enterprise
Institute is funded in part
by ExxonMobil. Editor's note).
Rowe and Blumenthal
called for the investigation after
discovering an email sent in June 2002 by an executive
at CEI, Myron Ebell, to Phil Cooney, the Chief of Staff
at CEQ, thanking Cooney for "calling and asking for our
help." The email goes on to suggest strategies for minimizing
the problem of global warming, including finding a
"fall guy (or gal)...as high up as possible" in the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to blame for the
report, and indicating that CEI might call for then-EPA
Administrator Christie Todd Whitman to be fired.
The lawsuit was filed
by CEI against the White House Office
of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science
and Technology Council. In the suit, CEI argues that the
National Assessment of Climate Variability and Change
(National Assessment) and EPA's Climate Action Report 2002
should be invalidated. The National Assessment is a
peer-reviewed study documenting global warming and
identifying its dangers. Its findings were relied upon
in the EPA's Climate Action Report 2002, which was
produced by the United States pursuant to its obligations
under the 1992 Rio Treaty on climate change. CEI alleges
that the federal report failed to meet scientific standards
for objectivity and utility.
Maine Attorney General
Steven Rowe stated, "It appears
that certain White House officials conspired with an
anti-environmental special interest group to cause the
lawsuit to be filed against the federal government."
"The idea that
the Bush Administration may have invited
a lawsuit from a special interest group in order to
undermine the federal government's own work under an
international treaty is very troubling," he said.
Rowe added: "We believe an investigation is necessary
to determine whether the idea of this lawsuit came from
the White House itself, and if so, whether it represents
improper conduct by public officials."
-- -- ON SAME WEB PAGE AS ARTICLE ABOVE -- --
Suit Challenges Climate Change Report
by U.S.
The New York Times, Aug. 7 2003
An antiregulatory group
sued the Bush administration yesterday
in an effort to force the government to stop distributing a
report on climate change that the group contends is inaccurate
and biased.
It was filed in Federal
Court in Washington by the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, a group with industry backing that contends
global warming poses no significant risks.
The suit says the continued
use of the report, which was
published in 2000, violates the Federal Data Quality Act,
a law enacted that year that requires information disseminated
by the government to pass standards for objectivity, quality,
and utility - meaning the data are reliable enough to be used
by the public.
Officials at the White
House Office of Science and Technology
Policy, which was named along with President Bush, declined
to comment yesterday, saying the White House had not yet
received a copy of the lawsuit.
The challenged report
is the National Assessment of the
Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change,
a region-by-region analysis of likely impacts of rising
temperatures that was commissioned by Congress in 1990.
The aim was to generate scenarios showing possible impacts
of global warming from building levels of heat-trapping
greenhouse gases.
It is available on
the Web at http://earth.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/nacc.
The suit says the report's
results were generated by flawed
computer models and portrayed some historical climate data
without including ``error bars'' showing the potential range
of error in temperature readings for past centuries.
The report in question
was the product of nearly a decade
of work by dozens of government and private scientists
- mostly during the Clinton administration - who had a
slim budget and tight deadlines that forced them to
compromise sometimes on their choice of computer models
and other tools, several study authors said.
Because of the inherent
weaknesses, the study quickly
became a prime target of industry lobbyists, conservatives,
and a small group of scientists who deny that greenhouse
emissions pose a significant threat.
Yesterday, Christopher
C. Horner, a senior fellow and
lawyer at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said
that the suit would finally put ``alarmism'' on trial.
''They don't have to
try to unring a bell,'' he said,
noting that the report has already been broadly distributed
and reprinted and posted on dozens of Web site. ``They just
have to cease in disseminating it until they correct it.''
