Climate Covered in Vanity Fair's 'Oral History' of Bush Years

by Emily Gertz

Published February 01, 2009 @ 11:53AM PT

The George W. Bush administration may be gone, but it's left behind a killer hangover: a lattice of environmentally destructive policies that the new administration will have to root out, and a laissez-faire regulatory legacy to reverse.

There was the fluent use of doublespeak that made increased cutting of national forests, and lowering air pollution standards, sound like bunnies hopping through healthy forests, and butterflies flitting through clear skies. Watch out for that logging truck, little bunny!

There's the eight years of outsized influence by fossil energy industries, such as industry reps meeting off-the-record with former V.P. Dick Cheney to craft the nation's energy policy, or Interior Department employees who were responsible for collecting royalties on oil and gas leases sharing sex and drugs with industry cohorts. Talk about drilling for energy.

So grab some aspirin, and re-live the enviro and climate outrages of the past eight years -- like the "Clear Skies Initiative," and "Brownie, you're doing a heckua job!" -- as well as the 2000 Florida recount, "My Pet Goat," "Mission Accomplished," domestic wiretapping, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and more, via Vanity Fair's blockbuster feature, An Oral History of the Bush White House.

Here are a few highlights on energy and climate change policy during the Bush-Cheney years:

In May 2001, the administration released its pro-increased drilling, pro-nuclear power expansion "Nation Energy Policy." It had been created by former Vice President Dick Cheney and task force, comprised primarily of representatives of the gas and oil industries. The records of these meetings were never released.

Rick Piltz, who was a senior associate in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program during the Bush-Cheney administration, tells Vanity Fair:

Christine Todd Whitman, the E.P.A. administrator, was one of several people in the Cabinet, along with Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who strongly supported a proactive position on climate change. And she was, I think, in Europe telling European governments that the U.S. position was to regulate carbon dioxide. And when she got back home, she had an interaction with the president in which she was very brusquely told that that was off the table. The turning point, essentially, was that Cheney grabbed hold of this issue and took down the whole notion of regulating CO2.

In mid-June 2005, evidence became public that through an astroturf group, the Global Climate Coalition, Exxon had played a major role in successfully advising President Bush to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. In following weeks, onetime oil industry lobbyist-turned-White House environmental policy staffer Philip Cooney resigned from his post -- and took a job at Exxon -- after it came out that he edited government reports to downplay the threat presented by global warming.

Piltz to Vanith Fair:

In the fall of 2002, I was doing something I’d been doing for years, which was developing and editing the [Climate Change Science Program’s] annual report to Congress. And it had been drafted with input from dozens of federal scientists and reviewed and vetted and revised and vetted some more.

And then it had to go for a White House clearance. It came back to us over the fax machine with Phil Cooney’s hand markup on it. I flipped through it and saw right away what he was doing. You don’t need to do a huge amount of re-writing to make something say something different; you just need to change a word, change a phrase, cross out a sentence, add some adjectives. And what he was doing was, he was passing a screen over the report to introduce uncertainty language into statements about global warming. The political motivation of it was obvious.

In December 2005, NASA tried to squelch its own climate scientist, James Hansen, after he gives a lecture on climate change to fellow researchers.

Piltz, who had by now resigned from the CCSP over political interference with its work, to Vanity Fair:

To me, the central climate-science scandal of the Bush administration was the suppression of the National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts report. In the 1997–2000 time frame, the White House had directed the Global Change Research Program to develop a scientifically based assessment of the implications of climate change for the United States. It was a vulnerability assessment: If these projected warming models are correct, what’s going to happen? And over a period of several years a team made up of eminent scientists and other experts produced a major report. To this day, it remains the most comprehensive effort to understand the implications of global warming for the United States.

And the administration killed that study. They directed federal agencies not to make any reference to the existence of it in any further reports. Through a series of deletions it was completely excised from all program reports from 2002 onward. It was left up on a Web site. There was a lawsuit filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is an ExxonMobil-funded “denialist” group, demanding that the report be deleted from the Web. Myron Ebell of the institute said, Our goal is to make that report vanish.

Video: The Daily Show - Vice Capades, April 29, 2004