Boston Globe
June 20, 2003

Bush Fries Climate Change

by Derrick Z. Jackson

UNDAUNTED BY accusations of cooking the books for war, President Bush
deep-fried the data on global warming.

The New York Times reported yesterday that the White House took a
draft report on the state of the environment by the Environmental
Protection Agency and deleted critical portions on climate change.
The White House knocked out references to studies that directly
mentioned industrial pollution and vehicle exhaust as contributors to
global warming.

The administration took out a phrase that said, ''Climate change has
global consequences for human health and the environment.'' It
replaced it with gobbledygook. The White House wrote, ''The
complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections among its
components make it a scientific challenge to document change,
diagnose its causes, and develop useful projections of how natural
variability and human actions may affect the global environment in
the future. Because of these complexities and the potentially
profound consequences of climate change and variability, climate
change has become a capstone scientific and societal issue for this
generation and the next, and perhaps even beyond.''

Bush is trying to fry climate change until the issue is seemingly so
tough to comprehend that Americans dismiss it. Two and a half years
into his presidency, this recipe has worked magnificently. In the
first few months of his presidency, Bush let EPA Administrator
Christine Todd Whitman tell the world that the United States took
seriously the carbon dioxide emissions that are such a major source
of global warming. But when Bush himself spoke, it was either to back
out of the Kyoto global agreement on climate change or reverse a
pledge to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Bush said he needed to wait
until he had ''sound science'' on the subject.

Over the months, evidence continued to mount in scientific journals
that global warming could have dramatic and potentially catastrophic
results for coastlines and cause a spread of disease. The evidence
was so overwhelming that the 2001 report by the National Research
Council that Bush himself commissioned said, ''Greenhouse gases are
accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities.''
The report later said, ''Global warming could well have serious
adverse societal and ecological impacts by the end of this century.''
The report warned that temperatures and sea levels will continue to
rise even under conservative scenarios. It also supported a full
assessment of global warming lest anything less ''may well
underestimate the magnitude of the eventual impacts.''

Since then Bush, with his campaign coffers lined with fossil fuel
energy interests and his administration bursting with oil
connections, has done his best to suppress the magnitude of the
possible impacts. Late in 2001 the council added a report that said
global warming may increase the chance of abrupt climate change,
changes that could place poor countries at particular risk.

Then, a year ago, Whitman sent a report to the United Nations that
reconfirmed that ''human activity'' is a real cause of the greenhouse
effect. While the first victims of global warming are assumed to be
poor people in low-lying countries, this report predicted a crazy
quilt of long-term disruptions and destruction of ecosystems
throughout the United States, from the drying up of ponds in the
Midwest to the disappearance of forests in the South to the death of
fish in the Pacific Northwest.

Bush crumpled all those reports and threw them into his political
incinerator. He embarrassed Whitman even more definitively, saying:
''I read the report put out by the bureaucracy.'' This was obviously
too much for Whitman to take. She recently announced her resignation
and is leaving her post next week. So giddy over having gotten rid of
the one person who showed at least minimal concern for the
environment, the White House now appears to be depending much more
upon so-called facts from organizations who have obvious reasons to
dismiss global warming, such as the American Petroleum Institute.

With the neutering of the EPA report, it should make one wonder. This
deletion of data on climate change should raise even more questions
as to whether Bush cooked the books for war. Bush is in the control
of oil interests in Washington. With the presence of our troops,
President Bush for practical purposes now controls the oil of Iraq.

America's lust for oil hangs so ominously around the invasion of Iraq
and in the denial of the impact of global warming that facts from
intelligence agencies and scientific journals have become
meaningless. One day, the dismissal of the facts will come back in a
disastrous way. Bush and the United States may have the oil now.
Meanwhile, the planet is cooking and frying.