The Environmental Protection Agency was all set to publish a detailed report on the current state of the environment. The document was written to provide a comprehensive look at the status of various environmental problems and what can be done to address them. All the EPA had to do was get the White House’s approval on the document.
As one might expect, the report included a thorough section on global warming with evidence of increasing temperatures, analysis on what has caused this change, and recommendations on what can be done about the problem.
Of course, the report doesn’t include this section anymore.
The White House was given a chance to “edit” the EPA report before its publication, and administration officials — surprise, surprise — decided to remove the global warming information.
“The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tail-pipe emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems,” the New York Times explained.
“Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year,” the article added. “White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion.”
In other places, text was rewritten to reflect the administration’s political beliefs. For example, an introductory sentence of the “Global Issues” section of the report initially said, “Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment.” The White House didn’t care for that, so they changed it to, “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.”
One version reflects the widely-accepted science of global warming and its impact on people. The White House version says the environment is “complex,” making it a “challenge” to determine if there’s a problem.
The fact that the Bush administration would go to these lengths to censor information on global warming doesn’t come as a big surprise. After all, Bush has had some trouble with this before.
During the 2000 campaign, for example, Bush promised to curb carbon dioxide emissions as part of a “four pollutant” environmental strategy. Just weeks into Bush’s term, the White House announced that the campaign promise had been made “in error.” In March 2001, Bush made it official by telling GOP lawmakers in Congress that his administration opposes mandatory limits on carbon dioxide, after having argued the exact opposite six months prior.
Just as troubling, however, is the administration’s approach to government documents that break with the White House’s political agenda.
Earlier this year, for example, a federal report called “Budget Information for States” showed that states were facing their most serious fiscal crises since WWII. The administration had a simple solution to the problem; they stopped publishing “Budget Information for States,” despite the fact that it was the primary source for comprehensive data on state funding from the federal government.
Similarly, on Christmas Eve 2002, when they hoped no one would be looking, the White House announced that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will no longer publish information about factory closings in the U.S. Apparently, the administration was embarrassed by the data showing higher unemployment and increased factory closings, so instead of implementing economic policies that produced more jobs, it stopped printing the unpleasant data.
The administration’s strategy appears to be simple: when a government document releases embarrassing data, stop publishing the document; when a government report makes claims that undermine Bush’s agenda, censor the report.
Isn’t there something vaguely Orwellian about the White House hiding information the administration doesn’t want the public to see?