The Bush administration climate "policy" is a sham and an embarrassment. The number of abuses against science--and of power--that we've seen on this topic over the past six years is overwhelming.
Sometimes, though, one choice quote can capture it all far better than a laundry list of well-documented misbehaviors. A choice quote like, say, this one from a recent Rolling Stone expose on Bush and climate:
One e-mail exchange about the study underscores just how many industry foxes were guarding the climate henhouse. When Matthew Koch (a White House energy adviser who today lobbies for API) saw the study, he wrote to Cooney (the former API lobbyist who is now "corporate issues manager" for ExxonMobil) and CC'd O'Donovan (who now works for Shell Oil).
"What??!!" Koch wrote in mock disbelief at the study's claim that the planet isn't really heating up. "I want to grow oranges in the Arctic!"
Note to special interesty-type people who dismiss or deny global warming: When working in government, resist the urge to include what you really think in emails that will inevitably be retrieved later. It makes you look like....well, I'll let readers fill in that blank (provided they can avoid profanity).
- Log in to post comments
I can't help but feel that it is not simply an unwillingness to face the scientific consensus that is happening but a realization that the whole climate scenario actually opens up numerous business opportunities for the right companies.
Its not a conspiracy theory of why they are driving us towards global warming (we are all partly responsible for that one) but it may partly explain the reluctance to change tack.
Its not a question of a desire to grow oranges in the Arctic but the realization that more lucrative and immediate needs such as property for those displaced by flooding, higher insurance premiums and novel pharmaceuticals to cope with new pathogens await down the present path. The companies at the top of the financial food chain didn't get to where they are by ignoring potential opportunities like these.
I think the late Molly Ivins had the right idea:
It makes you look like you've been Bushwhacked.
Politicians as diverse as Al Gore and Newt Gingrich have repeatedly pointed out that there is money to be made by going green.
The problem is that the fossil fuel interests are faced with either diversifying into new businesses or losing, and they're not clever enough or mobile enough to get out of their present business.
I don't think the Rolling Stone article provides enough context to interpret the Koch quote. Was he mocking the idea that global warming will result in an expansion of the area in which humans will live? Was he mocking the consensus that AGW is real (to understand, recall that some denialists think those who worry about AGW want AGW to happen.) ? Those just two of many widely different possible interpretations. It's unwise to emphasize a comment which so poorly understood. It's like a soundbite, quote so short it contains almost no meaning of its own, encouraging people to fabricate (often unintentionally) meaning around it. I know, it's funny, and I agree that it can't be good for anyone's reputation, but we really don't know what he meant.
I suspect it was an off hand remark meant to humorously mock AGW alarmist rhetoric. It doesn't strike me as nefarious or conspiratorial.
Does it surprise you that Bush would staff his administration with people that share his skepticism on the subject?
The sadly cynical part of this is that the Bush Administration claims their GHG emissions policy has been working. How? It is a classic case of setting the bar low.
The goal, set in 2002, was a 18% reduction in GHG emissions "intensity", the emissions per $GDP, by 2010. Sounds nice, fewer emissions per dollar of income. The problem is that GDP has been increasing faster than emissions for years... in the US, it increased by 18% from 1990, the year country-level emissions were reported, to 2002, when the policy was set. So goal was business-as-usual.