More on How Bush Found the Way to Continue Inaction on Emissions (with bonus Jon Stewart Video)

First, see Dorian de Wind’s piece ; it has a bearing on this.

Did you know that George W. Bush is still president?  It’s true.  And he’s still got plenty of ways to worsen things before his term is over, leaving us a country discredited in the eyes of our own allies, a more toxic and unstable environment, a military stretched to the breaking point, and an enormous deficit.

He merrily signed off at the G8 by saying his ‘"Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,’ knowing full well he was going to stave off any progress on climate change to the end of his term. Today’s Washington Post reports:

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce today that it will seek months of further public comment on the threat posed by global warming to human health and welfare — a matter that federal climate experts and international scientists have repeatedly said should be urgently addressed.

The Bush Administration discovered a great truth:  a bare-faced lie, however it may be discredited, is as good as the truth if you pretend you believe it and act on it anyway.  And if you don’t mind being called out as a liar, you can lie with complete impunity so long as there is no person with the authority (or the spine to wield it) to stop you. 

As they’ve done many times before, administration employees have selectively altered the agency’s findings to reach a conclusion that better reflects Bush’s wishes.

Check out today’s story in WaPo.  According to it, today’s EPA report —an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking —will override its own December 5 finding:

backed up by a lengthy scientific analysis — that global warming is unequivocal, that there is "compelling and robust" evidence that the emissions endanger public welfare and that the EPA administrator is "required by law" to act to protect Americans from future harm. (WaPo; emphasis added)

How could this happen? 

It happens because such a finding would trigger a number of measures that Bush doesn’t want triggered on his watch, according to — guess who — that malignant offshoot from the executive branch known as the Cheney Branch.  It’s true.  Look:

"They argued that this increase in regulation should be on the next president’s record," not Bush’s, said a participant in the lengthy interagency debate, referring principally to officials in the office of Vice President Cheney, on the White House Council on Environmental Quality, on the National Economic Council and in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).(WaPo).

In its unaltered form, the changes heralded by the findings in the report would have had substantial economic as well as environmental benefits.  Sadly, those changes would have also have done two things that Cheney isn’t going to let happen on his watch — I mean, Bush’s.

1. Trigger ’sweeping’ regulatory requirements under the Clean Air Act;
2. Cost utilities and automakers billions of dollars.

To read the details of how the first set of findings developed (’after resistance from the Cheney branch) after Bush’s order to the EPA to begin ‘the first steps’ toward regulation, see WaPo here.  (This is my favorite detail: ‘Some officials began carrying around copies of Bush’s executive order, waving it while arguing with senior political appointees.’(WaPo))   Read about Cheney’s energy adviser here.

WaPo conscientiously informs us that the full story of what it tactfully calls the ’sidetracking’ (as opposed to, say, the ‘hijacking’) of the original finding isn’t known.  Someone told an ‘EPA deputy associate administrator to withdraw the finding after it was emailed to Susan Dudley, head of the  OMB’s regulatory review office. (WaPo). But here’s a clue:

An official said the person involved was "more senior than the head of OMB," but declined to be more precise. (WaPo)

We do know, of course, that in April 2007, the Supreme Court (Massachusetts v. EPA)  told the EPA that it needed to get its thumb out and either determine whether greenhouse gases are a threat to humankind or explain why it couldn’t.(WaPo-07)  Or, as The Washington Post put it at the time, ‘[It] rebuked the Bush administration yesterday for refusing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, siding with environmentalists in the court’s first examination of the phenomenon of global warming.’

The court ruled 5 to 4 that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Clean Air Act by improperly declining to regulate new-vehicle emissions standards to control the pollutants that scientists say contribute to global warming….

"EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. The agency "identifies nothing suggesting that Congress meant to curtail EPA’s power to treat greenhouse gases as air pollutants," the opinion continued.  (WaPo-07)

According to today’s article, this made an impression on EPA officials.. 

After the court ruling, in Massachusetts et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency et al.,"people were bouncing back and forth into each other’s offices, saying, ‘Can you believe this? Look at this decision; look at the language; this is so strong,’ " recalled one agency official, who like the others asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. "People thought, ‘We are going to move forward and do the right thing.’ "(WaPo; emphasis added)

Right.  The White House simply did what any sulky child does when it’s been ‘rebuked’ and told to do what it doesn’t want to do:  dragged its feet by…

….editing its officials’ congressional testimony, refusing to read documents prepared by career employees and approved by top appointees, requesting changes in computer models to lower estimates of the benefits of curbing carbon dioxide, and pushing narrowly drafted legislation on fuel-economy standards that officials said was meant to sap public interest in wider regulatory action.(WaPo).

Jon Stewart in this video — ‘be patient; this gets amazing!’ — explains one technique that was apparently used to good effect.  Via The Washington Post:

By late November, [EPA Administrator Stephen L.]  Johnson  had held a meeting with his staff at which he advocated finding a danger to public welfare and praised the agency’s technical supporting document as "excellent." But when [Deputy Associate Administrator Jason] Burnett sent the proposal to the White House, the OMB staff refused to open it, and it sat in limbo for months.(WaPo; links added)

EPA officials, speaking anonymously, say that the Bush administration — as it has before, with other officials — pressured them to make findings that would reflect the Bush administration’s wishes.  This aspect of the Bush administration — the willingness of its minions and gremlins to support the distortion of fact — is something I still can’t get my head around.  We all know it’s happened before — and I’m not even thinking of the Iraq war.  Remember when Surgeon General (2002-2006) Dr. Richard Camorna resigned?  Remember him claiming he’d been ‘muzzled‘ and the examples he gave of exactly how?

WaPo concedes that the full story of how Bush’s environmental regulations got ’sidetracked’ isn’t known.  Of course it isn’t. The full story of how the Bush administration managed to bury information that would have proved it was doing what everyone knows it was doing won’t emerge till Bush is out of the White House and officials feel free to accept those book deals.

Here, according to The Washington Post,  are some of the distortions that the Bush administration foisted on the public by having its appointees change information in the reports:

EPA determined that global benefits of reducing carbon are worth $40 per ton, but the report will state that this isn’t an official estimate.  And their supporting evidence will be omitted.

‘Dozens’ of pages on ‘cost-effective’ ways to reduce greenhouse gases have been cut out.

The benefits of tighter-fuel economy standards (originally estimated to be $2 trillion) have been recalculated based on the assumption that gas in the future will cost $58 per barrel instead of, say, $140, reducing the benefits to between $340 and $830 billion.

Edward Markey (D), Chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming got off a good one: 

"If this administration spent the same effort fighting global warming as they do editing and censoring global warming documents, the planet might not be in such dire straits."(WaPo).

Markey, who is naturally quite frustrated, says his staff was apparently allowed to see a copy of the EPA’s  Dec. 5 finding, but not to keep a copy. (WaPo).Well, naturally.  There are rules about these things — we don’t want unofficial findings circulating around out there.

So there it is:  the Bush Administration finds the way to keep on doing nothing till Bush’s term is over, at least with respect to climate change.

Or — maybe he’s right!   As I often say, just because someone habitually lies doesn’t guarantee that they sometimes won’t tell the truth.  That’s the hell of the Bush Administration — you can be fairly sure that Bush and his cronies will lie, but you can’t be 100% sure with respect to any particular fact.  Maybe the EPA’s first findings were really highly questionable —oh, never mind the scientists — and Bush is just showing laudable caution here.

But would you like to bet the planet on it?

Recommended: 

• Note to Bush:  Don’t Brag About U.S. Pollution
• Climate Progress

CROSS-POSTED AT BUCK NAKED POLITICS