We just WON’T comment on this since it truly speaks for itself:
Philip A. Cooney, the White House staff member who repeatedly revised government scientific reports on global warming, will go to work for ExxonMobil in the fall, the oil company said today.
Mr. Cooney resigned on Friday as chief of staff to President Bush’s environmental policy council, two days after documents obtained by The New York Times showed that he had edited the reports in ways that cast doubt on the link between greenhouse-gas emissions and rising temperatures.
A former lawyer and lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying group for the oil industry, Mr. Cooney has no scientific training.
The White House, which said Friday that there was no connection between last week’s disclosure and Mr. Cooney’s resignation, repeated today that Mr. Cooney’s actions were part of the normal review process for documents on environmental issues involving many government agencies….
And his new job duties?
An Exxon spokesman, Tom Cirigliano, declined to describe Mr. Cooney’s new job. Associates of Mr. Cooney said he planned to move to Dallas. Mr. Cooney did not return e-mail or phone messages.ExxonMobil has long financed advertising and lobbying efforts that question whether human-caused warming poses sufficiently serious risks to justify curbing carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by smokestacks and tailpipes.
Meanwhile, here’s the environmental quote of the year:
Some climate scientists and environmental campaigners said Mr. Cooney’s quick shift from the White House to Exxon was evidence of a near-seamless relationship between the Bush administration and the oil industry.
“Perhaps he won’t even notice he has changed jobs,” said David G. Hawkins, who directs the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private environmental group.
As we said: we won’t comment on THIS one. We’ll let our highly-eloquent readers (on the right and left) leave their comments in the comments section…..
UPDATE: Jack O’Toole notes that a certain quote cited above has since vanished from the Times story.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.