Tactics used by Oil Companies and Lobbyists to Prevent Action Combating Global Warming

By Sharon Begley
Newsweek

Aug. 13, 2007 issue - Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate's Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with "the overwhelming science out there, the deniers' days were numbered." As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. "I realized," says Boxer, "there was a movement behind this that just wasn't giving up."

White House breaks climate rules

A federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., this week ruled
that the Bush administration violated a 1990 law that requires it to
publish the nation's climate change research agenda as well as periodic
updates on the projected health and economic impacts of global warming.
Judge Saundra Armstrong dismissed the administration's claim that it
had the flexibility to decide when and how to issue the reports, and
set new deadlines of March 1 for the White House to issue the research
plan (already a year late) and May 31 for the impact assessment,
currently overdue by three years. (Center for Biological Diversity)

Bush and the Global Warming Case

Court Rules Against Bush Administration in Global Warming Case:

Federal Judge Orders Production of Suppressed

Scientific Reports on Global Warming Impacts

OAKLAND, Calif.–The Bush administration was rebuked today by a federal judge for suppressing scientific reports on the impacts of global warming on the United States. In response to a lawsuit brought last year by conservation organizations, Federal District Court Judge Saundra Armstrong issued an order finding the Bush administration in violation of the Global Change Research Act of 1990 for failing to produce an updated Research Plan and a National Assessment as required by the statute.
“This administration has denied and suppressed the science of global warming at every turn,” said Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the attorneys arguing the case. “Today’s ruling is a stern rebuke of the administration’s head-in-the-sand approach to global warming.”

The Research Plan and National Assessment required by the Global Change Research Act are intended to be the preeminent documents guiding federal research and policy-making on issues related to global warming. The Research Plan guides all federal climate research, while the National Assessment serves to provide an understandable summary of global warming impacts on the environment, economy, human health and human safety of the United States and is to by used by Congress and federal agencies in setting policy and responding to global warming.
The last National Assessment was issued in late 2000 under the Clinton administration. Its use and dissemination was suppressed by the Bush administration, and the required update in 2004 was never produced. The Research Plan was required by law to be updated in 2006 but also has never been produced.

The Court ordered the Bush administration to issue the draft overdue Research Plan by March 1, 2008, with a final 90 days thereafter, and the National Assessment by May 31, 2008.

“Knowledge is the key to effective action,” said Danielle Fugere, global warming program director for Friends of the Earth. “Congress knew this when it required the best minds in our government to conduct a National Assessment documenting the impacts of global warming on the U.S. Today’s ruling will help make that information available.”

In April 2005, at the request of Senators John Kerry and John McCain, the U.S. Government Accountability Office investigated the Bush administration’s failure to produce a 2004 National Assessment. It concluded that 1) the administration “did not submit a scientific assessment in November 2004, 4 years after the previous assessment, as required by the [Global Change Research] act,” 2) the administration expressly refuses to complete a single National Assessment, and 3) the White House’s piecemeal approach lacks an “explicit plan or…assessing the effects of global change on the eight areas enumerated in the act: the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity. “From muzzling NASA’s top climate scientist to political cronies in the White House editing climate science reports, the Bush administration has repeatedly tried to obscure and deny the science, while attempting to run out the clock on his administration,” said John Coequyt, energy policy analyst with Greenpeace.

Scientific research continues to indicate that rapid global warming from human production of greenhouse gases threatens every aspect of society, from our economy and public health to water availability and biological diversity. Recent scientific literature documents the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets at a rate faster than predicted. There is also evidence that the Arctic permafrost is beginning to melt, which will result in massive emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane. Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s leading
climate scientist, has warned that just 10 more years on current greenhouse gas emissions trajectories will commit the world to large-scale, disastrous climate impacts.

Today’s court ruling comes in the case Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace, Inc. v. Brennan, et al.,
(Case No. 06-CV-7062 (SBA) (N.D. Cal.)). Senator Kerry and Congressman Jay Inslee filed an amicus brief and moved to intervene in support of plaintiffs in the case.