mentor's blog

truth...redacted?

 abuse

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases, a former EPA official maintains.

Dick Cheney's office requested that testimony about climate change be cut, an ex-EPA official says.

When six pages were cut from testimony on climate change and public health by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October, the White House insisted the changes were made because of reservations raised by White House advisers about the accuracy of the science.

But Jason K. Burnett, until last month the senior adviser on climate change to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, says that Cheney's office was deeply involved in getting nearly half of the CDC's original draft testimony removed.

"The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) ... any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change," Burnett has told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The three-page letter, a response to an inquiry by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, the panel's chairwoman, was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press. Boxer planned a news conference later in the day.

Burnett, 31, a lifelong Democrat who resigned his post last month as associate deputy EPA administrator because of disagreements over the agency's response to climate change, describes deep political concerns at the White House, including in Cheney's office, about linking climate change directly to public health or damage to the environment.

Scientists believe manmade pollution is warming the earth and if the process is not reversed it will cause significant climate changes that pose broad public health problems from increases in disease to more injuries from severe weather.

Senate and House committees have been trying for months to get e-mail exchanges and other documents to determine the extent of political influence on government scientists, but have been rebuffed.

What are they so afraid of? It's well known that that this administration barely will acknowledge that "climate change" is an actual phenomenon, much less any ideas that human activity may play a role in the current changes we are seeing in the global climate. White House officials are ill-equipped to second guess experts in the climatology field. If the science is questionable, it will be proven so by better information and better science. The censorship of large segments of testimony in this matter just perpetuates the notion that the Bush administration has no interest in the truth (or the responsible pursuit of it) when the possible facts uncovered run counter to the current political and economic agendas of the administration.