Changing climate change

Friday, July 11, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s office appears to have spearheaded the Bush administration’s attacks on scientific work that counters its political positions.

In a letter made public Tuesday, a former Environmental Protection Agency official charged that Cheney’s office had tried to delete congressional testimony about the public health consequences of global warming. Jason K. Burnett, who was EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson’s senior adviser on climate change until last month, was responding to a congressional inquiry into the Bush administration’s actions to block scientific work.

Burnett said Cheney’s office worked last year to excise a significant portion of the congressional testimony that Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was to give about climate change and public health.

Burnett said the White House, at the urging of Cheney’s office, tried to enlist him in the effort to cut Gerberding’s testimony, but he refused. In the end, however, the White House deleted six of the original 14 pages of her testimony.

White House advisers had expressed concern about the accuracy of the science, but that was merely a smoke screen. Such testimony would have given support to efforts to regulate greenhouse gases.

The EPA has preliminarily found that carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is a threat to public health. The White House has literally refused to accept the finding in an attempt to stall potential regulation of carbon dioxide emissions. The White House has worked against such regulation because cutting emissions could cut into the bottom line of the administration’s political patrons, especially oil and coal companies.

Burnett also noted that this year, Cheney’s office unsuccessfully tried to change testimony prepared for Johnson that stated the obvious: Greenhouse emissions hurt the environment.

Although not surprising given its track record, it is still appalling that the Bush administration has denied the clear science of global warming and the public health dangers associated with it. Congress should press its investigation to determine whether there has been any influence peddling or other wrongdoing in the administration’s disgraceful actions.