Administration official edited climate reports extensively

No surprise there-old stuff mostly regarding Cooney...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/washingt...

Material Shows Weakening of Climate Reports

By ANDREW C. REVKIN and MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: March 20, 2007

WASHINGTON, March 19 — A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.

In a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the official, Philip A. Cooney, who left government in 2005, defended the changes he had made in government reports over several years. Mr. Cooney said the editing was part of the normal White House review process and reflected findings in a climate report written for President Bush by the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.

They were the first public statements on the issue by Mr. Cooney, the former chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Before joining the White House, he was the “climate team leader” for the American Petroleum Institute, the main industry lobby in Washington.

He was hired by Exxon Mobil after resigning in 2005 following reports on the editing in The New York Times. The White House said his resignation was not related to the disclosures.

Mr. Cooney said his past work opposing restrictions on heat-trapping gases for the oil industry had had no bearing on his actions once he joined the White House. “When I came to the White House,” he testified, “my sole loyalties were to the president and his administration.”

Mr. Cooney, who has no scientific background, said he had based his editing and recommendations on what he had seen in good faith as the “most authoritative and current views of the state of scientific knowledge.”

Mr. Cooney was staunchly defended by James L. Connaughton, the chairman of the environmental council and his former boss.


More at link....

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EDIT: COPYRIGHT. PLEASE POST ONLY
4 OR 5 PARAGRAPHS FROM THE
COPYRIGHTED NEWS SOURCE PER DU
RULES.

:kick: & :thumbsup:

Copyright restrictions and all of that - wouldn't want DU to get sued . . .

:hi:

Sorry about that. It was posted in haste...
:hi:

(as usual-unlike some others who contribute nothing to intelligent debate on DU)

It doesn't matter even if it is obvious that it is someone else's writing and its against DU rules.

Copyrights: Do not copy-and-paste entire articles onto this discussion forum. When referencing copyrighted work, post a short excerpt (not exceeding 4 paragraphs) with a link back to the original.

:eyes:

:shrug:
And seriously, the peppering of posts with "lol" and "lolololol", as is customary among 14 year-old Britney Spears fans I imagine, is really not helpful...

The editing period expired so I couldn't fix it. Hit 'n run posts are a bad idea :-/...
I emailed the mods.

:hi:

Here is the schedule, the times are approximate

http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/fullschedule.csp?timeid=212041064398


Here is Waxman's website, the video is not yet posted, but there are documents from the hearing.
http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1214

This was a very heated hearing, refer to the thread from this morning...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x446014

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/washington/20climatecnd.html


http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scientists-Warming.html

edit to add a 3rd link
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/washington/20climate.html?hp

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/washington/20climate.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Here is the proper link (which Demreadingdu has already posted above). Apologies for the crappy post. It was posted in a hurry :-/.

Also hopefully a mod will edit it as I requested.