The Role of Climate Change Deniers in the “Resignation” of Christine Whitman

[Time for change]

Christine Todd Whitman “resigned” as the administrator of the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) almost seven years ago. The incident remains as relevant today as ever because of what it tells us about how corporate funded climate change deniers continue to block action to ameliorate global warning, through massive propaganda and lobbying campaigns.


Christine Whitman’s EPA on climate change

In early 2002 the EPA came out with their “Climate Action Report 2002”. A subsection of the introduction of the report, titled “The Science”, began:

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing global mean surface air temperature and subsurface ocean temperature to rise…

Greenpeace summarized the gist of the report:

The report forecast major impacts on the continental United States as well as the submersion of barrier islands, and called for action to minimize the economic consequences of these events…

Andrew Revkin commented in the New York Times:

In a stark shift for the Bush administration, the United States has sent a climate report to the United Nations detailing specific and far-reaching effects that it says global warming will inflict on the American environment. In the report, the administration for the first time mostly blames human actions for recent global warming. It says the main culprit is the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But while the report says the United States will be substantially changed in the next few decades… "very likely" seeing the disruption of snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes, for example… it does not propose any major shift in the administration's policy on greenhouse gases.

Pressure by climate change deniers and Bush’s disavowal of his own EPA’s report

Though the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) claims to be an organization “whose research on public policy reflects the principles of free enterprise, individual liberty and limited government”, it is one of the premier climate change denial organizations in the world. Its major funding sources have included ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Dow Chemical, General Motors, and Richard Scaife.

In September 2003 Greenpeace uncovered an e-mail from Myron Ebell of the CEI that was very revealing with regard to the influence CEI exercised on the Bush administration. The e-mail, dated March 2002, was addressed to Phil Cooney, a senior official at the White House Council for Environmental Quality. It began: “Dear Phil, Thanks for calling and asking for our help”. The Greenpeace article describes Ebell’s memo to Phil Cooney:

He describes his plans to discredit an EPA study on climate change through a lawsuit. He states the need to "drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think that they are serving the president's interests by publishing this rubbish." He notes his group is considering a call for the then-head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, to resign, and openly suggests that she'd make an appropriate "fall gal" if the administration is serious about getting back into bed with conservatives opposing action on climate change.

This was followed in June 2002 by a letter to George W. Bush from the CEI and other climate change denying organizations expressing their concern over the EPA report:

In our view, Climate Action Report 2002 undermines your position on the Kyoto Protocol and damages efforts in the Congress to advance your energy policies and to oppose environmental policies that would implement Kyoto-style controls on energy use.

Apparently the report by George W. Bush’s own EPA came as somewhat of a surprise to him, and in any event the pressure put on him by the corporate funded climate change deniers had the desired effect:

It appeared to be a remarkable change in policy, espousing gloom and doom global warming scenarios that President Bush has studiously eschewed for years. Within 24 hours, though, Bush dismissed it as a "report put out by the bureaucracy," which it was, and "re-vowed" his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

The resignation of Christine Todd Whitman

On May 21, 2003, Christine Whitman announced her “resignation” as EPA Administrator. Though she cited personal reasons at the time, not many people believed that. But in a later interview with the Washington Post, Whitman was more forthright about her reasons:

It was (Vice President) Cheney's insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, that led Christine Todd Whitman to resign as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, she said in an interview that provides the most detailed account so far of her departure.

An overview of the strategy of corporate funded climate change deniers

The Union of Concerned Scientists released a report in 2007 that pointed out the many strong similarities between the climate change denial movement and the movement to portray cigarette smoking as safe. The report was titled “Smoke, Mirrors, & Hot Air – How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science”. From their Executive Summary:

In an effort to deceive the public about the reality of global warming, ExxonMobil has underwritten the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign since the tobacco industry misled the public about the scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease.

As this report documents, the two disinformation campaigns are strikingly similar. ExxonMobil has drawn upon the tactics and even some of the organizations and actors involved in the callous disinformation campaign the tobacco industry waged for 40 years. Like the tobacco industry, ExxonMobil has:

 Manufactured uncertainty by raising doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence.

 Adopted a strategy of information laundering by using seemingly independent front organizations to publicly further its desired message and thereby confuse the public.

 Promoted scientific spokespeople who misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific findings or cherry-pick facts in their attempts to persuade the media and the public that there is still serious debate among scientists that burning fossil fuels has contributed to global warming and that human-caused warming will have serious consequences.

 Attempted to shift the focus away from meaningful action on global warming with misleading charges about the need for “sound science.”

 Used its extraordinary access to the Bush administration to block federal policies and shape government communications on global warming.

The report documents that, despite the scientific consensus about the fundamental understanding that global warming is caused by carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping emissions, Exxon-Mobil has funneled about $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of ideological and advocacy organizations that manufacture uncertainty on the issue. Many of these organizations have an overlapping – sometimes identical – collection of spokespeople serving as staff, board members, and scientific advisors. By publishing and republishing the non-peer-reviewed works of a small group of scientific spokespeople, Exxon- Mobil-funded organizations have propped up and amplified work that has been discredited by reputable climate scientists.

Fallout

After doing what he could to blunt the impact of the EPA’s Climate Action Report 2002, Phil Cooney continued on in his role as corporate whore liaison to the Bush administration’ so-called Council on Environmental Quality. Susan George describes what became of him in her book, “Hijacking America – How the Religious and Secular Right Changed what Americans Think”:

He made hundreds of changes to various scientific documents, excising and softening them and adding weasel words like “potentially” or “might” where scientists saw certainty and direct human responsibility for climate change.

Eventually one of Cooney’s colleagues had seen enough and resigned over the Bush administration’s war against science:

In March, Rick Piltz, a former senior associate with the federal Climate Change Science Program, resigned from his job of 10 years… Mr. Piltz alleged in an interview that the government has "essentially suppressed the use of the most substantial scientific assessment undertaken by the program in its 15-year history." The administration was displeased with its findings, he alleged, so that the National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change compiled by hundreds of U.S. scientists was sent "into a black hole," playing no role in strategy planning or reports to Congress.

Cooney resigned under the spotlight of negative publicity and was hired a few days later by ExxonMobil.

I’ve said before that I’ve known of a number of otherwise progressive people who have fallen for this corporate funded misinformation. This is testament to the extraordinary effectiveness of the lavishly corporate funded climate change deniers. The advice I have for these people is: Before believing or quoting sources that disagree with the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, please try to ascertain who funded the source.

Al Gore summed up the issue of corporate funded climate change denial and the consequences of failure to adequately address climate change in his book, “Our Choice – A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis”:

In our generation, the decision by powerful ideologues and self-interested corporate advocates to convert questions of truth into questions of power has produced a lassitude in reaction to genuine, fact-based warnings of an onrushing tragedy with no parallel in all of history….

Were we not to take bold action, the worst impacts of the climate crisis would unfold over many generations… But we cannot wait for the full fury of the crisis in order to mobilize a response, because by then it would already be too late… By that point, the generation that finally realized that humans had been condemned to endless degradation of their prospects for the entirety of their lives and the lives of their children and their children’s children would be justified in looking backward at us in our time as a criminal generation that they would curse endlessly as the architects of humanity’s destruction.