Official White House policy documents on climate change were altered by a former oil-industry lobbyist to play down the link between greenhouse gases and global warming, it emerged yesterday.
Philip Cooney, the chief of staff for the White House council on environmental quality, altered several draft reports in 2002 and 2003, after they had been approved by government scientists, despite having no scientific background himself. Much of his editing made it into final versions of reports.
Many of the changes were very simple. For instance, in one case he added the words “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties. In another, he added the word “extremely” to the sentence: “The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult.”
White House sexed-down climate change report
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According to the Guardian, he had also ‘performed a similar role in his previous job for the American Petroleum Institute, a lobby group representing Exxon Mobil and other oil companies focused on countering the virtual concensus among scientists that man-made emissions are rapidly heating the planet’.
Strange how money talks – and in the meantime, our world is being destroyed…