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The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration To Deny Global
Warming

TIM DICKINSON
Posted Jun 20, 2007 12:49 PM

>>View our slide show, "Inside the Bush Administration’s Denial Campaign
Against Climate Change," _here_
(http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/index.php/2007/06/21/slide-show-ins\
ide-the-bush-administrations-denial-campaign-aga
inst-climate-change/) .
>>> This article is from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on news stands
until June 29th
"That's a big no. The president believes . . . that it should be the goal of
policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life
is a blessed one."
- Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary responding in May 2001 to
whether Bush would ask Americans to curb their first-in-the-world energy
consumption
Earlier this year, the world's top climate scientists released a definitive
report on global warming. It is now "unequivocal," they concluded, that the
planet is heating up. Humans are directly responsible for the planetary heat
wave, and only by taking immediate action can the world avert a climate
catastrophe. Megadroughts, raging wildfires, decimated forests, dengue fever,
legions of Katrinas - unless humans act now to curb our climate-warming
pollution,
warned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "we are in deep
trouble."
You would think, in the wake of such stark and conclusive findings, that the
White House would at least offer some small gesture to signal its concern
about the impending crisis. It's not every day, after all, that the leading
scientists from 120 nations come together and agree that the entire planet is
about to go to hell. But the Bush administration has never felt bound by the
reality-based nature of science - especially when it comes from international
experts. So after the report became public in February, Vice President Dick
Cheney took to the airwaves to offer his own, competing assessment of global
warming.
"We're going to see a big debate on it going forward," Cheney told ABC News,
about "the extent to which it is part of a normal cycle versus the extent to
which it's caused by man." What we know today, he added, is "not enough to
just sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that's going to
'solve' the problem."
Even former White House insiders were shocked by the vice president's
see-no-evil performance. "I don't see how he can say that with a straight face
anymore," Christine Todd Whitman, who clashed privately with Cheney over climate
policy during her tenure as the administration's first chief of the
Environmental Protection Agency, tells Rolling Stone. "The consequences of
climate
change are very real and very negative, but Cheney is not convinced of that. He
believes - not quite as much as Senator James Inhofe, that this is a 'hoax' -
but that the Earth has been changing since it was formed and to say that
climate change is caused by humans is incorrect."
Cheney's statements were the latest move in the Bush administration's ongoing
strategy to block federal action on global warming. It is no secret that
industry-connected appointees within the White House have worked actively to
distort the findings of federal climate scientists, playing down the threat of
climate change. But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those
distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a
policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council
on
Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove. An
examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House
has been
forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as
interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration scientists
and
climate-policy officials - confirms that the White House has implemented an
industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the
American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate
polluters.
"They've got a political clientele that does not want to be regulated," says
Rick Piltz, a former Bush climate official who blew the whistle on White
House censorship of global-warming documents in 2005. "Any honest discussion of
the science would stimulate public pressure for a stronger policy. They're not
stupid."
Bush's do-nothing policy on global warming began almost as soon as he took
office. By pursuing a carefully orchestrated policy of delay, the White House
has blocked even the most modest reforms and replaced them with token
investments in futuristic solutions like hydrogen cars. "It's a charade," says
Jeremy Symons, who represented the EPA on Cheney's energy task force, the
industry-studded group that met in secret to craft the administration's energy
policy. "They have a single-minded determination to do nothing - while making it
look like they are doing something."
It's now almost impossible to fathom that back in 2000, after then-candidate
Bush vowed to place caps on carbon pollution, top climate scientists
believed he was just the man to take action on global warming. "It looked like
we
could finally get beyond the fray that had consumed the Clinton
administration," recalls James McCarthy, a Harvard climate scientist who
co-chaired the
previous report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
gaveled down the very day Bush was inaugurated in 2001.
Even at that point, the science was in. The U.N. panel linked "most of the
warming observed over the last fifty years" to "human activities." That
judgment aligned with the National Assessment on climate change, a landmark
federal
report commissioned by Bush's father in 1990 and completed just before Bush
was elected in 2000. The assessment projected dire impacts from global warming
- from the extinction of maple trees in New England to a catastrophic loss
of snowpack in California. "If we do nothing," McCarthy says, "the lack of
water in California will force a mass exodus."
But those who were expecting a Nixon-to-China moment from Bush on climate
weren't counting on the influence of the vice president and his industrial
patrons. In March 2001, Whitman traveled to Italy for climate talks with
European
allies. She affirmed Bush's commitment to regulating greenhouse gases - a
position she had vetted with Condoleezza Rice and Chief of Staff Andy Card. But
what Whitman didn't grasp was that when it came to climate, the president
was largely irrelevant.
Whitman should have had her doubts. Prior to joining the Cabinet, she sought
personal assurance from Bush that the EPA would be able to call its own shots
without deferring to the CEQ - the Council on Environmental Quality, a
policy arm of the White House. As Whitman recalls it, Bush made no effort to
mask
his bureaucratic ignorance. "What's CEQ?" he asked blankly.
Cheney took full advantage of the president's cluelessness, bringing the CEQ
into his own portfolio. "The environment and energy issues were really turned
over to him from the beginning," Whitman says. The CEQ became Cheney's
shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots. To head up the council, Cheney
installed James Connaughton, a former lobbyist for industrial polluters, who
once
worked to help General Electric and ARCO skirt responsibility for their
Superfund waste sites.
Industry swiftly took advantage of its new friend in the White House. In a
fax sent to the CEQ on February 6th, 2001 - two weeks after Bush took office -
ExxonMobil's top lobbyist, Randy Randol, demanded a housecleaning of the
scientists in charge of studying global warming. Exxon urged CEQ to dump Robert
Watson, who chaired the IPCC, along with Rosina Bierbaum and Mike MacCracken,
who had coordinated the National Assessment.
Exxon's wish was the CEQ's command. According to an internal e-mail obtained
by Rolling Stone, Connaughton's first order of business - even before his
nomination was made public - was to write his White House colleagues-to-be from
his law firm of Sidley & Austin. He echoed Exxon's call that Bierbaum, the
acting director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, be "dealt." In
the end, each of the scientists on Exxon's hit list was replaced. "It was
clear there was a strong lobby and activity against me by some in the energy
industry - especially ExxonMobil," says Watson.
A month after Exxon's fax, Whitman got her first sign that the EPA was no
longer in charge of climate policy. "When I made the statement in Italy that
something might happen on CO2," she says, "the utility industry got really
engaged, and all of that caused a rethink." In a move Cheney is suspected of
engineering, conservative senators Jesse Helms, Chuck Hagel and Larry Craig
wrote
the White House on March 6th seeking a "clarification" of the president's
policy.
Two days later, the climate "rethink" was laid out in a memo by a team of
advisers loyal to Cheney - two of whom, Andrew Lundquist and Karen Knutson,
would go on to lead the vice president's energy task force. The memo - provided
to Rolling Stone by a former administration official - concluded that Bush's
campaign promise to regulate CO2 "did not fully reflect the president's
position" and that "it would be premature at this time to propose any specific
policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming." The authors dismissed
both the IPCC and the National Assessment, writing that "the current state of
scientific knowledge about causes of and solutions to global warming is
inconclusive and . . . must await further scientific inquiry."
When Whitman heard that Bush was wavering on warming, she "broke through the
palace guard," as the president had urged her to do, and marched into the
Oval Office. "I wanted to tell him that there were ways to call for a cap on
carbon that wouldn't hamstring the economy," she says, "and that it was vitally
important we not be seen as ignoring the issue of climate change." But before
Whitman could even present her case, the president cut her off. "It was
clear the decision had already been made," she says.
As a dumbstruck Whitman walked out of the Oval Office, she bumped into the
true Decider. There was Cheney, collecting the envelope from a secretary that
contained Bush's "clarification" on climate-warming pollution - which he was
on his way to deliver, in person, to his allies in the Senate.
Although the letter was signed by the president, it bore Cheney's
unmistakable stamp. Quoting the language of the vice president's energy
staffers almost
verbatim, it not only reversed Bush's promise to regulate CO2, it also made
a sweeping new declaration: that carbon dioxide "is not a 'pollutant' under
the Clean Air Act." (The administration would cling to this untenable position
for six years, until the Supreme Court ruled in April that federal law
compels the EPA to take regulatory action on climate pollution.)
The letter concluded with a hint of things to come: "I look forward to
working with you and others to address global climate change issues in the
context
of a national energy policy." Bush's about-face on planet-warming pollution
thus enabled Cheney to take control of the White House's energy policy and to
work with industry behind closed doors to craft a polluter-friendly approach
to global warming. "By having control of the energy plan, the vice president
also had the reins on the climate policy," says Symons, who sat in on
Cheney's energy task force. "The ideology is simple: You don't put limits on
greenhouse-gas pollution, because that might put limits on coal and oil - and
that
would hurt industry's performance. Everything else flowed from that."
As he shaped climate policy, Cheney took his cues from the Global Climate
Coalition, an alliance of anti-Kyoto polluters that included the top lobbying
arms of the oil and coal industries. In June 2001, the administration
dispatched Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of state for global affairs, to
address the GCC at the headquarters of the American Petroleum Institute. In her
speech, Dobriansky was glad to give the industry crowd credit for the
president's decision to withdraw from the international treaty designed to slow
climate
change. Her talking points from that day read, "POTUS rejected Kyoto, in
part, based on input from you."
Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act also reveal that
Dobriansky had received a copy of the GCC's "21st Century Climate Action
Agenda," a game plan crafted by polluting industries that calls for "a new
approach
to climate policy" focusing on "voluntary actions" rather than mandatory
limits on greenhouse gases. On February 14th, 2002, Bush gave a speech at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that laid out his policy on
global warming for the first time. The speech was a Valentine's Day gift to
polluters, officially enshrining the GCC's agenda, almost point for point, as
the
White House's climate policy. Under the plan, planet-warming pollution would
actually increase by thirty-four percent by 2030. Bush vaguely promised to
cut the "intensity" of carbon emissions by eighteen percent over the next ten
years - neglecting to mention that the nation was already on track for a
fourteen percent reduction. He touted $700 million in new funding for
technologies
that might someday reduce emissions - money that government auditors were
later unable to find any trace of. And he promised that the entire plan would
be thoroughly reviewed and re-evaluated - in 2012, four years after he left
office.
The National Academy of Sciences blasted the policy, saying it lacked a
"guiding vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring
progress." Even the technology promoted in the president's plan was bogus. "It's
as if these people were not cognizant of the existing science," one member
of the academy remarked. "Stuff that would have been cutting-edge in 1980 is
listed as a priority for the future."
In his Valentine's Day speech, Bush gave credit to the man who Cheney had
placed in charge of crafting the nation's climate policy to suit the needs of
big polluters. "I want to thank Jim Connaughton, who is the chairman of the
Council on Environmental Quality," Bush declared. "He's done a fabulous job of
putting this policy together."
Connaughton's mission at the CEQ was to make sure climate regulations never
got in the way of energy development. A Yale-educated lawyer, Connaughton
comes across like a slightly caffeinated Ron Howard, with a manic energy and a
balding pate of wispy red hair. As head of the CEQ, he put a green spin on
polluter-friendly measures: Lowering air quality became the "Clear Skies
Initiative," while allowing timber companies to step up their clear-cutting was
dubbed the "Healthy Forests Initiative."
To direct the White House's spin on global warming, Connaughton appointed
Philip Cooney as his top deputy. Cooney had the right experience for the job: He
worked as "climate team leader" for the American Petroleum Institute. In
1998, the API took part in an industry coalition that created the "Global
Climate Science Communications Action Plan." The plan, recently entered into
evidence by the House Oversight Committee, maps out an elaborate disinformation
campaign to prevent "precipitous action on climate change." The strategy was to
sow doubt about global warming, disseminating industry-funded research to
challenge "the science underpinning the global climate change theory."
Now, with Cooney in the White House, the industry had its own anti-climate
man running the disinformation campaign. As the "action plan" directed, Cooney
set out to censor the EPA's science on global warming and inject the
industry's denialist positions into government documents. "They decided they
didn't
need to win the debate on climate," says Piltz, the former official who
exposed Cooney's tactics. "They just had to leave an atmosphere of uncertainty
about it and dissipate the will for political action."
But for all his credentials as a master of spin, Cooney got off to a rough
start. In May 2002, the administration released its Climate Action Report, a
dispatch to the U.N. that documents progress on climate-treaty obligations. The
report was developed by the EPA, but internal documents reveal that Cooney
edited it to reflect positions advocated by the API and Ford. On the opening
page of the chapter on climate impacts, Cooney inserted a litany of language
in bold intended to cast doubt on the science: "the weakest links in our
knowledge . . . a lack of understanding . . . uncertainties . . . considerable
uncertainty . . . perhaps even greater uncertainty . . . regarded as
tentative."
But the clumsy caveats weren't enough to obscure the report's real science.
With the help of an EPA source, The New York Times filtered out Cooney's
waffling and filed a front-page story that called the report "a stark shift for
the Bush administration." The report, the Times observed, detailed
"far-reaching effects that global warming will inflict" and "for the first time
mostly
blames human actions for recent global warming."
Cooney was horrified: An obscure government report he had tried to whitewash
now threatened to undermine his former employers in the energy industry.
Panicked, he called on an old friend for help. Myron Ebell had been a key member
of the coalition that crafted the disinformation "action plan." In fact,
casting doubt on global warming is Ebell's full-time job: He heads the
climate-denial campaign at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank
that was
underwritten in part by ExxonMobil.
Ebell recalls that Cooney was frantic over the story in the Times. "We tried
to put some qualifiers on that chapter in the report," Cooney told him.
"We'd take the text from EPA, and then we'd add a sentence like, 'We don't
really
know if this is really happening.' So we tried to do it, but I can see now
that we made a total mess of it."
Ebell's advice to Cooney is contained in a e-mail dated June 3rd, 2002.
"Thanks for asking for our help," he wrote. "I know you're in crisis mode. . . .
I want to help you cool things down, but after consulting with the team, I
think that what we can do is limited until there is an official statement from
the administration repudiating the report."
That repudiation came the very next day. President Bush himself dismissed the
report, saying it had been "put out by the bureaucracy." Forget the
headlines, he said - there was no shift in the administration's policy.
What happened next, according to internal e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone,
reveals just how seriously the White House took its intelligence fixing on
global warming. Cooney was put in charge of damage control and was apparently
instructed to craft a letter to the Times denying that the president had
changed course on climate change. But this time, Cooney's editor was not just
Connaughton, but Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove. The collaboration
with Rove raises questions about Cooney's congressional testimony last March,
in which he insisted, under oath, that he had not discussed with Rove his work
at the CEQ.
The letter drafted by Cooney - and vetted by Rove - insists that the Climate
Action Report "reinforces" the "significant scientific uncertainties"
emphasized in the president's climate policy. Edits to the rough drafts of the
letter were blacked out by White House censors, but Rove's pithy endorsement of
the final draft survived. "Great," he wrote in praise of Cooney's spin.
"Defends the report rather than staying focused on the policy." In other words,
Cooney had succeeded in emphasizing the report's overhyped uncertainties, thus
shifting attention away from the White House's do-nothing approach to global
warming.
At the same time, Cooney got a pat on the back from Bill O'Keefe, his old
boss at API. In a letter to Bush's chief of staff, O'Keefe - by that point a
registered lobbyist for ExxonMobil - urged the president to tighten up the White
House spin machine and make sure all communications were "on the same page,
with the same message." O'Keefe also faxed a copy to Cooney with a
handwritten note reading, "P.S. You are doing a great job."
From then on, Cooney wielded a heavier pen when editing official reports on
global warming. Not content to obscure science with uncertainty, he began to
rewrite the science itself. Draft documents made public by the House Oversight
Committee reveal that Cooney now had veto power over federal scientists,
including Richard Moss, coordinator of the Climate Change Science Program
Office, and even James Mahoney, the assistant commerce secretary nominally in
charge of America's climate science.
In one document, Moss and Mahoney attempted to push back on several of
Cooney's more than 100 edits to an EPA document called "Our Changing Planet" -
each of which served to amplify uncertainty and downplay the threat posed by
global warming. Cooney repeatedly overruled Moss and Mahoney with an aggressive
"no" scrawled in the margins. On another document Cooney marked up, he
commanded EPA officials that "these changes must be made." Beside one
strike-through
marked with a star, Cooney wrote, "Red Flag: Do not cite National
Assessment" - dismissing the landmark report commissioned by Bush's father.
Although some of Cooney's edits were revealed in a New York Times story in
June 2005 that led to his departure, the full extent of his interference has
never been reported. His commissarial coup came in April 2003, with his
revisions to the EPA's Draft Report on the Environment. He began by deleting
the
sentence "climate change has global consequences for human health and the
environment." He then deleted the top-line assessment by the National Research
Council, which establishes an unequivocal cause-and-effect link - "Greenhouse
gases are accumulating in the atmosphere as the result of human activities,
causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." In
its place, Cooney wrote the following mishmash of his own creation: "Some
activities emit greenhouse gases and other substances that directly or
indirectly may affect the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation, thereby
potentially affecting climate on regional and global scales."
The changes sparked a rebellion by the EPA's senior scientists. In an
internal memo uncovered by Congressional investigators, they wrote that Cooney's
edited text "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate
change" and "may leave an impression that cooling is as much an issue as
warming." Whitman was also furious. "The language that CEQ found acceptable was
such pablum," she says now. "It was so much below the level of sophistication of
the report that I felt it would have denigrated it all." But her solution to
this problem was to simply delete the section on climate change - handing
Cooney a carte-blanche victory.
Whitman says she killed the section hoping that scientific documents included
with the report would speak for themselves. But the capitulation helped
drive her to the breaking point. Four days after bowing to Cooney, she resigned
as head of the EPA.
Internal documents uncovered by Rolling Stone reveal that Cooney did far
more than edit scientific reports to suit the administration's point of view.
Just as neoconservative hawk Douglas Feith funneled false intelligence on
Iraq's weapons programs to the vice president, Cooney steered
industry-sponsored
junk science on global warming to Cheney. "What disturbed me most," Whitman
says, "was the administration's record of taking the most extreme of the
science - what I call the 'political science' - and giving it the same weight
as
the real science."
The most egregious example of cooked intelligence was a study underwritten in
part by the API, Cooney's former employer. The study, which purported to
show that the twentieth century was not unusually warm, was authored by two
astrophysicists, both of whom were on the payroll of the George C. Marshall
Institute, a climate-denial group funded by ExxonMobil and now headed by Bill
O'Keefe, Cooney's former boss. The paper's publication in a minor German journal
in January 2003 quickly created a scandal, with the editor in chief and three
other editors resigning in shame after acknowledging that the paper was
fundamentally flawed and should never have been published.
"It was sham science," says McCarthy, the Harvard scientist. "It's almost
laughable, except that this study was held up by the administration as a
definitive refutation of the temperature record."
But even as the paper was being discredited, it was causing great excitement
in the White House. When Kathie Olsen of the Office of Science and Technology
Policy forwarded the study to Cooney, he responded with an enthusiastic,
"Thanks, Kathie!" Six minutes later, according to internal e-mails, the study
was in the hands of Kevin O'Donovan, who served as Cheney's point man on
climate. The study also grabbed President Bush's attention, as revealed in an
e-mail sent two days later to a high-ranking White House official: "Bob - if you
din't [sic] already have, this is the study the President was talking about."
The study gave Cheney's office the quasi-plausible refutation of climate
science it was waiting for. According to a memo reviewed by congressional
investigators, but which the CEQ refused to make public, Cooney was eager to
promote the sham science. The study, he e-mailed O'Donovan, "represents an
opening
to potentially reinvigorate debate on the actual climate history of the past
1,000 years." The paper, he added, "contradicts the dogmatic view held by
many in the climate science community that the past century was the warmest in
the past millennium. . . . We plan to begin to refer to this study in
administration communications on the science of global climate change."
One e-mail exchange about the study underscores just how many industry foxes
were guarding the climate henhouse. When Matthew Koch (a White House energy
adviser who today lobbies for API) saw the study, he wrote to Cooney (the
former API lobbyist who is now "corporate issues manager" for ExxonMobil) and
CC'd O'Donovan (who now works for Shell Oil).
"What??!!" Koch wrote in mock disbelief at the study's claim that the planet
isn't really heating up. "I want to grow oranges in the Arctic!"
Such joking aside, the administration continues to hold up the discredited
study as a counterweight to the IPCC's scientific, peer-reviewed findings on
global warming. Testifying before the House Oversight Committee in March,
Connaughton lauded the study as a "new and major piece of science." His only
regret, he said, is that "I'm not a scientist, so I can't find it conclusive."
Although Cooney resigned in 2005, the campaign of disinformation he
implemented had the desired effect. Two months after Cooney returned to work
for
ExxonMobil, the Cheney energy plan was passed into law. A massive giveaway for
the fossil-fuel industry, the Energy Policy Act authorized $6 billion in
subsidies for oil and gas production and another $9 billion for coal producers.
Worst of all, the bill fast-tracked the construction of coal-fired power plants
that would hasten global warming.
Nor did Cooney's return to the oil industry spell an end to the
administration's meddling in climate science. Less than a month later, before
the G8
summit on climate change, the administration killed the opening line of the
eight-country report - "Our world is warming" - and quashed a section that
cited
"increasingly compelling evidence of climate change." Last month, in
negotiations leading up to the newest round of G8 talks, the administration
blocked
another motion that "resolute action is urgently needed in order to reduce
global greenhouse gas emissions."
"It's the ideological bent of the current administration," says McCarthy.
"They seem absolutely resistant to any call to action, no matter what the
science says."
Indeed, the campaign to sow doubts about climate change has grown more
aggressive in recent years. No longer is the administration simply censoring
scientific reports - it has moved to silence the scientists themselves. In the
wake of Hurricane Katrina, the administration refused to allow a top federal
scientist whose research links increased hurricane intensity to global warming
to speak to the press. It sent out a gag order to top government polar
scientists, demanding that anyone attending international scientific conventions
agree not to speak to reporters about "climate change, polar bears and sea ice."
And it ordered a former intern from the Bush-Cheney campaign in the NASA
press office to prevent Dr. James Hansen, the godfather of global-warming
science, from talking to the media.
"Interference with communication of science to the public has been greater
during the current administration than at any time in my career," Hansen
testified before Congress in March, suggesting that NASA's press office had
become
an "office of propaganda." This month, when news leaked that the Pentagon
plans to kill a satellite program critical to monitoring the Earth's climate,
NASA's scientists issued a confidential memo warning that the move "places the
overall climate program in serious jeopardy."
In many ways, the administration's refusal to budge on global warming mirrors
its intransigence on Iraq. No matter how bad the reports from the field get,
Bush appears determined to stay the course. "Never once - not a single time
- have they revisited the decision to not do anything serious about global
warming," says Symons, who sat in on Cheney's task force. "They say it's more
'serious' now than they did earlier on. But the president has never said,
'Let's start over and come up with a real plan.' "
Even when Bush proposes what looks like a plan, it's designed to stall real
progress on global warming. In May, America's allies in the G8 unveiled an
ambitious proposal: Member nations would cut planet-warming pollution in half by
2050, accepting mandatory caps on carbon emissions. But the administration
flatly rejected the plan, which it called "fundamentally incompatible with the
president's approach to climate change."
Instead, at the G8 summit on June 6th, Bush pushed what he touted as his "new
initiative" for combating climate change. For the first time, the president
acknowledged that "long-term goals for reducing greenhouse gases" are needed.
But his solution, in essence, is to take his do-nothing strategy global,
turning our allies into a Coalition of the Warming. Under his proposal,
mandatory caps on emissions would be replaced with "aspirational goals" to be
met
through voluntary cuts and futuristic technology. Countries would work
independently for the next "ten to twenty years" to develop strategies to
"improve
energy security, reduce air pollution and also reduce greenhouse gases" -
apparently in that order.
And when will the United States and other polluting nations be expected to
meet the nonbinding targets they set for themselves under Bush's plan? Not
until as late as 2075 - well past the point that global warming will have
superheated the planet.
>> This article is from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on news stands
until June 29th
>>View our slide show, "Inside the Bush Administration’s Denial Campaign
Against Climate Change," _here_
(http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/index.php/2007/06/21/slide-show-ins\
ide-the-bush-administrations-denial-campaign-aga
inst-climate-change/) .




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