Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (23 page)

In the land of happy endings, immediately after Revkin reported the illicit edits, Cooney submitted his resignation, purportedly to spend more time with his family, and within a week took up full-time employment with ExxonMobil.

The White House continued pursuing its editorial policy the following year, slashing by more than 50 percent the testimony that Centers for Disease Control director Julie Gerberding was permitted to give to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. In response to White House demands for an advance copy, Gerberding had submitted a draft of her testimony to the White House before appearing at the committee hearing in October 2007. As reported at the time by MSNBC, “White House press secretary Dana Perino said the prepared testimony went through an interagency review process and the Office of Science and Technology Policy did not believe that the science in the testimony matched the science that was in a report by the International Panel on Climate Change . . . [Perino said of the report] ‘It was not watered down in terms of its science. It wasn’t watered down in terms of the concerns that climate change raises for public health.’”

But when Kevin Grandia at the DeSmogBlog obtained a full text of the proposed testimony, it became clear that the White House had slashed the testimony in half, removing almost all references to negative health effects and allowing Gerberding only to describe to the committee the measures that the CDC had made to prepare itself for a climate-changed America.

Probably the highest-profile accusation of Bush administration censorship concerned the scientist James Hansen, for almost thirty years the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In sharp contrast to my earlier description of scientists as media-shy and constantly making understatements, Hansen has been one of the clearest and most outspoken climate commentators in the world for more than two decades. Hansen first caught government attention in 1988, when he appeared before the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee saying, “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”
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Hansen’s position and the quality of his contribution to climate science have made it difficult to criticize him, though the denier community has tried time and again. For example, California Republican Darrell Issa accused Hansen in 2007 of being a partisan supporter of the Democrats and, especially, of John Kerry in his challenge for the presidency against George Bush in 2004. Issa launched the criticism on the basis of a US$250,000 science prize that Hansen had won from the Heinz Foundation. The Heinz Awards are given annually to honor individuals working in areas important to the late senator John Heinz, a Pennsylvania Republican. The prize is awarded by Heinz’s widow, Teresa Heinz, who is now married to Kerry. Hansen himself had complained in 2006 that George Deutsch, whom President Bush had appointed as a NASA press aide, was trying to limit or control what Hansen and other scientists were saying to the media. Hansen told
60 Minutes,
“In my more than three decades in the government, I’ve never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public.” Hansen said that NASA scientists were told that their Congressional reports and public presentations must be reviewed and approved beforehand, and that they could only participate in media interviews if a NASA public affairs staffer sat in. Deutsch later denied the efforts at censorship but was forced to resign over a scandal that broke when it was discovered, first, that he had ordered a NASA Web site designer to add the word “theory” beside every reference to the big bang, and second, that he had lied on his resume, claiming a university degree that he had never obtained.

And despite Deutsch’s insistence that Hansen had overstated the efforts to muzzle him, in 2008 NASA released a forty-eight-page report arising out of an internal investigation into the charges. The report concluded, “During the fall of 2004 through early 2006, the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public.” Despite the clarity of this finding—a flat statement that NASA Public Affairs was corrupting the flow of scientific information to the public, who had paid for the research—the story blew over quickly, with little coverage in most major media and a shrug of recognition from those closest to the issue.

Not to be outdone in the censorship department, the Canadian government took a clumsy stumble into the game in 2008 and got caught issuing an embarrassing “Media Relations Protocol,” a PowerPoint presentation now available on the DeSmogBlog, that was transparently designed to frustrate or prevent media relations. The new rules, distributed to all Environment Canada scientists, said that no one was allowed to respond to any reporter’s query before first consulting with their supervisor. If it was then judged appropriate to respond to the question, it would be referred to the Media Relations office in Ottawa, where political staff could “respond with approved lines.” This was designed to overcome two supposed problems. The protocol held that there had been “limited coordination of messages across the country” and that Environment Canada “interviews sometimes result in surprises to [the] minister and senior management.”

Despite the similarities in the styles of climate change positioning that have prevailed in Canada and the United States, especially during the later years of the Bush administration, the direct dollar-driven corporate influence over politicians isn’t as easy to establish in Canada as it is south of the border. The political system is different, and Canada’s limits on corporate donations are tighter, especially recently, but there has never been any doubt as to the domination of corporate advantage over environmental responsibility in the making of Canadian climate policy. At least, that’s a reasonable conclusion when you realize that at the federal level especially, there was no Canadian policy in place as of early 2009 to actually reduce national greenhouse gas emissions. The Conservative Party administration of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is still talking about slowing the rate of increase.

Yet Canada once had a pretty good reputation on environmental issues. The treaty that ultimately turned around the destruction of the ozone hole was signed in Montreal in 1987. The first international conference on climate change was held in Toronto in 1988, and when the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 for the Earth Summit, Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney was the first leader to sign the resulting UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

But Canada was deeply in debt in the early ‘90s and subject to a gathering antigovernment sentiment. Although Mulroney’s nominally Conservative government had dug the debt hole deeper, Liberal Party prime minister Jean Chrétien, who was elected in 1993, immediately set about cutting government spending and pursuing his election promise of providing “jobs, jobs, jobs” for Canadians, with no evident regard for a deteriorating environment. By 1997, when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change partners were negotiating a new climate protocol in Kyoto, Canada had joined the corporate resistance, but grudgingly accepted the challenge to cut national greenhouse gas emissions to 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Unfortunately, there was never a possibility that Canada would meet that commitment. In 1998 Prime Minister Chré-tien set up a cumbersome and cynical “implementation process.” Consisting of sixteen “tables” incorporating every subject area and interest group in the Canadian political panoply, the process was doomed from the start. The featured speaker at the kickoff conference was not the prime minister, or even his minister of the environment, but rather the deputy minister, dispatched to try to assure the assembled lobbyists and environmentalists that the government was taking the process seriously.

In the pitched negotiations that followed, the corporate representatives from organizations like the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Cement Association of Canada brought a three-part argument. First, they said, climate change might not be happening, and if it is, humans might not be to blame, so why bother wrecking the Canadian economy in an attempt to fix it? Second, if climate change is happening, and humans are to blame, the Kyoto Protocol is a completely inadequate response—so why bother wrecking the Canadian economy in an attempt to implement it? And third, as Canada’s economy is inextricably linked to the economy of the United States, and as the United States, even with Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the White House, clearly has no intention of meeting its commitments, why bother wrecking the Canadian economy when nothing we do can balance the damage being done south of the border?

We have already been talking about the first argument, and the third argument is still very much in vogue—except that now North American foot-draggers are more likely to point the finger at India and China when recommending that we all throw our hands up in despair and resume mining tar sands and coal as fast as we can. But in 1988 the second argument was the most infuriating, for two reasons: First, it was true. If the world community hopes to address the threats of climate change, then the provisions contained in the Kyoto agreement are woefully insufficient to the task. Second, by making this point, the corporate lobbyists demonstrated that they had read enough of the science to understand the size and scope of the problem. Yet they still recommended inaction as the response.

And they prevailed. Two years later the Liberal government produced its
Action Plan 2000 on Climate Change,
promising to spend just C$1.1 billion over five years and to implement changes that would reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by seventy-two megatons a year in the Kyoto reporting period between 2008 and 2012. But the proposed reductions were always loosely calculated and seldom deducted directly from a current total. Far from reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Canada had been increasing its output by an average of more than sixteen megatons a year for the previous eight years. Instead of being 6 percent below 1990 levels, the country was closer to 20 percent above—which is to say that Canada was at nearly 30 percent over its Kyoto target and still moving in the wrong direction.
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Notwithstanding his record of inaction and the virtual impossibility of meeting Canada’s commitment, Prime Minister Chrétien’s government ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002 and implemented a handful of increasingly promising policies over the next three years. But the political winds had shifted from the eastern-based Liberal Party to the western-based Conservatives— a re-formed right-of-centre coalition that was not nearly as green as the Mulroney Progressive Conservatives of the late 1980s.

When Conservative leader Stephen Harper campaigned for the prime minister’s job in early 2006, he did so on an interesting two-track campaign. He promised first of all to be a law-and-order conservative who would crack down hard on people who broke the law. And he promised to abrogate Canada’s international legal commitment to the Kyoto Protocol. If any reporters noticed the contradiction, there is no record that they asked him about it. Once elected, the prime minister promptly handed the job of environment minister, which included defending the government’s climate change position, to the Alberta member of parliament Rona Ambrose. Ambrose came across as a Canadian version of the benighted Sarah Palin—attractive, initially popular, and totally out of her depth, which turned out to have been a policy decision. Government scientists in Environment Canada reported to their private-sector colleagues that Ambrose declined to be briefed on the science of climate change.

The Conservative hostility to Kyoto surprised no one. Prime Minister Harper was himself elected as a member of parliament from the oil capital, Calgary (his actual riding is Calgary Southwest), and his party’s base is preponderantly in resource-rich western Canada, and decidedly in oil-rich Alberta.

In 2006 Alberta was awash in cash. Between 1990 and 2006 fossil fuel industry revenues had climbed 61 percent.
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But that windfall had come with a complicating factor: industry-source greenhouse gas emissions had increased over the same period by 53 percent, accounting for almost half of the total increase in emissions recorded over the same period. Most of the rest came from transportation and from coal-fired electricity generation.

Harper’s position on climate change, that of a loyal Alber-tan, had been on the record—and perfectly unclear—for years. In a story published December 21, 2006 (“PM Denies Climate-Change Shift”), the
Toronto Star
’s Ottawa bureau chief, Susan Delacourt, chronicled the evolution of the prime minister’s thinking. In September 2002, for example, he passed off the issue as a controversy of little interest to Canadians: “It’s a scientific hypothesis, a controversial one and one that I think there is some preliminary evidence for . . . This may be a lot of fun for a few scientific and environmental elites in Ottawa, but ordinary Canadians from coast to coast will not put up with what this [the Kyoto accord] will do to their economy and lifestyle, when the benefits are negligible.” In 2004, Delacourt writes, the prime minister updated that position to say, “The science is still evolving.” And by 2006 he was still referring to “so-called greenhouse gases.” If you give him the benefit of the doubt, Prime Minister Harper seemed, even as he took over the reins of power, to be like those well-educated Republicans from Chapter 12, so steeped in uncertainty that he couldn’t bring himself even to believe in the existence of the greenhouse gases that Joseph Fourier had discovered in the early part of the 19th century.

In addition to announcing that he had no intention of trying to meet Canada’s Kyoto targets, the Canadian prime minister also set about dismantling all the climate change policies that the previous Liberal government had implemented to date. He shut down the government’s climate change Web site and removed all references to global warming, and especially to Kyoto, from federal communications, except to say that henceforth he would be resisting international pressure and pursuing a “made-in-Canada solution.”