CHENEY2
NEW NODE, 7/13 for new content but also for consolidation/analysis, see also Tag
pension aei bd
stood by liz jan 6 flanked
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AEI is governed by a Board of Trustees, composed of leading business and financial executives.
Daniel A. D’Aniello, Chairman
Cofounder and Chairman Emeritus
The Carlyle Group
Clifford S. Asness
Managing and Founding Principal
AQR Capital Management, LLC
The Honorable Richard B. Cheney
Peter H. Coors
Chairman of the Board
Molson Coors Brewing Company
Harlan Crow
Chairman
Crow Holdings
Ravenel B. Curry III
Chief Investment Officer
Eagle Capital Management, LLC
Kimberly O. Dennis
President and CEO
Searle Freedom Trust
Dick DeVos
President
The Windquest Group
Robert Doar
President
American Enterprise Institute
mahdi
https://books.google.com/books?id=2p6LDwAAQBAJ
3 mil$ nat res almost 2 gas and oil sector; 13x Gore; 1998-2003 hallib over 1 mil$ gop 55k$ dems]; b43 got more oil $ than any other fed cand; 9 days before inaug API HQ K street mtg to draw up wishlist; ez drill fed land, more alaska an GOM, lower royalty for offshore etc; --> energy plan may 2001; API appt to admin: newsweek says not since rise of railroads so many footsoldiers; energy ceo 22.5m$ to BC has constant access to secret energy task force; lay b43 pal had most access; cheney starts mtgs w/ ff ceo contributors;energy sec [NPI advisors] had 109 mtds spencer abraham betw jan and may 2001, incl chevtex, exxonmobil and enron, all big donors;
arbusto fail bought by spectrum? fail bought by harken (soros and harvard] for 2.25m$ in stock; b43 go 600K$ and bd seat 50-120K/yr
cheney secdef 1990 got b41 to go after saddam in kuwait b/c of oil; aei kazakstan caspian pipeline operated by chevron, hallib built refineries Tengiz; azerbajan --> hallib ceo oct 1995 (he had good rel w/ saudis as secdef] 1994-2001 rev up 127%
an 921 thom h
...Dick Cheneyknew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein not only had nothing to do with 9/11 but actively hated and hunted down Bin Laden's Al Qaeda operatives so he could imprison or kill them. But Cheney had run Halliburton into trouble, betting that if he picked up Dresser Industries on the cheap that the Clinton administration would cover their asbestos liability. When he lost that bet and Halliburton was in trouble, a nice war with billions in no-bid contracts for the oil-company-turned-defense-contractor was just the grift he needed to both bail him out and make him fabulously rich....
ran ceq: On Global Warming
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's office was behind a push to censor congressional testimony that global warming poses a danger to the public, according to Jason Burnett, a former associate deputy administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.The vice president and the White House Office of Management and Budget heavily edited testimony last year by the director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). "I read the testimony, checked with EPA scientists, and came to the conclusion that the draft testimony was fundamentally accurate as written," Burnett stated in a letter to Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. [1]
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liz revsionist jihad ~ starr fedsoc rove book
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14rich.html
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assessemnt:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/the-final-insult-in-the-bush-cheney-marriage.html?_r=0
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ISIS advice
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/dick-cheney-should-be-jail kinzinger endorse
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pimping for dtr with TP
http://www.alternet.org/activism/will-dick-cheney-be-arrested-canada-war-crimes
Bush was clueless, but Cheney -- to whom virtually all Bush era malevolence ultimately traces -- was not. He took the CEQ under his wing and made it his personal policy/propaganda shop, much like he did with the Office of Special Plans in the run up to the Iraq War. He used it to funnel favorable intelligence (read: bogus skeptic studies) up to the highest levels of gov't and out to the media, to interfere with scientific gov't reports, and to stymie executive rule-making. And of course Connaughton played along willingly.
As it happens, Connaughton's in the news again. On Wed., the Senate EPW Committee held a hearing on the abysmal EPA reaction to 9/11 air quality dangers. The EPA Inspector General issued a report (PDF) in 2003 revealing that the CEQ forced the EPA to tone down warnings about the air and reassure everyone it was safe. Connaughton testified at the hearing. Josh Marshall -- who has some video highlights from the testimony -- says that ...
... the result was such a tour de force of testimonial BS that we wanted to show you some of it. We see a lot of congressional testimony and thus a lot of non-denial-denying, obfuscation and generally bamboozling crap. But this performance stood out.
This guy really personifies the Bush era, with its fetid mix of mendacity, ideology, and incompetence. No doubt he'll be back in a cushy lobbying job before Bush's boxes are even cleared out of the White House.
http://www.grist.org/article/james-connaughton-the-bush-era-personified/
38 min gellman npr
9/08
can't find my summary of
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94662546
wapo series http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/about/about_this_series/
paste from downstairs
cheney1
6/16/2013
webodec3
6/18/2013
see also imperial presidency/neo-con
Holy Cow 2000:The Strange Election of George W. Bush - Google Books Result
http://books.google.com/books?isbn=1937853004...Kenneth:{ O'Reilly}:
is not the book w/ long index of all the ppl go got plum jobs after 2000 election ripoff not sjlp or lonkplus, but kindle
ctr holds jonathan alter BO and ~
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wsj: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121554228130836473.html July 9, 2008
By STEPHEN POWER
WASHINGTON -- A disclosure Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney's office sought to alter a federal official's prepared testimony about the health consequences of global warming intensified an increasingly open conflict between the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House over how to respond to climate change.
The latest in a series of disclosures about internal disputes within the Bush administration came as President George W. Bush was in Japan with other leaders of the Group of Eight nations to forge an agreement on combating climate change. (Please see article on page A8.) But back home, Mr. Bush's critics contend that his aides are working to ensure that any actions his administration takes in response to climate change will have a limited impact.
The disclosure about Vice President Cheney's role came from Jason Burnett, who until last month was the EPA's associate deputy administrator. Mr. Burnett, whose duties included advising EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson on a range of issues involving climate change, is a supporter of the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D., Ill.) and has contributed extensively to the campaigns of other Democrats -- giving more than $100,000 since 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based government watchdog.
Congressional Democrats have been prodding the Bush administration to take action on limiting emissions of the greenhouse gases believed to contribute to global warming, even as Congress itself has failed to pass proposals to cap such emissions. In the meantime, some Democrats in Congress have been extracting emails and other internal documents to build a case that the White House has squelched efforts by EPA officials to put forward meaningful proposals for greenhouse-gas controls.
In a letter dated July 6 in response to questions from the chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), Mr. Burnett said Mr. Cheney's office and the White House Council on Environmental Quality "were seeking deletions" last fall to congressional testimony about climate change prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mr. Burnett said the latter office asked him "to work with CDC" to remove from the testimony "any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change."
The issue of whether greenhouse gases endanger public health or welfare is significant because a finding by the EPA that they do would require the agency to regulate them under the terms of the federal Clean Air Act, spurring new rules across a range of industries.
Environmentalists, congressional Democrats and officials in more than a dozen states have sought to prod the EPA to reach a decision on the matter, following a Supreme Court ruling last year that greenhouse gases are pollutants and can be regulated under the EPA's existing authority. But the Bush administration has resisted, arguing that economy-wide regulations of such emissions could cripple the U.S. economy.
Mr. Burnett said he declined to go along with the White House request to push for deletions to the CDC testimony, because the CDC's draft testimony -- which included examples of how climate change is likely to have "a significant impact" on public health -- was "fundamentally accurate."
The line -- and many others -- were eventually eliminated from the testimony prepared last October for CDC Director Julie Gerberding, based on draft copies of the testimony that were leaked last fall and posted online by groups that favor regulation of greenhouse gases. Dr. Gerberding did testify, however, that climate change "is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans."
Representatives for Mr. Cheney and the White House declined to comment Tuesday on Mr. Burnett's assertions. A spokesman for Dr. Gerberding said "any edits that were made to the written testimony were made during the routine editing process," and that Dr. Gerberding "spoke openly and freely without constraint" in her Senate testimony last fall.
In his letter, Mr. Burnett notes that at the time of Dr. Gerberding's testimony "there was extensive debate" over how the EPA should respond to the Supreme Court's ruling. Mr. Burnett says the White House Council on Environmental Quality suggested to him that he could best serve the EPA "if I would convince CDC to delete particular sections of their testimony."
In an interview, he declined to elaborate on the assertions in his letter, but said he left the EPA because "I thought I'd done as much constructive work as could be done under this administration" in response to the Supreme Court ruling.
Administration officials said in March that before declaring greenhouse gases endanger health or welfare, the government should first seek public comment. The EPA has yet to do so, however, largely because of a dispute between EPA officials and a White House office that reviews proposed regulations over how to frame the issue, people familiar with the matter said.
books:
The Dark Side is a dramatic, riveting, and definitive narrative account of how the United States made terrible decisions in the pursuit of terrorists around the world—decisions that not only violated the Constitution, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In spellbinding detail, Jane Mayer relates the impact of these decisions by which key players, namely Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, exploited September 11 to further a long held agenda to enhance presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment.
anglerreview:
By Loyd E. Eskildson
audio: http://excerpts.contentreserve.com/FormatType-25/1523-1/197066-Angler.wma ch 1
p 198-205 on coal power plants life extended?
"Angler" is the code-name used by the Secret Service to refer to V.P. Cheney. "Angler" the book tells the story of V.P. Cheney's role in the Bush administration - from his selection as candidate, his initial moves before even taking office, to his ability to influence decision-making throughout the Bush term, and does this in a calm, credible manner.
Selecting a Running Mate: Bush asked Cheney early on, and was turned down. This, per Gellman, only increased Cheney's appeal. Bush II had witnessed tensions between his father's White House staff and those looking out for Dan Quayle's future; Cheney, in addition, had told him about problems between Nixon-Ford, and Ford-Rockefeller. Bush did not interview a single candidate before settling on Cheney. Further, Cheney negotiated his expanded role at the beginning - "I want to be a real partner in helping you reach decisions."
Cheney's Role in Staffing Positions: Cheney's commanding role on major appointments was without precedent. He recruited candidates, pre-interviewed them, and escorted them for Bush's approval in Austin. For State, Bush already set his sights on Colin Powell, and Linda Chavez for Labor (she withdrew after a nanny-scandal). Cheney brought in Rumsfeld, Whitman (EPA), and O'Neill (Treasury).
Cheney did not stop at the cabinet - 2nd and 3rd ranking officials (eg. Hadley, Bolton) could be vital allies. In policy fields he cared about Cheney placed people even deeper in the bureaucracy. The list did not include most of the Friends of George from the Republican Governor's Association.
"Scooter" Libby was made national security advisor, chief of the V.P. staff, and assistant to the president.
Cheney Gets Personally Involved: Early on (12/03/00), Cheney got his imprint in on the economy by suggesting a recession looked likely - setting the stage to blame Clinton and cut taxes. Cheney also attended almost all NSC meetings and briefed Bush afterwards (Rice did also - separately.) Cheney joined the regular Wednesday lunch of the president's economic team (secretaries of labor, commerce, and treasury, also the budget director), and the National Economic Council, the weekly Senate Republican caucus (LBJ was the last V.P. that tried - he was blocked by the Senators; Cheney pointed out that he was President of the Senate).
Also, theWhite House created a panel called the Budget Review Board, with Cheney as chair. Overseeing the budget was exactly the find of serious, boring work that Bush disliked, and Cheney thrived in the vacuum. Conflicts with OMB went to the Board, and no one appealed further to Bush.
Cheney also usually sent a staff member to Norquist's Wednesday anti-tax luncheons. Cheney had abandoned Milton Friedman's "no free lunch" maxim for Laffer's supply-side economics - despite serious objection from his long-time friends Paul O'Neil and Alan Greenspan.
Unlike most of his rivals and even the president, Cheney knew what he wanted.One of his first assignments to staff was a fast-track review of Clinton's departing executive orders, accompanied by an order to stop associated operations at the Government Printing Office. (Cheney knew that regulations have no force until printed in the Federal Register). He also got Bush tofreeze hiring for everyone whose paperwork wasn't complete.
Cheney then finagled an office on the House side - close to the action on tax-writing. Greenspan began weekly visits to the White House - mostly to see Cheney. One important result was taking Greenspan out of 100% opposition to the Bush tax cuts.
Cheney worked With Andy Card to undermine Sen. Chafee's opposition to the bush tax cut, and convinced Bush to stand firm against Jefford's threat to bolt the party is not given additional Special Education funds. (Cheney reasoned that the R's had already de facto lost control, and did not want to reward threats.)
The Energy Task Force: Cheney asked for chairmanship of the task force on energy. Prior to starting, he directed an assistant to devise a structure that would leave the task force beyond reach of the Federal Advisory Commission Act (Hillary's undoing). This was achieved by limiting "membership" limited to employees of the executive branch. When challenged, Cheney convinced Bush to fight disclosure, contrary to most other advisers; his aim was to set a precedent and gain power.
Environmental groups were limited to a single meeting, and used up half the time making introductions; regardless, Cheney did not attend. An early goal became to walk Bush back from support for reducing CO2; Cheney was aided by four R Senators' requesting clarification from Bush. EPA Secretary Whitman sensed a problem, scheduled a meeting with Bush, but was beat by Cheney's presenting a proposed response to the Senators.
How did he do it - his energy task force portrayed the scientific debate as complex, and unresolved. Bush hated wading into that sort of situation and usually told experts to come back when they had hammered out their facts. Cheney also called for smarter policy and technology to avoid the choice between less energy and greater pollution.
Cheney sat in on the president's daily briefings - AFTER receiving the briefing himself earlier in the A.M. Thus prepared, he was able to shape the president's briefing as well as make comments of his own.
Following these paths gave Cheney awareness and involvement in much of went on in the White House early on. From here on he was in an ideal position to play a leading role, detailed in an interesting and credible manner by "Angler," in the Bush administration. This included not just influencing decisions but also ensuring they were carried out - eg. "defanging" new source EPA rules for coal-fired power plants. Still another source of Cheney's strength was his long-term relationships with numerous members of Congress, which he sometimes strained with slanted and stretched versions of reality (eg. describing Iraq's dangerousness to Rep. Armey to convince him to support war).
Bottom Line: "Angler" shows V.P. Cheney did not acquire his power and influence by accident - it was built through his experience and learning in prior decades at the top levels of government. Clearly he has transformed the nature of the office, and was aided in doing so by an uninvolved, incurious president who was also a poor manager (eg. failure to follow-up directive to Rumsfeld to begin Guantanamo trials, to back up Rice vs. Rumsfeld; to quickly realize "Brownie" was incompetent - Cheney did).
On the other hand, Cheney's ignoring warnings pre-9/11 (along with Bush), sometimes duplicity, and lack of pragmatism in favor of erroneous policies (eg. resisting information requests, even from the 9/11 Commission; almost marching the administration over the cliff regarding reauthorization for internal eavesdropping; lack of sensitivity to growing opposition to the Iraq War) are serious, irredeemable flaws.
Finally, to be fair, it should also be pointed out that Cheney was scrupulous in avoiding possible personal gain from his actions (eg. the Energy Task Force).
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video:
http://fora.tv/2006/06/26/Ron_Suskind 06.26.06 reality-based jrnl, price of loyalty p 118-25 DC wrote tyhe ltr pruprted fron 4 sen?, self-correcting not working (all classified, tho al-q knows) Suskind discusses his new book, The One Percent Doctrine,
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see ch 4 on energy:
p 90 DC aligned himself w/ denialists
hf hp: Distilling interviews with journalists, biographers and central figures in Cheney's saga, including 20 hours with the former vice president himself, Cutler chronicles how Cheney -- zealously, relentlessly, single-mindedly -- accumulated the power he then wielded in the first term of President George W. Bush. We see Cheney shrewdly and patiently playing the inside game for decades -- attaching himself to rising stars in successive Republican administrations; becoming a leader in Congress; finally steering Bush to pick Cheney as his running mate and then insisting on unprecedented control of security matters.
The portrait is riveting because we know what Cheney's ascent led to: our seemingly irrevocable, full-blown security state, with all the attendant risks of constitutional and civil liberties abuses; wholesale destruction and civilian deaths in swaths of Afghanistan and Iraq; more than 6,500 dead and more than 50,000 wounded U.S. soldiers; the rise of remote-control warfare, now embodied by drones; and a relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds arguably more antagonistic than ever before. The film has the dreadful fascination of a road trip you know ends in a car wreck.
Since Cheney left the capital, President Barack Obama not only hasn't dismantled most of the "world according to Dick Cheney"; in many cases, he has either actively ratified it (drones and intrusive surveillance and monitoring of leaks). In other cases in which he has opted for rollback (Afghanistan), Obama has moved with extreme caution.
The documentary is about Cheney, but by indirection it is about Bush, too. In his first term, the president let Cheney be Cheney, often without even knowing he was doing so. As the years passed, Bush belatedly moved to rein in his vice president, siding with Justice Department lawyers on surveillance issues; firing Cheney's dearest friend, Donald Rumsfeld, from his Pentagon job; letting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice win the argument over whether to bomb a Syrian nuclear reactor site (we didn't).
Finally, in the administration's last days, Bush refused to pardon Cheney's right-hand man, Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, who had been convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in the Valerie Plame case (though he did commute Libby's prison sentence).
natjrnl:The one area where Cheney comes off especially poorly is the intramural slugfest in 2007 over warrantless domestic wiretaps. While passionately defending the practice of listening in on American citizens in the homeland, Cheney didn’t tell President Bush that his deputy attorney general and several Justice Department colleagues had determined such domestic surveillance was illegal and were preparing to resign in protest. When the president was finally looped in at the last minute, he dialed back the policy--and was furious at being blindsided. His irritation with Cheney helped create a breach between the two that has never been mended.
http://issuu.com/ombwatch/docs/bushlegacy:{ 70 pp}:
: an assault on public protections
SClub got 24 hrs to input energy pol
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Jason Leopold | Cheney Suppressed Evidence in California Energy Crisis
Cheney Suppressed Evidence in California Energy Crisis
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report
Thursday 19 July 2007
In-depth investigation shows how Vice President Dick Cheney pressured federal energy regulators to conceal evidence of widespread market manipulation by energy companies during the California electricity crisis in 2001.
In March 2001, while California's two largest utilities were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, and the state's electricity crisis was spiraling out of control, Vice President Dick Cheney summoned Curt Hebert, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), to his office next to the White House for a hastily arranged meeting.
Cheney had just been informed by his longtime friend Thomas Cruikshank, the man who handpicked the vice president to succeed him at Halliburton in the mid-1990s, that federal energy regulators were close to completing an investigation into allegations that Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Companies and AES Corporation of Arlington, Virginia had created an artificial power shortage in California in April and May of 2000 by shutting down a power plant for more than two weeks.
Cruikshank was a member of Williams's board of directors, and perhaps more importantly, had been one of many energy industry insiders advising Cheney's energy task force on a wide-range of policy issues, including deregulation of the nation's electricity sector, that would benefit Williams financially.
Cruikshank informed the vice president he had learned about the preliminary findings of FERC's investigation during a Williams board meeting earlier in March 2001. FERC, Cruikshank told Cheney, was in possession of incriminating audio tapes in which a Williams official and an AES power plant operator discussed keeping a Southern California power plant offline so Williams could continue to receive the $750 per megawatt hour premium for emergency power California's grid operator was forced to procure to keep the lights on in Southern California.
AES was the operator of two power plants in Los Alamitos and Williams marketed the electricity. The power plants were designated by the California Independent System Operator (ISO), the agency that manages the state's power grid, as crucial in order to ensure a reliable flow of electricity in the Southern part of the state. To stave off the potential for blackouts, the ISO was given the authority to pay top dollar for power if the power plants operated by AES, as well as power plants operated by other companies, were not in operation.
California's electricity crisis wreaked havoc on consumers in the state between 2000 and 2001. The crisis resulted in widespread rolling blackouts and forced the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, into bankruptcy. California was the first state in the nation to deregulate its power market in an effort to provide consumers with cheaper electricity and the opportunity to choose their own power provider. The results have since proved disastrous. The experiment has cost the state more than $30 billion.
According to a copy of the March 2001 Williams transcript, Rhonda Morgan, a Williams official, told an AES power plant operator "it wouldn't hurt Williams's feelings" if the power plant that was down for repairs was kept offline for an extended period of time so the company could continue to be paid the "premium" for its emergency energy supplies from the ISO. In a separate conversation with Eric Pendergraft, a senior AES official, Morgan said, "I don't wanna do something underhanded, but if there's work you can continue to do ..."
Pendergraft responded to Morgan, saying, "I understand. You don't have to talk anymore."
The collusion between Williams and AES allowed Williams to earn an extra $10 million over a period of 15 days and set in motion a series of events that resulted in the California power crisis between 2000 and 2001, a crisis that was based almost entirely on manipulative practices by energy companies.
This story is based on a two-month investigation into Cheney's energy task force; how the vice president pressured cabinet officials to conceal clear-cut evidence of market manipulation during California's energy crisis, and how that subsequently led Cheney to exert executive privilege when lawmakers called on him to turn over documents related to his meetings with energy industry officials who helped draft the National Energy Policy and also gamed California's power market. Truthout spoke with more than a dozen former officials from the Energy Department and FERC as well as current and former energy industry executives all of whom were involved in personal discussions with Cheney relating to the National Energy Policy.
In addition to Hebert, the FERC chairman, the other senior cabinet officials who attended the March 2001 meeting in Cheney's office included Andrew Lundquist, the former executive director of Cheney's energy task force, now an energy industry lobbyist, White House political adviser Karl Rove, President Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card, and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, according to former Energy Department and FERC officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they said they were not authorized to disclose details of their secret meetings with Cheney or information about the energy task force meetings.
Joe Allbaugh, another adviser to the vice president’s energy task force, had heard of a similar situation involving an energy company his wife was involved with. Allbaugh told Cheney that Reliant Energy also shut down a power plant in California in June 2000. That caused wholesale power prices in California to reach levels that exceeded "just and reasonable" rates, a violation of the Federal Power Act. FERC apparently had audio tapes of Reliant employees discussing the scheme.
"[We] started out Monday losing $3 million ... So, then we decided as a group that we were going to make it back up, so we turned like about almost every power plant off. It worked. Prices went back up. Made back about $4 million, actually more than that, $5 million," the Reliant trader says in a tape-recorded conversation on June 23, 2000.
Allbaugh's wife, Dianne Allbaugh, was a lobbyist for Reliant, TXU and Entergy, who was paid at least $20,000 a month by those corporations, and told her husband what she had learned from executives at Reliant. Allbaugh then informed Cheney.
Cruikshank and Allbaugh did not return dozens of calls or respond to emails seeking comment. Devona Greenstone, a spokeswoman for Hebert, was sent a detailed list of questions for Hebert to answer and was given more than one week to respond to the queries. But neither Greenstone nor the former FERC chairman replied despite numerous follow-up phone calls and emails sent to Hebert and Greenstone. A spokesperson for Cheney also failed to return 16 messages left for comment over the past month.
If You Were "King" or "Il Duce"?
Joseph Kelliher, a former Energy Department official, had been soliciting advice from Williams, Reliant, El Paso, Enron and other energy companies on natural gas issues on behalf of Cheney, another area those companies were accused of gaming, particularly in California.
In a March 10, 2001 email, just a week or so after Cheney was briefed by Cruikshank about the Williams scheme, Kelliher emailed energy lobbyist Dana Contratto, asking Contratto if he was "King or "Il Duce, what would you include in a national energy policy, especially with respect to natural gas issues?", according to energy task force documents.
Contratto responded with a three-page list of ideas, many of which were included in the final version of the energy policy.
On another occasion, Kelliher sought out Stephen Craig Sayle, an Enron Corp. lobbyist, to make similar recommendations. Sayle, former counsel for the House Commerce Committee, sent Kelliher Enron's "dream list." The list included a recommendation that the administration commit to market-based emissions trading, which was also used in administration's National Energy Policy.
Sayle wrote Kelliher about the energy policy, saying, "a multi-pollutant regulatory strategy should be estimated for the power generation sector including: Gradually phased in [mercury, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide emissions] reductions; reform/replacement of NSR; use of market-based/emission trading programs; inclusion of both existing and new plants and equal treatment for both. The last bullet is the critical one to ensure that: a) we encourage the new generation that is required; b) we ensure that the new technologies developed through DOE programs can come into the market.
"Obviously, this is a dream list," Sayle said in the March 23, 2001 email he sent to Kelliher. "Not all will be done. But perhaps some of these ideas could be floated and adopted."
Sayle also provided Kelliher with a PowerPoint presentation on behalf of his other energy clients in the so-called Clean Power Group, a consortium made up of a handful of the country's biggest energy companies, including NiSource Inc., Calpine Corp., Trigen Energy Corp. and El Paso Corp, whose mission, according to the group's web site, is to "streamline requirements under the Clean Air Act for electric generating facilities while at the same time making major reductions in air emissions."
The PowerPoint presentation, A Comprehensive Multi-Pollutant Emission Control Strategy for Power Generation, summarized the Clean Power Group's support of a "cap and trade" method in addressing emissions of mercury, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide from power plants, but included a proposal for a voluntary cap on carbon dioxide. The Clean Power Group stood to benefit from the initiative it urged Kelliher to get the White House to adopt in that the companies could release more emissions under its proposed plan than under the more restrictive rules the Clinton administration had put in place.
After receiving Sayle's email and supporting material, Kelliher recommended that President Bush "direct the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to propose multi-pollutant legislation that would establish a flexible, market-based program to significantly reduce and cap emissions; provide regulatory certainty to allow utilities to make modifications to their plants without fear of new litigation; provide market based incentives, such as emissions-trading credits to help achieve the required reductions," all of which the president approved and was eventually incorporated into the National Energy Policy.
In fact, President Bush's "Clear Skies" initiative consists of many of the bullet points laid out months earlier in Sayle's email to Kelliher.
In addition to Kelliher's correspondence with Sayle, he also met with oil and gas industry lobbyists who helped draft language that Kelliher passed on directly to the White House. Two months later, the president issued executive orders nearly identical to those Kelliher received from the lobbyists months earlier, according to energy task force documents.
Kelliher now chairs FERC, the agency that is entrusted with keeping a close eye on wholesale energy markets, ensuring that companies like Williams and Reliant refrain from engaging in the type of manipulative practices they were caught doing during the spring and summer of 2000 in California.
Cheney Orders FERC to Seal Evidence
But the documentary evidence of widespread market manipulation that FERC obtained in March 2001, while Kelliher was soliciting energy industry officials to assist in writing the National Energy Policy, and when Cruikshank and Allbaugh disclosed to the vice president the manipulative tactics Williams and Reliant had engaged in, was sealed by FERC on direct orders by Cheney because it would have been a political nightmare for the Bush administration and would have derailed a recommendation of one of the cornerstones of the vice president's National Energy Policy: deregulation, and perhaps scuttle the policy altogether if evidence about the energy companies behavior in California was made public, according to half-a-dozen former FERC officials and former Energy Department officials.
So in May 2001, just days before Cheney unveiled his long-awaited National Energy Policy, FERC entered into confidential settlements with Williams in which the company forfeited $8 million it was owed by California's grid operator for power Williams sold into the marketplace at inflated prices. Williams did not admit any guilt for the power plant shutdown and, on orders from Cheney, FERC agreed to keep details of the settlement sealed. FERC later entered into a similar settlement with Reliant. The company agreed to forfeit $13.8 million it was owed by California's grid operator, did not admit to any wrongdoing, and FERC kept the details of the settlement confidential.
Moreover, FERC kept California officials in the dark about the nature of the state's claims that its wholesale electricity market was being manipulated. Hebert is now the vice president of external affairs for Entergy in New Orleans.
For former Governor Gray Davis, the illegal behavior by energy companies like Williams that federal energy regulators discovered, then covered up, during a time when the former governor had said publicly he believed such behavior had taken place, is beyond disturbing.
Instead of protecting the interests of consumers, FERC's primary job, Hebert toed the White House line and together with Cheney, Hebert had come out publicly to say that Davis should immediately order the California Public Utilities Commission to relax environmental restrictions on the permitting process related to power plant construction and raise electricity rates to keep utilities Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison from becoming insolvent. The insolvency issue was due to the fact that the utilities were paying higher prices for power than it was legally allowed to charge its customers under the state's deregulation law.
In an interview, Davis, now an attorney with Loeb & Loeb in Century City, California, said he never saw the evidence FERC had obtained implicating Williams in shutting down power plants in the state.
"If I had hard evidence that this was happening, I would have stood out in front of the Congress until they did something," Davis said. "I thought there was something rotten going on but I never believed that these energy companies would outright steal from us."
"This was an absolute outrage and was based on pure greed," Davis added. "I clearly didn't know this was happening with Williams. I think FERC perpetrated a fraud on the American public and California consumers by sealing the findings of this investigation while I was out there saying that this type of manipulation was happening. I think that if the results of this investigation were made public in March 2001, when FERC knew this was taking place, it would have stopped energy deregulation in America in its tracks. This admission in effect by Williams would have been the death knell for energy deregulation."
Davis had a tumultuous relationship with the federal agency that appeared to be based on partisan politics. Just three months before Cruikshank and Allbaugh provided Cheney with details that the energy companies they were affiliated with had gouged California consumers and violated the state's market rules, the vice president, and FERC's chairman, railed against Davis, blaming the energy crisis on him and said the governor's claims that energy companies were acting like a "cartel" were baseless.
"The basic problem in California was caused by Californians," Cheney said, adding that he would resist calls by lawmakers to allow price caps to be placed on wholesale energy prices in the Western United States.
Even after Hebert had secured evidence showing that Williams manipulated the power market, he continued to pin the blame for skyrocketing power prices squarely on the shoulders of Davis and the state's Democratic leaders.
"I went to FERC and laid out our problems and was promised they would look into it. Nothing happened," Davis said. "My experience with FERC during the energy crisis was wholly unsatisfactory. I did not ever feel that they believed their job was to act in the public interest. I always believed they were acting in the interests of the energy companies. They operated as if they were a wholly owned subsidiary of the energy companies."
Hebert, however, fell out favor with the Bush administration when he privately opposed a recommendation by Ken Lay, made to Cheney, to open up the country's transmission lines to corporations such as Enron. Lay requested Cheney and Bush replace Hebert, which they did in the summer of 2001.
PG&E Files for Bankruptcy; Rove Orchestrates Political Spin Campaign
In a televised speech to California residents on April 5, 2001, Davis resisted Cheney's and Hebert's calls to increase electricity rates for average consumers to keep the state's public utilities afloat, opting instead to increase electricity rates of the state's largest power customers such as manufacturing plants. The next morning PG&E filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Davis publicly railed against the Bush administration's refusal to launch an investigation into wholesale energy companies trading practices, and its position on price caps. Davis's rhetoric started to impact the Bush administration's approval ratings. Rove, working closely with Cheney, entered into discussions on how the White House would respond to criticism by Davis that the Bush administration was turning its back on California.
"Karl [Rove] started to talk about using the resources of former Republican National Committee staffers to put together an attack campaign against Davis, and pin the power problems on the governor and his administration," according to one former high-level Energy Department official who was privy to the conversation between Rove and Cheney.
Rove enlisted the help of former RNC staffers Ed Gillespie, then a lobbyist who was working for Enron and other energy companies, and Scott Reed, who used to work for the RNC and was the former manager of Robert Dole's presidential campaign, to start devising a strategy to attack Davis and lead people to believe that the energy crisis was entirely his fault. Gillespie was recently tapped by President Bush to replace Dan Bartlett as White House counselor.
Reed and Gillespie, who was doing double duty advising Cheney's energy task force on behalf of Enron, advised Rove and the vice president that the PG&E bankruptcy left Davis vulnerable and the best course of action for the White House was to take advantage of Davis's vulnerability by stating that Davis single-handedly, in refusing to raise electricity rates, caused one of the largest bankruptcies in American history. Gillespie went a step further, according to Energy Department officials familiar with his conversations with Rove and Cheney, by suggesting that the White House start courting Republican gubernatorial candidates to replace Davis in the 2002 election.
At the White House in April 2001, Rove met with Brad Freeman, President Bush's California finance chairman during the 2000 presidential campaign, and Gerald Parsky, an investment banker, who was Bush's top adviser in California. The discussion centered on Parsky and Freeman's interest in courting actor Arnold Schwarzenegger to discuss his bid for governor in 2002.
"That would be nice," Rove said about the possibility of Schwarzenegger, a Republican, to replace Davis as governor, according to people who were briefed about the meeting. "That would be really, really nice."
Davis said he could see now see how the energy crisis created a political opportunity for the White House in California.
"In retrospect I could see how that happened," Davis said. "There's no question that the energy companies saw me as an adversary when I wouldn't buckle under their demands. I was vulnerable and the [energy companies and the White House] took advantage of it. This crisis took place in the early days of the Bush administration. I figured these guys are too busy picking out furniture for their offices. I didn't think they [the Bush administration] were spending their days in office involved in some full-scale conspiracy. But it turns out they were."
Cheney Takes Aim at Davis
Meanwhile, Cheney continued to meet with energy company officials who were instrumental in drafting key aspects of the National Energy Policy. At the same time, the usually reclusive vice president was granting interviews to numerous reporters discussing his take on the California energy crisis which continued to spiral out of control.
In May 2001, the PBS news program "Frontline" interviewed Cheney who was asked by a correspondent whether energy companies were acting like a cartel and using manipulative tactics to cause electricity prices to spike in California.
"No," Cheney said during the "Frontline" interview, even though he was personally briefed about energy companies manipulating the state. "The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things - an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate. Now they’re trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus, not having addressed the supply side of the issue. They've obviously created major problems for themselves and bankrupted PG&E in the process."
The same month, May 2001, Davis met with Bush at a Century City hotel, not far from the offices he now works at as an attorney. He pleaded with Bush one last time to put price controls in place. Bush refused.
Behind the scenes, while Bush and Davis discussed the state of the energy crisis, Gillespie was emailing Enron officials on the status of Cheney's energy policy. He alerted Enron executives to the exact language that would appear on one of the hot-button issues revolving around price caps in California and the west and allowing energy companies free access to the nation's transmission lines.
"I believe this is the exact language that will appear under the 'energy supply' section of the report," Gillespie wrote. "Recommends that the President encourage the FERC to use its existing statutory authority to promote competition and encourage investment in transmission facilities," which Enron was lobbying heavily for. "Please keep this under wraps. We do not want to circulate this beyond the folks listed on this email. Please let me know any concerns. As we have known for several weeks, the report is not as explicit as we would want, but the White House, vice president, and [Department of Energy] have repeatedly but verbally assured us that they are making clear to FERC exactly what this means."
Another email Gillespie forwarded Enron officials, dated May 17, 2001, came from Cheney's spokeswoman, Juleanna Glover, who told Gillespie "you're really relied upon around here ... hear your name all the time in connection w. tough issues, but you know that already."
On May 21, 2001, five days after unveiling his energy policy, Cheney told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" that Davis was to blame for the energy issues in the state.
"They knew over a year ago they had a problem, and Gray Davis refused to address that problem," Cheney said. "[They] kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off, with the notion that somehow price caps could be maintained. Now, today, where are they in California?"
GOP Front Group Attacks Gray Davis, Shields Bush, Cheney
At the same time, Reed informed Rove and Cheney that his nonprofit, the American Taxpayers Alliance, a Republican front organization, would begin to air a series of scathing radio commercials taking aim at Davis's failure to tame the energy crisis in June 2001. The ads, Reed said, were aimed to shift attention away from Republicans in Washington and "back to Sacramento where it belongs." Reed added that the ads would leave Davis "bleeding like a stuck pig."
The ads, which began to air in June 2001, did in fact make an impact:
"He's pointing fingers and blaming others. Gray Davis says he's not responsible for California's energy problems; after all, the Public Utilities Commission blocked long-term cost-saving contracts for electricity. But who runs the PUC? The people Gray Davis appointed - Loretta Lynch and other Davis appointees who left us powerless. That's why newspapers say he just ignored all the warning signals and turned a problem into a crisis. Grayouts on Gray Davis."
The ads and the negative press Davis received helped set in motion a chain of events that would lead to a historic recall campaign and put Schwarzenegger in office.
What the public didn't know, however, is that Cheney and Rove recommended that Reed approach Reliant Energy, the firm that one of Cheney's energy task force advisers, Joseph Allbaugh, was affiliated with via his wife's lobbying for the company, to fund the radio spots, according to former Reliant executives involved in the matter. Reliant donated nearly $2 million of Reed's $3.2 annual budget, yet the company only reported spending a total of $340,000 on government lobbying in apparent violation of the law, according to the company's public records.
Gillespie also launched a public relations campaign against Davis. He took ads out in print publications attacking Davis. The ads were paid for by Gillespie's 21st Century Energy Project, which he formed in close coordination with Karl Rove less than a month after the National Energy Policy was released in May 2001, according to former Enron executives who worked closely with Gillespie. Enron funneled at least $75,000 to Gillespie to pay for the ads through Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, according to documents obtained by Truthout.
Russ Schriefer, who worked with Gillespie on Bush’s presidential campaign and formed Mosaic Media with Quinn Gillespie in February 2001 to produce advocacy ads for Republicans, wrote the Davis ads. The ads aired on ABC, Fox and CNN.
Norquist, a longtime friend of Cheney's, was personally tapped by Rove to assist Gillespie with the ad campaign. Norquist may be best known for his close relationship with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. One of Abramoff's clients, Raul Garza, chief of the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas, donated $25,000 to Norquist's organization in order to obtain an invitation to a reception with President Bush on May 9, 2001. Norquist and Abramoff were also in attendance and a photograph of Garza standing alongside Bush with Abramoff in the background was kept from public view when the Abramoff scandal blew up. Bush had denied publicly that he ever met Abramoff.
At the time, Gillespie said the ads were necessary "because Davis put all his time and energy into trying to shift responsibility and President Bush spent all his time and energy trying to accept responsibility. The president is trying to change the tone, but others of us have to point out that the crisis developed on the watch of Governor Davis and President Clinton."
Executive Privilege
Immediately following reports that Cheney relied upon the recommendations of 400 energy industry executives to draft the National Energy Policy, lawmakers began to demand that the vice president turn over documents regarding his task force meetings to Congress. The vice president vehemently refused.
With White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales weighing in on the issue, the administration exerted "executive privilege" as the reason it refused to turn over task force documents to Democratic lawmakers. The issue reached the Supreme Court that ruled in Cheney's favor. As Attorney General, Gonzales still refuses to publicly release audiotapes from 2000 and 2001 in which other energy companies were also found to have discussed ways in which to manipulate the California energy market. Some of the heads of those companies implicated in the crisis also provided Cheney with input on the National Energy Policy.
In 2004, Reliant became the first energy company that was indicted for its role in manufacturing the California energy crisis. A year later, the company refunded California $453 million.
Last month, two power companies agreed to pay California $84 million to settle charges stemming from the 2000-2001 California energy crisis.
PacifiCorp, a unit of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., paid the state $27.9 million to resolve claims that it manipulated the California and Pacific Northwest electricity markets in 2000 and 2001. MidAmerican Energy Holdings is a subsidiary of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
In a second case, a subsidiary of Houston-based El Paso Corp. paid California $56 million.
Joseph Kelliher, the chairman of FERC, and the man who, on behalf of Cheney in March 2001, lobbied these very companies to help write the National Energy Policy, helped negotiate the settlements.
Davis feels vindicated in light of the refunds paid to California consumers, which, to date, have totaled about $6 billion. He said that he believes he would likely never have faced a recall if FERC publicly released details of its investigation into Williams in March 2001. But despite what he knows now Davis doesn't hold a grudge against the individuals responsible for using the energy crisis to have him recalled.
"No one ever said life is fair," Davis said.
http://archive.truthout.org/article/jason-leopold-cheney-suppressed-evidence-california-energy-crisis
===
California energy crisis trial looms
By Jason Leopold
The federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to rule soon after press time on a key piece of evidence, kick-starting the long awaited criminal trial involving Houston-based Reliant Energy’s alleged scheme to boost profits by shutting down power plants in California during the height of the state’s energy crisis in 2000.
The criminal trial – the first one related to the state’s energy crisis – was scheduled to begin in November 2005. It was postponed when prosecutors asked the Ninth Circuit to overturn US District Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling that market rules of the California Independent System Operator could not be used as evidence to establish what constitute normal wholesale power prices.
Energy traders who
gamed the system
in California may
finally be getting
their due.
Prosecutors want to submit as evidence price benchmarks calculated by the ISO. Federal regulators have used these to distribute billions of dollars of refunds to buyers from power sellers accused of price gouging. Walker sided with defense attorneys who objected to that.
Reliant and four of its traders are accused of wire fraud, commodities market manipulation, and conspiracy. Reliant faces millions of dollars in fines, and the traders each face five years in prison and $250,000 in fines.
Despite the last minute delay, the case appears to be a slam dunk for the prosecution based on evidence already submitted, said a Justice Department spokesman.
One piece of evidence the government is using against Reliant is a transcript of a conversation between one of the company’s traders and a power plant operator, in which the two men discuss shutting down some of Reliant’s power plants in California between June 20 and 22, 2000, to create a shortage so the price of power would skyrocket.
The transcript was released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in January 2003. The scheme worked: it caused power prices to reach “unjust and unreasonable” levels in California, illegal under the Federal Energy Policy Act.
“[We] started out Monday losing $3 million ... So, then we decided as a group that we were going to make it back up, so we turned like about almost every power plant off. It worked. Prices went back up. Made back about $4 million, actually more than that, $5 million,” the Reliant trader says in a tape-recorded conversation on June 23, 2000.
California’s energy market is still in limbo, with warnings of future blackouts and supply shortages in future summer months, and no mechanism in place to deal with the situation.
As natural gas prices continue to skyrocket nationwide, the power situation in California is dire. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was elected due in part to voter frustration with the way governor Gray Davis handled the energy crisis, has not fixed the situation.
California’s electricity crisis wreaked havoc on consumers in the state between 2000 and 2001, resulted in rolling blackouts, and forced the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, into bankruptcy. California was the first state in the nation to deregulate its power market nearly 10 years ago. The results have since proved disastrous. The experiment has cost the state more than $70 billion, according to some estimates.
For three years, California officials pleaded with federal regulators, President Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney to provide the state with some relief from soaring wholesale power prices and investigate energy companies for allegedly manipulating the market. Bush and Cheney responded personally to Gray Davis’s pleas for help in May 2001 by saying the crisis was the result of California’s incomplete deregulation.
It wasn’t until Enron collapsed in October 2001 and evidence of the company’s manipulative trading tactics emerged that FERC began to take a look at the company’s role in California’s electricity crisis. Since then, memos written by former Enron traders were uncovered, with colorful names like “Fat Boy” and “Death Star,” that contained the blueprint for ripping off California.
Enron’s top trader on the West Coast, Timothy Belden, the mastermind behind the scheme, pleaded guilty in 2003 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators.
California had demanded $8.9 billion from energy companies for overcharging the state for electricity during the crisis. An administrative law judge for the agency released a preliminary decision in December that says California is due no more than $1.2 billion in refunds, since the state owes the companies $1.8 billion in unpaid bills.
Shutting down power plants in California to boost wholesale prices is not a new issue. In 2002, CBS News reported that Williams Companies engaged in identical behavior around the same time as Reliant. The evidence, also a transcript of a recorded conversation between a Williams trader and a power plant operator in California, showed the two conspiring to shut down a power plant for two weeks to boost electricity prices and Williams’s profits. FERC kept the evidence under wraps for a year and cut a secret deal with Williams to refund California $8 million without admitting guilt.
FERC released the transcripts in late November 2002 after the Wall Street Journal sued the commission to obtain a full copy of its report. Had the evidence been released before Enron collapsed, it might have helped California’s case. But it would have hurt Bush’s National Energy Policy, made public the month Williams and FERC hatched a settlement. Bush visited California and told Davis he could not do anything to help the state.
Memos written by former
Enron traders contained
the blueprint for
ripping off California.
On May 17, a few weeks before the meeting between Bush and Davis, Vice President Dick Cheney, who chairs Bush’s energy task force, was interviewed by PBS’s “Frontline” for a special series on California’s energy crisis. During the interview, Cheney flat-out denied that energy companies ripped off California.
“The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things – an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn’t really deregulate,” Cheney said.
When asked whether it was possible that energy companies were behaving like a “cartel” and if some of the high power prices in California could be the result of manipulation, Cheney responded with a resounding “no.”
The Bush administration’s critics have said it’s highly unlikely that the president, Cheney, and members of his energy task force were kept in the dark about the Williams and Reliant scams, especially since the findings of the investigation by FERC took place around the same time the policy was being drafted. According to evidence obtained by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA.), the energy task force “considered and abandoned plans to address California’s energy problems in its report.”
Reliant has also been connected to Cheney’s energy task force, which met between January and March 2001 to work on Bush’s National Energy Policy.
Reliant, along with Entergy and TXU, two other electricity corporations based in Texas, hired Diane Allbaugh as a lobbyist. Allbaugh is the wife of Joe Allbaugh, a trusted Bush cohort who had served on Cheney’s energy task force and a director of the Federal Energy Management Agency.
Reliant, TXU, and Entergy each paid Diane Allbaugh $20,000 for consulting work during the last three months of 2000. It’s unclear whether she lobbied the energy task force on behalf of Reliant, TXU, and Entergy, which would have certainly been a conflict of interest, but her husband, Joe Allbaugh, “has participated in task force talks with a direct bearing on the energy companies’ interests generally, such as environmental rules for power plants and electricity deregulation – a specialty of his wife’s,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
The energy bill signed by Bush in August was a boon to Reliant Energy. House Energy Committee Chairman Joe Barton has for years pushed for legislation to create more competitive electricity markets. Reliant, whose executives enjoy close a relationship with Barton, played a role in shaping the energy bill, and worked side by side with Barton for years in shaping a portion of the energy bill that deals with competitive power markets.
Barton’s staff includes two former Reliant executives, and until recently, Reliant’s lobbying team included two former Barton aides. Reliant employees contributed more than $35,000 to Barton’s political causes between 2001 and 2004. Barton holds about $15,000 in Reliant stock, which has increased nearly tenfold since he bought the shares in 2002.
Jason Leopold is the author of News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit his Web site at www.jasonleopold.comfor updates.
EIJ
==
Halliburton doing biz in Iran, BC outlaws, 1995 so hires DC and co creates cayman is subsid to keep doing (previously fined for violating export ban). to be legal subsid has to be indep, but houston still ran co; iran was helping kill us troops [in iraq?] p 85
DC brought in fmr generals into co, then they worked as lobbyists to get biz 86 also acted as booster for afgan war, as revealed by 2008 pulitzer prize davis barstow nyt "msg machine"
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/8/pentagons_pundits_ny_times_reporter_david
---
DC called himself a "pretty good environmentalist" strat ignor DC once sorta ok on green, but only 1 of 16 ~ ESA; 1 of 26 support RR ~ Clean water act; ~ superfund, safe drink act; ~ cit suit ~ chem 50
Bowen, in Censoring Science says DC ran meetings on climate in parallel w/ secret energy mtgs, invited Hansen ) principals only, means big deal p 98
---
By Georges Magazine he [b2?] was ranked nr 45 in a list of the 50 most influential politicians. Greenspan was one, Cheney was two.
---
wikipedia: In July 2008, a former Environmental Protection Agency official stated publicly that Cheney's office had pushed significantly for large-scale deletions from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on the health effects of global warming "fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases."[118] In October, when the report appeared with six pages cut from the testimony, The White House stated that the changes were made due to concerns regarding the accuracy of the science. However, according to the former senior adviser on climate change to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, Cheney's office was directly responsible for nearly half of the original testimony being deleted.[118]
...
Cheney was a prominent member of the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG),[83] commonly known as the Energy task force, which comprised energy industry representatives, including several Enron executives. After the Enron scandal, the Bush administration was accused of improper political and business ties. In July 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that the US Department of Commerce must disclose NEPDG documents, containing references to companies that had made agreements with the previous Iraqi government to extract Iraq's petroleum.[84]
Beginning in 2003, Cheney's staff opted not to file required reports with the National Archives and Records Administration office charged with assuring that the executive branch protects classified information, nor did it allow inspection of its record keeping.[85] Cheney refused to release the documents, citing his executive privilege to deny congressional information requests.[86][87] Media outlets such as Time magazine and CBS News questioned whether Cheney had created a "fourth branch of government" that was not subject to any laws.[88] A group of historians and open-government advocates filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, asking the court to declare that Cheney's vice-presidential records are covered by the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and cannot be destroyed, taken or withheld from the public without proper review.[89][90][91][92]
---
rfk2
b2 pick DC ensured Wise Use backing. go to guy for wise use and oil in 80's;
arranged /led 1st veto of wilderness bill in hist under RR, big win psychol.
1992 to 2000 "dist advisor" to Ctr for Def of Free Ent (WU) arnold exec VP. DC also on
bd of Nat'l Legal Ctr for Public Interest, WU CTT 31
...
haliburton free pass on benzene fracking
Ch 6 blueprint for plunder
energy co 48.3m to b2 and gop 2000, 58m since inaug 96 31 of 48 trans team energy ties; cab and staff 4 cab sec, 6 powerful WH and 20 high level apptees
rove owned 250K enron stock early 2001 while energy pol made; also BP, amoco, royal dutch shell 97 but involved in all decisons (scooter sold a bunch early
2001 dept comm ceo of cabot chem; undersec chief econ for exxon
secret taks force; Nat Energy Pol Dev gp right after inaug 97 but Fed Advisory Comm Act says any mtgs of pvt and public be disclosed, so official members
all gov as end-run 98 DC #2 spenser abrams (2000 failed relect sen after one term MI 700K from car industry) killed fuel effic; Joe Allbaugh dir F Energy Reg Comiss vs FEMA?(tx "iron triangle) wife lobby for reliant, entergy and txu); also Don evans tx, norton (1/3 sen camp energy co's), and Paul O'Neill SIC vowed to
sell alcoa stock but stalled till after rep out, stock went up 30% 99 thot he cd have good impact, but relaized not goal 101
may 17 01 rep released --> energy bill ; exxon record profits, 2x prev yr 99
for 1st x, GAO sued for info, recently appt judge denied, no appeal , but Sierra C and Jud watch won. scotus delayed till after election; scalia had gone to oil co duck hunt junket refused to recuse, tho many demands 100 docs heavy redacted, and nothing from CD DC? mtgs 100
task force got input from API, Am Gas assoc, nat mining assoc and edison 101 400 co's combined in Alliance for Energy and ec growth to lobby.
B2 campaign workers became lobbyists; mtgs w/ task force; am gas at least 8 480 K contrib 1999-02 etc, api, exelon, westinghouse, enron 10x, 6 w DC (who refused to cap CA energy prices) 103 RELIANT engineered CA scam 103 Westar exec email said $ to Delay PAC was price for "seat at table" of the task force
103. DC says just b/c somoen gave $ to camp does not mean shd not have "express views " to gov 103
suskind bk says DC orchestrated idea of energy crisis, permitted no discuss and said pres wd not read anyone's reports 104 day before rep released, foto op
w/ green energy
chevron big input, api lang on exec order verbatim 104-5
19 mtgs/contacts w/ nuke ind over 1/2 mil contrib
So Co 1.6 m 99-02 met 7x, hired haley barbour and current rnc Marc Racicot SIC to lobby esp on co2, NSR rule key, req gpa plants to intall control when
upgrade or expand 106 prosecuted by BC (8 of 51); dpet Just forced to drop suits EPA cheif enforcement officer quit 106 "if yo have a good lobbyist, you can
just buy your way out of trouble" 106 joined by edison's Tom Kuhn, b pioneer college roomate edison 600k to gop 99-02 and its mmbers almost 20 mil since 98
106
rep rec'd exempt old power plants from CAA; barbour raisedf 250K at may 21 gala, 150k from So co.107
Haliburton gave 1 mil gop 97-02, and all soft money 1/2 mil to gop ; incentive to polute added to rep.bill, tho O'N says does not cost more to do right.
conservation a private virtue, noy basis of pub;lic poliocy DC TO speech mo before rep released 107 but 1 mpg increase = ANWR 2.6 = iraq and kuwait import,
8 all of ME 108 JC cafge up 7.5, shorage --> glut 108, 86 rolled by RR; lovens says if not, we need no persian gulf oil after 86; no need for wars; since
1990 80 mil car $ , cancelled tax decd for gren cars, less effic st'ds 100K tax break hummers etc. result worst effic in 20 yrs 109 tax cuts to offset
energy prices [basically another subsidy !?] bill ~ Daschle but end-run, by june 02 3/4 of 105 recs in place
oct 01 weakend regs on mining and air pollut
power plants kill a Trillion fish/yr 111
took pwer from states to limit offshore drill, b2 refused to suppoert Superfund (hid as reform) but 1:4 Us ppl live near one 112 10c bbl cheap b/c excluded
from liability under cost recovery 112 normally epa can clean site then charge 3x to poluter, so big leverage ; w/o tax, no cleanup; oct 03 fund went
bankrupt, so cost shifted to public.
---
In October 2003, the Pentagon published a report titled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall. The authors conclude by stating that "this report suggests that, because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern."[3]
M oD: ~ gw as late as 2007 p 213
salon:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/03/31/dean/index.html
http://www.muckety.com/Richard-B-Cheney/1323.muckety
Energy task force 2001
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cheney_Energy_Task_Force
---
pjt censored:
The energy turmoil of 2000-01 prompted Bush to establish a task force charged with developing a long-range plan to meet U.S. energy requirements. With the advice of his close friend and largest campaign contributor, Enron CEO, Ken Lay, Bush picked Vice President Dick Cheney, former Halliburton CEO, to head this group. In 2001 the Task Force formulated the National Energy Policy (NEP), or Cheney Report, bypassing possibilities for energy independence and reduced oil consumption with a declaration of ambitions to establish new sources of oil.
The Bush Administration’s struggle to keep secret the workings of Cheney’s Energy Task Force has been ongoing since early in the President’s tenure. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, requested information in spring of 2001 about which industry executives and lobbyists the Task Force was meeting with in developing the Bush Administration’s energy plan. When Cheney refused disclosure, Congress was pressed to sue for the right to examine Task Force records, but lost. Later, amid political pressure building over improprieties regarding Enron’s colossal collapse, Cheney’s office released limited information revealing six Task Force meetings with Enron executives.
With multiple lawsuits currently pending, the Bush Administration asserts that its right to secrecy is a matter of executive privilege in regard to White House records.
---
cheney blamed greens for elect shortage, but refinery surplus (cheaper to expand grandfather's ) what saved CA was conservation, sneered at option by cheyney 324
Bush global warming plan 4.6 bil 1cent per person/day, not enough to make any change 337
2000 82% forest lobby $? to gop
----
Vice-president Dick Cheney - Cheney denied that he had any ties with Halliburton Company after he left his position as CEO of the company in 2000. An investigation by the Congressional Research Service revealed that while VP Cheney received deferred compensation from Halliburton to the tune of $500,000 to $1,000,000. While Cheney was Secretary of Defense for George Herbert Walker Bush, the Pentagon contracted infamous Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root "to study the cost effectiveness of outsourcing some military operations to private contractors. Based on the results of the study, the Pentagon hired Brown & Root to implement an outsourcing plan." Cheney became the CEO of Halliburton in 1995. Questions about "sweetheart deals" with Halliburton arose as the company was awarded no-bid contracts for reconstruction in Iraq. The contracts were estimated to be worth about $1.5 billion. Probes into Halliburton led to allegations of overcharging the military for importing oil from Kuwait into Iraq, $6 million in kickbacks for the awarding of contracts to a Kuwaiti company and $180 million in bribes to land a natural gas project contract in Nigeria while Cheney was CEO. Reported by MSNBC/AP on 9 April 2004 to be "making a pitch for Westinghouse's U.S. nuclear power technology" while in China on the taxpayer tab.
==
see cooney and connaughton
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/opinion/18mon1.html?_r=1&hp
...
Some candidates are emphatic in their denial, like the Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, who flatly rejects “the man-caused climate change mantra of the left.” Others are merely wiggly, like California’s Carly Fiorina, who says, “I’m not sure.” Yet, over all (the exception being Mark Kirk in Illinois), the Republicans are huddled around an amazingly dismissive view of climate change.
A few may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as out-of-control taxers.
In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence — or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter. It was also remarkably heavy-handed.
According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr. Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as “brutal.”)
The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.
Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.
In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.”
Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.
A version of this editorial appeared in print on October 18, 2010, on page A34 of the New York edition.
RS 28 june 07
The Secret Campaign of Bush's Administration To Deny Global
Warming
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.
Page 3
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."
Page 3
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."
Page 5
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.
Page 6
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 [worked for sen c burns,
abramoff; nasa scandal?; goldwater teaching award]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.
===
sum:
The Energy Policy Act of 2005, signed by President George W. Bush on August 8, 2005, achieved many of the goals set out by Cheney’s secret task force in 2001 and ushered in a new era of deregulation, self-regulation, and utter disregard for environmental and safety laws. It also coincided with a culture of deep and widespread corruption at the Interior Department, including the Minerals Management Service. This era unquestionably set the stage for the BP oil catastrophe—Cheney’s Katrina.
Joshua Dorner is Communications Director for Progressive Media. To read more about the causes and consequences of the BP oil catastrophe, go the Energy and Environment page of the Center for American Progress web site.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/06/prelude_cheney_katrina.html
-----
DC approced cooney pick conn
conn and dc undercut ctw till she quit
cooney headed api fight on ghg p 108
cooney left for sr pos at exxon
chevron big infl on energy task force (as were funders of bush cheney polit funds? p111
dc tried to turn emissions from epa to doe 115
The co-presidency of Bush and Cheney
By Shirley Anne Warshaw
http://books.google.com/books?sitesec=reviews&id=i2-PWgKCKDAC
Editorial Review - Publishers Weekly vol. 256 iss. 14 p. 37 (c) 04/06/2009
In this critical investigation of former vice president Cheney’s role in George W. Bush’s administration, Warshaw (The Keys to Power ) reveals how Bush and Cheney split the presidency, each using the office’s power to advance agendas that rarely overlapped. This suited Bush’s limited agenda and experience well; while he focused on education reform and faith-based initiatives, he was content to leave Cheney in charge of economic and foreign policy. As head of Bush’s transition team, Cheney staffed virtually the entire administration with longtime associates who shared his vision of a strong—some have called it “imperial”—executive. He and his staff controlled political appointments and drafted most of the 800-plus signing statements affixed to bills that declared the president’s refusal to enforce selected parts of laws passed by Congress. Warshaw rejects analyses that portray either Cheney or Karl Rove as puppet masters in favor of portraying Bush as capable in the spheres that mattered to him, where Cheney was careful not to interfere. Thoroughly researched and insightful into the complexities of both personalities, the book offers an engaging look at the most controversial presidency since Nixon’s. (June)
===
co-prez bk
dc's dc at OMB was mitch daniels, VP eli lilley
http://books.google.com/books?id=i2-PWgKCKDAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
nyt
Editorial
Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency
Published: December 23, 2005
George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke.
Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.
It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.
The president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," Mr. Cheney said this week as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.
Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile shield that doesn't work but makes military contractors rich. Early in his tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him, and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had recently amassed a fortune.
The effort to expand presidential power accelerated after 9/11, taking advantage of a national consensus that the president should have additional powers to use judiciously against terrorists.
Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq immediately, pushing the intelligence community to come up with evidence about a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to writing the legal briefs justifying the abuse and torture of prisoners, the idea that the president can designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants" and detain them indefinitely, and a secret program allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. And when Senator John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of law at American military prisons, Mr. Cheney not only led the effort to stop the amendment, but also tried to revise it to actually legalize torture at C.I.A. prisons.
===
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman’s newsbreaking investigative journalism documents how Vice President Dick Cheney redefined the role of the American vice presidency, assuming unprecedented responsibilities and making it a post of historic power.
Dick Cheney changed history, defining his times and shaping a White House as no vice president has before— yet concealing most of his work from public view. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman parts the curtains of secrecy to show how Cheney operated, why, and what he wrought.
Angler, Gellman’s embargoed and highly explosive book, is a work of careful, concrete, and original reporting backed by hundreds of interviews with close Cheney allies as well as rivals, many speaking candidly on the record for the first time. On the signature issues of war and peace, Angler takes readers behind the scenes as Cheney maneuvers for dominance on what he calls the iron issues from Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to executive supremacy, interrogation of Al Qaeda suspects, and domestic espionage. Gellman explores the behind-the- scenes story of Cheney’s tremendous influence on foreign policy, exposing how he misled the four ranking members of Congress with faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, how he derailed Bush from venturing into Israeli- Palestinian peace talks for nearly five years, and how his policy left North Korea and Iran free to make major advances in their nuclear programs.
Domestically, Gellman details Cheney’s role as “super Chief of Staff ”, enforcer of conservative orthodoxy; gatekeeper of Supreme Court nominees; referee of Cabinet turf; editor of tax and budget laws; and regulator in chief of the administration’s environment policy. We watch as Cheney, the ultimate Washington insider, leverages his influence within the Bush administration in order to implement his policy goals. Gellman’s discoveries will surprise even the most astute students of political science.
Above all, Angler is a study of the inner workings of the Bush administration and the vice president’s central role as the administration’s canniest power player. Gellman exposes the mechanics of Cheney’s largely successful post-September 11 campaign to win unchecked power for the commander in chief, and reflects upon, and perhaps changes, the legacy that Cheney—and the Bush administration as a whole—will leave as they exit office.
Fri Jun 18, 2010 at 01:52 AM PDT
Dick Cheney rears his head over the Gulf disaster
by 1BQFollow
305 Comments / 305 New
You probably know that Halliburton, the contractor BP hired to cement the well, is under investigation for its role in this disaster.
You may also know that Dick Cheney has ended his seclusion in a secure, though disclosed, location.
But do you know just how much of this disaster could be attributed, both directly and indirectly, to Dick Cheney? Viewed as a whole, his actions while in office make him look at least as culpable in the Gulf oil disaster as Tony Hayward. Please bear with me - this will take a while to explain...
The failure of the MMS to regulate the oil and gas industries is now legendary (to the extent that it was regulated at all). It could be argued that the American Petroleum Institute regulated the MMS, apparently, and despite its inquiries, with Congress' permission. How this came about was a long-term strategy.
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It seems that Wyoming, Cheney's home state, has been a breeding ground for fossil fuel enthusiasts. And those enthusiasts found employment working for and with the Bush Administration:
The Wyoming connection was especially evident from 2000 to 2008, during the two administrations of President George W. Bush and his vice president, Wyoming native Dick Cheney. A former chief executive of Halliburton, Cheney took an early and very active interest in energy policy and placed several Wyoming political friends in key positions in the Department of Interior.
Among those friends and the key positions they occupied:
-- David J. Gribbin III, a high school and college friend from Wyoming, was Cheney's transitional liaison with Congress. Gribbin previously worked for Cheney as Halliburton’s chief lobbyist in the capital.
-- Thomas Sansonetti, a prominent Cheyenne lawyer, GOP activist, and member of the conservative Federalist Society, who headed the team choosing top personnel for the Department of Interior, which oversees Minerals Management Service.
-- Gayle Norton, who, though not from Wyoming, was picked by Sansonetti to head Interior. Native Coloradan Norton was a longtime protégée of James Watt in the Mountain States Legal Foundation, of which Watt was the founding director. Norton was also a member of the Federalist Society.
-- Rebecca W. Watson, a former Sheridan, Wyoming, lawyer, who Norton named as assistant Interior Secretary for Land and Minerals Management. Watson was responsible for the Bureau of Land Management, the Office of Surface Mining and the Minerals Management Service.
-- Rejane "Johnnie" Burton of Casper had managed the Wyoming Department of Revenue under former Gov. Jim Geringer. In 2007, Burton resigned under fire from her $168,000-a-year Minerals Management director’s job after the Department of Interior Inspector General found widespread corruption in the agency’s Colorado-based royalty collection office. In addition, questions were raised in Congress about Burton’s handling of offshore leases. Burton now works as a $49,000-a-year aide for longtime friend and former legislative colleague Wyoming U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis.
-- Randall Luthi, of Freedom, is a former speaker of the Wyoming House and a former aide to U.S. Sen. Alan K. Simpson. He succeeded Burton as MMS director. Luthi left his Minerals Management position when President Obama took office in January 2009. A little over a year later, Luthi was named president of the National Ocean Industries Association, the main industry trade group for the offshore oil and gas industry. (Luthi testified May 27 before the House Natural Resources committee investigating the Gulf of Mexico disaster. (Complete hearing transcript - PDF.) Several of the companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster are members of Luthi’s association. One of the National Ocean Industries’ stated missions: reduce federal regulatory controls. More about Luthi here (be sure to click through the links; the Daily Beast article is a doozy!)
-- Former Wyoming U.S. Rep. Barbara Cubin, as chairman of the House Resources Energy and Minerals subcommittee, was Congress’ most strident champion of the now-abandoned "Royalty-in-Kind" program that had allowed energy producers to pay Mineral Management Services royalties with gas or oil instead of cash. Where was the protest by the deficit hawks?
-- Current U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis pushed a proposal through the state Board of Land Commissioners to commit Wyoming’s 50 percent share of federal natural gas royalties to the Minerals Management Royalty-in-Kind program While serving as state treasurer in 2005. In 2008, Royalty in Kind accounted for more than half of the $543 million in federal gas royalties dispersed to the state. Deficit hawks, are you reading this?
Got the picture? The Department of Interior in general, and the MMS in particular, were oozing with Cheney devotees. This ensured that the primary regulatory body for the fossil fuel industry would be "industry friendly." But that's just part of the story.
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Another part of the story is the "National Energy Policy Development Group," aka the Cheney Energy Task Force. Offered without comment from Sourcewatch:
The National Energy Policy Development Group was a group, created by Executive Order on January 29, 2001, that was chaired by Vice President Richard Cheney. The group, commonly referred to as the "Cheney Energy Task Force," produced a National Energy Policy report in May 2001. In a cover note to George W. Bush, Cheney wrote that "we have developed a national energy policy designed to help bring together business, government, local communities and citizens to promote dependable, affordable and environmentally sound energy for the future." The composition of the task force, according to the report, was confined to government officials.
However, according to media reports at the time, energy industry executives participated in the Task Force. In particular, those identified as having been involved included then-Enron President and Chairman Kenneth Lay and lobbyists Haley Barbour and Marc Racicot.
The National Resources Defense Council filed a FOIA request for the records of the meetings. As they state:
In early 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney presided over a task force charged with setting a new national energy policy. For months high-ranking Bush administration officials met in secret with lobbyists and executives from utility companies and the oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy industries. In May 2001 the task force released its recommendations: more subsidies to polluting industries, more reliance on oil, more nuclear power. Despite NRDC's repeated requests for information, the Bush administration refused to disclose the names of industry participants in the task force or what they discussed with Bush policymakers.
In April 2001 NRDC filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for access to the task force's records; the Bush administration refused to comply. NRDC filed suit, and a federal judge ordered the administration to turn over the documents. On March 25, 2002, nearly a year after first requesting them, NRDC received roughly 10,000 pages relating to the task force from the Department of Energy. Subsequently the department provided another 3,500 pages, but withheld more than 16,000 others.
You can peruse the documents here. As they clarify further:
Even though the government heavily censored the documents before supplying them to NRDC, they reveal that Bush administration officials sought extensive advice from utility companies and the oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy industries, and incorporated their recommendations, often word for word, into the energy plan.
The Guardian reported on a piece by the WSJ:
The oil well spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch used in two other major oil-producing nations as last-resort protection against underwater spills.
The lack of the device, called an acoustic switch, could amplify concerns over the environmental impact of offshore drilling after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig last week...
... regulators in two major oil-producing countries, Norway and Brazil, in effect require them. Norway has had acoustic triggers on almost every offshore rig since 1993.
The U.S. considered requiring a remote-controlled shut-off mechanism several years ago, but drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness, according to the agency overseeing offshore drilling. The agency, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, says it decided the remote device wasn't needed because rigs had other back-up plans to cut off a well.
The U.K., where BP is headquartered, doesn't require the use of acoustic triggers.
The Journal's report doesn't come out and say this, but the environmental lawyer, Mike Papantonio, said on the Schultz show in an interview you can watch here that it was Cheney's energy task force - the secretive one that he wouldn't say much about publicly - that decided that the switches, which cost $500,000, were too much a burden on the industry. The Papantonio segment starts at around 5:00 in and lasts three minutes or so.
So Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force, that was supposed to "promote dependable, affordable and environmentally sound energy for the future," consulted with wolves on how best to guard the sheep
A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.
The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.
In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate "to my knowledge," and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know.
Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the task force. In addition, Cheney had a separate meeting with John Browne, BP's chief executive, according to a person familiar with the task force's work; that meeting is not noted in the document.
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Separately, the conservative Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request of their own and found that
on the grounds that the administration was not "in compliance with the Federal Advisory Commission Act (FACA), which mandates that certain documents, task force members, meetings, and decision-making activities be open to the public." Judicial Watch argued that the acting as energy lobbyists -- "regularly attended and fully participated" in the group's meetings held behind closed doors, and were in fact members of the group. The Sierra Club also filed suit. (The two actions were later merged.) "At issue is whether Cheney allowed private energy lobbyists and big-name campaign contributors to participate in the work of the group, and if so, whether that information should be made public," UPI reported.
They also found:
that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at:www.JudicialWatch.org.
The Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates (UAE) documents likewise feature a map of each country’s oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the projects, costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date.
You can view the documents here.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
When you tie the whole thing together, you end up with a compelling case for the following points, none of which is original and all of which are familiar to you, but taken as whole, detail an abuse of executive power that has resulted in preventable disasters:
-- Cheney appointed cronies to positions within the Bush Administration where they could be the most helpful to the fossil fuel industry, rubber-stamping the industry's every wish;
-- The Cheney Energy Task Force recommended rules and guidelines that allowed the fossil fuel industry to be self-"regulating;"
-- The Cheney Energy Task Force may have specifically recommended against a safety device that might have averted the loss of 11 lives;
-- The Cheney Energy Task Force appeared to have some interest in early 2001 in Iraq's oil industry, including which foreign companies were pursuing business there
Does anyone besides me think Dick Cheney ought to rear his orange-jumpsuit-clad head over a prison yard for the rest of his life? If so, can you contact an elected official to suggest that an investigation into Cheney's role in the abomination in the Gulf that he helped create (in addition to pulling us into a war of aggression) is at least as worthy of investigation as Tony Hayward?
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Please remember to rec the BP Catastrophe Liveblog Mothership!
Post-coffee update: Thanks to those who've clicked through many of the links. In the semi-cold light of morning, I feel even more strongly that no matter how culpable Tony Hayward is, Dick Cheney played a pivotal role in enabling the cost-cutting measures that cost 11 lives on Deepwater Horizon, not to mention the thousands of lives lost or shattered in two wars of aggression.
WebofDCeit
GLOBAL WARMING
SKEPTIC/DENIER
FUNDER$
FRONTS
POLITICIANS
INDUSTRIE$
LOBBYIST$
MEDIA
FLACKS
HACKS
DIRTY TRICKS
REVOLVING DOOR
GLOBAL WARMING
B2, scientist
SCIENCE suppression
Watson, Robert
Pioneer
Nixon
1994 Newt Revo, B2, lobbyist
ABRAMOFF
GOP2, Pioneer
Ailes
DIRTY TRICKS
Pachaurigate
CHENEY
B2, revolving door, Wise Use
CHENEY
Uber
GLOBAL WARMING
scientist
Hansen, J
Rumsfeld
Star Wars
Gulf War 2
Gun Control
Kucinich, D
Pioneer
Reagan
api, revolving door, Uber
American Petroleum Institute API
Blackwater
api, CoC
BP Oil
B2, revolving door, Uber
BUSH2
api, CoC
Chevron
Pioneer
Goldwater, B
GOP2
Apostates
TP, Uber
BECK, G
coal, CoC, Denier, GOP2
Blunt, R
CoC, Denier, tobacco
Boehner, J REP
Koch
American Enterprise Institute/AEI
Four Sisters
Bradley Fdn
GOP
api, revolving door
Haliburton
antagonist
CHENEY
Dick Cheney
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Dick_Cheney
===
6:28 AM 12/9/2010
cheney http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/opinion/18mon1.html?_r=1&hp
---
RS
“Six Years of Deceit: Inside the Bush Administration’s Secret Campaign to Deny Global Warming and Let Polluters Shape America’s Climate Policy”
A very good article in the June 28 issue of Rolling Stone, on the Bush administration global warming disinformation campaign, shows direct connections between former White House CEQ chief of staff Phil Cooney and both Vice President Cheney’s office and Karl Rove. From Cheney’s continuing statements that deny and misrepresent the scientific intelligence on human-induced global warming, to Cooney’s manipulative policing of federal climate change science communications on topics deemed politically sensitive, a lack of integrity in dealing with climate science started at the highest level of the administration and fed down directly into the working level of the federal climate research program. Federal science program officials, in requiring clearances from Cooney to publish reports, had been drawn into Cheney’s sphere of influence. “They’ve got a political clientele that does not want to be regulated,” Rolling Stone quotes Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz as saying. “Any honest discussion of the science would stimulate public pressure for a stronger policy. They’re not stupid.” Also from our conversation with reporter Tim Dickinson: “‘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.’” This article—“Six Years of Deceit: Inside the Bush Administration’s Secret Campaign to Deny Global Warming and Let Polluters Shape America’s Climate Policy”—is a must-read for anyone concerned with this problem.
One excerpt from the much longer article:
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,” [former EPA administrator Christie] 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 [American Petroleum Institute], Cooney’s former employer. The study, which purported to show that the twentieth century was not unusually warm, was authored by two astrophysicists [Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon], 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 [Prof. James] 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!”
whole art:
The Secret Campaign of Bush's Administration To Deny Global
Warming
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.
Page 2
"They've got a political clientele that does not want to be
regulated," says Rick Piltz, a former Bush climate official
[see his caveat, he was a science guy, not an appointee?]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.
Page 3
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."
Page 3
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."
Page 5
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.
Page 6
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.