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Sununu, J

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8/20 villain, primary FORK

NOTE POL DYNASTY nh? 2026 MIDTERM

MERRI OK

SEE HACKS LINDZEN MICHAELS

BAK

built his own climate model in 1990?! prolly not, he HAD built very different [and presumably much cruder] models as a grad student (fluid vs mech?}:

He earned a bachelor of science degree in 1961, a master of science degree in 1963, and a Ph.D. in 1966 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in mechanical engineering.[ fluid [mechanical] engineering had done some computer models as phd student

180 read lips pledge

freaked out by  1975 marg meade talk on climate

Sununu was the first White House Chief of Staff for George H. W. Bush, serving from 1989 to 1991.

dubya wanted him out

$600K gov't planes to ski (boost 1k pts light) CBG got him to repay only 47K$

White House Chief of Staff under President George H.W. Bush from January 21, 1989 until 1991. Sununu stepped down amidst allegations he had used taxpayer-funded flights for personal flights. Sununu has been described as the “bad cop” to Bush's “good cop”

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revelle daughter said PO'd he did not get to talk to Sununu 1990, died 1992

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GZERO MALC NW CW BK

SPY MAG ~ SUNUNU CLIMATE DENIER

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FR JOHN H

JR John E. Sununu - Wikipedia

John Edward Sununu (born September 10, 1964) is an American politician from the U.S. state of New Hampshire. A member of the Republican Party, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1997 to 2003 and in the U.S. Senate from 2003 to 2009. He is the son of John H. Sununu and older brother of Chris Sununu, both of whom were governors of New Hampshire.

Sununu was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1996, and was reelected in 1998 and 2000. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2002, defeating Republican incumbent Bob Smith in the primary and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in the general election. Elected to the Senate at 38 years old, he was its youngest member throughout his entire term. In 2008, he lost reelection to Shaheen in a rematch.

Sununu is the Republican nominee in the 2026 U.S. Senate election in New Hampshire, seeking to reclaim his old seat. He faces Democratic congressman Chris Pappas.

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As of 2009 Sununu sat on the Board of Managers of ConvergEx Holdings, a holding company for BNY ConvergEx Group, an affiliate of Bank of New York Mellon, which holds a 33.8% stake in BNY ConvergEx Group.[36]^

On July 7, 2010, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP announced that Sununu was joining the firm as an adjunct senior policy advisor.[37]^ Akin Gump is one of the largest law firms and lobbying firms in Washington, D.C.[38]^

Sununu was appointed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to serve on the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) for the Troubled Asset Relief Program funds, whose purpose is to assess how the TARP program is working, in order to help Congress determine whether to continue injecting capital into the financial sector.[39]^

Sununu is a regular op-ed contributor to The Boston Globe.[citation^^ ^^needed]^

Before the 2014 election cycle, speculation abounded that he would pursue a rematch against Shaheen, but in April 2013, he said he would not.[40]^

On January 30, 2019, Lloyd's of London announced Sununu had been appointed to its governing council.[41]^

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AN 9 26

A new theme is emerging in midterm campaigns: they're talking about rampant corruption in Washington.

The Washington Sun (formerly NOTUS) noticed that campaign ads are starting to pop up on both sides of the aisle, though predominantly among Democratic candidates attacking other lawmakers and the president for corruption.

A few weeks ago, a Gallup poll indicated that while economic issues continue to be top of mind for voters — whether it's the economy, inflation, gas prices, housing affordability or grocery costs — behind those is the concern that the government has become pay-to-play.

In New Hampshire, former Sen. John Sununu (R) is being forced to defend allegations that he's "cashing in" on his Senate seat after he went to work for a lobbying firm as a "senior policy advisor" following his loss in 2008. His opponent alleges that he has been “helping big pharma and big oil make billions, while we pay the price.”

The pro-Sununu crowd then attacked Rep. Chris Pappas, who is married to a former policy lawyer for Amazon. Pappas' husband also registered as a lobbyist 11 years ago and worked for Amazon for four years, until 2019.

It's just one example out of "dozens," the Sun reported.

“We’re seeing more of these kinds of ads than ever before,” said GOP pollster Robert Blizzard. “It’s across every age group, income level, a feeling that they’re getting screwed but the stock market is somehow high, so the frustration with politics-as-usual, the assumed corruption that goes along with that, is at a fever pitch.”

It comes amid reports that President Donald Trump is cashing in on his presidency, making 28,700 stock trades from his inauguration until June 2026. Trump is also raking in cash from his cryptocurrency venture. His sons are buying into companies that are then given lucrative government contracts.

Still, it isn't only Trump that is name-checked in the ads. The ads follow the theme of a politician taking donations from special interest groups and making policies that hurt voters because they're being paid to do so. Meanwhile, all other politicians or watchdogs refuse to call them out.

“Trump, and his corruption, is baked in on everything, which is why the corruption piece is so good,” a one Democratic consultant working with congressional races said. “You can link it directly to the candidates, and not make our ads just be about being anti-Trump.”

A Democratic pollster explained, “They pushed it too far and pushed it past where normal voters are willing to put up with it.”

Strategists are seeing an opening on the issue for the first time because voters are frustrated seeing a corrupt system while they're struggling to get by.

Democratic pollster Angie Kuefler has conducted her own corruption-related research, finding that voters don't merely want Democrats to pledge to stop GOP corruption; they want it across the board.

“As the candidate, you have to make clear that you’re going to take on corruption in both parties, including your own, and then you have to tie that corruption to costs going up for the voter, because what changes voting behavior is demonstrating the impact on them,” she told the Sun. “Tying a bad, corrupt politician to rising costs is a double whammy, one-two punch, that connects to both the problem in politics and to their pain.”

The Sun obtained a research memo on the matter for a Democratic super PAC saying that 52 percent of voters indicate the “most harmful” corruption likely involves “special interests, billionaires … acting within the law” to elect politicians who then owe them.

"A third of those polled said criminal acts by individual politicians were more harmful than the influence of special interests," the report said.

REF

Five Things You Should Know About Chris Pappas’s Trump-Backed Opponent John Sununu

September 9, 2026

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Yesterday, former Senator John Sununu became New Hampshire’s Republican U.S. Senate nominee after riding the coattails of Donald Trump’s endorsement and his family’s last name. With eight weeks to go until election day, here are five things you should know about John Sununu:

1. Sununu is Running for Senate to “Protect” Donald Trump’s “Gains.”

John Sununu welcomed Donald Trump’s endorsement and said he would “absolutely” campaign with him. Following the endorsement, Sununu could not name even a single instance where he disagrees with Trump.

Sununu called this Senate race “important to President Trump’s agenda and to the successes that have been made in Washington” and said he is running for Senate to “protect those gains” that Trump and Republicans have made in Washington.

Public polling shows Trump has a -25 net approval rating among Granite Staters due to his highly unpopular and costly agenda that will drag Sununu down as he runs to sell Granite Staters out to Trump and his corporate special interest backers.

2. Sununu Supports Trump’s Big Ugly Bill That Made Devastating Cuts to Health Care in New Hampshire.

John Sununu supports Donald Trump’s Big Ugly Bill, saying Republicans “did the right thing,” even though the bill shuttered a health care center in Franconia and is ripping health care away from tens of thousands of Granite Staters just to give tax breaks to the ultrawealthy.

Sununu’s support for Trump’s devastating health care cuts is just the latest in a history of supporting slashing Granite Staters’ health care. In office, he repeatedly voted to cut Medicaid and Medicare, attacked the Affordable Care Act, and proposed a health care plan that could let insurance companies deny coverage for Granite Staters with pre-existing conditions.

Sununu even told Granite Staters to “stop complaining about health care.”

3. Sununu Supports Trump’s War With Iran That’s Boosting His Own Profits While Raising Granite Staters’ Gas Prices.

John Sununu has “expressed support for” and “has been defending” Donald Trump’s highly unpopular war with Iran that surged the value of Sununu’s Big Oil stocks by 24 percent.

While New Hampshire families and small businesses have been forced to pay skyhigh prices at the gas pump, Sununu has been “cheering on” Trump’s war and accepted more than $80,000 in campaign contributions from energy executives.

4. Sununu Was a “Leading Figure in the Effort” to Privatize Social Security.

While in office, John Sununu was a “leading figure in the effort” to privatize Social Security, repeatedly introducing legislation that would have enriched Wall Street while directly exposing Granite Staters’ retirement accounts to stock market crashes and wild swings.

Sununu supports Donald Trump’s Big Ugly Bill that accelerated the timeline for Social Security to become insolvent, which could affect the hundreds of thousands of Granite Staters who rely on its benefits. While in Congress, Sununu co-sponsored a bill that was forecast to make Social Security insolvent seven years earlier than had been predicted at the time.

5. Sununu Voted to Help Corporate Special Interests, Then Cashed In and Made Up To $35 Million While Granite Staters Paid the Price.

In office, John Sununu voted to serve the interests of Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Big Oil — then cashed in with those same industries as his net worth surged by up to $35 million. Sununu voted to give Wall Street a $700 billion taxpayer bailout, then got paid by a company propped up by billions in bailout funds, but Granite Staters were left to face rising foreclosures.

Sununu helped Big Pharma maximize their profits by repeatedly voting against allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices — including casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate — leaving Granite State seniors to pay more in out-of-pocket costs. He then spent nearly a decade cashing in at a top lobbying firm that was paid more than $10 million by its Big Pharma clients, including to stop efforts to lower prescription drug prices.

While oil companies raked in record profits, Sununu blocked efforts to protect Americans from gas price gouging and left Granite Staters with spiking gas prices, then cashed in at a Washington firm that made millions from Big Oil.

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11 25 netflix the wh effect

sununu out, but bad effects k?

overpromise in campaign, underpromise in office/ policy. meaning?

b41 pushed to rio JEJ promo in theatres; paraiah at rio

reporter asked about US pressure, our guy says we never do --> ha

bromley

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https://time.com/6169294/climate-change-politicized-in-1990s/ eugene linden

Because the markets are where the money is, politicians followed. Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the dizzying evolution of George H.W. Bush starting in 1988. Aware of the upsurge in interest in environment during that year, Bush vowed to be the environmental president. On Aug. 31, 1988 in a campaign speech, he said, “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the ‘greenhouse effect’ are forgetting about the ‘White House effect’. In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House. It will include the Soviets, the Chinese… The agenda will be clear. We will talk about global warming.”

Bush actually did convene a conference once president, but sometime between his campaign speech and the conference in April, the “lobbyist effect” came into play. The Chinese were not invited, and the briefing papers for cabinet members warned them not to use the phrases “global warming” or “greenhouse effect.” This is akin to convening a conference on pandemics and forbidding your aides from mentioning COVID-19.

The battle to contain global warming was lost in the 1990s. The mixed messages coming from the U.S. on global warming undercut efforts to convince China and other emerging nations to eschew coal and “leapfrog” fossil fuels in powering their industrialization. China leapfrogged the U.S., but it was in greenhouse gas emissions and not in the adoption of renewables. A study of 2019 emissions by The Rhodium Group found that China accounted for 27% of total emissions that year, two and a half times more than the U.S., and equivalent to more than the combined emissions of the 27 nations in the European Union and the 38 nations in the OECD.

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losing earth not all here? eg see wm reilly

Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when the anthropologistMargaret Meadconvened a symposium on the subject at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices,” Mead wrote, “the whole planet may become endangered.” Her conclusions were stark, immediate and absent the caveats that hobbled the scientific literature. Or as Sununu saw it, she showed her hand: “Never before have the governing bodies of the world been faced with decisions so far-reaching,” Mead wrote. “It is inevitable that there will be a clash between those concerned with immediate problems and those who concern themselves with long-term consequences.” When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots.

In April, the director of theO.M.B., Richard Darman, a close ally of Sununu’s, mentioned that the NASA scientist James Hansen, who had forced the issue of global warming onto the national agenda the previous summer, was going to testify again — this time at a hearing called by Al Gore. Darman had the testimony and described it. Sununu was appalled: Hansen’s language seemed extreme, based on scientific arguments that he considered, as he later put it, like “technical garbage.”

While Sununu and Darman reviewed Hansen’s statements, the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly, took a new proposal to the White House. The next meeting of the I.P.C.C.’s working group was scheduled for Geneva the following month, in May; it was the perfect occasion, Reilly argued, to take a stronger stand on climate change. Bush should demand a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions.

Sununu disagreed.It would be foolish, he said, to let the nation stumble into a binding agreement on questionable scientific merits, especially as it would compel some unknown quantity of economic pain.They went back and forth. Reilly didn’t want to cede leadership on the issue to the European powers; after all, the first high-level diplomatic meeting on climate change, to which Reilly was invited, would take place just a few months later in the Netherlands. Statements of caution would make the “environmental president” look like a hypocrite and hurt the United States’ leverage in a negotiation. But Sununu wouldn’t budge. He ordered the American delegates not to make any commitment in Geneva. Very soon after that, someone leaked the exchange to the press.

Sununu, blaming Reilly, was furious. When accounts of his argument with Reilly appeared in The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post ahead of the Geneva I.P.C.C. meeting, they made the White House look as if it didn’t know what it was doing.

A deputy of Jim Baker pulled Reilly aside. He said he had a message from Baker, who had observed Reilly’s infighting with Sununu. “In the long run,” the deputy warned Reilly, “you never beat the White House.”...

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John Henry Sununu (born July 2, 1939) is an American politician who was the 75th Governor of New Hampshire (1983–1989) and later White House Chief of Staff under President George H. W. Bush. He is the father of John E. Sununu, the former United States Senator from New Hampshire, and Christopher Sununu, the current governor of New Hampshire. Sununu was the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party from 2009 to 2011.

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Sununu co-hosted CNN's nightly Crossfire from March 1992 until February 1998.[6]^

From 1963 until 1983, he was President of JHS Engineering Company and Thermal Research Inc.[6] In addition, he helped establish and worked as chief engineer for Astro Dynamics Inc. from 1960 until 1965.[27]^

Sununu is President of JHS Associates, Ltd. and is a partner in Trinity International Partners, a private financial firm. He is also a member of Honorary Council of Advisors for U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (USACC).[28]^

Legacy

In his report Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, Nathaniel Rich wrote that in November 1989 Sununu prevented the signing of a 67-nation commitment to freeze carbon dioxide emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005, and singled him out as a force starting coordinated efforts to bewilder the public on the topic of global warming and changing it from an urgent, nonpartisan and unimpeachable issue to a political issue, and an increasingly intractable one.[29]^

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https://www.npr.org/transcripts/710992579

apr 2019

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. As we deal with more extreme weather around the world and hear more dire reports about the future impact of climate change, you have to wonder, why didn't we succeed in taking preventive measures sooner, before things had progressed? That's one of the key questions my guestNathaniel Rich tries to answer in his new book, "Losing Earth: A Recent History." It's an expanded version of his report that the New York Times magazine devoted an entire issue to last August.

He focuses on the period from 1979 to '89, a period he describes as a time before the fossil fuel industry funded scientists to create doubt about the science of climate change and before the Republican Party adopted climate denialism as a central tenet. He focuses on the scientists, activists and political leaders who pushed for measures to limit carbon emissions and the political and corporate leaders who blocked them. We're also going to talk about where we are now with a president who doubts the science and a growing movement of young people insisting on action reversing the path we're on.

Nathaniel Rich, welcome to FRESH AIR. How much worse has the climate change problem gotten since your book ends in 1989?

NATHANIEL RICH: More carbon dioxide has been emitted into the atmosphere since the final page of the book basically, since the end of 1989, than in the history of civilization preceding it. So it's gotten a lot worse. Obviously, the political situation's gotten a lot worse as well. It's become a starkly partisan issue. I don't have to tell anyone that. And it seems like we are much further from a solution than we were 30 years ago.

GROSS: You write that, now, a long-term disaster is the best-case scenario.Would you explain that?

RICH: Yeah. Well, a certain amount of warming is baked in. And that's, you know, referring to some of the projections about 1 1/2 or 2 degrees Celsius warming above historical means, and there's all kinds of horrific scenarios that come with that. Of course, that's not nearly as bad as, you know, 3 degrees or 4 degrees or 5 degrees warming. But even when we talk about it in those terms, in sort of half degrees or full degrees warming, it's almost euphemistic because there's there's such dramatic differences even between, you know, 2 degrees and 2.1 degrees, 2.1 degrees and 2.2 degrees.

And I think one of the lies, sort of convenient dishonesties we have about the issue, one of the more benign ones, I guess, is that we think of it almost, like, in Hollywood terms, like, either we're going to win this thing, or we're going to suffer a crushing defeat. But of course, there's a huge range of outcomes in between.And at this point - yeah - where we're at, ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to better our situation as much as possible.

GROSS: Is there a moment when you think we came really close to seriously cutting back on the carbon emissions that are responsible for climate change during the period that you write about, '79 to '89?

RICH: Absolutely. From from '79 to '89, there are a series of efforts, escalating efforts, to first bring the issue to the attention of the powers that be, people at the highest levels of the federal government, and then to bring it to the public to generate public concern. And finally, in the middle of the decade, a solution materializes, which is a global treaty to reduce emissions that would be binding. And it's modeled after the ozone treaty that's then in process.

And by the end of the decade, we've reached the point of high-level diplomatic meetings to negotiate this binding global treaty. And we get to the precipice of an agreement on the framework of this treaty. And at the very last second, the U.S. pulls out, the story I tell in the book.

And so I think that, at least on paper, that's the closest we've come. I think you could have a reasonable, you know, debate about whether or not, if the U.S. did sign the treaty, they would have lived up - we would've lived up to the terms of it, whether other countries would have lived up to the terms of it even if it was binding. And that's a more, you know, complicated conversation to have. I think, at the very least, we'd be a lot further ahead than we are now. That seems indisputable.

GROSS: So what year did the U.S. pull out of this treaty? Who is the president, and why did we pull out?

RICH: So it's 1989. President is George H.W. Bush. And the previous summer, James Hansen, a NASA scientist who had become essentially the face of climate science, gave testimony before Congress in which he said, global warming is here. It's no longer a theory. We're seeing evidence of warming in global temperatures. It was the hottest summer in American history at the time.

And the story became a - it became a major public national story and to the point that even George Bush on the campaign stump gave speeches about it, was making promises that, as president, he would solve the problem then called the greenhouse effect as well. And he said, you know, those who think we can't solve the greenhouse effect haven't heard about the White House effect. And when I'm in the White House, you know, we'll solve it. And he gets to the White House.

James Baker, who's the new secretary of state, in his first major speech at the State Department, he invites the IPCC, the international organization under the auspices of the United Nations that's drafting - begins drafting a treaty. They have one of their first meetings at the State Department.And he endorses this program. And over the course of the year, you get to a meeting in Noordwijk in the Netherlands, a kind of coastal town on the North Sea.

That's the first high-level diplomatic meeting of - it's of environmental ministers from all over the world. Sixty-five countries or so come there.And there's a general sense that everyone's going to sign essentially a letter of intent that they will pursue a binding treaty to reduce global emissions. And at that meeting, the U.S. pulls out.

And the reason, at least the narrow political reason for that, is that over the course of that year, there had been a huge fight within the administration between William Riley, the head of Bush's EPA, and John Sununu, his chief of staff. And Sununu was highly skeptical of the science and suspicious of the motives of this treaty. And he was ultimately more powerful and won the argument, essentially, and was able to force the U.S. delegation to not accept anything that was binding. And at that point, the treaty became watered down.

GROSS: Do you think that some of these treaties are almost like masquerades where countries show up, and they look really great - like, we're going to do it - we're going to sign it - and then, at the last minute, you pull out? Like, it's almost like a game of chicken. Like, nobody really wants to do it, but everybody's waiting for somebody else to pull out - that no one really has the political will to make the sacrifices that need to be made.

RICH: Yeah. That's John Sununu's argument, basically. I spoke to him at length for the book. And he said, listen - I mean, he's totally unapologetic about his role in this. And I said, you know, do you claim responsibility for thwarting (laughter) any chance of a solution on this? And he said, I - essentially, he said, I wish I could. But in fact, I felt that we were the only honest brokers at the table and that the other countries weren't serious - that even though it was, you know, a quote, "binding agreement," essentially, what - you know, what's the country going to do if someone doesn't hit their targets? Are they going to bomb them? You know, are they going to have economic sanctions? I mean, of course not.

And in fact, the leader of the delegation,Allan Bromley, who was Bush's science adviser and was kind of Sununu's man in Noordwijk - he wrote a memoir in which he essentially said the same thing, that he said that - in conversations with other delegates, other environmental ministers - at Noordwijk, he asked them, you know, how are you going to hit these targets? Do you have plans, you know, to reduce emissions by 20 percent or whatever by a certain year? And they would say - a couple of them told him, well, no, but it's just a piece of paper. And, you know, no one's going to send us to jail.

And so I think, yes, it's - I think you have to take seriously that kind of cynical view. And I think you can't really take seriously Sununu's scientific opinions on this matter. But I think you can take seriously his skepticism about the power of these treaties.

GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Nathaniel Rich. He's the author of the new book, "Losing Earth: A Recent History." We're going to take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more about climate change and why we haven't made more progress than we have. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Nathaniel Rich, author of the new book "Losing Earth: A Recent History." It's about climate change and why we failed to solve the problem when we had the chance. The book focuses on 1979 to '89, looking at the scientists, politicians and the oil industry, the people who were leading the efforts to change and the people who were blocking them.

You said in an interview that you spent an enormous amount of time researching the oil industry and their efforts in blocking the efforts to curb carbon emissions. And you also said that it actually plays a very little part in your book. (Laughter) You didn't use much of your research. So why is that?

RICH: The industry has been following this issue for a long time. You know, there are studies from Exxon or even Humble Oil - the predecessor to Exxon - going back into the mid-1950s. And even then, those studies were not about whether or not this was happening. It was really - the question was, how much of the added CO2 in the atmosphere was because of Exxon, basically, because of the fossil fuel industry? And they continued to monitor this over the decades. There were, you know, occasional sort of CO2 working groups, study groups. This was going on, also, at the American Petroleum Institute - the big trade group for the oil and gas industry - and at some of the other companies.

And those efforts continued through the '80s. But it was never - during that decade - obviously, things have changed quite dramatically - but during that decade, it was never a high priority. And I spoke with a lot of people who worked in the industry during that time and people at the highest levels of API. And they really weren't concerned about it, in part because there was no serious efforts in D.C. to pass, you know, laws or policies to reduce emissions.

And it wasn't really until Hansen - James Hansen, the NASA scientist - spoke before Congress in '88 and generated a huge - sort of huge national headlines that they started to worry.And the story of how they began to mobilize this multidecadal effort to sow propaganda, disinformation, to buy off politicians and scientists and, ultimately, to convert an entire political party to denialism is - the seeds of that you see emerging in the weeks and months after the Hansen hearing. But before that, it was really on the back burner.

GROSS: So let's talk about how theoil industry's lobbying efforts changed at the end of the '80s, where your book ends. You write about how the American Petroleum Institute started funding a lobbying group.They formed the lobbying organization the Global Climate Coalition. And what did this lobbying group do to mobilize public opinion to be skeptical of climate science?

RICH: Yeah, it's sort of a remarkable turn of events in that after Hansen's hearing, there are these high-level conversations at the American Petroleum Institute and at Exxon about, essentially, what do we do about this? It seems clear that regulation is coming. You know, George Bush is talking about it, and so on.

And they essentially reached the same conclusions. They - Exxon and API - they say, we need to be an active participant in any kind of policy discussion. We need to burnish our credentials as, you know, scientific experts on the subject, so we have credibility in it. We need to make sure that the science - that the policy doesn't extend beyond what the science says. Emphasize uncertainty where it exists. That would become, you know, crucial later on. And then, perhaps most important, don't accept any policy that will hurt the bottom line. That's the beginning of it.

And then, as almost an afterthought at the time, API, through its press office, which is coordinating the press for this industry group Global Climate Coalition, starts to reach out to a couple of scientists who are friendly with the industry who have expressed some doubt about either the ozone or CO2. And they start encouraging them to speak to the press. Sometimes that encouragement takes the form of payouts. The head of the API program told me they gave $2,000 to a scientist whenever he wrote an op-ed for a national publication. And that is almost an afterthought at the time. It's pretty low on the totem pole of what they're doing. They're also meeting with congressmen and so on.

But it pays enormous dividends because all of a sudden, national news publications start quoting these scientists - and it's really a handful of people, four or five people - over and over again. And an issue that to this point has been a story about, you know, fear of what's going to happen, all of a sudden has two sides. And of course, that's like catnip, (laughter), for journalists. And all of a sudden, you have a number of pieces that start to appear that say maybe there's not scientific consensus about this problem.

GROSS: Right. But generating controversy around climate change, where, it sounds like before, it wasn't - there weren't people denying it. There were people saying - based on your research, there were people saying, well, we don't really know for sure how bad things are going to be. Do we really want to risk the economy over science that's not kind of nailed down yet? We don't know what the consequences will be or when they'll be, exactly, so let's kind of keep the status quo as long as we can.

So it goes from that to, like, the whole notion of climate change is controversial. There's two sides. So is that, like, one of the innovations of the late '80s, making it, like, controversial with two sides and one of the sides saying this science really might not be true at all?

RICH: Yeah. Exactly. And it starts almost tentatively. It starts with saying, well, it's not as certain as we think, as people say, as James Hansen says it is. There's problems with the climate models, thecomputer models that, you know, Hansen uses. And then it goes into, we really don't know what, you know, the regional effects will be. And it grows and grows. It's almost like they're encouraged by their success, and they become more and more brazen. And then ultimately, you get, after a number of years, into the '90s, you get into this bizarro universe where, all of a sudden, they're questioning the basic fundamental science itself. And of course, that science goes back not to just 1979 but to the late 19th century about, you know, what's the effect of pumping a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere and what warming will that cause?

And so it's - we've entered this weird funhouse realm where now, if you jump ahead to the present day, you have a political party, the only major political party in the world, that endorses a position that's essentially to the right, even, of what the industry now says in their public statements. You know, Exxon publicly today doesn't deny climate change, but you have a party that does. And so it's - I think it's something that future historians will spend a lot of time piecing out, is how this sort of little lie grew into a big lie and overwhelmed our politics.

GROSS: Do you think it's fair to say that the fossil fuel industry invented the idea of climate denial?

RICH: Yeah. I think that's fair to say.

GROSS: OK. This is interesting. You say that the industry, the fossil fuel industry, saw an upside to the warming trends of climate change. What was the upside for them?

RICH: Well, there are a few. I mean, drilling in the Arctic is one of them, which you see starting to happen now.

GROSS: Drilling in the Arctic because of the permafrost melting?

RICH: Yeah because - yeah, the ice melting (laughter). And so that opens up shipping passages, and you can get to more oil. And of course, they were studying that back in the '80s, as well, you know, licking their chops (laughter). And but also, one of the early findings from API was that in a warmer world, you'd need more energy. Essentially, more air conditioning. And that would, you know, further industry profits.

GROSS: My guest is Nathaniel Rich, author of the new book "Losing Earth: A Recent History." We'll talk more about climate change, and what stood in the way of taking action to stop or slow it and how young activists today are redefining the issue ...

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Nathaniel Rich, author of the new book "Losing Earth: A Recent History." It's about climate change and why we didn't take action sooner to stop or at least slow it. Rich examines the period from 1979 to 1989, a period he describes as a time before the fossil fuel industry funded scientists to create doubt about the science of climate change and before the Republican Party adopted climate denialism as a central tenet. He focuses on the scientists, activists and political leaders who pushed for measures to limit carbon emissions and the political and corporate leaders who blocked them.

So we were just talking about the oil industry's role in obstructing movement forward on stopping climate change. Politicians played a strong role in this, too. One of the centerpieces of your book is the NASA scientist James Hansen testifying before Congress about carbon emissions, climate change and what we're in store for if we don't move forward. And his testimony - you can say it was suppressed. You could say it was censored. I don't know what word you want to use. But the H.W. Bush administration tried to stop him from saying what he planned on saying. Tell us who tried to do it and how.

RICH: Yeah, this is something that had not been known. And one of the things I most wanted to figure out was that after Hansen testifies in 1988 - of course, and he's been testifying all decade - but in '88 he gets this huge amount of attention - and in 1989, he's due to go back. And this is right as negotiations are really getting started on a global treaty. And John Sununu is fighting this.

And his testimony comes back not only with deletions but also with absurd, new language, essentially to the effect that no regulatory policy should be introduced if it at all forces the U.S. to suffer economically - of course, nothing a scientist would say in any context. And he's outraged, understandably. And he takes this testimony to Al Gore, who's then a senator and leading the hearing. And Gore calls The New York Times. And they run a huge story about it. And it becomes a major scandal. And in fact, it generates more support for climate policy than Hansen could have done by himself.

And it had been unknown, you know, who was responsible for that? At the time, the White House claimed it was some bureaucrat five levels down from the top. I asked John Sununu if he knew anything about it. And he said, yeah, I did (laughter). I was responsible for it - that he told Richard Darman, the head of the OMB at the time, to censor it. He didn't think that Hansen's claims had merit. And he tried to stop it.

GROSS: How much of a scientist was John Sununu?

RICH: He considered himself a scientist. He considered himself...

GROSS: On what grounds? (Laughter).

RICH: ...An old engineer. I mean, on fairly legitimate grounds. He got a Ph.D. in - I believe in fluid [mechanical] engineering. And he had taught. And he even taught a - he taught at MIT. He even taught a class about science and public policy. And so he still - he fashioned himself, you know, an expert and smarter than any of the scientists whose work he was reviewing. And he -because he had done some computer modeling, although of a very different sort, as a Ph.D. student, he felt that that gave him the authority to say that Hansen's computer modeling about climate - extremely sophisticated computer programs that he was running - were inaccurate and bad. And that was sort of the foundation of his argument of why, you know, this climate science stuff was made up.

GROSS: So let's jump to where we are today. Let's start with President Trump and his administration. Do you consider President Trump a climate skeptic or a climate denier?

(LAUGHTER)

RICH: It almost seems to sort of confer too much dignity to give him either of those terms. I mean, a denier. He's certainly a denier. But you know, that's almost like - we're engaging now in a kind of fantasy realm that it is - to say, even, that he's a denier suggests that he's actually - sort of thinks about it and has weighed the science. And I don't think that's what we're really talking about when it comes to the president.

GROSS: But there are people in his administration, I think, who are pretty hardcore skeptics or deniers. Who are some of those people?

RICH: Oh, gee. Yeah. Well, I mean, Scott Pruitt, now deposed; Ryan Zinke, now deposed, basically - Andrew Wheeler. So the - you know, Pruitt, head of EPA, replaced by Wheeler; Zinke, the interior. Myron Ebell's sort of an old denier who's within the administration. Just about every person, I think - Rick Perry, head of energy. It's the whole party.

I mean, you - I don't think - it's hard today, at least at the national level, to be a viable candidate on the right and accept scientific consensus on climate change. It's endemic. And it's - at this point, I think it's constitutional. It's a central tenet of Republicanism.

GROSS: So one of President Trump's first actions was to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. What are some of his other - what are some of the other things he's done to block any momentum forward on stopping - on limiting carbon emissions?

RICH: Oh, trying to roll back just about every, you know, policy that President Obama introduced, trying to roll back clean air standards, emissions from coal factories, mileage standards - CAFE standards, they're called - you name it, all-out assault. And not just on climate but on any kind of environmental protection, I should say. And you know, I guess the only silver lining is that something like the Paris accord, it's - you know, he can withdraw, but the formal withdrawal doesn't happen for a couple of years, and even then the treaty is voluntary to begin with, so it's more of a political statement than anything else. But rolling back emission standards is probably at the top of the list of the bad things that are going on.

But I think more destructive is just this peddling of this kind of - this fantasy, and essentially - I mean, it's connected to a lot of other stuff you see in the administration, a basic affront on objective reality, and you see that extends beyond the climate conversation and into, you know, the conversation we're having about news and reporting and historical fact and all the rest.

===

This is when the GOP turned away from climate policy

Scott Waldman and Benjamin Hulac, E&E News reportersPublished: Wednesday, December 5, 2018

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060108785/

the start of the George H.W. Bush presidency, the Republican Party fretted about the dangers of climate change. By the end, it was focused on doubt and inaction.

Since then, the party has drifted further away from the conclusion of scientists and from policies to address global warming.

Bush embraced climate science in the 1980s and campaigned on protecting Americans from its dangers.

"Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the 'White House effect,'" Bush said in a 1988 campaign speech. "As president, I intend to do something about it."

But as soon as Bush got into office, the administration started to work against meaningful policy on climate change, observers say, even as it crafted strong positions on air pollution to defeat the threat of acid rain.

After his decision on the Clean Air Act amendments, Bush had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to international climate talks and ceded a chance to make meaningful policy at a time when the world had not yet politicized climate science, said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University geosciences professor who attended some of the early climate talks as an observer.

"I wish we had gotten more leadership out of him, the kind of leadership that he showed on acid rain," he said. "If he had exerted the same kind of leadership on climate change, we would be further along today."

The Bush presidency was a "debate over denialism in microcosm," saidJerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center and a former climate skeptic who now works to convince conservatives about the dangers of climate change.

Conservatives around the world, including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were worried about climate change and looking for policy solutions. Instead, skeptical forces grew stronger, pushed by Washington-based think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. While Bush ignored those groups on acid rain, he acquiesced on climate change.

"The GOP during the Bush presidency pivoted from a position of being torn on how to respond to climate change," Taylor said. "This issue could have gone either way, but we know which way it went. The party could have been on climate change where the party is on acid rain, which is accepting it as a real thing and with some responsibility for a government response and total peace with the decision."

Bush aides wanted to establish the administration as having strong environmental credentials, topping the leaders of England, Canada and France in advance of an economic summit held in July 1989. In a State Department memo that has been declassified, the agency recommended that the United States focus on policies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions,including supporting nuclear power.

"The theme which runs through these proposals, and which I recommend the President stress, is that of wise, active stewardship over the resources of our planet," a State Department official wrote. "This is a responsibility we have to ourselves and as our legacy to future generations. Every man, woman and child can make a meaningful contribution to carrying out this responsibility. This approach links individual responsibility with national and international responsibility."

Bush used his presidency to foster stewardship in minor ways.

He continued work already underway at the Council on Environmental Quality and the White House science and technology office. And he created the Environment and Conservation Challenge Awards — a program to highlight environmental protection and generate "environmental awareness" — and a recycling network for federal agencies, which hadn't existed before.

While Richard Schmalensee, an economic adviser to Bush, described climate change in a 1990 memo as a theory, the president had already warned of its dangers.

Before reaching the White House, he stumped before a crowd on the banks of Lake Erie in southeast Michigan, where he said he would make climate change a centerpiece of his administration.

"In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House," Bush said at the Lake Erie Metropark in 1988, adding that he would invite the Chinese, the Soviets and officials from emerging economies.

"The agenda will be clear," Bush said. "We will talk about global warming. We will talk about saving our oceans and preventing the loss of tropical forests. And we will act."

Months earlier, James Hansen, a NASA scientist, had testified before a Senate committee that the Earth was warming and that humans were the reason.

In his remarks in Michigan, Bush appeared to reference that testimony.

"1988 is the year the Earth spoke back," Bush said. "Our land, water and soil support a remarkable range of human activities. But they can only take so much. We must remember to treat them not as a given, but as a gift."

As then-President Obama argued on a 2015 trip to the Everglades, Bush came from a period when addressing environmental threats — climate change included — was bipartisan in America.

"George H.W. Bush was the first president, globally, to acknowledge the impacts of climate change and that we needed to do something about it," Obama said. "This is not something that historically should be a partisan issue."

In the spring of 1990, Bush did hold a White House summit on the science and economics of "global change" — climate change — a fact he highlighted in a letter the next year to Congress.

The White House wrote in the letter that scientists at the time warned that temperatures could rise "10 to 50 times faster than anything in recorded history" if humans continued to burn fossil fuels.

Still, the administration underscored uncertainties in the science, specifically over sources of greenhouse gases, sea-level rise, and connections between power plants and carbon emissions.

"Significant scientific uncertainty still attends global climate change," the White House said.

Despite Bush's endorsement of Hansen's work on the campaign trail, his administration would later interfere in the public presentation of that research. In 1989, Hansen complained that the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget toned down the severity of his conclusions before they were delivered to a Senate committee headed by then-Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.). That move would foretell later efforts by the administration of President George W. Bush to water down conclusions by climate scientists before they were publicized.

Hansen blames the elder Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, for misleading the president on climate science.

Sununu was more interested in those who rejected the emerging climate science, including a number of researchers who have continued to battle against consensus science today. Some of them, includingPat Michaels of the Cato Institute, continue to have influence in the Trump administration and have encouraged the rollback of climate protections. Sununu ran his own rudimentary climate models and said that scientists were wrong.

Still, Hansen said Bush pushed forward with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was a meaningful step forward at the time, and one that President Clinton and the younger Bush neglected to push ahead on.

"The Framework Convention on Climate Change, the product of Rio in 1992, was exactly the right response to all that was revealed in the 1980s," Hansen said in an interview yesterday. "The elder Bush deserves much credit for that. He was being pushed in a very bad direction by the elder Sununu, a real jackass from my perspective as a scientist."

Bush showed hints of taking climate action again near the end of his presidency. But he punted.

Bush was immersed in a tough campaign, which he would ultimately lose, when he bucked members of his party and spoke at the Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Bush said he had come with a climate plan in hand. It would focus on energy efficiency, forestry, new technologies and clean air.

He signed an agreement to create a "framework convention on climate change" — the U.N. body that would go on to become the UNFCCC.

"I invite my colleagues from the industrialized world to join in a prompt start on the convention's implementation," Bush said. "Let us join in translating the words spoken here into concrete action to protect the planet."

Bush pledged environmental funding to poorer nations."We come to Rio recognizing that the developing countries must play a role in protecting the global environment but will need assistance in pursuing these cleaner growth," he said.

But then, his administration did little to follow through with those pledges or to fight for something more concrete than a framework. In the end, Bush balked at the most meaningful part of the Rio gathering — setting specific emissions reduction targets.

It turns out Bush was correct. The models showing warming have been borne out, and the problem has worsened, as Hansen predicted. According to the most recent version of the National Climate Assessment, the models may have underpredicted the worst effects. This year and the past three have been the warmest in recorded human history.

So, for all his talk, Bush's climate legacy is that he walked away from pushing a policy that would restrict greenhouse gases at the very moment that the top scientists in the world were saying it posed a crisis for humanity, said Oppenheimer, the Princeton professor.

The resulting void was filled with political fights that have worsened under the Trump administration.

"The real shame is that we saw this coming and we had a chance to get ahead of the impacts of climate change before they manifest themselves, and we just didn't do it," Oppenheimer said.

---

eli rabett

roger revelle

---

https://web.archive.org/web/20100129102339/http://home.att.net/~espi/Cosmos_myth.html

---

[C. R. Hufbauer, "Global Warming: What My Father Really Said," Washington Post, op-ed, September 13, 1992.]"

"Contrary to George Will's "Al Gore's Green Guilt" {op-ed, Sept. 3} Roger Revelle - our father and the "father" of the greenhouse effect - remained deeply concerned about global warming until his death in July 1991. That same year he wrote: "The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time." Will and other critics of Sen. Al Gore have seized these words to suggest that Revelle, who was also Gore's professor and mentor, renounced his belief in global warming.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

When Revelle inveighed against "drastic" action, he was using that adjective in its literal sense - measures that would cost trillions of dollars. Up until his death, he thought that extreme measures were premature. But he continued to recommend immediate prudent steps to mitigate and delay climatic warming. Some of those steps go well beyond anything Gore or other national politicians have yet to advocate.

...

In private, he often spoke of a $1.00 a gallon tax as eminently reasonable, not "drastic."

...

All of us remember our father's frustration at the White House award ceremony in November 1990, when he received the National Medal of Science. Told he would sit next to John Sununu, a well known advocate of the "wait and see" approach, he was delighted at the prospect of bending Sununu's ear. When Sununu failed to appear, Revelle was disappointed, saying, "I had hoped to tell him what a dim view I take of the administration's environmental policies."

Roger Revelle proposed a range of approaches to address global warming. Inaction was not one of them. He agreed with the adage "look before you leap," but he never said "sit on your hands."

---

https://www.desmogblog.com/john-h-sununu}:

Credentials

Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966. He completed both undergraduate and graduate levels at MIT. [1]

Background

John H. Sununu served as the 75th Governor of New Hampshire from 1983 to 1989 and later as White House Chief of Staff under President George H.W. Bush from January 21, 1989 until 1991. Sununu stepped down amidst allegations he had used taxpayer-funded flights for personal flights. Sununu has been described as the “bad cop” to Bush's “good cop” (and was profiled as such on a 1990 cover of *Time*magazine). While in the White House, Sununu was known for hisdisagreements on environmental issueswith EPA administrator William K Reilly.  [1], [9], [10], [17]

John Sununu was president of JHS Engineering Company (JHS Associates, LTD) and Thermal Research Inc. until 1973 when he became a representative of the New Hampshire State Legislature. According to his Bloomberg profile, Sununu helped establish and served as a chief engineer for Astro Dynamics Inc. from 1960 to 1965. He has also served as chairman of the advisory boardof Fusion Telecommunications International Inc. [1], [14]

He has been associated with a range of other companies such as North American Galvanizing & Coatings Inc., formerly Kinark Corp., where he served as a director since 1996. He has also been a director at Anglo Asian Mining PL. He is also a former partner in Trinity International Partners, a private financial firm. Sununu is currently a member of the boardof Rift Energy Corporation, an oil and gas exploration company focused on developing East and Central Africa.[15], [1], [8]

In 2004 he co-chaired the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, Nuclear Energy Task Force. He has taught at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and at Tufts University where he served as associate dean of the College of Engineering. He also served on the Advisory Board of the Technology and Policy Program at MIT. [1]

Sununu co-hosted CNN's nightly “Crossfire” program from March 1992 until February 1998. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. [1], [12]

In 2018, The New York Times'sarticle “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change” highlighted Sununu as a key player in the George W. Bush era as an influence in veering the administration away from efforts to combat climate change.[13]

:{:{Sununu was formerly listed as a policy expert at the Heartland Institute, a think tank at the forefront of climate change denial that has received funding from ExxonMobil. :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:[16]}:

Stance on Climate Change

June 16, 2015

:{:{Sununu appeared on *HuffPost* live where he claimed there had been “no change in temperatures” over the past 18 years: :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:[19]}:

[vid]

sununu: “Where have you been the last eighteen-and-a-half years where there's been no change in temperatures?” Sununu asked HuffPost Live’s Alyona Minkovski. “There's been no increase. Where have you been?”

Minkovski: “90% of scientist that do agree…”

Sununu: [Interrupts] “That's not true.”

Minkovski:  “…that climate change is real. That it is something that is man-made.”

Sununu: “No, that's not true.”

Minkovski: “It is true.”

Sununu: “I have a PhD in engineering. I understand the technologies involved, and I have to tell you the 90% consensus is an artifact. If you go back and talk…”

Minkovski: “Created by who?”

Sununu: “Created by those who support the policies. The fact is that …  the data is not out, and the figure is not correct. The data that we have today shows at least aneighteen-and-a-half year hiatus in what they claimed would be a horrible increase in temperature. […] So the point is, is that if you really look at the data, you'll find out that the disastrous situation that they predicted has not occurred.”

March 13, 2009

In his speech at the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC), Sununu declared:

“The global warming crisis is just the latest surrogate for an over-archingagendaof anti-growth and anti-development. This agenda grew and gathered support in the years following World War II.” [2]

Key Quotes

2018

Sununu, asked by *The New York TImes*about whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing a global warming treaty during the Bush administration, responded: [13]

“It couldn’t have happened,” he said, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.” [13]

March 13, 2009

Sununu commentedat theHeartland Institute's ICCC:

:{:{“Nature will eventually do what nature has always done. It will respond in a self-stabilizing manner over the long term with moderate variability over multi-decade periods and with occasional significant variability over the short term.}:

“But waiting for 'eventually' to prove the alarmists wrong is not the wisest course of action. Unfullfillable ambitions to stifle growth will devastate a world trying to deal with the complexities of economics, stability, and the environment. Quality of life depends on access to energy. Noble intentions about 'C02-free' sources of energy are not sufficient, if their agenda of eliminatingcoal as a source, and turning their back on nuclear,are allowed to be part of our near-term policies.” [2]}:

Undated

During a White House meeting between Sununu and former EPA administrator William K Reilly, Sununureportedly interrupted a junior staff member who had mentioned an initiative to reduce fossil fuel use: [13]

“Why in the world would you need to reduce fossil-fuel use?” Sununu said.

“Because of climate change,” the staff member replied.

Sununu responded: “I don’t want anyone in this administration without a scientific background using ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ ever again,” he said. “If you don’t have a technical basis for policy, don’t run around making decisions on the basis of newspaper headlines.”

Key Deeds

March, 2009

John H. Sununu was a speaker at the Heartland Institute's second International Conference on ClimateChange (ICCC2). His speech, titled “The Politics of Science: It ain't pretty” can be viewed below. [4]

DeSmogBlog researched the funding behind the conference and found that sponsor organizations had collectively received over $47 million from energy companies and right-wing foundations, with 78% of that total coming from the Scaife Family of foundations. [5]

[vid]

at numerous points during his speech Sununu refers to an “anti-growth lobby,” “anti-development crowd” and alludes to “alarmists” with an “agenda” as being behind the issue of global warming. When referring to the funding that goes to climate change research, Sununu claims that “the alarmists have effectively captured the funding allocation process.”[2]

When describing “some elements of the science” of climate change,Sununu points to research by prominent climate change skeptic Richard Lindzen to support his view that CO2 increases lag an increase in temperature: “it is temperature driving an increase in C02 and not C02 driving temperature.” According to *SkepticalScience*, this argument has been previously shown to be invalid. [6]

Sununu's suggestion to climate skeptics is the following (emphasis added): [2]

“We need to recognize that for at least most of the next decade the real battle will be to win over public opinion and influence the policy makers. Unfortunately, standing between us and the public most of the time is the media. And the press seems to have bought the alarmist line, hook and sinker. They thrive on reinforcing the alarms.

I am often asked about the press. The question is usually something like 'is the press biased or ignorant?' My answer is: Yes they are.

We have to try to deal with a long-term education process and a long-term lobbying process. […] And, most important, we must work hard to communicate on these issues in terms that can be understood by non-technical individuals. We must remember we are trying to educate the public and policy makers.”

December 1, 2007

The Heartland Institute described Sununu as an“ally” of wireless companies fighting against industry regulation from the FEC in the Cell Phone Consumer Empowerment Act of 2007 (S. 2033). [7]

“When you regulate prices, when you get price controls for any component, every experience at the federal level with price controls has not worked,” Sununu said in a statement. [7]

December 1, 1997

Sununu featured EPA Administrator Carol Browner on CNN's “Crossfire” program.During the program, according to a summary by World Climate Report—a publication run by climate change denier Patrick Michaels and produced by the industry-funded front group called the “Greening Earth Society”— “Host John Sununu sent her into orbit by informing the Administrator that the more accurate way to look at the problem was to observe that the good ol' U.S.A. turns out to be one of the most efficient nations in history—producing relatively little greenhouse gas per unit of gross domestic product.” [20]

May, 1989

CYA?

Sununu, despite earlier opposing a binding agreement regarding climate change, personally signed a telegram to Geneva endorsing a plan to “to develop full international consensus on necessary steps to prepare for a formal treaty-negotiating process.” According to the telegram, “The scope and importance of this issue are so great that it is essential for the U.S. to exercise leadership.” [18]

The telegram occurred following controversy when the White House had allegedly ordered climate scientist James E. Hansen to change his testimony to avoid the impression “that there is unanimity within the government on this issue.”  [18]

1989 – 1993

At some point during his service as Counselor to the President, Sununu put together a group who would take care of “the action side of policy” which “could require formal and legally binding obligations associated with carbon dioxide emissions, which would have significant economic effects on the nation and on the capacity of this nation's industrial growth.” [3]

The group consisted of Allan Bromley (as Science Advisor), Michael Boskin (the President's Advisor of Economics), Dick Darman (Head of the Office of Management and Budget), and Roger Porter (in charge of domestic policy at the White  House). John H. Sununu joined this group as their fifth member. According to Sununu, “there was no disagreement that there was a trend of concern in the long run in terms of global temperature rise being a reality, but the questions that had to be answered were: What is the magnitude of it? How fast will that change take place? And also questions which rarely get asked — Is that change good or bad, and how does that change compare with other natural cycles that may be taking place at the same time? And finally, what kind of impact can any policy really have in dealing with those issues?” [3]

Sununu claimed that “some of the satellite data [SINGER?] on temperatures were suggesting a temperature decrease pattern rather than a temperature increase pattern […that] certainly had to be put on the table as one of the fact points that the President had to be aware of.” He then goes on to describe how climate models [MICHAELS?] of the time were inaccurate and “not well coupled to the ocean” and that “you do not make national policy based on such data.” [3]

Sununu and his committee put these answers forward to the President with the recommendation that “the President of the United States should not commit to policies that would result in trillion dollar changes in the U.S. economy until there were then more adequate technical bases for such a position” [3]

1991

Sununu resigned from his his position as White House chief of staff, telling President Bush he feared he would be “a drag” on his re-election campaign, *The New York Times* reported. [11]

“I knew the rules of the game when I came to town. He's going into a campaign. He doesn't need the extra political target that folks would be shooting at,” Sununu told reporters. [11]

“The removal of Mr. Sununu seemed designed to give the President a chance to dispel the aura of confusion and hesitation that has hurt his Administration in recent months. He left Mr. Sununu with a consolation prize that seemed modest in light of speculation that the chief of staff would be given a major Cabinet department to placate him and conservative Republicans who are loyal to him,” Andrew Rosenthal wrote at The New York TImes.[11]

Affiliations

Social Media

Publications

Sununu is the author of The Quiet Man: The Indispensable Presidency of George H.W. Bush,documenting his experiences as Bush's former Chief of Staff.

According to a search of Google Scholar, John H. Sununu has published the following articles, larely in the area of engineering and policy:

Resources

  1. “Executive Profile: John H. Sununu Ph.D.,” Bloomberg Businessweek. Accessed August 15, 2018.
  2. John H. Sununu. “The Politics of Global Warming,” The Heartland Institute, March 13, 2009. Archived March 13, 2009. Archive URL: https://archive.fo/AGwFm
  3. Fleury Paul A and Lachello Francesco.In Memory Of D Allan Bromley – Nuclear Scientist And Policy Innovator - Proceedings Of The Memorial Symposium, World Scientific (August 29, 2006.)
  4. “Second International Conference on Climate Change, Program” (PDF), Heartland Institute. Archived March 6, 2018.
  5. “Heartland Institute's 2009 Climate Conference in New York: funding history of the sponsors,” DeSmog,2009.
  6. “CO2 lags temperature - what does it mean?” SkepticalScience. Accessed August 2018.
  7. Frank Barbetta. “CONGRESS SEEKS 'BILL OF RIGHTS' FOR WIRELESS USERS,” The Heartland Institute, December 1, 2007. Archived August 15, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.fo/4sPdY
  8. “Board of Directors,” Rift Energy.Archived August 15, 2018. Archive URL: https://archive.fo/o1knu
  9. Kathleen Hom. “Whatever Happened To … the chief of staff to the first President Bush,” Washington Post, September 5, 2010. Archived August 15, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.fo/IYnoi
  10. “John Sununu,” Time, May 21, 1990.
  11. Andrew Rosenthal. “SUNUNU RESIGNS UNDER FIRE AS CHIEF AIDE TO PRESIDENT; CITES FEAR OF HURTING BUSH,” The New York TImes, December 4, 1991. Archived August 15, 2018. Archive.fo URL: https://archive.fo/dCZ7i
  12. “John H. Sununu,” Crossfire. Archived August 15, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.fo/r7coC
  13. Nathanial Rich. “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” The New York Times, August 1, 2018.
  14. “Fusion investor presentation september 2013 final 1,” Fusion,2013. Retrieved from Slideshare.
  15. North American Galvanizing & Coatings, Inc. SEC Filing (Schedule 14A), April 9, 2007.
  16. “WHO WE ARE,” Heartland Institute. Archived August 17, 2016.
  17. “The Reilly-Sununu War,” The New York Times, February 16, 1990.
  18. “U.S. REVERSES ITSELF, BACKS TALKS ON GLOBAL WARMING,” Deseret News, May 12, 1989. Archived August 16, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.fo/JdmFI
  19. Aly Nielsen. “Sununu Hits Back At Climate Change Alarmism on HuffPost Live,” NewsBusters, June 16, 2015. Archived August 16, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.fo/j9IVY
  20. “EPA Administrator Melts Down,” World Climate Report, Vol. 3 No. 7. December 15, 1997. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmog.

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John Henry Sununu (born July 2, 1939) served as the 75th Governor of New Hampshire (1983–89) and later White House Chief of Staff under President George H. W. Bush. He is the father of John E. Sununu, a former senator from New Hampshire. Sununu was the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party from 2009 to 2011.

Early life[

Sununu was born in Havana, Cuba, the son of Victoria (née Dada) and John Saleh Sununu, an international film distributor.[1] His father's family came to the United States from the Middle East at the turn of the century. His paternal ancestry is Palestinian from the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem community in Jerusalem. His father, John, was born in Boston. Most of the last two generations of Sununus were also born in the United States. Sununu's mother, Victoria Dada, was born in El Salvador. Her family was Greek Orthodox Christian and settled in Central America at the turn of the century. Most of his closest relatives in Beirut have died, including an uncle who returned to the Lebanese capital from the United States several years ago. The Governor paid his last visit to Beirut as a child in the late 1940s.[2]^

He earned a bachelor of science degree in 1961, a master of science degree in 1963, and a Ph.D. in 1966 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in mechanical engineering. Sununu is a member of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity.

From 1968 until 1973, he was Associate Dean of the College of Engineering at Tufts University and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. He served on the Advisory Board of the Technology and Policy Program at MIT from 1984 until 1989.

A Republican, Sununu served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives from 1973 to 1975.

Governor[

Sununu became New Hampshire's 75th Governor on January 6, 1983, and served three consecutive terms. He served as chairman of the Coalition of Northeastern Governors, the Republican Governors Associationand, in 1987, the National Governors Association.

White House Chief of Staff[edit]

Sununu was the first White House Chief of Staff for George H. W. Bush, serving from 1989 to 1991.

Sununu is considered to have engineered Bush's mid-term abandonment of his 1988 campaign promise of "no new taxes".[3]^

Sununu is responsible for recommending David Souter to President George H. W. Bush for appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, at the behest of New Hampshire senator Warren Rudman. The Wall Street Journal described the events leading up to the appointment of the "liberal jurist" in a 2000 editorial, saying Rudman in his "Yankee Republican liberalism" took "pride in recounting how he sold Mr. Souter to gullible White House chief of staff John Sununu as a confirmable conservative. Then they both sold the judge to President Bush, who wanted above all else to avoid a confirmation battle after[Robert Bork]."[4] Rudman wrote in his memoir that he had "suspected all along" that Souter would not "overturn activist liberal precedents."[5] Sununu later said that he had "a lot of disappointment" about Souter's positions on the Court and would have preferred him to be more similar to Justice Antonin Scalia.[5]^

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George_H._W._Bush_on_telephone.jpg "Enlarge")

President Bush speaks on the telephone regarding Operation Just Causewith Sununu and Brent Scowcroft, 1989.

Time magazine dubbed Sununu "Bush's Bad Cop" on the front cover on May 21, 1990.[6]^

At the recommendation of George W. Bush,[7] Sununu resigned his White House post on December 4, 1991.[8][9]^

Television[edit]

Sununu co-hosted CNN's nightly Crossfire from March 1992 until February 1998.

Business[

From 1963 until 1983, he served as President of JHS Engineering Company and Thermal Research Inc. In addition, he helped establish and served as chief engineer for Astro Dynamics Inc. from 1960 until 1965.

Sununu is President of JHS Associates, Ltd. and is a partner in Trinity International Partners, a private financial firm.

Sununu is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a member of the Board of Trustees for the George (H.W.) Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

He is also a member of Honorary Council of Advisors for U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (USACC).[10]^

Personal life[edit]

He is married to the former Nancy Hayes, and they have eight children, including former U.S. Senator John E. Sununu.In recent years, he moved to Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. He and his wife were subsequently elected as the town's honorary hog reeves and poundkeepers.[11] The title is usually given to an unsuspecting newcomer each year. The Sununus had recently moved from Salem to Hampton Falls to be closer to relatives.

Sununu's daughter Cathy is the president of the Portsmouth Museum of Art in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.[12]^

Sununu has met the eligibility requirements for the Mega Society, the world's most exclusive high-IQ society, which accepts only those who score in the 99.9999th percentile on IQ tests (Mensa, the world's largest high IQ society, accepts scores in the 98th percentile). ^[13]

Controversies[

Sununu angered some when he was the only governor of a U.S. state not to call for repeal of the controversial UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 ("Zionism is Racism"). He later reversed his position on this issue and supported the Republicans' pro-Israel 1988 platform.[14]^

As White House Chief of Staff, Sununu reportedly took personal trips, for skiing and other purposes, and classified them as official, for purposes such as conservation or promoting the Thousand Points of Light.[15] The Washington Post wrote that Sununu's jets "took him to fat-cat Republican fund-raisers, ski lodges, golf resorts and even his dentist in Boston."[15]^

Sununu had paid the government only $892 for his more than $615,000 worth of military jet travel.[16]Sununu said that his use of the jets was necessary because he had to be near a telephone at all times for reasons of national security.[17] Sununu became the subject of much late-night television humor over the incident.[15] Sununu worsened the situation shortly afterwards when, after leaking rumors of financial difficulties in his family, he traveled to a rare stamp auction at Christie's auction house in New York City from Washington in a government limousine, spending $5,000 on rare stamps.[18]^

Sununu then sent the car and driver back to Washington unoccupied while he returned on a corporate jet.[18] In the course of one week, 45 newspapers ran editorials on Sununu, nearly all of them critical of his actions.[19] Sununu resigned his White House post on December 4, 1991.

Sununu repaid over $47,000 to the government for the flights on the orders of White House counsel C. Boyden Gray,with the help of the Republican Party.[20] However, the reimbursements were at commercial rates, which are about one-tenth the cost of the actual flights; one ski trip to Vail, Coloradoalone had cost taxpayers $86,330.[21]^

Sununu in an interview with Andrea Mitchell called President Obama, "lazy and disengaged."[22]^

In pop culture[edit]

In the 1991 police comedy film The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, Sununu is played by Peter Van Norden.[23]^

References

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The Coors family is highly influential in shaping the activities of three organizational pillars of the New Right -- the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation (FCF) and the Council for National Policy (CNP) -- which comprise an influential force in Washington, DC. Involvement with these key groups provides the Coors family with a conservative political base. From this base, the family is connected to prominent activists in other New Right organizations, to groups on the Religious Right, and to allies in governmental agencies and in Congress. 

For example, FCF is the major New Right political power base for White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, who engineered the David Souter Supreme Court nomination. In reality, the Coors family is a powerful, wealthy, highly organized force for social change. The change they support with their time and money is a return to Social Darwinian political and economic morality framed by the unrestricted demands of market and capital. They see racism ending with the Civil War and leaving no enduring legacy in the 20th century. In international affairs, they expect Third World countries to embrace U.S. capital investment without restrictions. They give money to groups that support the apartheid government in South Africa, the violent RENAMO army in Mozambique and the Pretoria-supported UNITA forces in Angola.