Al Gore returned to Congress today to call for honest action against global warming, as more details emerged about how the White House and its oil industry allies deliberately softened climate change evidence.
A New York Times story Tuesday laid out in detail how a Bush White House operative with close ties to the oil industry and the Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise institute "edited" White House documents to play down scientists’ descriptions of climate change. That official, Philip Cooney, was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute before he became chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality in 2001. In 2005 he went to work for Exxon.
It was Cooney to whom the CEI’s chief global warming skeptic, Myron Ebell, addressed a cozy 2003 memo about how to discredit a too-sympathetic global warming study by the Environmental Protection Agency. The memo also suggests ways to get rid of then-EPA chief Christie Whitman, who resigned the post a few months later "to spend more time with her family."
No wonder Gore’s three decades of effort to get U.S. action on climate change completely stalled out during the Bush administration.