Over at Rolling Stone, MoJo alum Tim Dickinson has a great piece on how Dick “I’m
My Very Own Branch of Government” Cheney skillfully got a clueless Bush to gut all meaningful climate policy.
“By having control of the energy plan, the vice president also had the reins on the climate policy,” says Jeremy 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.”
Though many details in the piece have been reported before—Mother Jones, for example, published a huge investigation into ExxonMobil’s role in the Bush administration’s climate change policy, and nobody’s done better work on this than the NYT‘s Andy Revkin—Tim got a big document dump from unnamed former administration sources, including, no doubt, the former head of the EPA, Christie Todd Witman, who spends much of the article claiming on the record that she was shocked, shocked that Bush & Cheney put the task of carrying industry’s water over protecting the planet.
“The consequences of climate change are very real and very negative, but Cheney is not convinced of that,” says Christie Todd Witman. “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.”
You know, if she was so appalled, she coulda just gone public and resigned. (She did resign in 2003 to “spend more time with her family.”) She also coulda spoke out on this subject forcefully before, say, the most recent meeting on the Koyoto protocols. As it is she’s just another Tenet-come-lately to the abandon Bush brigade.
Witman keeps denying she’s interested in running for president (more like VP). But she recently wrote a book called It’s My Party Too. As a pro-choice(ish) moderate Republican, a former governor, and a chick armed with a formidable family political pedigree—CTW could make an interesting addition to a ticket. Except for the whole “I allowed global warming to go unchecked on my watch” problem. That and telling everyone it was safe to go back to Ground Zero two weeks after 9/11.
Let’s see if she can blame Cheney for that!
Update: CTW spent the entire day today on Capitol Hill, defending her 9/11 record. It did not fly with Rep. Jerry Nadler (more after the jump). And the timing of the RS article is fortuitous? Perhaps.
Update #2: Tim has given generous shout-outs to Revkin, Ron Suskin, as well as Chris Mooney and Ross Gelpspan-who along with Bill McKibben-wrote MoJo’s ExxonMobil investigation.
From the NYT:
Nadler opened the session by saying the Bush administration “has continued to make false, misleading and inaccurate statements, and refused to take remedial actions, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.”
Whitman, the main focus of much of that criticism, called such allegations “misinformation, innuendo and downright falsehoods.”
