Bush, Cheney, suppressed global warming facts

This video from the USA is called Sen. Boxer blasts Bush Administration on EPA report.

By Shannon Jones in the USA:

US: White House suppressed climate change testimony

10 July 2008

A former official with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has alleged that Vice President Dick Cheney intervened to alter testimony to Congress about the potential health and safety dangers posed by greenhouse gases.

In a letter to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, former Bush administration climate advisor Jason Burnett alleged that the White House and Cheney’s office intervened to edit the testimony of Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who appeared before Congress last October.

In her testimony Gerberding told of the serious threats to health and safety posed by climate change, including severe weather events, health issues from air pollution, scarcity of food and water and the spread of water-borne diseases.

Burnett, one of the few Democratic appointees in the Bush administration, resigned his post in June citing differences with the White House over its decision to prevent the state of California from setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions by motor vehicles.

Gerberding’s testimony was a response by the EPA to the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA requiring the agency to decide if greenhouse gases posed a health risk and, if so, issue appropriate regulations. In a rebuke to the White House, the court majority stipulated that the EPA make its decision based on scientific evidence of potential harm to public health and welfare, not policy preferences.

A finding by the EPA that greenhouse gases posed a health risk would, under terms of the Clean Air Act, require the agency to set guidelines regulating greenhouse gas emissions by polluters, something bitterly opposed by the Bush administration. The White House has therefore done everything in its power to prevent testimony regarding the health and environmental hazards posed by greenhouse gases going on the public record.

In the face of this stonewalling, environmental groups along with 17 states and several major cities filed a lawsuit earlier this year against the EPA seeking to force it to respond to the Supreme Court ruling. However, to this date the EPA has issued no official findings.

See also here.

A congressional investigation has produced new details on the degree to which senior Bush administration officials favored using the Clean Air Act to limit greenhouse gas emissions – until pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, ExxonMobil and others in the oil industry led the Bush administration to change course: here.

Bush: ‘Human life is precious’—EPA: ‘Less than you might think’: here.

Cheney and war on Iran: here.

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