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Suppressed Global Warming Report Finally Released |
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Yesterday the EPA released a report that has been suppressed by the White House since December. From Reuters:
In a 149-page document, the agency’s scientists said that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that potential health risks include more heat waves, floods and droughts, insect outbreaks and and wildfires, along with crop failure and decline in livestock and fisheries productivity…
The idea that climate-warming greenhouse emissions threaten public health is an essential part of the Clean Air Act; policymakers must find that a substance poses this kind of threat to be designated as a pollutant, and EPA said in its documents that greenhouse gases do this.
Last April, in the culmination of years of lawsuits against the EPA for its inaction on climate change, the Supreme Court ordered the EPA to investigate the health effects of greenhouse gas emissions and determine if they were pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The Court ruled that if greenhouse gases are found to threaten human health the EPA is required to regulate their emissions.
Since this ruling the EPA has been investigating the health effects of climate change. However, several EPA scientists have come forward reporting political interference and blatant suppression of their findings.
Last week former EPA official Jason Burnett reported that Dick Cheney’s office censored the EPA head’s Congressional testimony to “play down the risk,” as well as testimony prepared by the Center for Disease Control. On Friday the White House simply rejected EPA findings that greenhouse gases threaten human health, instead opening a six-month “comment period” on the EPA’s climate change investigation that effectively guarantees “that no action will be taken to regulate carbon emissions while George Bush remains president.”
As the Washington Post reported last Wednesday:
[California Senator Barbara] Boxer demanded that, in light of Burnett’s allegations, EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson turn over “every document related to the agency’s finding that global warming poses a danger to the public” – a determination the EPA reached late last year in a document that has never been made public. On that basis, the senator said, the agency must issue regulations to limit the emissions.
The White House declined to open the EPA e-mail containing that finding, which Burnett sent on Dec. 5, leaving the recommendation in limbo. Burnett was responsible for climate change issues at EPA.
Yes that’s right — the EPA first sent the report released yesterday to the White House in December, only to be informed the White House would not open the email. Now that the White House and the EPA are safely within the confines of its six-month “comment period,” neither are required to take any action based on the report’s findings.
For more on how the White House handles its environmental email, here is Jon Stewart:
Always comforting to know the most juvenile and ridiculous of political tactics by the White House are still all it takes to cheat Congress, the Supreme Court, AND the American people out of the semblance of effective governance.
Playing down the risk is what all governments do, I hope these politicians can look their children and grandchildren in the eye when the planet is beyond help.
Folks, The pace of climate change is just a symptom of the modern society which we “enjoy” today? The “many “hidden” harms being done appear now to be a consequence of the 24 hour day? Read this blog http://www.lightpollution.org.uk/dwnLoads/24HourDay_v3PAC.pdf
What do YOU think?
There’s plenty of blame to go around - for the White House, for Congress, for corporations, and for the American public that refuses to moderate its consumption. People in the future will look back on the entirety of what we call the “developed world” - and on the example set by the USA in particular - and shake their heads - much in the same way we shake our heads at those who owned slaves.