Cheney 'tried to suppress climate change evidence'
US vice president Dick Cheney’s office pushed to delete references about the consequences of climate change on public health from congressional testimony, in a bid to play down the effects of global warming, a former environment expert claims.
Jason Burnett said the White House had been worried that the proposed testimony last October by the head of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention might make it more difficult to avoid regulating greenhouse gases.
The account, described by Mr Burnett in a July 6 letter to Democratic senator Barbara Boxer, chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, conflicts with the White House explanation at the time that the deletions reflected concerns by the White House Office of Science and Technology over the accuracy of the science.
Mr Burnett, 31, until last month a senior adviser on climate change at the Environmental Protection Agency, said Mr Cheney’s office was deeply involved in getting nearly half of the CDC’s original draft testimony removed.
“The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) ... any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change,” Mr Burnett said in the letter to Ms Boxer.
At a press conference yesterday, Ms Boxer went so far as to say White House press secretary Dana Perino had lied about why the White House had pushed for the deletions. That prompted Ms Perino to demand an apology from Ms Boxer.
Mr Burnett declined to comment beyond what he described in the letter and said he did not want to identify the people he had talked to in Mr Cheney’s office or elsewhere at the White House.
“I’m not interested in pointing fingers at individuals,” he said.
White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said the White House stood by its explanation for the deletions and noted that science adviser John Marburger had raised concerns.
Mr Marburger issued a summary of his concerns at the time, but at a Senate hearing a few weeks later said he did not recommended deleting six of the 14 pages as was done.
Megan Mitchell, the vice president’s press secretary, dismissed the allegations by Mr Burnett and said: “We don’t comment on internal deliberations.”
Mr Burnett, a lifelong Democrat, resigned last month as associate deputy EPA administrator because of disagreements over the agency’s response to climate change.
He appears an odd choice for the EPA post, which included liaison with the White House on climate issues. Currently a supporter of Barack Obama for president, he has contributed nearly £62,500 to Democratic candidates since 2000, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics.
An economist who had written a number of papers on government regulation while at the Joint Center for Regulatory Study, an effort of the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, Mr Burnett first joined the EPA in 2004. He resigned two years later because of objections to an EPA rule on soot.
He was asked to return in 2007 by EPA administrator Stephen Johnson, who put him in charge of co-ordinating the agency’s response to a Supreme Court ruling on whether to regulate carbon dioxide.
In his letter he describes misgivings at the White House, including in Mr Cheney’s office, about linking climate change directly to public health or damage to the environment.
Nowhere was that more apparent than in the heavy editing of the CDC testimony last October, he maintained.
The White House, at the urging of Mr Cheney’s office, “requested that I work with CDC to remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change,” wrote Mr Burnett.
“CEQ contacted me to argue that I could best keep options open for the (EPA) administrator (on regulating carbon dioxide) if I would convince CDC to delete particular sections of their testimony.”
He said he refused to press CDC on the deletions because he believed the CDC’s draft testimony was “fundamentally accurate”.
Mr Burnett said Mr Cheney’s office also objected last January over congressional testimony by Mr Johnson that “greenhouse gas emissions harm the environment”. An official in Mr Cheney’s office “called to tell me that his office wanted the language changed”, but it was kept as it was.
Mr Burnett also described in greater detail the White House refusal in December to accept a draft EPA finding that concluded that carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, was endangering human health.
After he sent the email with the draft finding attached, he said he received a telephone call from the White House asking that he “send a follow-up note saying that the email had been sent in error”.
“I explained that I could not do that because it was not true,” wrote Mr Burnett. Ms Boxer said the draft finding was now “in limbo” and not available for public review.
