Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Members of Vice President Cheney's staff censored congressional testimony by a top federal official on the health threats posed by global warming, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said today.

In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, former EPA deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett said an official from Cheney's office edited out six pages from the testimony of Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last October.

Several media outlets, including The Washington Post, reported at the time that Gerberding had planned to say that "CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern," among other passages.

Boxer said the administration feared that Gerberding's testimony would force it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. The White House has opposed mandatory limits and insisted that voluntary measures and increased research are the best way to address the problem.

By the way, the Post went out of its way to point out that the whistleblower is a Democrat. And that's important, because...? The Post did not, however, point out Cheney's ongoing ties to a company with major oil interests, but I guess that's not germain ... By the way, was there anything going on in the White House that Cheney wasn't the boss of?

Labels: Bush administration, climate change, Dick Cheney, global warming, worse than Watergate

Labels: Al Gore, climate change, global warming, Nobel Peace Prize

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."

HOUSTON — Oil giant Exxon Mobil topped its own record for the biggest annual profit by a U.S. company last year, racking up earnings that amounted to $4.5 million an hour for the world's largest publicly traded oil company.

It reported the record net income — $39.5 billion — despite a 4 percent drop in earnings in the final three months of 2006, as prices for oil and natural gas fell from extraordinary levels earlier in the year.

... Exxon Mobil wasn't alone among oil and gas entities posting a huge profit in 2006. On Thursday alone, three other companies — Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Marathon Oil Corp. and Valero Energy Corp. — also reported best-ever full-year profits. The four companies combined had earnings of $75.6 billion last year.

Last week, Houston-based ConocoPhillips said its $15.5 billion profit last year topped its previous record from 2005 by about $2 billion dollars.

Chevron is scheduled to report 2006 results Friday.

Exxon Mobil's 2006 profit beat its own previous record for a U.S. company of $36.13 billion set in 2005. Its net income for 2006 equals the approximate gross domestic product — a measure of all goods and services produced within a country in a given year — of countries like Ecuador, Luxembourg and Croatia.

Labels: Bush administration, climate change, Exxon Mobile, global warming