Climate Crimes Against Humanity

Richard B. Simon

The UN's latest warning on global warming, the final installment in a series of reports from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- timed to affect this week's conference in Bali -- basically boils down to this:

HELLO! IS ANYBODY LISTENING? THIS IS A PLANETARY EMERGENCY!

CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS FROM BURNING FOSSIL FUELS ARE KILLING OUR PLANET'S ABILITY TO MAINTAIN A TEMPERATURE FIT FOR HUMANS.

That’s partly because, for decades, interests including Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union (now Russia), and recently China, have moved behind the scenes to subvert every global climate conference, where representatives of all the nations on earth come together to come up with a solution to the problem.

However, when it comes to undermining international action to prevent catastrophic global climate change that will endanger the very survival of humanity, the lead offender is the United States.

American liberals, some conservative thinkers, and governmental and non-governmental entities abroad have argued that the Bush Administration’s declaration of the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and outdated, its systematization of the abuse of prisoners in the War on Terror, and the legalization of the medieval torture now euphemistically known as “waterboarding,” amount to crimes against humanity.

But even torture will seem a quaint and outdated concern when Americans fully understand that the Bush Administration, in collusion with the oil industry, has worked deliberately to sink not only U.S., but global policy intended to avert the catastrophe of a rapidly changing climate.

The Bush Administration has allowed global climate change to proceed, unimpeded – and even encouraged the melting of the polar icecaps, regardless of the devastation that coastal flooding, intensifying storm energy, changing disease vectors and migrating cvlimate patterns will wreak on the world’s human population. They have systematically suppressed scientific understanding; poisoned the well of public discourse; obfuscated the true nature and causes of the crisis; and used American power and influence to subvert global action.

These are crimes not only against human conscience (as in the case of genocide), but literally, against the very survival of our species.


A Brief History Of American Climate (In)action: The First Bush Years

The first President George Bush acknowledged the problem posed by global warming at the very first international treaty conference to address climate change in 1989. He responded by prioritizing research on global climate change – as opposed to action. Bush nodded to the importance of the issue, making the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency a Cabinet-level position, but he worked to sink actual emissions reduction targets at the conference.

Stewart Patrick and Shepard Foreman, in Multilateralism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Ambivalent Engagement, argue that this represented a major shift in U.S. foreign policy – from the U.S.-led multilateralism of the post-WWII period, to a new unilateralism, whereby America began to act regardless of the opinions of its allies. It was curious behaviour for a nation whose policies historically led those of its allies through moral and reasoned influence.

Is it a coincidence that this shift to ignoring the will of the allies began with Bush – whose fortune is built from extracting and selling oil, and whose political fortunes were likewise bankrolled by Texas oil interests – using American power to kill global action on climate change?

Let's face it – in 1989, the Greenhouse Effect was not a partisan political issue. It was taught not as theory, but as established scientific fact, in geology, geography, and meteorology courses, in America's top geology and earth science programs, at fairly conservative universities. At the time, even “liberal media” outlets buried their scant climate coverage in the back pages (they still do). And so, for most of the next fifteen years, the issue remained largely off the American public's radar.

In 1992, at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the world’s scientists and policy-makers decided that action was necessary to stave off catastrophic global climate change – changes in temperature that would, again, threaten the ability of humans to survive on earth. But to Bush, the health of the American economy was a greater priority than the survival of human life on earth. And America’s economy was keyed to the oil economy. (The previous year, Bush had fought – and won – history’s first oil war.)

Patrick and Foreman explain that Bush's interference fifteen years ago led the conference's statement of its ultimate purpose to be "the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." That there was no mention of the carbon dioxide emissions which cause the warming was Bush's doing.

Bush signed on to agreeing with the goal, but only after, literally, forcing the world to ignore the cause – burning oil (and its hydrocarbon cousins, coal and natural gas). He committed U.S. climate resources to a ten-year study, rather than to action.

At the end of that ten-year study, his son would be President, preparing to invade oil-rich Iraq, in history’s second oil war. Among his responses to global warming would be to launch yet another ten-year study, which will be completed in 2012, just in time for a presidential election in which another member of the Bush nuclear family, Jeb Bush, is certain to be a contender.


A Brief History Of American Climate (In)action: The Clinton Years

It was the U.S. Congress, Democrats and Republicans, that killed Kyoto.

Bush had taken carbon dioxide emissions, the actual cause of global warming, off the table. And Clinton, a business-friendly “New Democrat,” had, in actuality, done little in his four years in office to change the status quo.

Here's what the Washington Post reported, as the Kyoto conference opened on December 1, 1997:

"KYOTO, Japan, Dec. 1 – The United States received a chilly response during its opening statements today at U.N. talks on a climate-change treaty, a meeting that Japan's foreign minister said "could change the history of mankind."

"At the opening assembly here, U.S. delegate Melinda Kimble reiterated the U.S. position, which includes holding the line on greenhouse-gas emissions at the 1990 level by 2010. She characterized more stringent proposals made by the European Union and others as unrealistic or ineffective. Her comments were met in the assembly hall with silence.

"In part as a response to worldwide criticism of the U.S. position, President Clinton announced in Washington Monday that he will send Vice President Gore to Kyoto to try to help forge an international agreement. That decision, after months of refusing to send such a high-level American to the meeting, represented a risk for Clinton and for Gore."

Even after sending Gore to wrangle an agreement, Clinton never sent the Kyoto treaty to the Senate for ratification. There was close to unanimous bipartisan opposition to Kyoto in the Senate. The energy and auto industries had convinced their labor forces that Kyoto would cost jobs, echoing Bush's contention that action would harm the U.S. economy (never mind that the survival of humanity on earth was in the balance, or that the U.S. economy relies on exploitation of natural resources, which are the fruits of a healthy environment.)

With both big business and big labor set against action, that meant both major parties, Republican (which represents business interests) and Democrat (which represents labor interests) opposed it.

Paul Roberts writes in The End of Oil (2004) that Clinton and Gore worried that action would impede an eventual Gore campaign in 2000.

Strategically, the Congress also opposed action that would put the U.S. at disadvantage relative, particularly, to China, which was beginning a process of rapid industrial development, and fast becoming America’s top strategic competitor. Kyoto exempted "developing nations" from the per capita emissions reduction targets – and counted China and rapidly-developing India, as developing nations.

So Clinton kicked the can, down the road, to the Gore Administration.


The 2000 Election, or Ozone Man vs. Exxon’s Man

The election of 2000 was a pivotal moment in human history on earth.

This was an election between Bush oil fortune scion George W. Bush, whose father had worked to scuttle even the mention of carbon dioxide emissions reductions in global agreements intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and Al Gore, the man who had held hearings in the Senate on the danger of catastrophic global climate change in the 1980s – before even the UN began to take action. The elder Bush had mocked Gore’s interest in the global environment during the 1992 campaign, deriding him as “Ozone Man.”

In other words, the winner of the 2000 election would decide whether the United States – which with 5% of the world’s population, uses 25 % of the world’s energy – would take act to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions or continue to ignore the problem and undermine international initiatitives, in favor of maintaining an energy economy in which fossil fuels were king.

The stakes could not have been higher.

Energy industry players dumped money into the Bush Campaign. The CEO of Halliburton, the world's largest oilfield services supplier, selected himself as Bush's running mate. The CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, offered the Enron corporate jet, aboard which Bush and Cheney campaigned. According to opensecrets.org, which tracks campaign finance, the energy sector gave over 2 million dollars to Bush's campaign, and just over 300,000 to Gore's, about a 6:1 ratio.The Center on Responsive Politics broke it down differently, in 2001:

"No longer is it a surprise to note that 78 cents out of every dollar the [energy] industry has contributed to federal parties and candidates over the last decade has gone to the GOP or that President Bush was the No. 1 recipient of the industry’s money during the last election. But here’s something you might not know: Bush, with more than $1.8 million in contributions, got more money from the industry during 1999-2000 than any other federal candidate over the last decade, barely eclipsing two fellow Texans in the process ... Texas-based companies dominate the industry’s giving. The most generous: the Houston-based Enron, the industry’s No. 1 contributor during 1999-2000 with more than $2.3 million in contributions, about $1 million more than No. 2 ranked Exxon-Mobil."

Meanwhile, as Roberts explains, Gore worried that his interest in climate change would cost him votes in states whose economies relied on fossil fuels, such as Kentucky, West Virginia, and his home state of Tennessee, a coal state, which he eventually lost (though his loss was attributed to an NRA campaign opposing him based on his support of gun control laws). So Gore, who would become one of the world's most important proponents of action to stave off climate change, did not talk much about it on the campaign trail. When climate change was discussed in the 2000 debates between Bush and Gore, it sounded like this:

Gore: I will work to reduce carbon emissions.
Bush: I agree. But I will not raise taxes, and I believe in local control.
Gore: Me, too.

Bush worked hard to give the appearance that he agreed that it was important to protect the environment, but that he disagreed only on the means – he preferred action on the local level, instead of the federal government acting intrusively. He went out of his way to appear to agree with Gore, and Gore with him.

But look at the actual conversation among Bush, Gore, and moderator Jim Lehrer, on October 11, 2000:

MODERATOR: Would you believe the federal government still has some new rules and new regulations and new laws to pass in the environmental area or do you think --

BUSH: Sure, absolutely, so long as they're based upon science and they're reasonable. So long as people have input.

MODERATOR: What about global warming?

BUSH: I think it's an issue that we need to take very seriously. But I don't think we know the solution to global warming yet. And I don't think we've got all the facts before we make decisions. I tell you one thing I'm not going to do is I'm not going to let the United States carry the burden for cleaning up the world's air. Like Kyoto Treaty would have done. China and India were exempted from that treaty. I think we need to be more even-handed, as evidently 99 senators -- I think it was 99 senators supported that position.

MODERATOR: Global warming, the Senate did turn it down. I think --

BUSH: 99 to nothing.

GORE: Well, that vote wasn't exactly -- a lot of the supporters of the Kyoto Treaty actually ended up voting for that because the way it was worded. But there's no doubt there's a lot of opposition to it in the Senate. I'm not for command and control techniques either. I'm for working with the groups, not just with industry but also with the citizen groups and local communities to control sprawl in ways that the local communities themselves come up with. But I disagree that we don't know the cause of global warming. I think that we do. It's pollution, carbon dioxide, and other chemicals that are even more potent, but in smaller quantities, that cause this. Look, the world's temperature is going up, weather patterns are changing, storms are getting more violent and unpredictable. What are we going to tell our children? I'm a grandfather now. I want to be able to tell my grandson when I'm in my later years that I didn't turn away from the evidence that showed that we were doing some serious harm. In my faith tradition, it is -- it's written in the book of Matthew, "Where your heart is, there is your treasure also." And I believe that -- that we ought to recognize the value to our children and grandchildren of taking steps that preserve the environment in a way that's good for them.

BUSH: Yeah, I agree. I just -- I think there has been -- some of the scientists, I believe, Mr. Vice President, haven't they been changing their opinion a little bit on global warming? A profound scientist recently made a different --

Lehrer interrupted. Because of the timed debate format – which allows for it to fit into television programming – they had run out of time.

The discussion of the environment had begun like this:

MODERATOR: New question, new subject. Vice President Gore, on the environment. In your 1992 book you said, quote, "We must make the rescue of our environment the central organizing principle for civilization and there must be a wrenching transformation to save the planet." Do you still feel that way?

Gore explained his extremely progressive position on environmental action, but he did not make Global Climate Change a central piece of his campaign. And when the press talked about Gore and earth, it was to mock the candidate for wearing “earth tones” at the suggestion of a campaign advisor.

Bush played up his commitment to protecting the environment (he even pretended to argue in favor of mandatory carbon emissions caps, which, as President, he has unequivocally opposed), and Gore played his down (likely to avoid being further tarred by the Bushes as an “extremist.”)
Shallow media coverage of the campaign focused on “body language” and fashion, not on actual differences on substantive issues. And the debate format limited the amount of time that could be spent discussing a single issue. That’s not to mention Americans’ brief attention span.

Many voters who were truly concerned about catastrophic climate change voted for the candidate who had made environmental issues central, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. Nader argued that the reason the debates sounded like “me, too” versus “me, too” was that both parties were owned by the same corporate interests. When the election was decided by just over 500 votes in Florida, Nader was considered a spoiler, whose longshot candidacy fatefully pulled votes from Gore’s column. But the defection of environment-voters to Nader meant that it was Gore’s reluctance to talk about climate change that cost him the election.

It’s a lesson Gore, who has become the world’s single most outspoken advocate of action, seems to have learned.


The Exxon Presidency

Bush, as it turns out, became President.

He had campaigned on a pledge to reduce carbon emissions, taking global warming off the table as a reason to vote for Gore. But among his first acts was to declare Kyoto dead on arrival. He gave his Vice President full rein to develop a national energy policy, which included new drilling on public lands across the American West, off the coasts of Florida and California, and in a wildlife refuge in Alaska – and it also included a look at Iraq. What it did not include was any consideration of global climate change, and environmental advocacy groups, which had enjoyed policy entree under Clinton-Gore, complained bitterly that they had been deliberately shut out. At the time, Vice President Dick Cheney argued that while energy conservation may be a personal moral virtue, it was, as a component of a national energy policy, ridiculous.

Bush, who had mentioned uncertainty during the debates, even while appearing to accept the cause and effect relationship of carbon emissions and climate change, changed his tune. As President, he echoed his father’s rationale: there was too much uncertainty to act. We did not know whether global warming was really happening. And if it was happening, we did not know enough to be able to tell if it was caused by humans. Moreover, even if it was being caused by humans burning fossil fuels, it might just be beneficial. (The Administration, in 2007, continues to tout the benefits of global warming.)

Meanwhile, dire warnings of calamity resulting from a rapidly changing climate became louder and more certain as the computer models advanced, and results from field study streamed in from virtually every field of science – chemistry, biology, geology, meteorology – and from every nation. The International Panel on Climate Change issued warning after warning, each more certain and more dire than the last.

And the new President Bush, who had pledged in the October 11 debate to base his climate policies on science, began a concerted campaign to undermine that science; to destroy the connection between science and policy-making in the Executive Branch of the United States Government; and to thwart international attempts to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

The U.S. became the villain – not just a reluctant participant, an obstacle to preventing catastrophic global warming, but an active opponent of action.

At Johannesburg – also known as "Rio Plus Ten", the ten-year follow-up to the Rio meeting at which Bush, Sr., scuttled action and even language intended to confront carbon dioxide emissions – the U.S. and the Saudis teamed up to kill action on carbon emissions. The Saudis have the world's largest oil reserves – and the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of oil. (The Saudi Royal family and the Bush family, it should be noted, have extensive personal and financial ties. It makes sense. Both families embody the intermingling of state power and oil wealth – and their symbiotic relationship is a metaphor for that between the two nations.)

In 2005, when it came time to send a representative to Montreal to discuss Climate Change at yet another international conference, the Bush Administration picked Harlan Watson, a man whom Exxon Mobil – the oil titan that was among Bush's top donors – had been pushing for top climate-related jobs in the federal government since 2001. The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin reported, on December 5, 2005:

"Watson has spent the past week in Montreal touting the administration's record on climate change. He said there is no reason the United States and other countries that oppose mandatory carbon dioxide limits should have to talk about what should be done once the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to cut global greenhouse gases by 7 percent by 2012, expires.

"Watson's position and the environmentalists' reaction should hardly be surprising – considering his apparent popularity with the oil industry. A Feb. 6, 2001, fax sent to the White House by oil giant Exxon Mobil proposed involving Watson more closely in international climate negotiations ... Exxon Mobil has consistently opposed mandatory curbs on greenhouse gases linked to climate change."

Exxon did not waste any time; when it faxed the White House to recommend its man to negotiate for the U.S. in climate talks, Bush had been in office seventeen days.

The Bush Administration also hired an oil industry lobbyist, Phillip Cooney, to run environmental policy emanating from the White House. As head of the Council on Environmental Quality, Cooney weakened virtually all scientific reports coming out of the government dealing with global warming -- literally by editing the language of certainty out of the reports. On June 8, 2005, The New York Times reported:

"A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits
on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in
ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming,
according to internal documents.

"In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003,
the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate
research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some
senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases,
the changes appeared in the final reports.

"The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the
phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend
to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are
robust."

Two days after the Times broke the story, Cooney resigned his White House post. He was immediately hired at Exxon Mobil. The Times reported,

"Philip A. Cooney, the former White House staff member who repeatedly revised government scientific reports on global warming, will go to work for Exxon Mobil this fall, the oil company said yesterday.

"Mr. Cooney resigned as chief of staff for President Bush's environmental policy council on Friday, two days after documents obtained by The New York Times revealed that he had edited the reports in ways that cast doubt on the link between the emission of greenhouse gases and rising temperatures.

"A former lawyer and lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying group for the oil industry, Mr. Cooney has no scientific training."

Also in 2005, the Bush Administration successfully killed consideration of emissions cuts to combat global warming at a G-8 summit in which global warming was to be a top concern. The Post’s Juliet Eilperin wrote, in "U.S. Pressure Weakens G-8 Climate Plan: Global-Warming Science Assailed" (June 17, 2005),

"Bush administration officials working behind the scenes have succeeded in weakening key sections of a proposal for joint action by the eight major industrialized nations to curb climate change.

"Under U.S. pressure, negotiators in the past month have agreed to delete language that would detail how rising temperatures are affecting the globe, set ambitious targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions and set stricter environmental standards for World Bank-funded power projects, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Negotiators met this week in London to work out details of the document, which is slated to be adopted next month at the Group of Eight's annual meeting in Scotland.

"The administration's push to alter the G-8's plan on global warming marks its latest effort to edit scientific or policy documents to accord with its position that mandatory carbon dioxide cuts are unnecessary. Under mounting international pressure to adopt stricter controls on heat-trapping gas emissions, Bush officials have consistently sought to modify U.S. government and international reports that would endorse a more aggressive approach to mitigating global warming."

Exxon’s investment in Bush’s campaign had certainly paid off.

The Guardian (UK) reported in 2005 that pressure from Exxon had been directly responsible for Bush's initial rejection of Kyoto at the beginning of his presidency.

As international efforts to curb carbon emissions faltered, oil prices soared. So did Exxon Mobil’s profits, breaking record after record, quarter after quarter after quarter. In 2005, the company posted the largest annual corporate profits in American history. In 2006, they did it again.


Bush’s War On Climate Science

The Bush Administration has spent its two terms in office weakening government reports on the dangers posed by climate change, and undermining Americans' confidence in the certainty of climate science. It has muzzled scientists at NASA, NOAA, and the Centers for Disease Control, ordering them to not talk about climate change. The Bush Administration has gone so far as to require political approval of public speaking engagements by scientists, such as NASA's top climate scientist, James Hansen. And, in the grand tradition of totalitarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, and Thang Shwe’s Burma, they have run public appearances and interviews through government minders, to make sure scientists toe the Administration’s line. The Times reported on January 29, 2006:

"The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

"The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

"Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said."

The Administration’s intimidation of government employees was effective enough that higher-ups at the Smithsonian toned down a major exhibit on climate change in the Arctic, to the chagrin of the scientists whose research the exhibit was designed to display. George Orwell would not be surprised to learn that the exhibit’s name was changed from “Arctic Meltdown” to the grammatically incorrect “The Arctic: A Friend Acting Strange” (the grammatical error, at least, was corrected; following the White House’s clear lead, the exhibit played up uncertainties about climate change, and played down international scientific consensus that carbon emissions are causing the Arctic ice to disappear.)

As recently as March of this year, the Administration forbade U.S. representatives to an international conference on polar bears to even mention the effects of global warming on polar bears. Global warming is considered an existential threat to the species, which relies on ice to hunt and bear young.The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on March 8, 2007,

"The Bush administration is ordering federal wildlife officials headed for international meetings on polar bears not to talk about how climate change and melting ice are affecting the imperiled animals. It is the latest in a string of cases in which the administration has carefully controlled or even banned government employees' public speech about global warming. This latest chapter involves two memorandums written in late February that put strict limits on what U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees could discuss at meetings in Norway and Russia. A third memo says the policy will apply for trips to those two nations as well as Canada and "any northern country.""

Why would the Bush Administration forbid its own negotiators to even mention global warming at meetings with North Pole nations?

It’s not only in international deliberations that discussion of climate change has been deliberately suppressed by the Bush Administration. The Associated Press reported just last month that the Administration had heavily redacted testimony to be given by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee (the committee, responsible for crafting this nation’s environmental laws, was chaired until 2006 by James Inhofe, Republican of the oil state Oklahoma, who maintains that global warming is “a hoax”) on the health impacts of global warming.

"Specific scientific references to potential health risks were removed after Julie L. Gerberding submitted a draft of her prepared remarks to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review.

"Instead, Gerberding's prepared testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee included few details on what effects climate change could have on the spread of disease. Only during questioning did the director of the government's premier disease-monitoring agency describe any specific diseases likely to be affected, again without elaboration.

"A CDC official familiar with both versions said Gerberding's draft "was eviscerated," cut from 14 pages to four. The version presented to the Senate committee consisted of six pages."

The Bush Administration wasn’t only censoring the scientific reports; it was also systematically dismantling the nation’s scientific apparatus – and destroying American scientists’ ability to even produce scientific data on global warming.

The National Academy of Sciences reported in January that the Bush Administration had cut funding for earth science programs and technology by thirty percent since 2000 – catastrophically undermining the United States' ability to understand or even study changes in climate. In "Cutbacks Impede Climate Studies: U.S. Earth Programs In Peril, Panel Finds" (January 15, 2007), the Washington Post's Marc Kaufman reported:

"The government's ability to understand and predict hurricanes, drought and climate changes of all kinds is in danger because of deep cuts facing many Earth satellite programs and major delays in launching some of its most important new instruments, a panel of experts has concluded.

"The two-year study by the National Academy of Sciences, released yesterday, determined that NASA's earth science budget has declined 30 percent since 2000. It stands to fall further as funding shifts to plans for a manned mission to the moon and Mars. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, has experienced enormous cost overruns and schedule delays with its premier weather and climate mission.

"As a result, the panel said, the United States will not have the scientific information it needs in the years ahead to analyze severe storms and changes in Earth's climate unless programs are restored and funding made available.

""NASA's budget has taken a major hit at the same time that NOAA's program has fallen off the rails," said panel co-chairman Berrien Moore III of the University of New Hampshire. "This combination is very, very disturbing, and it's coming at the very time that we need the information most."

"NOAA officials announced last week that 2006 was the warmest year on record in the United States -- part of a highly unusual warming trend over several decades that many scientists attribute to greenhouse gases. Some climate experts think that the atmospheric warming could bring more extreme weather -- longer droughts, reduced snowfall and more intense hurricanes such as the ones experienced along the Gulf Coast in 2005."

In June of this year, NOAA and NASA scientists told the Associated Press that the Administration was "drastically scaling back efforts to measure global warming from space, just as the president tries to convince the world the U.S. is ready to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gases."The Associated Press report continues:

"A confidential report to the White House, obtained by The Associated Press, warns that U.S. scientists will soon lose much of their ability to monitor warming from space using a costly and problem-plagued satellite initiative begun more than a decade ago.

"Because of technology glitches and a near-doubling in the original $6.5 billion cost, the Defense Department has decided to downsize and launch four satellites paired into two orbits, instead of six satellites and three orbits.

"The satellites were intended to gather weather and climate data, replacing existing satellites as they come to the end of their useful lifetimes beginning in the next couple of years.

"The reduced system of four satellites will now focus on weather forecasting. Most of the climate instruments needed to collect more precise data over long periods are being eliminated."

The Administration appears to be purposefully crippling our nation’s ability to study changes in the global climate system.


Global War On Terra

The evidence of the Bush Administration’s malfeasance on global warming is overwhelming.

As American public opinion on global warming has reached the tipping point, Bush has begun to assert publicly that the United States must act. But in action, he continues to work to torpedo global initiative to stave off climate catastrophe. In September, world leaders met in New York to lay groundwork for the key Bali climate conference, for which the IPCC’s most recent, urgent, message is designed to serve as prologue. Bush skipped New York, and instead held his own dissident conference of the world’s major carbon emitting nations.

Bush’s political allies argued that this second path was analogous to the formation of NATO, an opportunity for the United States to advance the international cause by working in parallel from outside the United Nations framework.

But that’s not how European attendees of Bush’s meeting saw it. The Guardian reported:

"The conference, attended by more than 20 countries, including China, India, Britain, France and Germany, broke up with the US isolated, according to non-Americans attending. One of those present said even China and India, two of the biggest polluters, accepted that the voluntary approach proposed by the US was untenable and favoured binding measures, even though they disagreed with the Europeans over how this would be achieved.

"A senior European diplomat attending the conference, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the meeting confirmed European suspicions that it had been intended by Mr Bush as a spoiler for a major UN conference on climate change in Bali in December.

""It was a total charade and has been exposed as a charade," the diplomat said. "I have never heard a more humiliating speech by a major leader. He [Mr. Bush] was trying to present himself as a leader while showing no sign of leadership. It was a total failure."

"John Ashton, Britain's special envoy on climate change, who attended the conference, said: "It is striking here how isolated the US has become on this issue. There is no support among the industrialised countries for the proposition that we should proceed on the basis of voluntary commitments."

The Administration has, since its very first moments in office, waged a concerted campaign to stave off global action to prevent catastrophic climate change. Bush's Administration has edited the reports, de-funded the science and dismantled the agencies, and, on the political side, worked to undermine the American people's confidence in the certainty of the science, largely by making rejection of climate science a tenet of Republican Party orthodoxy, and purposefully and methodically injecting uncertainty into the debate.

The Administration has imposed totalitarian restrictions on American scientists (the kind you might expect in, say, Saudi Arabia, or China, or Russia, which, by the way, eagerly anticipates increased post-thaw oil production in Siberia). And it has decimated American planetary science programs, once the envy of the world, specifically to prevent scientific understanding of global climate change from advancing.

Bush has allowed oil companies, whose product is among the leading causes of catastrophic global warming, to write U.S. policy on how to deal with climate change. They have sent agents of the oil industry to represent the United States at international conferences to address the global crisis -- their agenda being to undermine any international agreement that would actually take action on climate change by addressing it at its source, carbon emissions.

Seven years into the Bush Presidency, the Arctic and Antarctic are warming at a speed that defies the predictions of climate change models. Washington Post writer Doug Struck reported on October 22 ("At the Poles, Melting Occurring at Alarming Rate"):

"For scientists, global warming is a disaster movie, its opening scenes set at the poles of Earth. The epic already has started. And it's not fiction.

"The scenes are playing, at the start, in slow motion: The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries is melting away. The sea ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of 2006, it shrank to a record low; this summer the ice pulled back even more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska. Where explorer Robert Peary just 102 years ago saw "a great white disk stretching away apparently infinitely" from Ellesmere Island, there is often nothing now but open water. Glaciers race into the sea from the island of Greenland, beginning an inevitable rise in the oceans ...

"At the South Pole, ancient ice shelves have abruptly crumbled. The air over the western Antarctic peninsula has warmed by nearly 6 degrees since 1950. The sea there is heating as well, further melting edges of the ice cap. Green grass and beech trees are taking root on the ice fringes."

The Administration still opposes caps on carbon emissions – but the U.S. government is taking some action. The United States is expanding Coast Guard bases in the Arctic to guard the newly-open shipping lanes and new oil drilling operations. The Times reported on October 18,

"For most of human history, the Arctic Ocean has been an ice-locked frontier. But now, in one of the most concrete signs of the effect of a warming climate on government operations, the Coast Guard is planning its first operating base there as a way of dealing with the cruise ships and the tankers that are already beginning to ply Arctic waters.

"With increasingly long seasons of open water in the region, the Coast Guard has also begun discussions with the Russians about controlling anticipated ship traffic through the Bering Strait, which until now has been crossed mainly by ice-breaking research vessels and native seal and walrus hunters.

"The Coast Guard says its base, which would probably be near the United States northernmost town, Barrow, Alaska, on the North Slope coast, would be seasonal and would initially have just a helicopter equipped for cold-weather operations and several small boats.

"But given continued warming, that small base, which could be in place by next spring, would be expanded later to help speed responses to oil spills from tankers that the Coast Guard believes could eventually carry shipments from Scandinavia to Asia through the Bering Strait."

Clearly, the White House is certain enough that global warming is happening to build new military bases in the Arctic to protect the oil industry’s infrastructure there, and guard the new trade routes that would allow oil tankers quicker access to intercontinental markets.

And what sounds like horrific news for global civilization is actually great news if you happen to be in the global oil business.


Climate Crimes Against Humanity

It is certainly not hyperbole to argue that if the President of the United States were actively working not to prevent, but to ensure planetary catastrophe – for profit – what we are talking about is movie-villain level evil.

It is increasingly certain that U.S. and multinational energy corporations, at the turn of the millennium, saw the writing on the wall: depending on the outcome of the 2000 election, the United States, in its role as global leader (and sole superpower) was going to either commit itself fully to addressing the global catastrophe of climate change – which would spell potential disaster for their industry, with trillions invested in oil infrastructure – or the fossil fuel industries were going to remain dominant in the global energy order.

The energy industries chose their man, selected his team, and ensured that the United States' response to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change was bring ’em on. Instead of staving off catastrophic global warming, encourage it with tax loopholes for low-mileage vehicles like Hummers, and an EPA whose role became to slacken emissions restrictions – an Environmental Protection Agency which argued, all the way to the Supreme Court, that protecting the environment is not in its job description.

As NPR's Nina Totenberg reported on November 26, 2006,

"The U.S. Supreme Court tackled the question of global warming for the first time Wednesday. At issue is whether the Bush administration can refuse to regulate carbon emissions when the Clean Air Act specifically mandates regulations of all pollutants that may endanger public health or welfare, including effects on climate and weather.

"As a presidential candidate in 2000, George Bush pledged to regulate carbon emissions. But once elected, he did an about-face and rejected the recommendations of even his own EPA administrator."

Instead of working to reduce carbon emissions, it appears they worked to increase carbon emissions, perhaps to ensure that, before the Oil President gave up the reins in 2009, another decade of inaction had made global warming irreversible. So that even a new president, taking office in 2009, would be able to do little to reverse the trend toward catastrophic warming, species extinction, spreading disease vectors, and rising sea levels that could inundate America’s (and the world’s) coastal cities within a hundred years. And, of course, easier drilling beneath the poles without all that pesky ice.

The IPCC now says that we have only two or three years in which we – meaning the entire human race – must begin to take drastic, global action to reverse climate change.

Most observers sense that only the United States can truly lead such a crucial global campaign. But the United States, with Bush at the helm, is the leading agent working against that campaign.

So, for the next fourteen months, the United States will remain in retrograde motion, while the world anxiously awaits the end of the disastrous Bush Presidency. The American Congress and the American people remain unwilling to remove Bush from office before January 20, 2009.

That makes us complicit.

Oil executives are responsible, too, of course – as are the leaders of foreign nations with similar agendas. But the President of the United States bears a unique responsibility to human morality that we do not expect from the Saudis or the Chairs at Exxon or Chevron.

It is certain that the name Bush will be cursed down the ages. But if George W. Bush’s official policy has been to allow planetary devastation, in order to ensure the continued financial dominance of his family and their allies, then he is guilty of the worst crimes against humanity the world has known – endangering, again, not just our sensibilities, but the very survival of our species.

If, in his lifetime, Bush is not tried for these crimes, then justice will be extinct.

Just like polar bears.

And, eventually, just like us.





- Richard B. Simon