Bush (George W.) Administration

Rejecting the Protocol

Bush gave several reasons for choosing not to support the Protocol. First, that it would have been traumatically expensive for the nation's economy to follow the Protocol, because only one fifth of the world's population was to be held accountable for it. Second, he nations of China and India had not yet signed the Protocol. Third, Bush didn't feel there was enough scientific evidence for human-caused global warming. In the year 2005, Department of State documents that were revealed that showed a strong influence of the ExxonMobil Corporation on domestic environmental policy. Additionally, the Exxon-led anti-Kyoto Protocol group Global Climate Coalition (GCC) was noted for influencing President Bush's decision to reject the Kyoto Protocol.

The year after Bush retreated from the Kyoto Protocol, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA—an agency of the United States federal government) issued a Climate Action Report stating that recent decades' global warming was, in fact, most likely due to human impact. Despite this report, Bush continued to doubt the science behind global warming and claimed that the EPA's report was not to be trusted.

Next, in the year 2002, Bush attempted to weaken the Clean Air Act of 1963 (which was amended in 1967, 1970, 1977, and 1990) with his Clear Skies Act (eventually presented to, and rejected by, the Congress as the Clear Skies Act of 2003). The Clear Skies Act proposed to raise the caps on mercury, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur dioxide emissions by large amounts, to postpone pollution standard enforcement until the year 2015, and to permit companies to modernize using including non-compliant equipment.

Several people in high positions in the U.S. government have publicly denounced Bush's repeated denial of global warming and his consistent dismissal of the scientific evidence. For example, James Hansen, the Director of the Goddard Institute at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in the year 2004, accused Bush and his administration of hiding the dangers of greenhouse gases from public awareness. Joseph Romm, formerly an official at the Department of Energy, accused Bush and his administration of consistently denying and delaying steps that could reduce carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.

Another federal employee, Rick Piltz, of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program co-wrote climate reports. He, along with other employees, claimed that climate reports were repeatedly edited by Bush administration officials to lessen the appearance of a global warming threat. Piltz gave the example of a review draft that was returned from the White House with handwritten edits by Phil Cooney, chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality and former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute. In the report cited by Piltz, a statement about global warming being enhanced by energy production was crossed out by Cooney. In another section, the review draft warned of rapid changes in the Earth; Cooney changed this line to read “maybe undergoing change”. Piltz claims these examples are only two of the many unscientific, but political, changes that Cooney made to the review draft.

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