Hockey Stick Goes to Washington - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 76

administration “to appear engaged” in negotiations over the international treaty to limit greenhouse
gas emissions known as the Kyoto Protocol. 4
The forces of climate inaction quickly stepped in, and Whitman's advice was ignored. Vice
President Dick Cheney formed an energy task force in early 2001 to draft a new national energy
policy. The makeup of the task force was a secret, but the list was eventually leaked to the
Washington Post . Among the most influential members, it turned out, were ExxonMobil vice
president James J. Rouse and Enron head Kenneth L. Lay (who would later be convicted of securities
fraud). Among the participants were numerous representatives of the country's leading electrical
utilities and mining and fossil fuel interests, including the American Petroleum Institute, the largest
fossil fuel industry trade group. According to the Washington Post , the list of participants bolstered
“previous reports that the review leaned heavily on oil and gas companies and on trade groups—
many of them big contributors to the Bush campaign and the Republican Party.” 5 The task force in fact
closely resembled a group we encountered in the first chapter, the Global Climate Coalition formed
by the fossil fuel industry in the 1990s to oppose policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas
emissions.
Bush appointed Philip Cooney as chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental
Quality (CEQ) in 2001. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, Cooney had no formal
scientific training. He had served as a climate change policy lobbyist for the American Petroleum
Institute (API), an inauspicious background for someone who would be in charge of White House
environmental policy. Cooney worked closely with Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise
Institute (CEI)—a lobbying group funded by the fossil fuel industry and conservative foundations 6 that
advocates against governmental regulation in the areas of consumer and environmental policy—to
undermine constructive climate change steps that the Bush administration EPA might be planning to
take. Following the EPA's publication in June 2002 of the “Climate Action Report” originally
commissioned by Whitman, which warned of the potential threats of climate change, Cooney and
Ebell hatched a plan, it would later be revealed, to drive a wedge between the White House and the
proactive EPA administrator. 7 A primary goal of the effort, according to Jake Tapper, writing for
Salon , was to force Whitman, far too environmentally friendly for their purposes, to resign. She did a
year later. 8
Using the controversial Data Quality Act, CEI and CEQ worked together to invalidate a climate
change report known as the National Assessment. 9 The National Assessment had been developed
during the Clinton administration and published in November 2000 on the eve of the presidential
election. It represented the most exhaustive assessment to date of the potential societal impacts of
climate change. The fact that the 2002 “Climate Action Report” relied substantially upon this earlier
assessment made it a highly attractive target to Cooney and the CEI. In August 2003, CEI filed a
lawsuit against the Bush administration to have the report declared unlawful and to prevent its further
distribution. The lawsuit was dismissed “with prejudice,” meaning the suit could not be re-filed. 10
Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was not impressed either, writing to the White House: “I hope
that the lawsuit … is not the result of a collusive plan conceived by the CEI in concert with the
Administration, itself. It would be wrong in any circumstance to reject the well-founded findings of
the [Clinton-era report], but for the Administration to use an outside group to pursue such an ill-
conceived goal would be doubly wrong, and could also be abuse of the courts at the expense of the
taxpayers.” 11