4-25-06, 11:00 am

To advance and communicate scientific knowledge and understanding of the earth, the solar system, and the universe. —from the mission statement of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

The problem with a mission statement is that someday, somewhere, you just might run into somebody that takes it seriously. That was the case for James Hansen, a veteran scientist, NASA’s top climate specialist, and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

In early December 2005, Hansen got into trouble for advancing knowledge about the crisis our planet faces. He called for accelerated efforts to reduce industrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases linked to global warming. After his speech, he told Andrew C. Revkin of the New York Times, he was threatened with “dire consequences” if he continued to advance such ideas.

Hansen said his bosses at NASA imposed obstacles to keep him from talking or writing about climate change, including requirements that all his statements and interviews go through public affairs staff, and that his supervisors could decide to stand in for him in any news media interviews. Hansen told New York Times that it would be irresponsible not to speak out, because NASA’s mission statement includes the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet.” He said he was particularly incensed that the intimidating directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.

A recent New York Times editorial titled “Censoring Truth,” accused the Bush administration of having “secured a special place in history for the audacity with which it manipulates science to suit its political ends.” But the attack by George Deutsch, NASA’s public affairs office, on Hansen was “a new standard of cynicism.”

In fact Deutsch had little, if any, scientific training. His chief credential appears to have been his service with Bush’s re-election campaign and inaugural committee. On his résumé, Deutsch claimed to have earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Texas A&M University, but when the university exposed this as bogus, Deutsch was forced to resign.

The shocker wasn’t NASA’s failure to check Deutsch’s credentials, but that this low-level Bush appointed bureaucrat with no qualifications was able to impose his ideology on agency experts. As Hansen observed, Deutsch was only a “bit player” in the administration’s dishonest game of politicizing science.

Muzzling scientists who make statements that are counter to the interests of big business is a hallmark of the Bush administration. Bush likes to say that “the jury is still out” on global climate change, despite the fact that the polar ice caps are melting, alpine glaciers are retreating, sea levels are rising and coral reefs are dying around the world. The global average temperature in 2005 of 58.3? F. was the warmest since scientists started keeping records in the late 1800’s. Improving the “business climate” for his friends in the auto and fossil fuel corporations is apparently more important to the administration than the risks of global warming.

Policy is where politics and science intersect. Scientific integrity is crucial in developing sound policy. We advance knowledge by allowing scientists the space to freely exchange and discuss findings from their research with a minimum of interference from narrow commercial interests and meddling from politicians. And it’s important to keep the public informed of these developments.

The Bush administration turns this wisdom upside down. It uses political litmus tests for appointments to official scientific advisory panels and shows a preference for corporate advocates. The administration handpicks ideologues to second-guess scientific research and to craft policies that boost corporate profits. It stacks panels with biased scientists with ties to industry, or has eliminated some scientific advisory committees altogether. Additionally, some scientists have noted that White House appointees scrutinize academic researchers, but refuse to acknowledge the biases of scientists on corporate payrolls. The administration’s policy is to use voluntary, market-based measures by corporations to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions of CO2 and other “greenhouse gases.”

Unfortunately, this meddling isn’t limited to global climate change. It’s part of a pattern that includes squelching hydrogeologists who speak out about how mountain-top removal mining operations endanger groundwater supplies, and censoring and distorting wildlife biologists’ work regarding endangered species. It extends to policies related to health. As columnist Robyn Blumner pointed out in 2001, “One of George W. Bush’s first acts as president – literally on his first full day in office – was to delight conservative supporters by reinstating the Global Gag Rule.” The rule cuts foreign aid funding to family planning organizations in other countries that provide abortion services or even talk favorably about abortion to their patients or the public.

Bush’s antagonism toward reproductive freedom stretches well beyond abortion into extreme positions against access to contraception and sex education. In 2003, Bush declared that any country that receives funding from the US to fight the spread of AIDS must emphasize abstinence over condoms. This policy had disastrous effects, says Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary general’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. US cuts in funding for condoms and an emphasis on promoting abstinence had contributed to a shortage of condoms in Uganda, one of the few African countries which has succeeded in reducing its HIV infection rate. Lewis accused Bush of “doing damage to Africa.” Work to control the AIDS epidemic in Brazil, Senegal and other hard-hit countries has been similarly damaged by Bush’s policies. Meanwhile, religious groups that oppose condom use are receiving an increased share of funding.

A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, titled Scientific Integrity in Policymaking, identifies policy issues being unfairly influenced by the administration: including climate change, mercury emissions, reproductive health, lead poisoning in children, workplace safety, and nuclear weapons.

“We found a serious pattern of undermining science by the Bush administration, and it crosses disciplines, whether it’s global climate change or reproductive health or mercury in the food chain or forestry – the list goes on and on,” said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Knobloch says that the panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on lead poisoning planned to strengthen the lead poisoning regulations in early 2004, in response to science showing that smaller amounts than previously understood could cause brain damage in children. Before the panel could act, former secretary of health and human services Tommy Thompson rejected the recommendation and replaced two members of the panel with individuals tied to the lead industry.

The Bush administration also influences policy debates by editing scientific reports to censor information that disagrees with its ideology, as was the case with two major reports from the Environmental Protection Agency in 2002 and 2003.

In other important cases ultra-right ideologues have halted sound environmental policies. In February 2006, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted:

It’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2. In March of 2001, just two days after EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman’s strong statement affirming Bush’s CO2 promise, former Republican National Committee (RNC) Chief Barbour responded with an urgent memo to the White House.

Barbour, who served as Bush campaign strategist, represented the president’s major donors from the fossil fuel industry who had enlisted him to map a Bush energy policy that would be friendly to their interests. His political credentials ensured the new administration’s attention.

The memo, titled “Bush-Cheney Energy Policy & CO2,” was addressed to Vice President Cheney and several high-ranking officials with strong connections to energy and automotive concerns keenly interested in the CO2 issue: Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Commerce Secretary Don Evans. Barbour pointedly snubbed Christie Whitman and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, both of whom were on record supporting CO2 caps. The memo ridiculed them for trying to address global warming, which Barbour dismissed as a “radical fringe issue.”

“A moment of truth is arriving,” Barbour wrote, “in the form of a decision whether this administration’s policy will be to regulate and/or tax CO2 as a pollutant. The question is whether environmental policy still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore.” He denounced the idea of regulating CO2 as “eco-extremism,” and advised them to not allow environmental concerns to “trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years.”

The memo had impact. On March 13, using the language and rationale provided by Barbour, Bush announced that he would not back a CO2 restriction. Echoing Barbour’s memo, Bush said he opposed mandatory CO2 caps due to “the incomplete state of scientific knowledge” about global climate change.

But the science is clear. In February 2006, a study by a renowned MIT climatologist published in the journal Nature linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming. Now the crows of fossil-fuel dependence are coming home to roost. The US addiction to foreign oil is giving us a catastrophic war in the Middle East, and Katrina gave us a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

Was Hurricane Katrina a fluke?

“Very few people in America know the names of Hurricane Katrina’s parents because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue,” Ross Gelbspan said on Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now show on just days after the hurricane landed. Gelbspan was senior editor for a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental articles and is the author of The Heat is On and Boiling Point.

He went on to say, “It’s very clear that global warming does not make more hurricanes, but it makes them much stronger.” Hurricanes gain energy and power from warm surface water. In the case of Katrina, it began as a Category 1 storm, but as it approached land in the Gulf of Mexico where water temperatures were about 80 degrees, it became “enormously more powerful.” Gelbspan added that this kind of phenomenon is happening all over the world.

A major part of the problem comes from CO2, one of the main “greenhouse” gases which cause global warming and which is generated by burning fossil fuels. The problem is compounded by destroying land covered by living plants that filter CO2 out of the air to make way for parking lots and strip malls. Nature is getting double-punched, then kicked when down.

So what can we do about global climate change? Ross Gelbspan, in his book, Boiling Point, advises immediate global political action. “It’s not lifestyle action,” he writes:

“Even if we all sat in the dark and rode bicycles, it would not stop global warming, especially given the reliance on coal in India and China, and on oil in Mexico and Nigeria and the developing countries.”

Gelbspan urges leadership on “spearheading a rapid transition to clean energy.” Political pressure, Gelbspan urges, is needed to change public policy toward sustainable energy and renewable resources.

Environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. echoes this sentiment. “Of all the debates in the scientific arena… there is none in which the White House has cooked the books more than that of global warming,” says Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In his book Crimes Against Nature, Kennedy outlines the Bush administration’s assault on the environment and democracy in general. He focuses on the undue influence of transnational corporations. Kennedy further ties the survival of democracy to sound environmental policy, contending that corporate power must never supersede democratic institutions.

But corporate power has, and continues to supersede democracy. Money buys power, including the power to set policy that affects us all. Environmental degradation is business as usual under capitalism. The destruction of environmental health is the symptom of a major social disease. The disease is capitalism; Bush, Cheney and company are its main infectious agents. Mother Nature is reeling on the ropes. Before we go down for the count, isn’t it about time we spoke up on how to fight this disease?



--David Zink is a contributor from Olympia, Washington.