The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration To Deny Global Warming

Exxon's wish was the CEQ's command. According to an internal e-mail obtained by Rolling Stone, Connaughton's first order of business - even before his nomination was made public - was to write his White House colleagues-to-be from his law firm of Sidley & Austin. He echoed Exxon's call that Bierbaum, the acting director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, be "dealt." In the end, each of the scientists on Exxon's hit list was replaced. "It was clear there was a strong lobby and activity against me by some in the energy industry - especially ExxonMobil," says Watson.

A month after Exxon's fax, Whitman got her first sign that the EPA was no longer in charge of climate policy. "When I made the statement in Italy that something might happen on CO2," she says, "the utility industry got really engaged, and all of that caused a rethink." In a move Cheney is suspected of engineering, conservative senators Jesse Helms, Chuck Hagel and Larry Craig wrote the White House on March 6th seeking a "clarification" of the president's policy.

Two days later, the climate "rethink" was laid out in a memo by a team of advisers loyal to Cheney - two of whom, Andrew Lundquist and Karen Knutson, would go on to lead the vice president's energy task force. The memo - provided to Rolling Stone by a former administration official - concluded that Bush's campaign promise to regulate CO2 "did not fully reflect the president's position" and that "it would be premature at this time to propose any specific policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming." The authors dismissed both the IPCC and the National Assessment, writing that "the current state of scientific knowledge about causes of and solutions to global warming is inconclusive and . . . must await further scientific inquiry."

When Whitman heard that Bush was wavering on warming, she "broke through the palace guard," as the president had urged her to do, and marched into the Oval Office. "I wanted to tell him that there were ways to call for a cap on carbon that wouldn't hamstring the economy," she says, "and that it was vitally important we not be seen as ignoring the issue of climate change." But before Whitman could even present her case, the president cut her off. "It was clear the decision had already been made," she says.

As a dumbstruck Whitman walked out of the Oval Office, she bumped into the true Decider. There was Cheney, collecting the envelope from a secretary that contained Bush's "clarification" on climate-warming pollution - which he was on his way to deliver, in person, to his allies in the Senate.

Although the letter was signed by the president, it bore Cheney's unmistakable stamp. Quoting the language of the vice president's energy staffers almost verbatim, it not only reversed Bush's promise to regulate CO2, it also made a sweeping new declaration: that carbon dioxide "is not a 'pollutant' under the Clean Air Act." (The administration would cling to this untenable position for six years, until the Supreme Court ruled in April that federal law compels the EPA to take regulatory action on climate pollution.)

The letter concluded with a hint of things to come: "I look forward to working with you and others to address global climate change issues in the context of a national energy policy." Bush's about-face on planet-warming pollution thus enabled Cheney to take control of the White House's energy policy and to work with industry behind closed doors to craft a polluter-friendly approach to global warming. "By having control of the energy plan, the vice president also had the reins on the climate policy," says Symons, who sat in on Cheney's energy task force. "The ideology is simple: You don't put limits on greenhouse-gas pollution, because that might put limits on coal and oil - and that would hurt industry's performance. Everything else flowed from that."