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

But for all his credentials as a master of spin, Cooney got off to a rough start. In May 2002, the administration released its Climate Action Report, a dispatch to the U.N. that documents progress on climate-treaty obligations. The report was developed by the EPA, but internal documents reveal that Cooney edited it to reflect positions advocated by the API and Ford. On the opening page of the chapter on climate impacts, Cooney inserted a litany of language in bold intended to cast doubt on the science: "the weakest links in our knowledge . . . a lack of understanding . . . uncertainties . . . considerable uncertainty . . . perhaps even greater uncertainty . . . regarded as tentative."

But the clumsy caveats weren't enough to obscure the report's real science. With the help of an EPA source, The New York Times filtered out Cooney's waffling and filed a front-page story that called the report "a stark shift for the Bush administration." The report, the Times observed, detailed "far-reaching effects that global warming will inflict" and "for the first time mostly blames human actions for recent global warming."

Cooney was horrified: An obscure government report he had tried to whitewash now threatened to undermine his former employers in the energy industry. Panicked, he called on an old friend for help. Myron Ebell had been a key member of the coalition that crafted the disinformation "action plan." In fact, casting doubt on global warming is Ebell's full-time job: He heads the climate-denial campaign at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that was underwritten in part by ExxonMobil.

Ebell recalls that Cooney was frantic over the story in the Times. "We tried to put some qualifiers on that chapter in the report," Cooney told him. "We'd take the text from EPA, and then we'd add a sentence like, 'We don't really know if this is really happening.' So we tried to do it, but I can see now that we made a total mess of it."

Ebell's advice to Cooney is contained in a e-mail dated June 3rd, 2002. "Thanks for asking for our help," he wrote. "I know you're in crisis mode. . . . I want to help you cool things down, but after consulting with the team, I think that what we can do is limited until there is an official statement from the administration repudiating the report."

That repudiation came the very next day. President Bush himself dismissed the report, saying it had been "put out by the bureaucracy." Forget the headlines, he said - there was no shift in the administration's policy.

What happened next, according to internal e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone, reveals just how seriously the White House took its intelligence fixing on global warming. Cooney was put in charge of damage control and was apparently instructed to craft a letter to the Times denying that the president had changed course on climate change. But this time, Cooney's editor was not just Connaughton, but Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove. The collaboration with Rove raises questions about Cooney's congressional testimony last March, in which he insisted, under oath, that he had not discussed with Rove his work at the CEQ.

The letter drafted by Cooney - and vetted by Rove - insists that the Climate Action Report "reinforces" the "significant scientific uncertainties" emphasized in the president's climate policy. Edits to the rough drafts of the letter were blacked out by White House censors, but Rove's pithy endorsement of the final draft survived. "Great," he wrote in praise of Cooney's spin. "Defends the report rather than staying focused on the policy." In other words, Cooney had succeeded in emphasizing the report's overhyped uncertainties, thus shifting attention away from the White House's do-nothing approach to global warming.