Extracts from Ofcom Complaint, by Category: Misrepresentation of People’s Views

CEI [cont]

In August 2003, the CEI sued the US Federal Government (see http://tinyurl.com/38w8e3) in order to suppress two major scientific reports concerning the current state of scientific knowledge about global warming. The CEI action failed, and the report was published to worldwide headlines focussing on the fact that the Bush administration was now admitting the science of climate change.

Subsequently a copy of an email was obtained by Greenpeace under the Freedom of Information Act (see analysis at http://tinyurl.com/34vsoa and the email itself at: http://tinyurl.com/2m5sku), which was sent on June 03, 2002 by Myron Ebell, a Director of the CEI, to Phil Cooney, who at the time was the Chief of Staff for President George W. Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality. Despite holding a position that one might assume would require scientific training, Cooney is a lawyer and holds a bachelors degree in economics, with no known scientific qualifications (see Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/2l9cz6).

Before taking that position, Cooney was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, the main US trade association for the oil and natural gas industries (see page 145 [of the full complaint], and Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/39gllu and http://tinyurl.com/2l9cz6).

The email from Ebell to Cooney appeared to show Federal Government collusion with the CEI over trying to dampen down the headlines over the report’s publication. It also appeared to show collusion over trying to force the resignation of the then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman. (She subsequently did resign in May 2003: see news report at http://tinyurl.com/yqtgzz).

Disclosure of this email led the Attorneys General of Maine and Connecticut to write to US Attorney General John Ashcroft calling for an investigation (see http://tinyurl.com/2erpof).

In late 2003, the CEI withdrew its lawsuit, but only after the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) added a caveat to the website hosting one of the reports, stating that it had not been subjected to the OSTP’s Information Quality Act Guidelines – without mentioning that these guidelines did not exist when the report was written, and that had they existed at that time, the report would have met them. The CEI then distorted the meaning of this caveat in a press release – see http://tinyurl.com/3cjokm and http://tinyurl.com/34v5n2 (PDF).

Continued …