Ceq Quotes

The congressional investigation found that Cooney and others at CEQ made 181 edits to a strategic plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program with the effect of “exaggerating or emphasizing scientific uncertainties related to global warming.” They made 113 more edits that “deemphasized or diminished the importance of the human role in global warming.” As Dickenson reports, after the 2002 fiasco with EPA’s adverse report, “Cooney wielded a heavier pen when editing official reports on global warming. Not content obscuring science with uncertainty, he began to rewrite the science itself.

In a memo dated September 17, 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Counselor to President Nixon for Urban Affairs, later Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) and US Senator from New York, explained the science of change to Nixon’s Chief Domestic Advisor, John Ehrlichman, and warned that sea levels could rise “by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington. . .” Moynihan then went on to say that “it is possible to conceive fairly mammoth man-made efforts to countervail the CO2 rise (e.g., stop burning fossil fuels),” but that “in any event. . ., this is a subject that the Administration ought to get involved with.”48 The first report of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), published in 1970, devoted an entire chapter to climate change, including a section entitled “Energy output—A disappearing icecap?”49

This is not a survey of the science, but a legal argument.” CEQ edits further instructed, “revise all science text in collaboration with [the Department of Justice].” By the final draft, the discussion of the NRC report had been substantially changed to conform to a deregulation stance.

The Woodwell–MacDonald–Revelle–Keeling report to CEQ contained a major warning about this policy. It strongly criticized the president’s programs to increase coal production, stressing that synthetic fuels from coal and other hydrocarbons would release an estimated 2.3 times the amount of carbon dioxide per Btu compared to natural gas. The report made clear that the new synfuels policy the Department of Energy had developed for the president was inconsistent with protecting the climate system.