Ex-oil Lobbyist Watered Down Us Climate Research

A former oil industry lobbyist edited the Bush administration's official policy papers on climate change to play down the link between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, it was reported yesterday.

Documents released by a watchdog group, the Government Accountability Project, show that as chief of staff for the White House council on environmental quality, Philip Cooney watered down government scientific papers on climate change and played up uncertainties in the scientific literature. Mr Cooney is a law graduate and has no scientific training.

The Bush aide had performed a similar role in his previous job for the American Petroleum Institute, a lobby group representing Exxon Mobil and other oil companies focused on countering the virtual consensus among scientists that man-made emissions are rapidly heating the planet.

"Cooney's still doing his old job for the American Petroleum Institute," said Kert Davies, the US research director for Greenpeace. "It's the American Petroleum Institute working within the White House."

The newly released documents, printed in the New York Times, show handwritten notes by Mr Cooney deleting paragraphs and editing others drafted by government scientists.

For example, he inserted "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties" in a section assessing the solidity of the evidence for climate change. He introduced the word "extremely" to the sentence: "The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult."

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, defended Mr Cooney's editing role as "part of our inter-agency review process".

"There are more than a dozen agencies involved in the inter-agency review programme," he said.

However, it is customary for scientific papers to be edited by other scientists.

Mr Davies said that Mr Cooney's influence on White House policy went further than manipulating documents, describing him as a "gatekeeper" for White House policymaking on climate change, helping to determine whose views were heard. An email dated June 2002, acquired by Greenpeace, showed that Mr Cooney consulted Myron Ebell, a radical critic of climate change science, at another business lobby, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, after the government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had surprised the White House by producing a paper broadly supporting the link with emissions.

"Thanks for calling and asking for our help ... it's nice to know we're needed once in a while," Mr Ebell wrote to Mr Cooney. "It seems to me that the folks at EPA are the obvious fall guys, and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible."

The head of the EPA, Christine Todd Whitman, resigned in 2003, after repeated rows between her agency and the White House over global warming.

Bush administration policy on global warming has generally echoed the approach advocated by the oil lobby, emphasising doubts over climate change science and focusing on the need for further research.

In his first few months in office, President George Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol on climate change, which advocated global cuts in emissions, and at Tuesday's White House meeting with Tony Blair, the president underlined the importance of further research.

"I don't know if you're aware of this, but we lead the world when it comes to dollars spent, millions of dollars spent on research about climate change," he said. "We want to know more about it. It's easier to solve a problem when you know a lot about it."