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Cheney’s Dirty Yes Men

As if we didn’t know Cheney’s energy bias, six years after the fact, the White House has released the names of the experts from whom a prominent energy task force sought advice in 2001.

The Washington Post’s article Papers Detail Industry’s Role in Cheney’s Energy Report reviews the list somewhat chronologically, and to no one’s surprise — the oil and energy-production industry was heavily favored.

Environmental interests were tossed aside, merely an endnote in the process. What happened to global warming concerns?

Jack N. Gerard, then with the National Mining Association, had a meeting with Lundquist [director of the task force] and other staffers in February. He urged the administration to give the Energy Department responsibility for promoting technology for easing global warming and to keep the issue away from the Environmental Protection Agency, which could issue regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. The administration adopted that position.

Case in point is Massachusetts versus EPA Supreme Court case, clearly the culmination of the administration’s effort to keep the EPA from regulating emissions, even though it can and should (as the Supreme Court has declared, six years later…).

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The political lag time simply isn’t acceptable in the physical, scientific world. According to the last IPCC report’s Recommendations for Policymakers, in order avoid a devastating temperature rise and the resulting impacts of global warming, we have one decade to act. Not one decade to consult, release names and understand retrospectively our errors; instead, one decade to revolutionize our energy policy.