The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), an agency whose three commissioners are appointed by climate denier Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), has censored a Texas climate scientist’s attempts to warn the public about the threat of global warming to the state’s residents. Rice University oceanographer John Anderson withdrew his article on the Galveston Bay from a collection commissioned by TCEQ after the agency stripped all mentions of climate change, sea level rise, and other man-made impacts on the environment. In an interview with Raw Story, Dr. Anderson said this was a “clear-cut case of censorship”:
This is a clear-cut case of censorship. It’s not scientific editing. It was strictly deletion of virtually any information that related to global change.
Among other deletions and re-writes, the agency altered Anderson’s text from “Sea level rise is one of the main impacts of global climate change and has accelerated” to “Sea level has changed over time”:
According to the Houston Chronicle, the co-editors of the project, Houston Advanced Research Center Vice President Jim Lester and scientist Lisa Gonzalez, have “informed TCEQ they did not want their names associated with the TCEQ version, fearing it would hurt their credibility as scientists.”
“It would be irresponsible to take whatever is sent to us and publish it,” TCEQ spokeswoman Andrea Morrow told ThinkProgress Green in a written statement. “And here, information was included in a report that we disagree with.” “I refer to Texas as a state of denial, and I don’t think we’re the only coastal state that’s in denial,” Anderson told Raw Story. “As long as we live in the state of denial, we’re just passing the check to our grandkids to deal with.”