| C|E|I | competitive enterprise institute |
Washington, D.C., June 3, 2002—The Environmental Protection Agency’s latest report on global warming to the United Nations, Climate Action Report 2002, violates an agreement between the White House and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, three members of Congress, and other non-profit advocacy groups, struck in settlement of a lawsuit. The report relies in part on the discredited National Assessment on Climate Change.
As a result of the lawsuit filed in October 2000, the Bush Administration ultimately agreed in September 2001 to withdraw the National Assessment and stated that its unlawfully produced conclusions are “not policy positions or official statements of the U.S. government.” EPA has ignored this agreement in issuing its report to the United Nations.
“Through Freedom of Information Act inquiries, we learned that the National Assessment was hurriedly slapped together in an incomplete and inaccurate form,” said Christopher C. Horner, CEI counsel who filed the lawsuit. “The current Climate Action Report inappropriately cites the disgraced National Assessment, in clear violation of the spirit and letter of our agreement with the White House in return for withdrawing our suit.”
Adds Myron Ebell, director of global warming policy at CEI: “The Administration has recognized that the National Assessment is the worst sort of junk science. For the EPA now to accept the National Assessment’s findings as valid undermines and contradicts President Bush’s global warming policies. The EPA needs to be told that the Clinton Administration is gone and Al Gore did not win the election.”
The lawsuit against the White House’s flawed climate science was brought jointly by CEI, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Representatives Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) and Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO), and other non-profit advocacy groups. CEI’s pleadings in the case can be found in the docket at the federal District Court for the District of Columbia (CV 00-02383).
This makes it sound as though the EPA report is merely a rogue faction of the government defying the White House. But where's the statement to that effect from the administration? One can kinda-sorta-maybe read it into Bush's "bureaucracy" crack, but given that he's never argued against the very idea of "global warming", that would be a charitable stretch.