They don’t want you to talk about it because it’s bad for business, and even worse for business-as-usual, but global warming – that 500-pound gorilla in the room – is pretty obvious even to the corporations and government agencies who are pretending it doesn’t exist. Call it climate change, or global warming, it’s an issue as divisive in its arena (environment) as abortion is among social rights advocates, and those who argue that it is part of a natural (earth or sun) cycle are only slightly less in denial than those who either pretend it isn’t happening or cover up the evidence that it is.
Take the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, whose internal watchdog recently charged it with fudging (or even faking) global warming studies conducted between 2004 and 2006 – a blame later laid off on political appointees in NASA’s press department, thus exonerating top management. In fact, the agency’s press officer, Michael Cabbage poo-poohed the 2008 report, calling it old news and citing the fact that the U.S. Government’s Accountability Office has since lauded NASA for its transparency. Cabbage may want to check his dictionary, now that the news of NASA’s withholding air safety stats from as far back as 2005 has hit the media. 
The internal audit on information accountability, which highlights such incidents as canceling a press conference on an ozone-monitoring mission because it was too close to the 2004 election, or denying NPR access to NASA’s top global warming physicist James Hansen, is clear evidence of the sort of denial, distortion and outright censorship that has cropped up in government agencies under the pro-business, anti-environment Bush administration. This is the same Hansen who, in 2006, admitted to the New York Times that NASA officials had ordered his work audited before being released, to prevent factual but damaging climate information leaking into the wrong hands (i.e., environmentalists and concerned citizens). NASA disagreed, saying there was no attempt to muzzle Hansen, and that the review process was simply an across-the-board attempt to make sure that policy statements are delivered by NASA-appointed spokespersons, not independent scientists and researchers. It might even be a valid argument but for the fact that Hansen has been with the agency more than three decades, and now heads up the program delivering computerized climate simulation models at the Goddard Institute in Morningside Heights, Manhattan. Who else would be likely to know more about climactic changes, or be better able to understand their consequences? In the Times interview, Hansen didn’t exactly say NASA was lying about censoring him, but he did suggest that the censorship is an effort to prevent people from knowing just how bad the recent climate-change findings are, and how great is the risk inherent in ignoring them and failing to curb emissions. Hansen’s most telling remark – that nothing in his 30 years prepared him for the massive effort to silence him that he encountered in December of 2005 – indicates just how entrenched this policy has become at NASA. In fact, NASA’s chief of public affairs, David Mould, admitted the policy had resulted in a lot of “managed” information, but added that the agency had since cleaned up its act - another reference to a transparency that clearly exists only in the minds of NASA’s press corps, whose coverage of the Mars mission already shows discrepancies between fact and “shine”. Political pressure is also impacting the nation’s wildlife refuges from Florida to Texas, according to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, an organization serving federal and state workers involved in natural resource protection. According to PEER, this Bush administration push to allow drilling, mining and other industrial activities in protected areas has led to a situation that puts business first and wildlife second. This is nowhere more evident than in Alaska, where land exchanges designed to permit oil and gas drilling threaten the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge. The same thing is happening at the Baca National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado. 
A similar report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS, shows that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA has, over the last 7 ½ years, been so censored and manipulated by industry lobbyists and politicians that distortion of scientific findings has become the norm, and suppression of unwanted information a political agenda that favors only those allied with Big Oil or Big Business. This has led to a situation where the EPA, charged with protecting the environment, has turned into the environment’s worst enemy. Seventeen states, two cities and eleven environmental groups are currently suing the EPA over this breach of trust. In a rare instance of accord with public will and opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled (Massachusetts vs. EPA) that the EPA is responsible not only for monitoring but for regulating global warming emissions. The current lawsuit, a natural extension of that ruling, demands the EPA act expeditiously (within 60 days) to create regulations governing emissions. The EPA, for its part, is using its protected status under the current administration to engage in the sort of in-your-face stall tactics that would do an insurance company proud. It contends, first, that the Supreme Court ruling didn’t set a deadline, and second, that further input (presumably from energy company executives) is needed. As if there weren’t enough studies on the EPA’s books! In response, The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has voted to subpoena these studies. As anticipated, the EPA has so far failed to deliver, and the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008 recently tanked on the floor of the Senate, further delaying any action on emissions until a new administration is seated. It has escaped few pundits’ notice that the above act called for measures so draconian few senators could in good conscience support it, since it would have - with curiously Republican flair - taxed not energy companies but the American middle class, which is sinking faster than the Titanic. Leaving this writer to wonder how many concessions Senator Joe Lieberman (I – CT) had to make to Senator John Warner (R – VA) to get the bill onto the floor in the first place. Finally, one might ask, how have so many federal agencies charged with the health and welfare of the nation managed to elude public scrutiny and sweep their unfortunate habits and findings under the rug without public comment or censure? Bill Moyers knows, and he told an audience of 3,500 journalists at the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform why. Mainstream media has been bought and paid for by corporate interests (which shape government in the form of lobbying), and now – rather than fulfilling its mission to inform – has become complicit in a conspiracy of silence which allows the few to profit at the expense of the many. Further Reading:
