The buck stops with the next President
Scrivener July 11th, 2008
I haven’t done much politico-blogging for a long time, frankly because I just don’t have the energy these days to be properly enraged by all the sins of the current administration. And I don’t have the energy tonight to write a proper post on this article, either, but it i just such a perfect statement of how this administration operates:
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce today that it will seek months of further public comment on the threat posed by global warming to human health and welfare — a matter that federal climate experts and international scientists have repeatedly said should be urgently addressed.The Supreme Court, in a decision 15 months ago that startled the government, ordered the EPA to decide whether human health and welfare are being harmed by greenhouse gas pollution from cars, power plants and other sources, or to provide a good explanation for not doing so. But the administration has opted to postpone action instead, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
To defer compliance with the Supreme Court’s demand, the White House has walked a tortured policy path, editing its officials’ congressional testimony, refusing to read documents prepared by career employees and approved by top appointees, requesting changes in computer models to lower estimates of the benefits of curbing carbon dioxide, and pushing narrowly drafted legislation on fuel-economy standards that officials said was meant to sap public interest in wider regulatory action. [...]
“They argued that this increase in regulation should be on the next president’s record,” not Bush’s, said a participant in the lengthy interagency debate. [...] “The administration didn’t want to show a high-dollar value for reducing carbon,” said one EPA official, adding that the administration cut dozens of pages from a draft that outlined cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gases.
Some officials said the administration has also minimized the benefits of tighter fuel-economy standards by assuming that oil will cost $58 a barrel in the future, compared with its current price of $141.65.
When historians look back on the record, assuming in the near future we take some extreme action to deal with global warming and there are historians left to look back on things like presidential records, they won’t believe that the problem started with Obama because he was the first one to act, but will note the current administration’s shameful 8 years of dodging and stalling.
The WaPo says it can’t discern exactly which White House official was responsible for overriding the EPA’s December 5th report, but reports that it was someone “more senior than the head of OMB.” Now, I admit that I haven’t fully memorized the whole executive branch organizational chart, but if it’s someone more senior than someone in a cabinet-level post, well, that would leave either the president or the vice president, wouldn’t it? Hmmmm, I wonder whether it was Dubya or Dick. Tough to figure out that one.
