White House Still Hiding Climate Change
Posted on | October 24, 2007
I can’t feign surprise, but the Bush Administration is still fighting to keep us ignorant:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House severely edited congressional testimony given Tuesday by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the impact of climate change on health, removing specific scientific references to potential health risks, according to two sources familiar with the documents.
Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Atlanta-based CDC, the government’s premier disease monitoring agency, told a Senate hearing that climate change ”is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans”…
Her testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee had much less information on health risks than a much longer draft version Gerberding submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review in advance of her appearance.
”It was eviscerated,” said a CDC official, familiar with both versions, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the review process…
”We generally don’t speculate and comment on anything until it is the final product,” OMB spokesman Sean Kevelighan said in reference to the draft testimony. He added that OMB reviews take into consideration ”whether they … line up well with the national priorities of the administration.”
Keeping information secret is what the Bush Administration does best, and they’re pretty clumsy at that, too.
