US: A White House official, formerly employed by the oil industry, has repeatedly edited US government reports on climate change to dilute claims that oil and gas emissions were responsible, papers released under US freedom of information law have revealed.
Environmentalists have long complained that White House reports on global warming look as if they had been edited by a lobbyist for the oil industry. It appears they may be right.
It was revealed yesterday that reports were in fact often changed by a former top official of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil companies in their fight against limits on greenhouse gases.
Papers released to the New York Times show Philip Cooney, now a White House official on environment matters, made handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003.
He removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved.
In many cases, the changes, which played down links between oil and gas emissions and global warming, appeared in the final reports.
The American Petroleum Institute has long argued that uncertainties about the causes of global warming justified delaying restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide and gases that trap heat in the earth's atmosphere.
President George Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney, both with backgrounds in the oil industry, have called only for voluntary restrictions on the growth in emissions up to 2012.
On Tuesday British prime minister Tony Blair raised the issue of greenhouse gases at a White House meeting with Mr Bush but did not report any progress in changing the administration's attitude.
Unlike other major industrialised nations, the US has refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Accord protocol, arguing enforced cuts would give too severe a shock to the economy and cost jobs.
Some of the changes to the climate reports made by Mr Cooney were subtle, like inserting the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties" to strengthen doubts about findings that most climate experts believe are solidly based.
Some were not so subtle. In a document on the need for research into how warming might affect water supplies and flooding, he deleted a paragraph describing the projected reduction of mountain glaciers and ice packs.
In a similar disclosure two years ago, it was reported the White House edited a major report on the state of the environment prepared by the government's Environmental Protection Agency.
An unnamed White House official deleted a line saying "climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment" and also a conclusion from government research that suggested recent climate change is "likely mostly due to human activities".
Out too went a reference to a 1999 study showing global temperatures had risen sharply in the past decade compared to the previous 1,000 years and a National Research Council report on various studies that suggested recent global warming was due to human activities, such as vehicle emissions.
The then EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman gave in to the White House censors, according to a leaked memo at the time in which she conceded that opposition "may antagonise the White House". She subsequently resigned.
Staff members at the agency protested in a confidential internal memo that the report "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change".
With 4 per cent of the world's population, the US produces 25 per cent of all greenhouse gases, in contrast to countries such as India, which, with almost four times as many people, is responsible for 3 per cent of emissions.
The documents edited by Mr Cooney were obtained by the New York Times from the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers that represents Rick Piltz, who resigned in March as a senior associate in the office that co-ordinates government climate research.
White House officials said the changes made by Mr Cooney were part of the normal inter-agency review that takes place on all documents related to global environmental change.
In a memorandum sent last week to the top officials dealing with climate change at a dozen agencies, Mr Piltz said the White House's editing and other actions threatened to taint the government's $1.8 billion-a-year effort to clarify the causes and consequences of climate change, the New York Times reported.
"Each administration has a policy position on climate change," Mr Piltz wrote. "But I have not seen a situation like the one that has developed under this administration during the past four years, in which politicisation by the White House has fed back directly into the science programme in such a way as to undermine the credibility and integrity of the programme."