Please note our new RAW email address, raw@sierraclub.org. Issue #260 In addition to whatever else goes on in his undisclosed location -- which I can only assume bears a strong resemblance to Dr. Evil's lair -- it seems Vice President Dick Cheney and his minions have been busy trying to stifle any attempts to even outline the benefits of action to fight global warming, much less do anything about the problem itself. Additional details of the Veep's shenanigans were revealed this week when a former Deputy Administrator at the EPA went all Scott McClellan decided to tell all. (Read his detailed letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer here.) The official, Jason Burnett, had actually already quit EPA once during the Bush administration over a previous disagreement about soot standards. For reasons that remain unclear on both sides, he accepted a request to return to EPA to head up the agency's response to the Mass. v EPA Supreme Court decision. (It's surprising that Burnett -- a lifelong Democrat -- was asked back, considering it was recently exposed that being a Democrat, a member of the Sierra Club, or even posting an unflattering cartoon of President Bush on your MySpace page caused you to be blacklisted for jobs at the Bush Department of Justice.) Though Burnett detailed many struggles within the administration over the proper response to the landmark Supreme Court case (which the EPA of course lost), it all took a turn for the truly absurd when EPA emailed its finding that CO2 did in fact endanger public welfare over to the White House for final vetting. In some truly junior high-level antics, the White House then called Burnett and told him to take the email back! He refused, so the White House then declared that it would simply not even open the email. And whose minion was responsible for all this? Someone from Dick Cheney's office, of course. It seems the Cheney faction of the administration has won out in the end, with today's non-response response to the Supreme Court, putting the final nail in the coffin of any hopes of any action on global warming whatsoever until Bush leaves offices. And speaking of absurd, how about Bush pumping his fist in the air at the conclusion of the G8 and bidding the assembled world leaders "goodbye from the world's biggest polluter." Talk about shocked, but definitely not awed. As usual, joke's on us! |