[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 18168-18169]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           BUSH ADMINISTRATION UNDERMINES ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Hinchey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HINCHEY. Mr. Speaker, from clean air and water to wetlands and 
global warming, this is an administration that is determined to ignore 
the most pressing environmental problems, dismiss good science that 
draws attention to these problems and undermine our most effective 
environmental laws that address those problems.
  It is one thing for the Bush administration to break its promises on 
environmental issues such as regulating carbon dioxide, but every 
administration has a responsibility to provide Congress and the 
American people with sound science that is untainted by politics.
  Unfortunately, it is becoming all too common for the Bush 
administration to compromise the independence and credibility of our 
government agencies by shelving and suppressing sound science if it 
does not fit their political agenda.
  Most recently, this trend is evident in EPA's actions surrounding the 
administration's ``Clear Skies'' proposal which would weaken the Clean 
Air Act. Earlier this month the EPA intentionally hid data showing that 
a competing Senate clean air bill would provide far greater long-term 
health benefits at only a slightly higher cost. While EPA disclosed the 
cost associated with the Senate bill, it failed to disclose that the 
proposal would result in 17,800 fewer premature deaths annually than 
the administration's proposal.
  This comes on the heels of last month's release of EPA's State of the 
Environment Report. The report, commissioned in 2001 by Administrator 
Whitman, was intended to provide the first comprehensive review of what 
is known about the various environmental problems, from air pollution 
to the state of drinking water supplies, where gaps in understanding 
exist and how we might fill them.
  The White House directed a major rewrite of an assessment of climate 
change, removing references to health and environmental risks posed by 
rising global temperatures.
  According to an EPA memo, the changes demanded by the White House 
were so extensive that the climate section no longer accurately 
represents scientific consensus on climate change and characterized the 
revised draft as an embarrassment to the EPA. If the changes are 
accepted, the staff memo said, the agency will take severe criticism 
from the science and environmental communities for poorly representing 
the science of climate change.
  According to the EPA papers, the White House deleted from a summary 
under the heading of Global Issues the sentence, ``Climate changes has 
global consequences for human health and the environment.'' A number of 
scientific reports have also raised those concerns.
  The draft also removed the reference and a graphic to a 1999 study 
showing global temperatures had risen sharply in the past decade 
compared with the previous 1,000 years. Instead, it cites a new study 
partly sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute that disputed 
those findings.
  The draft eliminated references to many studies, concluding that 
warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of 
smokestack and tailpipe emissions and could threaten health and 
ecological systems.
  The White House deleted a National Research Council finding that 
various studies have suggested that recent warmings were unusual and 
likely due

[[Page 18169]]

to human activities, although the same 2001 NRC report had been 
commissioned by the White House and endorsed by President Bush 
previously.
  This is the second time in the past year that the Bush administration 
has censored information on global warming. Last September, an annual 
EPA report on air pollution that for 6 years had contained a section on 
climate was released without one. Administrator Whitman told the New 
York Times she was perfectly comfortable with the edited version.
  However, the seriousness of climate change cannot be understated. The 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of hundreds of 
scientists established by the United Nations in 1988 to assess global 
warming, concluded that global warming is real and will have serious 
consequences.
  Their report, released in January, 2001, states that the Earth has 
warmed in the last century and that the majority of the observed 
warming is attributable to human activities, including fossil fuel-
generated carbon dioxide emissions.
  In late 2001, the National Academy of Sciences confirmed those 
findings.
  This just shows that the administration is manipulating the EPA's 
formerly unbiased science for its political agenda in an effort to 
mislead the public.
  We have spoken on this floor about the way in which the 
administration has manipulated data with regard to weapons of mass 
destruction in Iraq, how the administration has put pressure on the 
intelligence agencies to manipulate their objectively drawn and 
realized information in order to make it more accurately fit the 
administration's political agenda; and here we have an example of how 
the administration is doing the same thing with regard to important 
scientific considerations on the single most important global issue of 
our lives, the warming of the Earth's temperature and the ecological 
consequences, as well as the consequences on the health and safety of 
people in this country and around the world. It is time for this 
administration to be honest in its science and in its reporting to the 
American people.

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