Is Palin Using Cheney's Climate Change Playbook?

As head of climate and energy policy for the Environmental Protection Agency, I witnessed first-hand the dangers of a Vice President who has a disregard for the balance of powers in our Constitution and a disdain for inconvenient facts.

Vice President Cheney has worked hard to cast doubt on the science of climate change. The Vice President's office wanted my help censoring the Congressional testimony from the Centers for Disease Control to eliminate any references to how climate change endangers human health. I refused. The Vice President's office later wanted me to water down congressional testimony on the strength of the science by not acknowledging that greenhouse gases "harm" the environment by causing climate change. Again I refused.

Having heard the words "the Vice President's office is on the phone" many times over the past few years I could not agree more when Senator Joe Biden called them "the eight most dreaded words in the English language" for those trying to uphold our nation's laws and respect our Constitution.

Given my experience with the dangers of an unaccountable Vice President, it sent shivers down my spine during the Vice Presidential debate when I heard Governor Palin say she's "thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the Vice President also, if that Vice President so chose to exert it, in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are." A bit more authority than our current Vice President has wrestled away from the President and Congress?

A strong Vice President is a great thing, but that strength should primarily come from being a trusted advisor to the President, not a separate power center somewhere between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch. Governor Palin is fortunate her smile and wink won't remind voters of Vice President Cheney's smirk and grimace; maybe people won't notice that her dismissal of science and views on the power of the office are quite similar to Vice President Cheney's?

But similar they are. With Governor Palin we would have a Vice President who wants to be vague about the connection between man's activities and climate, shifting focus to "cyclical temperature changes on our planet." While most everyone has accepted man-made climate change, Governor Palin is still waging the war against climate science as if she simply took a page out of Vice President Cheney's playbook.

In a recent interview, Governor Palin tried to manufacture uncertainty about the causes of climate change and about the human role by stating there are legitimate "different sides of the argument as to who is to blame" and suggesting it could be just nature to blame. No, it is not just nature and there is no real remaining uncertainty about the causes of climate change despite the efforts of Vice President Cheney and Governor Palin to fabricate uncertainty. Although the Office of the Vice President pleaded with us at the Environmental Protection Agency to avoid referencing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in the end the Environmental Protection Agency and the IPCC both have concluded that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and most of the warming is "very likely" due to humans. This is why both Senator McCain and Senator Obama have previously supported a mandatory cap on greenhouse gases. Candidate Obama still does. Candidate McCain isn't so sure about the wisdom of Senator McCain's policy.

The clear harm caused by greenhouse gases is why eight years ago then-Governor Bush also promised a cap on these gases. But after the elections this campaign promise unraveled. President Bush put Vice President Cheney in charge of the secret energy task force. Since climate and energy are two sides of the same coin, this put Vice President Cheney in charge of climate policy. Over time this helped President Bush to flip his stance to opposing meaningful action on greenhouse gases. Is Governor Palin preparing to play a similar role with Senator McCain? She, like Vice President Cheney, would be in charge of energy policy. She, like Vice President Cheney, supports an expanded view of the powers of the Office of the Vice President. She, like Vice President Cheney, is already distorting climate science to support her preconceived policy positions. Do we really want another four years of dreading the words "the Vice President's office is on the phone?" I don't.

Comments

[hellinabucket]

Also Palin believes that God will come & heal the planet! Cheney & his secret energy meetings put the foxes in charge of the henhouse. In every area of administration, they put the foxes in charge. It is so vital that Obama is elected to reverse this idiotic trend. I hope Jason gets reappointed somehow, we need people like you taking care of things for us!

[blood1]

McCain has STOPPED saying he will require MANDATORY / Regulations to help reduce green house gases....n­ow he wants to make them VOLUNTARY.­..sounds like a typical GOP ploy...jus­t leave out that one word and Industries REJOICE and send him money.

One more TRICK for the electorate to consider when choosing their next president.

[topgunna]

While I don't doubt that carbon dioxide can act as a greenhouse gas, and its increased atmospheric concentrations trap more heat, CO2 concentrations certainly aren't the only driver of climate, and far from the most important.

Temperatures have been stagnating and trending downward over the past 10 years or so. That doesn't falsify the anthropogenic theory, but it does indicate that other factors in the climate system are having a greater impact than CO2 concentrations (which would imply slowly increasing temperatures before leveling off logarithmically).

I won't even get into the inane assumption that feedbacks in the climate system are net positive. Anyone who has taken high school physics should know that negative feedbacks dominate stable systems.

Unfortunately, climate science isn't a hard science that can be empirically tested, so we'll have to wait and see. It's certainly possible that CO2 is 100% necessary for life on Earth, but potentially catastrophic in large quantities. I just don't think Mother Nature has such a cruel sense of irony.

[radnip]

Well humans did walk with dinosaurs. So destruction of the earth's climate must be a god thing. It's good she has children to experience the chaotic world about to come if we do not do something soon about the climate. I bet she'll be first to claim she could not have foreseen the climate problem!

[lagumbo]

It seems that Channey is so sure MCCAIN AND PALIN will be in the white, he has given Palin his entire play book. Remember PALIN'S answer about the duties of the veep.

[AntiClast]

Yes, she is another Cheney.
She had hearings on the polar bear issue. She brought in all the professional
climate deniers, who are (mostly indirectly) funded by oil and coal companies.
She only heard the standard denier arguments. (It's all the sun, climate always
changes, natural cycles, cosmic rays, blah, blah, blah, none of it supported by
research). She regurgitates it -- 'natural cycles'.
She got a good deal for Alaskan taxpayers by upping the contributions from
oil revenues to the state budget. She's bowed to oil since.
Ironically, Alaska is so far the state most impacted by global warming. Anyone
who has lived there for a couple of decades can itemize changes they've observed.
Ice floes float down channels where they weren't before.
She has not articulate McCain's position that global warming is real, not once.