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.