The U.S. Department of Energy is preparing to claim that Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force did all it could to involve environmental groups in planning the Bush administration’s energy plan. Last month, a federal court ruled in favor of the Natural Resources Defense Council and ordered the department to release as many as 14,000 documents relating to the task force. As it gets ready to file the documents next Monday, the DOE is spreading the word that it was the greenies, not administration officials, who were uneager to cooperate. “Several did not return our phone calls and messages,” one DOE official wrote last August in a document that will be filed. Enviros said the latest administration spin was bosh. Elizabeth Thompson, legislative director of Environmental Defense, seemed to speak for many environmental groups when she said, “My voicemail wasn’t full of a lot of requests from the administration.”
