Articles by Brian Beutler

Henry Waxman weighs in on Bush admin. efforts to suppress climate science

The House Oversight committee has released its official report (PDF) on White House efforts to interfere with climate change science, and its conclusions are ... well, totally predictable. To wit:

The Committee's 16-month investigation reveals a systematic White House effort to censor climate scientists by controlling their access to the press and editing testimony to Congress. The White House was particularly active in stifling discussions of the link between increased hurricane intensity and global warming. The White House also sought to minimize the significance and certainty of climate change by extensively editing government climate change reports. Other actions taken by the White House involved editing EPA legal opinions and op-eds on climate change.

The sheer volume and magnitude of chicanery, when laid out in nearly 30 pages of detail, betrays a remarkably fastidious program of misinformation.

I suppose it's in the nature of things that many of the sub rosa efforts to tamper with the findings of real scientists would leak to the press and the Congress. After all, it's only Bush appointees who take an oath -- explicit or otherwise -- to uphold the president. The scientists who work in those appointees' agencies, on the other hand, were apparently pretty upset about all of this.

Edwards reacts

John Edwards is the first leading candidate to respond to the advance of the Lieberman-Warner bill:

Boxer statement

Barbara Boxer is, of course, glowing:

A roundup of today’s action in the Senate Environment Committee

It took nine and a half hours of chipping away at a seemingly infinite stream of amendments -- some positive, some poison-pills -- but the Senate Environment and Public Works committee favorably reported Joe Lieberman and John Warner's greenhouse gas bill, America's Climate Security Act, today.

The process wasn't easy. Republicans came armed with about 150 amendments, some of which were so toxic and clearly non-passable that it appeared they were simply trying to obstruct or derail the proceedings altogether. Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, aware that the amendment avalanche would take hours to overcome, called the Senate floor to order at noon, two and a half hours later than usual, to help the bill along. It was a procedural move, designed to buy the committee time lest Republicans take advantage of a rule that would have allowed them to derail the entire proceeding. Perhaps thanks to Reid's maneuvering, that never came to pass.

Unfortunately, neither did a handful of extremely important amendments -- introduced by Senators Clinton and Sanders -- that would have strengthened ACSA enough to please dark greens, a constituency that has thus far been unimpressed with the bill's wide array of compromise measures.

At the end of a very long day, though, there were only a couple of surprises. That the bill passed was expected; that the bill was only modestly improved was expected; that Hillary Clinton didn't show up was expected.

What wasn't expected -- at least at the outset -- was that the whole process would go so smoothly. Yes, it took an extremely long time, but in the end, the minority withdrew or didn't introduce most of their amendments, and they never overtly attempted to derail the proceedings, allowing the process to be completed within one day.

Then there was the other big surprise: Sen. Bernie Sanders voted to report the legislation favorably out of the committee.