With all of the shocking and distressing revelations about the Bush administration’s illicit activities, none have so shocked and distressed me as that contained in an article in today’s New York Times about a NASA scientist whom the administration has attempted to silence due to his calls for action on fossil fuel emissions.Dr. James Hansen has long been the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan. He feels that information about air pollution and its effects on the environment, including global warming, must be communicated to the public as part of NASA’s mission to “understand and protect our home planet.”
As reported in the Times article, the Bush administration has tried to stop Dr. Hansen from speaking out since he gave a lecture in December, 2005 calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
The debate over global warming is a red herring. Whether the globe is getting colder, staying the same temperature, or getting warmer, air pollution is a health hazard and reliance on Arab oil is a political hazard. Existing technology, if developed and used, could very significantly reduce both of those hazards. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are not motivated to move us away from dependence on fossil fuels because their personal economic fortunes depend on the continued addiction to those fossil fuels.
According to Dr. Hansen, the pressures that the Bush administration have brought to bear on him and other scientists have “already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.”
He states an obvious point. “Communicating with the public seems to be essential, because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic.”
The directive to silence Dr. Hansen came through telephone conversations between the Bush administration and NASA officials, leaving no significant documentation. It is a nefarious irony that at a time when the Bush administration has compromised our privacy, allegedly to protect us against physical harm, it is not recording for us its own phone calls whose effects threaten us with physical harm.
Back on December 6, 2005, Dr. Hansen gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. There, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, especially in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the U.S., climate change would leave the earth “a different planet.”
On December 15, he released data showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century. NASA officials then repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who communicated to Dr. Hansen that there would be “dire consequences” if such statements continued.
The Times article contains much that is incriminating of the Bush administration. I quote: “At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.”
These are tactics reminiscent of the communist regimes of U.S.’s cold war antagonists Russia and China. What is it going to take for Congress and the Senate to realize it is past time for a “regime change” right here?