Bush's Environment Chief: From the Oil Lobby to the White House to ExxonMobil

The Bush administration worked behind the scenes to weaken key language in the Group of 8 proposal for joint action on climate change. The Washington Post reported on Friday that administration officials successfully pressed negotiators to drop sections of the report that warned of more frequent droughts and floods and commited a specific dollar amount to promoting carbon sequestration in developing countries.

This follows major revelations published in the New York Times earlier this month that a White House official repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that played down links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. The official -Philip Cooney- was chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality which shapes much of America”s environmental policy. Before coming to the White House in 2001, Cooney was a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute.

Just two days after that article was published, Cooney resigned from the council and ExxonMobil announced they were hiring him. A recent investigation by Mother Jones magazine found that ExxonMobil has spent at least eight million dollars funding a network of groups to challenge the existence of global warming.

ExxonMobile defended its hiring of Cooney by stating that they hire from both sides of the aisle. In a written statement to Democracy Now! The company wrote that “ExxonMobil hired Mr. Cooney at about the same time we hired Matt Gobush, who was the Communications Director for Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman. We have always hired highly qualified people for their talent--not their politics.”

* Andrew Revkin, prize-winning science reporter with The New York Times. He wrote the books "Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast" and "Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest." He is the recipient of the National Academies Communication Award for print journalism, two Science Journalism Awards of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an Investigative Reporters & Editors Awards.

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