Twenty one years ago, on this day, June 10th, 2005, Phil Cooney resigns as chief of staff of Council on Environmental Quality
Cooney joined the George W. Bush administration when he was appointed chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality. On June 10, 2005, Cooney announced his resignation, two days after the story of his tampering with scientific reports broke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Cooney
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 380ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 432ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context for this was that from the mid-late 1970s Exxon had been looking at carbon dioxide build up, and they had formed relationships with people like Wally Broecker, the famed oceanographer. And there’s an entire website called “Exxon Knew” which is where you can download documents released during court cases which show that Exxon’s scientists were warning the executives of the dangers ahead and indeed. Exxon’s predictions of what CO2 concentrations would be and what temperatures would be were remarkably accurate. However, in the mid 1980s Exxon made a conscious choice that they would resist climate action because it would hurt their profits, and so they then funded various climate denialist groups, became a founding member of the Global Climate Coalition, which successfully scuppered climate action between 1989 and 2002.
The specific context was that George W. Bush was in the White House for a second term, and he had won this one fair and square (Well, no, he had swiftboated John Kerry, but he hadn’t needed his supreme court justice mates who’d been appointed by his dad to hand him the election the way they had in 2000). Anyhoos, a scandal had broken because it was obvious that the Council on Environmental Quality, which had been set up in 1970 under Nixon to provide environment advice, was soft-pedalling and watering down warnings from actual scientists. Somebody had leaked it and Cooney had then resigned.
What I think we can learn is this: the assholes try to cover all the bases. They usually succeed.
What happened next: Exxon continued to be assholes. The following year, the Royal Society took the quite unusual step of issuing a public letter to Exxon asking them to stop funding climate denial. Exxon didn’t.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
References
You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
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Also on this day:
June 10, 1966 – Seaborg’s commencement address