White House Distorts Greenhouse Facts

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 3, 1997 — Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) announced today that they will run an advertisement in the Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post. The ad will highlight just a few examples of scientific opinion that differs from the “consensus” from the White House.

“The policies advocated by the Clinton administration cannot be justified,” said Jonathan H. Adler, Director of Environmental Studies at CEI. Adler pointed to recent articles in Nature, Science, and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society as evidence that there is no need to sign a global climate treaty in Kyoto. “Current scientific research does not support the apocalyptic claims put forth by the administration and the environmental establishment,” he said.

It is expected that the White House climate conference on Monday will not give a fair hearing to many of the arguments that counter the views of the Clinton administration. After the conference on September 30, with meteorologists from all over the country, it is clear that the precedent has been set for this to happen. “I was somewhat skeptical that human beings were really doing anything to affect the weather, but hearing the president and vice-president state emphatically that the scientific debate is over, well, that went a long way toward convincing me,” stated Barry Finn, chief meteorologist for WYOU in Scranton, PA.

“It is irresponsible for the President of the United States to claim a consensus when one does not exist in order to lock the U.S. into a binding UN treaty that will cripple our economy. Our advertisement will allow the American public to hear something from the other side,” stated Marlo Lewis, Vice President for Policy at CEI.

“It is disturbing that the administration has sought to silence its critics and cut off debate,” Adler commented, pointing to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s declaration on the Diane Rehm Show that raising questions about climate science is “un-American”. Adler noted that during the first term of the Clinton-Gore administration, an Energy Department official was fired for questioning whether scientific research supports predictions of a global warming disaster. “If the facts are truly on their side, they have nothing to fear from an open discussion of the issue,” Adler said.

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to free markets and limited government. For more information, please call Emily McGee at (202) 331-1010.