Joint Letter To President Bush On The EPA’s Climate Action Report
Dear President Bush,
We write to share our concerns with Climate Action Report 2002, which your administration recently transmitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and released to the public by posting on the EPA web site. As opponents of the Kyoto Protocol and similar domestic proposals to ration energy, we welcome your remarks of June 4 that you had “read the report put out by the bureaucracy” and that you still opposed the Kyoto global warming treaty. We recognize that your principled opposition to Kyoto has come at considerable political cost, and we admire your resolution in the face of continuing environmental alarmism.
Climate Action Report 2002 is largely a compilation and summary of junk science produced by the Clinton-Gore Administration in order to support their Kyoto agenda. In particular, crucial parts of the report rely on the discredited National Assessment on the impacts of climate change, which your administration stated on September 6, 2001 was “not policy positions or official statements of the U. S. government,” as part of a settlement of a lawsuit brought by three members of Congress and several of the organizations signing this letter. In addition, the report clearly does not comply with the requirements of the Data Quality Act.
In our view, Climate Action Report 2002 undermines your position on the Kyoto Protocol and damages efforts in the Congress to advance your energy policies and to oppose environmental policies that would implement Kyoto-style controls on energy use. We do not believe that these negative effects will go away merely by ignoring the report.
We therefore urge you to withdraw Climate Action Report 2002 immediately and to direct that it be re-written on the basis of sound science and without relying on discredited products of the previous administration. As production and release of this report demonstrates, pursuing your global warming and energy policies effectively will not be possible as long as key members of your administration do not fully support your policies. We therefore also urge you to dismiss or re-assign all administration employees who are not pursuing your agenda, just as you have done in several similar instances.
Thank you for your attention to our concerns. We stand ready to work with you and your administration on pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer policies.
Yours sincerely,
Fred Smith and Myron Ebell
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Paul Beckner
Citizens for a Sound Economy
Frances B. Smith
Consumer Alert
Kenneth Green
Reason Foundation
David Rothbard
Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow
Karen Kerrigan
Small Business Survival Committee
Thomas A. Schatz
Citizens Against Government Waste
Grover Norquist
Americans for Tax Reform
Tom DeWeese
American Policy Center
Steve Hayward
Pacific Research Institute
George C. Landrith
Frontiers of Freedom
Patrick Michaels
Cato Institute
S. Fred Singer
Science & Environmental Policy Project
Lori Waters
Eagle Forum
Morton C. Blackwell
Conservative Leadership PAC
Paul Driessen
Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise
Paul M. Weyrich
Free Congress Foundation
John Berthoud
National Taxpayers Union
David A. Keene
American Conservative Union
Eric Licht
Coalitions for America
Lewis K. Uhler
National Tax Limitation Committee
C. Preston Noell, III
Tradition, Family, Property, Inc.
Ron Pearson
Council for America
Gary L. Bauer
American Values
Robert A. Schadler
Center for First Principles
Jefferey S. Taylor
Free Republic Network
Richard LessnerAmerican Renewal
Michael Hardiman
American Land Rights Association
Kevin L. Kearns
U. S. Business and Industry Council
William J. Murray
Government Is Not God
Benjamin C. Works
Sirius
F. Patricia Callahan
American Association of Small Property Owners