US environmental policy chief quits: adminstration says departure was 'completely unrelated' to his deletng scientific paragraphs and editorializing

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | US environmental policy chief quits: "Gary Younge in New York | Monday June 13, 2005 | The Guardian

A former oil industry lobbyist has resigned as a White House aide after being accused of doctoring official US policy papers on global warming to play down the link between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

Philip Cooney, who was chief of staff of the White House council on environmental quality, quit his job two days after a report released by a watchdog group, the government accountability project, showed he had deleted some paragraphs and edited others drafted by government scientists.

The White House said his departure was 'completely unrelated' to last week's disclosure. 'Mr Cooney has long been considering his options following four years of service to the administration,' said White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino. 'He'd accumulated many weeks of leave, and decided to resign and take the summer off.'

Mr Cooney, a lawyer with no science background, previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for oil firms.

The government accountability project was unavailable for comment yesterday, but revealed last week that he changed the documents in a way that would be more beneficial to the oil industry. In a section which gauged how sound evidence was for climate change he inserted "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties".

In another sentence which claimed: "The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is difficult," he included the word "extremely" before "difficult". ...