June 19, 2003
WASHINGTON, DC – President Bush today announced his new approach to the environment. Dubbed "revisionist environmentalism," the new policy seeks to remedy global warming by removing references to it in government documents.
The Administration immediately implemented its new policy by deleting large portions of a study by the Environmental Protection Agency. The deleted portions allegedly concluded that humans have contributed to global warming through smokestack and tail-pipe emissions, which contain "greenhouse gases."
The President quickly took pains to clarify that he is not to be confused with those whom he has called "revisionist historians," people who now openly question whether Iraq had a weapons program prior to the United States invasion. Iraq’s weapons program was cited by the Administration as a principal reason for the invasion.
"Some people think that global warming is a big problem. This document shows that it’s not," the President said in a press conference held in the Rose Garden of the White House. "I believe ours is a great nation, and I can withhold information from it if I want," he added.
The President said that the new policy was influenced by the totalitarian government of North Korea, which owns the country’s only radio station and provides all of its content. He also said that he was inspired by the former Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, whose counterfactual statements have inspired a website, http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com and who has been described as "one of the most entertaining mouthpieces of tyranny ever to grace the international stage."
Allegedly, the report had included a 1999 study showing that the global temperature had risen sharply in the previous 10 years compared to the previous 1,000. Instead, the report cites a different study, which questions the soundness of such a conclusion and was funded partly by the American Petroleum Institute.
One specific alleged alteration in the EPA document was to replace the sentence "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment" with the text "The complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections among its components are well beyond the intellectual grasp of the current Administration. We choose not to differ to scientists that do understand climate change, and this report is going to cite a biased study from the American Petroleum Institute, representing an industry which will profit greatly from less stringent environmental laws and in which the President and Vice President were once employed."
"We decided not to err on the side of caution," said Christie Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, "We wanted to advocate a view that risks the health of the planet and everyone on it." She continued, "There’s a lot of really good information that people can use to measure our successes. There’s also a lot more you should know, but we cut that out."
reported in jest (kinda) by John Eischeid
(NOTE: Please see the New York Times article on the front page of today’s paper (June 19, 2003). Some of the quotations are paraphrased or slightly altered, but the sentence regarding the consequences of climate change really was removed and the cited studies really were swaped. The words about the Iraqi Information Minister came from the following web address: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/30211.html. )