Conflict of Interest: Oil and Global Warming

Global warming is threatening future generations, but thanks to oil men (Bush, Cheney, et al) and women (such as Condee Rice, et.al.), scientists are being shouted down. Their profits in trade for our children’s welfare. What else is new? It’s clearly a conflict of interest that our government leaders should be involved in the oil business. 

“The problem is that 90 percent of energy is fossil fuels. And that is such a huge business, it has permeated our government,” according to James Hansen, 67, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. “What’s become clear to me in the past several years is that both the executive branch and the legislative branch are strongly influenced by special fossil fuel interests,” he said, referring to the providers of coal, oil and natural gas and the energy industry that burns them.

Hansen testified before the US Congress that “interference with communication of science to the public has been greater during the current administration than at any time in my career.”

Government public relations officials, he said, filter the facts in science reports to reduce “concern about the relation of climate change to human-made greenhouse gas emissions.”

“It’s analogous to an engineer who sees that there’s a flaw in the space shuttle before it is to be launched. You don’t have any choice. You have to say something. That’s really all that I’m doing,” he explained. 

Source: Earth in crisis, warns NASA’s top climate scientist