Crony appointments and climate change

If memory serves, this came out ages ago while the GOP were still in charge inside the beltway and Bush was still enjoying reasonably hefty approval ratings. However, the story barely survived one news cycle so I'm glad to see it resurfacing.

WASHINGTON, March 19 — A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.

It's a good reminder that every single one of our regulatory agencies, that I remind you were formed to protect us from corporate malfeasance, have been put into the hands of crony hacks drawn from the very industries they are supposed to be policing and as a result decades worth of environmental progress has been destroyed as the Bush administration has incrementally pushed back regulations that had cleaned up the destruction these industries caused in the first place.

Ironically the justification for easing the regs is often that they worked so well, the industries can go ahead an pollute again in order to increase their profits and "help build" the economy. That is if they don't decide to use the profits to pay off their CEOs and say, relocate to Dubai...