Rick Piltz interview
I spoke to Rick Piltz in regard to his appearance in the film “Everything’s Cool,” which chronicled the efforts to get information on global warming out to the public and past the Republican propaganda machine. Piltz was a senior associate in the Climate Change Science Program Office under Bush — he started under Clinton — a science policy expert who soon became so disgusted with the censorship and altering of data that he went public, an insider who came out.
The film chronicled Piltz’s process of blowing the whistle — I spoke with co-director Judith Helfland about the film — in 2005. Soon after Piltz’s resignation, Philip Cooney was revealed to have been editing government reports on climate change to reflect not the scientific data that was originally in the reports, but the Bush administration’s policies.
Piltz created Climate Science Watch following his life as a civil servant for the purpose of monitoring climate science news and the workings of the government in that regard.
JM: “Everything Cool” manages to be funny and sad at the same time.
RP: They have such a unique filmmaking style, it was so interesting to work with them, I’ve never done anything quite like that before, but I never found myself in a situation quite like that before. I take it as fundamentally being a piece about citizenship, citizen activism, through these personal stories. They get certain things really right, like the focus on this orchestrated disinformation campaign to stall action on global warming, I think they have a really important point, essentially right, in the movie. There’s a very non-cynical take on the value of speaking up, speaking out, and taking action, a very unjaundiced view of that. I appreciate that in them.
JM: When you talk about this disinformation campaign, it is a wider thing other than just global warming — it’s very much a game plan on all fronts.
RP: Sometimes I think, particularly how I’ve criticized and watch dogged the Bush Administration in particular, it seems to me that I have focused on the global warming climate disruption issue because it’s the thing that I’ve been both engaged with here and where I’ve bumped up against the politicization of science directly, so I speak from that direct experience and expertise. It seems to me that I’ve been covering the global warming beat of a more general pattern and the administration has had a pretty cavalier attitude in regard to misrepresenting the intelligence in different areas in order to suit their political purposes. I think that really until a bit into Bush’s second term, people really tended to think “Well, what’s going on here is just a debate about policy.” If that’s all it were, there would be plenty to debate, but these guys were willing to misrepresent, in a variety of ways, the scientific conclusions about climate change in order to conform the message to what they wanted to make happen politically, and that sort of interference introduces a whole different level of problems around integrity and censorship and accountability that I thought really went over the line.
Global warming is not the only area where the evidence is one thing and the politics is something else and it leaves the nation in a tough position, because if you don’t understand the problem and you don’t have a political leadership that is willing to talk about it straightforwardly with people — what the risk is, how we’re going to manage it — then you have a breakdown of the country’s preparedness to deal with problems. Then you have the aftermath in Iraq, then you have the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — failure of preparedness, failure of preparedness — and we’re doing the same thing on climate change, it’s just a more slow-rolling disaster, so you don’t see it happen quite so fast.
JM: Do you see this as a direct result of years of rising scientific illiteracy in our country?
RP: I can’t really speak to comparing the current situation with regard to scientific literacy a generation ago, but the problem is that we’re such a technical society now, so many of the public issues that you need to have some Democratic decision making about bring in science issues in some way and technical issues in some way that are not easy, that politicians do not understand some of this stuff very well, nor do most citizens. Maybe it does create a situation where people are more easily manipulated. Global warming is the classic case of this, because here is an issue that now, finally, is really a major issue for the public to deal with and it has been driven so much by the findings of scientists over the years. You couldn’t have invented an issue without a base of political activism, it required a very sophisticated element of scientific understanding of what we’re doing with the earth system to call the problem to people’s attention. But scientists can’t solve the problem in terms of managing society, so then it has to go into the political arena that’s really ill-equipped to deal with long term issues and to deal with scientifically complex issues.
I’ve been to most of the Congressional hearings in the last 20 years here in Washington on climate change and watching the world of the climate scientists come to Washington and try to talk to the politicians, it’s two different worlds, it’s not an easy communication to develop, because neither side has that much skill in dealing with what the other is having to deal with. It’s a legitimate problem. It’s not just that people are ignorant. I don’t know how we’re going to deal with some of these kinds of issues with the level of sophistication that most people bring to it. It’s scary.
JM: It reminds me a lot of the evolution debate, where the opposing side really takes advantage of either an ignorance or a misunderstanding of the basic way science works.
RP: “Evolution is just a theory,” as if that means that evolution is just a hunch, rather than a theory in science is a rigorous formulation that encapsulates everything you know in a systematically organized way, you know, and it’s almost impossible to conceive how you would do modern biological and ecological research with the template of evolution for the research. But maybe one analogy is because people don’t understand it, they can dissuade this and that by unscientific influences. In the case of global warming, I don’t know if there’s a direct analogy to the creationism thing — I guess there is if you pursue it — but just in terms of global warning, the disinformation campaign, the denialists, didn’t really have to win the debate on the science of global warming in the sense that they have to put forward a massive body of scientifically peer reviewed of the sort that goes into the big mainstream scientific assessments like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they just had to manufacture the sense that there was some kind of debate going on.
The science community tends to have a lot of integrity about “Here are the questions we still don’t have answers to,” and they’re upfront about where they’re uncertain. Most scientists are thinking about “What is the next question I’m trying to deal with that I don’t have the answer to” and it’s only from time to time that they say “but we really do know a lot and let us synthesize for you what we understand.” In fact they know huge amounts about the climate system, in spite of the fact that they’re still studying unresolved questions — but if you come into that with a predatory relationship to uncertainty, and you say, “Well, they have all these questions they haven’t resolved yet, there’s all this uncertainty, and we have a scientist here who thinks something different from that scientist there, so obviously there’s still some big debate and, of course, we can’t do something about in terms of policy until all these scientific issues are resolved.” That’s what I saw the Bush administration White House people doing with the science program reports that I was working on. They were adding and deleting in such a way as to systematically — paragraph after paragraph, page after page — introduce the idea that there was some sort of fundamental scientific uncertainty that still needed to be debated and they would seize on any stray factoid or study or think tank, or whatever, in order to do that. And it was totally political. It didn’t have anything to do with science and the way scientists think and the way the scientific literature develops. It was totally predatory.
I can’t get into the minds of the creation scientists — they’re being driven by some kind assumptions from religious faith, so it’s a little bit different, it’s not like oil industry lobbyists who don’t want to be regulated and they know that if they can all string along the idea that it’s under debate to stave off debate, I think that creationism is a little different. At the level of the general public, it might be analogous in that they say, “Looks like there’s a debate going on, so there’s two sides to every question.” So who knows?
JM: I am under the impression there is the dominion side of the global warming debate, where the attitude of a certain stripe of Christian is that the earth is our dominion and it’s to be used and the end is coming anyhow.
RP: That’s a scary notion, that’s like living though there’s no tomorrow. But I think you’ll find that even in the evangelical community now, you also will find a fairly strong contingent on what you might call “the stewardship side.” There was a major statement that was signed by a lot of prominent evangelicals in the last year or so saying that we have to take stewardship of God’s green earth and with global warming, there is science and the science says that this is a problem and we have to deal with it. There’s nothing in religion or evangelical Christianity that says that you have to completely disregard scientific evidence about climate change, or that you can’t live in harmony with nature. There’s a split in that community.
JM: You started under Clinton.
RP: I was in that office for 10 years, from 1995 to 2005. I had been on the professional staff of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology for a number of years and one of the things I did for the House science committee was organize their oversight hearings of the global climate change research program. I had been focused on global warming as a policy problem since the late 1980s, for 20 years now. I came at it from the policy issues side, involved with environmental energy policy, and while working for the science committee, I got more and more attuned to really trying to understand what the scientists were saying and meeting them and reading that literature and so forth. I’m not trained as a natural scientist, but I suppose I’m at a point now that I understand the science much better than most policy and political types do and I understand the politics much better than most scientists do, so I’m sort of in between those two worlds.
Then I moved over to the program side in 1995, and I was not a career federal civil servant, I was hired into this office that was a coordination office, multi-agency, $2 billion a year to work on communication and strategic planning and legislative issues and so forth. In that office, you had the science world on one side and the political world on the other and they collided in that office. I was dealing with all these career, high level federal science managers who are the ones who fund all the scientists and do all this work, meeting all of them, but then anything that would come out of that that would a report to Congress or a report to the public, had to go through a White House sign-off and that’s when I saw what they were doing — and we were caught in the middle of that.
JM: What was your experience prior to the Bush administration?
RP: None of these administrations is above criticism and I could run a critique on Clinton, but I will say that under the Clinton/Gore administration, the main White House overseer of the research program was the Office of Technology and Science Policy and those people were well within the mainstream of the science world. They were actually, in some cases, eminent scientists themselves. It did seem to me that they were primarily interested in communicating the mainstream science findings and bringing them into the White House policy process, whatever advisory role they were playing. Sometimes they could be a pain in the neck to deal with, but I didn’t feel like they were at war with the science community. They were of it, essentially, and so we really were dealing with a different species, a different animal, with the Bush administration, because the White House science office was significantly weakened and kept at arm’s length and they put a commerce department political appointee as the director of the program, the secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere. He was no a radical right wing idealogue, he was a moderate, nevertheless he was an agent of the White House rather than someone who represented the science community to the White House. And this White House Council on Environmental Quality, where Phil Cooney worked as chief of staff, was an entirely political office run by corporate lawyers and they were the environmental policy mavens for the White House and they started involving themselves directly in the governance of the science program.
That is something that had never happened under Clinton/Gore. The policy people stayed on the policy side of the fence and the science people stayed on the science side of the fence and there was a pretty clear distinction between them. In this case, it was getting co-mingled in a very different way and instead of the leadership of the science program now being this collegial thing about career science managers, there were three political appointees at the table — one from the commerce department, one from the White House environmental policy shop, and the other was from the State Department, our Kyoto Protocol negotiator, non-negotiator. He was sitting there too and he had to approve everything. This, now this sends a message, I think I said this standing outside Cooney’s office in the movie, to the career technocrats, their antennae are out for political signals, they’re not bull rockers, they don’t want to get in trouble with their boss politically, and it shifted the whole thing to a message of “We now want to talk about climate change in terms of scientific uncertainty, not scientific understanding, get it?” And so they torqued the whole thing around to the point that no message was going to come out that no message was going to come out that would create any sense of urgency about dealing with the problem.
JM: Do you have any memory of the moment when you realized that it had all changed?
RP: There were a couple and Danny Gold and Judith Helfand caught them both in the movie. Our office, a little subgroup in our office, had coordinated something called “The National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Change for the United States.” It was a major set of documents, I had a stack of them on my table in the dining room, which you see in the movie. That was a major study. It’s been praised by the Academy of Sciences as a seminal work — and it’s not just sciency stuff, it’s scientists talking to people in different regions around the country about the issues of concern to them and it really was supposed to initiate a process that would be ongoing to connect the science with society to get people the information they needed about the risk management on global warming to deal with the problem. This was a type of discourse that the Bush administration could not abide. It would involve taking the problem seriously and getting people talking about dealing with it. This was way off the trajectory they wanted me on, so they suppressed the study and Cooney, through the Commerce Department program director, told the federal agency “Don’t refer to this body of documents, don’t use them, don’t talk about them, and don’t do anymore of this kind of work.”
It’s an extremely long story and you can go on for thousands and thousands of words, I’ve given testimony on it, written depositions in lawsuits and all of that, but very early on, not too long after Bush was in — and we’re not going to participate in the Kyoto Protocols, we’re not going to regulate C02, we’re going to have a science program and that’s it — I got a call from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “The chief of staff here says you are to delete all the material on the national assessment from the next climate program annual report to Congress, just take it out.” I said, “Why? It’s the major study that the program has put out, we’ve been talking about getting it out for years, it’s the most important thing this huge program has ever done to be relevant to society and we just have a few pages in there about what it is and how to obtain copies.” They said “They don’t want do this. They don’t want in there. They don’t want to antagonize their friends, their buddies. Myron Ebell and Chris Horner from Competitive Enterprises, along with Senator Imhoff, had filed a lawsuit to supress the national assessment. The lawsuit was thrown out, but the administration supressed the national assessment anyway. They don’t want to antagonize their political friends.
What had happened somewhere early on in the politics inside the White House is that clearly — and this has been validated to me by somebody who has been right in there and experienced it — it was told from deep inside that the administration has decided to give the climate change issue to the right wing. So that’s it. It was taken out. I wrote a long letter to my director saying that this isn’t right, this is bullshit, what kind of signals does this send to people who are writing this stuff and working on this stuff and what does it mean for the future for how this program communicates and how the White House drives these decisions? There was just silence, they didn’t say anything.
That was the first and it was a more than a year after that they started really bearing down, they had their whole political team in place and they started really bearing down and I went to the fax machine one day and here was this big stack of papers that had been faxed over from Phil Cooney’s office on a mark-up of two different things in which he had hand-marked the changes he wanted. This was after the thing had been written and re-edited and revised and reviewed and approved and gone through the most complicated bedding of anything I’ve ever worked on, it’s been through dozens of people at all levels of the agency and then it gets handed to him at the end and he says “Well, these are the changes I want.” You don’t go back to anybody to say “Are these accurate?” or “Do these improve the text?” or anything, it was just all message control. I looked at it and I thought, “Oh, shit, look at this!” I was supposed to hand the thing over to someone else to work on — one of them I had to do directly and the other one I had to pass along — and I just quickly went over and ran a photocopy of it and thought, “This is not going to disappear.”
These guys don’t write that much down. They don’t write anything down anymore since this happened. They don’t leave a record of any of their decisions. There would be a long, high-level meeting and they would be discussing something, and I would be sitting along the wall with senior staff and I would think, “God, that is really a corrupting way to talk about our relationship with the National Academy of Sciences.” I’d be writing my own notes for the record and then going home and talking them into the tape recorder and then the chairman would turn to the staffer who was doing the minutes and say, “Don’t let any of the discussion of the last 15 minutes be reflected in the minutes, let’s not create anything that can be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.” And everybody around the table, nobody said anything.
JM: That’s positively Nixonian.
RP: When the director of the Center for Disease Control, Dr. Julie Louise Gerberding testified before Senator Boxer’s environment committee last fall, she had been asked to give testimony on the impacts of climate change on public health in the United States, she wrote testimony that included that in addition to what the bureaucracy has in place at the CDC, and the White House stripped out the half of her testimony that was the actual discussion of impacts of health in heat waves and all the different aspects of water resources, and it was pure act of censorship. And it was like “We’re trying to get to the bottom of who did this,” but there are no documents. It’s obvious. It’s the same people from the White House Council on Environmental Quality, nobody else would have the stroke and nobody else has the censor, there obviously was a phone call that said to take that part of the testimony out. I’m sure there was nothing written down anywhere.
Cheney leaves no paper trail. I bet when Cheney leaves office, you’ll find that every piece of paper that he does have in there has been shredded, there will be no record of what he did. He doesn’t do paper.
JM: So they learned their lesson.
RP: But Cooney was not that brilliant, he had so much hubris, he was so cavalier, it was like, “Well, here, do this,” and he didn’t happen to know who he was dealing with. I thought, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with this, I’m not ready to resign my job and be unemployed, I don’t know exactly where this is going, I can’t pick up the phone and argue with the White House or they’ll fire my ass out of here so fast.” I was senior staff, but even people way up the power curve from me didn’t argue with the White House, and that’s a deference. Things aren’t decided on merit, it’s a power pyramid. But I thought, “I’m not going to let go, I’m going to do something with this at some point, because there’s a story developing here that is going to need to come out.” I didn’t know what to do with it, but ultimately I thought, “I have to get out of here,” it’s getting worse and worse and after Bush’s second term, there were a number of things that made it look like things were getting worse rather than better.
We kind of stopped them in their tracks in certain ways and delegitimized what they were doing, but it didn’t look that way at the beginning of 2005. It looked like we were going to get rolled over for four years and he was going to be all-powerful and I thought, “Okay, if I do nothing more than write up a white paper and put that and the document up on a Web site somewhere, in case anybody at least wants it for the record, I’ve got to at least do that, because the story’s not being covered because people cannot see what the story is because none of the insiders will talk. It’s like a mafia code of silence — loyalty, blah, blah, blah. There’s not much of a culture in Washington of principle resignation and whistle blowing. There’s anonymous leaks to the press, there’s a lot of that, trying to advance yourself tactically by working a reporter and all of that, but as far as people just coming out with the documents, I realized that in doing it, I was doing something relatively rare. It was a strange position to be in.
JM: The movie ends a little depressingly.
RP: I would say, in terms of the trajectory of the film, to me it starts with everybody pretty depressed and ends on this fragile uptick of hope. McKibben’s got his demonstration, which is going to get bigger. Ross, who does tend to be pretty despairing about where we’re going, is talking to high school students — I mean, how much more of a gesture of hope can there be than talking to young people — and I’m testifying before the House Oversight Committee which, finally, for the first time in years, is actually planning to do some investigation on oversight, and Heidi’s got her show. So to me it ends with a little bit of uptick of hope, but they show the thing slamming shut, it’s like a very fragile thing, it’s not at all clear with the momentum in the global system that we’re going to avoid catastrophic impact through climate change, so there’s a personal hopefulness among the characters, but maybe the global situation is not that hopeful.
JM: How has the dialog changed since the end of the film? Is it bettter?
RP: I went independent in 2005 and started Climate Science Watch, which got adopted by the Government Accountability Project, the whistle blower counsel, advocacy organization here that had counseled me when I was doing the whistle blowing. Over a period of time, we developed that into a public interested, watch dog, investigation, advocacy project. It’s very small, I have myself, I have a full-time researcher, I have foundation grants, I have fundraising assistance and legal assistance and a whole network of informants, but it’s not a big organization. It’s a small watch dog organization that does one thing which is to watch dog what happens on the political receiving end of the climate science.
I’ve been working on that full time and then some since then, doing it pretty independently in terms of talking to the media, writing for the Web site, public speaking, talking to people, and so forth. I think that the coverage in the media has definitely changed, major media anyway, it’s quantified and documented. From where we were in ‘03 or ‘04 to where we’ve been in ‘06 and ‘07 and into this year, there’s been an evolutionary shift in how the climate change issue is covered. There is much less of a tendency to give equal time to skeptics, contrarians, denialist information campaign people. That is not done nearly as routinely, there is much more of a straightforward acceptance of the mainstream way that this is talked about in the media and I think the main cause of it is the drumbeat of statements by scientifically trained people that the climate is changing and the impact is likely to be very serious, combined with things that people have already been able to observe directly. And then I think the conscious effort to discredit the disinformation campaign — not just myself — who have directly challenged the Exxon Mobil corporate funded political thing. I think that people in the media have come to see that more clearly than they were seeing it a few years ago.
So, yes, there has been an evolutionary shift in the major US media that covers it, more routinely just reporting the science developing in a straightforward way and taking it as a legitimate issue and a real problem that political leadership should be expected to deal with and there is no fundamental uncertainty about whether we have a problem, so I think that as far as the flat out denial that there is global warming driven by human activities, that battle has been primarily one. There are still people out there who are denialists on it, they’re all over the blogosphere, but they don’t have any traction politically anymore. The political system and corporate America have moved on to talk about what kind of deal needs to be done to start fixing this damage, but I think that there is still a lot of disinformation not about the reality of human driven global warming but about how bad the impacts are likely to be and about what’s involved in reducing emissions, so it’s complex and more nuanced. It’s like, “Well, maybe these impacts are not going to be that great and if you try to do something about it, you’re going to destroy the economy.” There’s a lot of bogus material out there that denies the full extent of the likely adverse consequences and that misrepresents what’s feasible in terms of reducing emissions. But it’s not like the Flat Earth Society, it’s a more complex kind of marketing. I think that’s the terrain that the battle is fought on now.
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