Bush Staffers Want to Grow Oranges in the Arctic

In this week's Rolling Stone Tim Dickinson, a former MoJo editor, waded through thousands of previously-FOIAd documents and emails to construct a comprehensive look at the Bush Administration's campaign of global warming denial.

Mother Jones was among the first on this beat back in spring of 2005 when Chris Mooney uncovered the administration's attempts to silence the global warming debate by way of its close ties to ExxonMobil, and that company's funding of climate change skeptics.

Interestingly, Tim notes that many of the documents he details in his feature were in plain sight, not buried from the public under any sort of top secrecy. I too, as the fact-checker for Mooney's piece two years ago, recall the reams of documents, the trail of evidence linking high-ranking administration employees, such as Larisa and Paula Dobriansky and Phillip Cooney, to the upperest of oil-industry crust.

Check out Tim's piece for a good summary, and for doozies such as this email to ExxonMobil lobbyist turned White House adviser Cooney, from White House energy staffer Matthew Koch, who, upon hearing about an industry-funded study that refuted warming was happening at all said:

"What??!! I want to grow oranges in the Arctic!"

Did he not learn anything from Jack Abramoff? If you are going to be callous and mess with the nation and people's lives on a grand scale, please, at least refrain from boasting about it in email verse.