 Stephen Colbert was at his funniest last night when he poked fun at NASA administrator Michael Griffin for “quietly altering” its mission statement to remove any justification for fighting global warming. He suggested other federal agencies should take NASA’s lead and make their mission statements just as unclear: “Come on, Environmental Protection Agency! You’ve got to make it more vague! Oh, and try losing ‘Environmental’ and ‘Protection’.” (they should also delete words like "Clean" "Air" "Act") Watch it!
From 2002-2006, part of NASA’s mission statement was to “protect our home planet”. But in February 2006, the statement was altered and the “protect our home planet” part was removed. Even a year ago, NASA scientists predicted that because of the mission statement revision, there would “be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.” Top NASA climatologist James Hansen called the deletion “a shocking loss,” because he had “been using the phrase since December 2005 to justify speaking out about the dangers of global warming.” In contrast to the previous mission statement, the 2006 revision “was made at NASA headquarters without consulting the agency’s 19,000 employees or informing them ahead of time.” Hat tip to ThinkProgress -- and of course, my man, Colbert. by
Erin Swanson
ESwanson@enviance.com
| 
