So, fun fact: back in the day (for these purposes, day = December 2007), the Environmental Protection Agency wrote an email to distribute among the Bush administration concerning six gases linked to global warming, and concluded they are dangerous to the public welfare. The administration stated that there should be an effort to control these emissions from cars and burning gasoline. The report also said that global warming has an adverse effect on air quality, water quality, forests, agriculture, and all sorts of other things that hurt the public. And guess what the Bush administration decided to do about it…or don’t, and let the Washington Post tell you:

That finding was rejected by the Bush White House, which strongly opposed using the Clean Air Act to address climate change and stalled on producing a so-called “endangerment finding” that had been ordered by the Supreme Court in 2007. As a result, the Dec. 5 e-mail sent by the agency to Susan Dudley, who headed the regulatory division at the Office of Management and Budget was never opened, according to Jason Burnett, the former EPA official that wrote it. The Bush administration, and then EPA administrator Stephen Johnson, also refused to release the document, which is labeled “deliberative, do not distribute” to Democratic lawmakers.

Yup. They not only ignored the findings, but refused to tell anyone, except for three senators in July of 2008. Nice. Well, that email has finally been released, by the Obama administration, only 22 months after it was written. Luckily, the conclusions reached in the email have already been acknowledged by the Obama administration, and things like carbon emissions are now are on the government’s radar, with the “EPA is currently drafting the first greenhouse gas standards for automobiles.” But this only goes to show how much political agendas can put the kibosh on actually helping the public. Not that this at all mirrors health care. At all.

photo credit: Senor Codo’s flickr photostream/Creative Commons