When I was a young boy and my older brothers or friends got to do something that I wasn’t allowed to do I would complain to my mom about her unfairness.

If I did something wrong - and I got caught - I’d also complain about the unfairness of my being punished when my friend’s got away with staying out after dark or shooting pellet guns at alligators. A common response from my mom was along the lines of “If __________ did __________, would you do it too?”. Those blanks would be filled in to read “If your brothers drank poison would you drink it too?” or “If you Kenny jumped off a cliff would you jump off too?”

I didn’t really understand her point at the time. Drinking poison or jumping off cliffs did not seem fun the way staying up late and getting watch R rated movies sounded fun. She never asked it that way. She was trying to teach me that sometimes you have to look at the people around you and realize that its up to you to do the right thing regardless of the choices made by the people around you.

Sadly, it appears that our President George W. Bush did not learn the same lesson. I was not privy to all the discussions at this week’s G8 summit in Japan, but the press coverage from the Financial Times lets you get the feel for what went down during the talks on climate change. I suspect it went something like this:

Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom: “Climate change is accelerating faster than was projected by the IPCC and we need to take serious action NOW to address green house gas emissions if we want to have any chance to slow down and reverse changes that will hurt us all economically, agriculturally, and medically.”

G.W. Bush representing the United States: “But… but… but… China and India get to keep polluting!”

Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom: “George, if China and India destroy their air and water and soil to the point that they end up killing off part of their population to starvation and lack of clean drinking water would you do the same?“

G.W. Bush: “Maybe.”

Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom: || All bang heads on table to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. ||

George W. Bush, speaking on behalf of American’s everywhere, promised on Sunday to be “constructive” (his word) in talks on global warming but said a deal was impossible unless fast-growing China and India agreed to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.

In President Bush’s own words: “I’ll be constructive. I’ve always advocated that there needs to be a common understanding and that starts with a goal, and I also am realistic enough to tell you that if China and India don’t share that same aspiration, then we’re not going to solve the problem.”

The United States, thanks to both the Clinton and G.W. Bush presidencies, the United States is already sitting out the Kyoto Protocol. The less we do now, the harsher the standards will be when the next pact replaces Kyoto in 2012.

This should not be a surprise to anyone after revelations today that the Office of the Vice President played a role, during the final hours before CDC director Julie Gerberding was to present her testimony to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on October 23, 2007, in “gutting” the report she prepared for the Senate committee.

The White House went on to lie about the edits when press secretary Dana Perino, baldly lied to the press corp stating that the President’s Office of Science Technology and Policy (OSTP), in consultation with OMB, had determined the CDC’s statements were not in line with the findings of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). According to Perino, there was not enough time to reconcile the differences, and instead the pages were removed in their entirety.

This was almost immediately refuted by one of the lead IPCC researchers.

“That’s nonsense,” said Jonathan Patz, professor of Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a lead author for the IPCC, “Dr. Gerberding’s testimony was scientifically accurate and absolutely in line with the findings of the IPCC.”

In fact, Barbara Boxer’s Senate Committee went on to produce a side-by-side comparison of the deleted CDC statements with supporting statements from the IPCC report, supporting Patz’s assertion. DeSmogBlog.com has the Full Version of White House “Edited” CDC Climate Report - with highlights! available online.

I wrote about this back in October of 2007 in a post titled Republicans, look up the word “Balanced” - Please! The fact that pages were deleted from the testimony is old news. The news today revealed that “The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) … any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change,” Burnett has told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Jason K. Burnett, was, until last month the senior adviser on climate change to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson. He says that Cheney’s office was deeply involved in getting nearly half of the CDC’s original draft testimony removed.

Burnett feels, in his opinion, that the office of the vice president quite correctly feared that if the CDC testimony reported even the more conservative information about the expected health effects climate change, it will be harder for the Executive branch to the resist mandatory caps on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases they way they have through both of Bush’s terms.

To be fair, Megan Mitchell, the vice president’s press secretary, dismissed the allegations by Jason Burnett, whom she referred to simply as “the Democrat.”