On Tuesday November 14, 2006, Friends of the Earth, Center for Biological Diversity, and Greenpeace sued the Bush administration for violating the Global Change Research Act of 1990 by refusing to produce a long overdue National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on the United States. The Assessment is critical to informed Congressional and agency decision-making on global warming and was due by 2004. See complaint.

Instead of producing the long overdue National Assessment, the administration has decided not to develop a comprehensive 2004 Assessment at all, replacing it with a drawn-out series of 21 shorter technical reports. As outlined by former Climate Change Science Program senior associate Rick Piltz, in his resignation letter and subsequent interviews in Environmental Science and Technology Online and Greenwire, this is an end-run around the Administration’s obligations to provide decisionmakers and the public with critical and timely information on climate change and its impacts.

Concerned by the proposal to parse and delay the National Assessment, Senators Kerry and McCain requested that the Government Accounting Office (GAO) evaluate whether a plan for 21 shorter reports meets the requirements of the Global Change Research Act. In April 2005, the GAO concluded that the Administration’s plan does not comply with the law, finding that: it does not meet the timeline prescribed by Congress; the 21 proposed shorter reports may not adequately address all of the topics required by the Global Change Research Act; and the 21 shorter reports cannot substitute for the single, coherent synthesis required by the Global Change Research Act and urgently needed by Congress and federal agencies to guide climate change policy.

On February 8, 2007, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA) joined our action by filing an amicus brief and making a motion for intervention in support of our lawsuit against the Bush administration.

The last full National Assessment was submitted October 31, 2000 under President Clinton (2000 National Assessment)