Environmentalists launched a campaign today that pokes Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack for declining to discuss the potential role of climate change in the record-breaking drought plaguing the Midwest and Plains.

The green group Forecast the Facts, recently formed to focus on the links between the warming planet and extreme weather events, launched a petition drive that deemed Vilsack's recent avoidance of questions about the climate-drought link "not acceptable."

"The scientific links between climate change and drought are well established by his own Department, and it's Secretary Vilsack's responsibility to share that information with farmers and the American public," the group said.

Vilsack last week shrugged off queries about the possibility that greenhouse gas emissions might be exacerbating the impact of what has become the nation's worst drought in more than a half-century, affecting the majority of the continental United States (E&E Daily, July 19). His move dismayed some climate activists who had hoped for a more direct engagement from the White House briefing room's high-profile stage.

"Another apparent example of the Obama administration's politicized evasiveness on forthright communication about anthropogenic climatic disruption," said Rick Piltz, a former official at the federal government's climate research program who now leads the green group Climate Science Watch. "Vilsack surely knows better, or should. Is his response any better than what we would have gotten from the Bush-Cheney administration?"

The drought, coupled with a series of recent heat waves and destructive wildfires in Colorado, has refired a political debate over climate change that was previously simmering on Congress' back burner. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's top Republican, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, took to the Senate floor earlier this month to warn greens against the "dangerous game" of using the weather to reorient public attention toward the effect of emissions (E&ENews PM, July 11).