secret science

belated redumdant, aha

see Secret Science Reform Act and laTER high quality res act

SEE PRECURSOR SOUND SCIENCE?

congrats you evil fecks, official policy

junk sci morphs to ? who did branding? luntz?

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RUBBER REVERSE SCI GAG

NOTE HE DOES NOT SAY PAID OR GUBMINT BUT TOP-DOWN

mma

August 19, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show SALEM

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): You've taken on the entire kind of climate science world. Energy department attacks climate science in contentious report. By the way, you're in safe company here. We think this is all politicized. This is driven towards a environmentalist agenda that is trying to weaken American energy dominance. The agency asked five client skeptics to write a report criticizing the consensus on global warming.

First of all, science does not have consensus. This is a very important thing. Right? Science says nothing. Scientists say things. Okay? Science never talks. Science is silent. This is a good thing that could apply to everything. Scientists say things. And scientists, like we learned during COVID, we learned during the lockdowns, learned during the vaccines, can say a lot of different things with the data.

Now, again, global warming does not have consensus like the second law of thermodynamics. Global warming does not have consensus like a object at rest will stay at rest. Your reaction, Mr. Secretary, and how you think about this because they — again, let me read this New York Times article, The consensus on global warming. What an outrageous claim. Your thoughts, sir.

CHRIS WRIGHT (GUEST): Yeah. I always give the contrast between the science, which is what the left likes, which is the opposite of science. Science is a process of challenge and engagement and debate and wrestling with data. And if the data doesn't agree with your model, your model is wrong. Where the science is this top-down, authority-driven thing used with COVID to me was the climate movement in fast forward. The science told you what to do.

But as you said, Charlie, look at those critics. They critique the authors. Five skeptics. Well, skeptical of what? They presented — these are five highly distinguished scientists. One of them was undersecretary for science in the Obama administration, provost at Caltech, PhD from MIT. All of those scientists were accomplished scientists that are also tired of this censorship of the science, censoring real science and real process of engagement. But even on my CNN interview a couple weeks ago, I went on to talk about the climate report. There are zero questions about climate change. Zero. They want to impugn the writers or impugn the way we reference people. They want to find little things. What we want to talk about is the data.

Let's talk about climate science. Like, it's a real phenomenon. It's a slow-moving phenomenon, not even remotely close to the world's biggest problem, but it's used by the left to justify big government and top-down control of everything. Let's be honest. Let's engage in real science, as you said. That's what we're about. And I'm excited to have that debate over four years. We're going to end a lot of children's nightmares. We're going to end a lot of people trying to be pushed around and bullied by people that don't know what they're talking about. Like, I've spent twenty years studying climate science as physical data, and the people who were passionate about it never want to debate me because they don't know anything about it. But we're going to have that debate whether they want it or not.

KIRK: Science is a process. It doesn't tell you anything. People tell you. Science is a method. It's a methodology. And good science, which again is a verb, they they act as if, well, science, you know, puts something out. No. You do science. You go in exploration of truth. And then once you have a conclusion, you have to measure it, you have to analyze it, you have to inquire it, you have to cross-reference it. And by the way, we're bringing back that methodology to our government, RFK at HHS, and you at the Department of Energy.

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https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3986&context=dlj

1722 DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 68:1719

DEREGULATION USING STEALTH “SCIENCE”

STRATEGIES

THOMAS O. MCGARITY & WENDY E. WAGNER†

ABSTRACT

In this Article, we explore the “stealth” use of science by the

Executive Branch to advance deregulation and highlight the limited,

existing legal and institutional constraints in place to discipline and

discourage these practices. Political appointees have employed dozens

of strategies over the years, in both Democratic and Republican

administrations, to manipulate science in ends-oriented ways that

advance the goal of deregulation.

Despite this bald manipulation of

science, however, the officials frequently present these strategies as

necessary to bring “sound science” to bear on regulatory decisions. To

begin to address this problem, it is important to reconceptualize how

the administrative state addresses science-intensive decisions. Rather

than allow agencies and the White House to operate as a cohesive unit,

institutional bounds should be drawn around the scientific expertise

lodged within the agencies. We propose that the background scientific

work prepared by agency staff should be firewalled from the evaluative,

policymaking input of the remaining officials, including politically

appointed officials, in the agency.

Copyright © 2019 Thomas O. McGarity & Wendy E. Wagner.

† McGarity is Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair in Administrative Law,

University of Texas School of Law; Wagner is Richard Dale Endowed Chair, University of Texas

School of Law. We are grateful to Jennifer Nou, Arti Rai, and the participants at the Duke Law

Journal 2019 spring symposium for helpful comments and suggestions. Special thanks go to the

Duke Law Journal editors, particularly Scott Grundei, for their wonderful work on this piece.

MCGARITY & WAGNER IN PRINTER FINAL (DO NOT DELETE) 4/25/2019 3:58 PM

1720 DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 68:1719

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .......................................................................................... 1720

I. Deregulatory Strategies .................................................................. 1724

A. Adjusting the Substance of the Science ........................... 1724

1. Censoring Science ........................................................... 1725

2. Limiting Scientific Input ................................................ 1728

3. Safety in Models .............................................................. 1729

4. Studying Rather than Acting and Raising the Burden

of Proof ................................................................................ 1733

5. Rewriting Reports Relevant to Regulatory Issues ........ 1740

6. Substituting Deregulatory Policy for Science ............... 1743

B. Adjusting Internal Resources and Procedures ............... 1747

1. Cutting the Budgets for Technical Staff and Scientific

Research ......................................................................... 1748

2. Changing Organizational Charts and Shifting

Personnel ....................................................................... 1752

C. Changing the Rules for Scientific Deliberations ............ 1756

1. Marginalizing External Review of Agency Science ..... 1757

2. Constraining the Staff’s Analysis of the Best Available

Science ............................................................................ 1767

II. Analysis ........................................................................................... 1769

A. Courts .................................................................................. 1772

B. Congress .............................................................................. 1773

C. Agency Counter-Pressure ................................................. 1774

1. Science Integrity Policies ................................................ 1775

2. Science Advisory Boards ............................................... 1778

3. Staff .................................................................................. 1779

D. The Scientific Community and the Media ....................... 1781

III. Reform ........................................................................................... 1783

A. Firewalling the Scientific Literature Review and Analysis

from Policy Input ............................................................... 1785

1. Support for Firewalls ...................................................... 1787

2. Precedent for a Firewall ................................................. 1789

3. Practical Implementation ............................................... 1791

B. Reinforcing Reforms ......................................................... 1800

1. Science Advisory Boards ............................................... 1800

2. Deliberative Process Privilege ....................................... 1802

Conclusion ............................................................................................. 1802

INTRODUCTION

Any new president who, like President Trump, campaigns on a

deregulatory platform is in for some unpleasant surprises after the

election. Undoing regulation, particularly in the areas of health, safety,

and the environment, is not as easy as it might appear. Rolling back

most major rules is tedious because it requires notice-and-comment

rulemakings under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”),1

with

One viable solution to this dilemma is to adopt stealth “science” strategies. By reaching into the science supporting past or ongoing regulatory actions and changing what the record says, a deregulatory president can sidestep at least the first two problems.5 Changing the science underlying a regulation allows the president to stay within the constraints of protective statutes. The president can show that the deregulatory action does not, on the face of things, compromise the statute’s protective goals, because the modified science demonstrates that his policies remain comfortably within those mandates. Equally important, manipulating the underlying science gives the public a false assurance that their health and environment are being protected. To this end, invoking “sound science” on behalf of an agency decision that in fact may be based on ends-oriented manipulations of the record can lend the patina of objectivity. Even if hurdles one and two can be overcome by playing games with science, the chief executive will still need to devise clever ways to grapple with hurdle three—the large number of career staffers, many of whom are scientists, who will most likely push back against efforts to manipulate science. Although overcoming this third hurdle can sometimes can be difficult, some well-worn paths by previous administrations to manipulate science to advance deregulation are becoming evident.6 This Article explores these strategies, uncovering a playbook of sorts that shows how deregulation-minded presidential administrations, including the current one, have reconfigured the science underlying regulations to advance deregulatory policies. In this Article, we trace out these stealth “science” strategies used to advance deregulation and assign them to three general categories.7 First, some political manipulation of science occurs deep within the...

1778 DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 68:1719

2. Science Advisory Boards. Several regulatory statutes create scientific advisory committees to review the work of agency scientists and provide advice on regulatory issues, and agencies frequently create science advisory boards on their own.325 A scientific advisory committee can lend the patina of objectivity to science-based agency decisions that can be very useful to an agency that is under attack in the political arena.326 At the same time, we have observed a number of instances—more than 30 percent of our accounts—in which scientific advisory committees have blown the whistle on low visibility attempts by upper-level decisionmakers to manipulate science to achieve predetermined outcomes.327 In the course of judicial review, courts in fact sometimes rely on criticisms by scientific advisory committees to support conclusions that agency actions are arbitrary and capricious.328 EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, for example, has on several occasions complained rather loudly that the administrator ignored its advice on NAAQS in an effort to make the standards less burdensome for the affected industries.329 A working group of EPA’s Science Advisory Board circulated a memorandum in May 2018 containing recommendations for full board review of several of the agency’s proposed deregulatory actions during the Trump administration.330 The memorandum, which was reported in the trade press,331 contained several rather strong criticisms of pending EPA actions, including the Agency’s reconsideration of its final determination of emissions standards for automobiles, national emission standards for hazardous air pollutants for hydrochloric acid production residual risk, and the repeal of emissions requirements for 325. See generally JASANOFF, supra note 207 (providing book-length treatment of the operation of science advisory boards in the United States).

...

“glider” trucks.332 The working group pointedly noted a “trend” in which the agency’s air office was providing less information to the Scientific Advisory Board about planned actions333 in an apparent effort to limit the Board’s input. Yet once again, this particularly important shield against politicization of science is limited by the reality that political appointees usually though not always control when a science advisory board is consulted and how that board is staffed. With the exception of a few statutory programs,334 there are virtually no legal constraints over these decisions. Even the composition of such boards is largely subject to political manipulation.335 3. Staff. Career agency scientists provide another valuable institutional check on manipulation by upper-level political appointees. These career staffers can serve as the ballast that keeps the agencies operating in accordance with professional norms that resist ends-oriented political intrusions. The staff, whether or not its work is disclosed to the public, still creates the initial scientific record to inform policy; this record at least creates a speed bump that political appointees must find a way around to advance ends-oriented policies. In nearly half of the stealth tactics discussed in Part I, the role of staff was pivotal in calling attention to the political manipulation of science.336 Some career scientists have resisted political changes to their analyses or conclusions.337 Other scientists have called attention to attempted manipulations, sometimes by leaking the evidence and documents to the press or posting them on the internet and sometimes by formally blowing the whistle on inappropriate actions.338 Moreover,...

when career staffers are called upon for explanations by Congress, some have been quite forthright in acknowledging efforts by political officials to meddle with the scientific record underlying regulations.339 The group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (“PEER”) also uses reports from existing staff to probe into agency decisions. PEER files a FOIA request about once every three weeks, often to probe matters brought to its attention by government employees.340

Another group, called “314 Action,” has established a secure hotline and an encrypted email drop through which government scientists can report abuses to lawyers and receive advice on their legal options.341 In some cases, these staff reports can lead to adverse consequences for the offending political appointees. When Assistant Interior Secretary Julie MacDonald was caught bullying scientific staff into changing their scientific analyses involving endangered species, for example, the DOI’s Inspector General documented her activities and she resigned.342

Former agency staffers can also serve as valuable informants on the manipulation of science after they retire from service. One group of former EPA staffers, for example, has formed an organization called the “Environmental Protection Network” to keep an eye on that agency’s activities and comment publicly on abuses when its members detect them.343 Among other things, it wrote a lengthy critique of Administrator Pruitt’s “transparency” proposal.344 But even with these important innovations, there are limits to what the career staff can accomplish. Political bullying of agency

339. One EPA senior science adviser testified before Congress, for example, that EPA Assistant Administrator for Pesticides and Toxic Substances asked her to employ a risk assessment model based on a scientific theory that she had never heard of to ensure a smaller risk estimate for the fumigant ethylene dibromide. LASH, supra note 53, at 173. 340.

Amanda Reilly, Group, Firm Offer Pro Bono Help for Federal Scientists, E&E NEWS (Oct. 25, 2017), https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/stories/1060064627/search?keyword=Group %2C+Firm+Offer+Pro+Bono+Help+for+Federal+Scientists [http://perma.cc/TD9W-ZY3J].

341. Nick Bowlin, Political Group Seeks Federal Whistleblowers, E&E NEWS (Nov. 2, 2017), https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/stories/1060065401/search?keyword=Political+Group+Seeks+F ederal+Whistleblowers [http://perma.cc/M2NX-ED6W]. 342. OFF. OF INSPECTOR GEN., U.S. DEP’T OF INTERIOR, INVESTIGATIVE REPORT: THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT AND THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND POLICY 1–8 (2008). 343. About Us, ENVTL. PROTECTION NETWORK, https://www.environmentalprotection network.org/about [http://perma.cc/2R7V-XEE6]. 344. ENVTL. PROTECTION NETWORK, COMMENTS ON EPA’S CENSORED SCIENCE PROPOSAL (2018), https://www.environmentalprotectionnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/ 08/EPN-Censored-Science-Summary.pdf [http://perma.cc/K7TY-BCHA].

scientists can still lead to scientifically compromised decisions. The White House has demanded changes to scientific records that even strong career staffers were not able to prevent.345

Moreover, since the political officials decide what counts as “deliberative process” privilege, the staff would seem relatively helpless—short of filing formal whistleblower complaints—to expose these tactics to the light of day.

D. The Scientific Community and the Media The scientific community has been heavily involved in publicizing and disciplining political manipulation of science in the agencies.346 The UCS, editors of top scientific journals, and respected scientists have penned reports, articles, commentaries, and editorials that document numerous problems.347 Soon after the 2016 elections, for example, “[m]ore than 2,300 scientists, including twenty-two Nobel Prize winners, [wrote] an open letter to President-elect Donald Trump and the 115th Congress, urging them to adhere to high standards of scientific integrity and independence” in addressing environmental problems.348 Scientists are working with public relations experts to hone their communications skills to facilitate interactions with the public and the media.349 The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February 2017 featured a panel on “Defending Science and Scientific Integrity in the Age of Trump.”350 345. See supra notes 26–34 and accomp...

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https://theintercept.com/2020/01/12/cancer-trump-administration-epa-carcinogens-regulations/

the war on the war on cancer

no pix no lnx many no graf

Sharon Lerner

January 12 2020,

WHEN ANGELA RAMIREZ was 38, she felt a slight pain in her chest. At first she thought she had pulled a muscle, but when it didn’t go away, Ramirez went to her doctor, who diagnosed her with stage 2 breast cancer. A mother of three and a parent educator in a local public school in Lake County, Illinois, Ramirez had to undergo a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, and five follow-up surgeries.

Eight years since the diagnosis, her family is still recovering. Because of complications, Ramirez is awaiting several more reconstructive surgeries. Her daughter Ada, now 15, was recently diagnosed with PTSD, in part, Ramirez thinks, because she spent much of her childhood worrying that her mother wouldn’t survive. And her husband is working 80 hours a week to cover medical expenses and lost income. “Cancer changes your whole life,” she said recently.

Ramirez used to think of her ordeal as random bad luck — an inexplicable series of genetic mutations that just happened to derail her life. But that changed in 2018, after she learned that she both lived and worked near two facilities that were emitting a cancer-causing chemical called ethylene oxide.

Two years earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency released an assessment of ethylene oxide performed by a small division of the agency known as IRIS, which crunched numbers showing that exposure to ethylene oxide caused elevated rates of tumors in the brain, lungs, uterus, and lymph systems. The technical report from IRIS, which stands for the Integrated Risk Information System, changed the classification of ethylene oxide, an odorless gas used to make other chemicals and sterilize medical equipment, from probably carcinogenic to plainly carcinogenic to humans. Based in part on several studies showing that female workers exposed to ethylene oxide had higher breast cancer rates, the report calculated a safety threshold that was 30 times more sensitive than previous estimates. Combined with agency data about local emissions, the new threshold allowed the EPA Office of Air and Radiation to identify the census tracts where residents were at increased risk of cancer from breathing ethylene oxide.

As Ramirez could plainly see on the EPA’s interactive map, the cancer risk was elevated both where she lived and, even more extremely, at the office where she worked for several years before her diagnosis, which was less than a mile from one factory that emitted the carcinogenic gas and less than three miles from another. The news was like a missing puzzle piece. “I had always found it kind of strange that I was the only one in my family who ever had cancer,” said Ramirez, who had moved to the suburbs from Chicago in 2005 in part because she wanted to be closer to nature.

Ramirez still suffers from chronic back pain and weakness. But the realization that her cancer may have resulted from emissions from the local factories has caused a different kind of suffering. “Every time I open the windows I think about it now,” she said. “I’m so angry. My kids at 2nd and 3rd grade shouldn’t have had to wonder whether their mother was going to die.”

Angela Ramirez's neighborhood is seen in this photo. The neighborhood in Waukegan, Ill., is located in a census tract that is at high risk for cancer. Jan. 2, 2020. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.Construction at Medline's facility in Waukegan, Ill. is underway on Jan. 2, 2020. In May 2019, Medline submitted a proposal to build new equipment that would control air pollution, after they came under fire for emitting ethylene oxide, a gas linked to cancer. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.]

Left/Top: The Ramirez's neighborhood in Waukegan, Ill., is part of a census tract that is at high risk for cancer. Right/Bottom: Construction at Medline's facility in Waukegan, Ill. is underway on Jan. 2, 2020. In May 2019, Medline submitted a proposal to build new equipment that would control air pollution, after they came under fire for emitting ethylene oxide.Photos: Pat Nabong for The Intercept]

The chemical industry also reacted strongly to the reports on ethylene oxide. In September 2018, after the National Air Toxics Assessment pinpointed the areas affected by the chemical, the American Chemistry Council, or ACC, a trade group that represents U.S. chemical manufacturers, asked IRIS to change its assessment of ethylene oxide. Dow Chemical, the biggest producer of ethylene oxide in the country and the second biggest in the world, also disputed the EPA’s assessment.

Now, political appointees at the EPA are engaged in what appears to be an end-run around the agency’s own science. While IRIS, which is staffed by career scientists, hasn’t officially backed away from its 2016 report, theTrump EPA recently announced that it would not be calling for the level of pollution reductions IRIS laid out during the previous administration, leaving people around the country more vulnerable to the known carcinogen. And that’s only one of the changes made under the Trump administration that promise to weaken protections for Americans’ health, many of which were intended specifically to stave off cancers.

Virtually no sector of the EPA’s work has escaped reversals that will cause disease and death among the U.S. population. The agency scrapped the Clean Power Plan and a rule to improve fuel efficiency standards for cars, depriving the public of not just the climate benefits but also the improvements to air quality and health both would have brought. The EPA rejected its own science in deciding not to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental problems in children. Dozens of other EPA rollbacks — including the gutting of the Clean Water Act, the undermining of guidelines on emissions of methane from landfills, the loosening of restrictions on toxic air pollution from industrial facilities, the disbanding of a panel on air pollution — will have dire health consequences, as will the dramatic reduction in the enforcement of environmental laws.

The erosion of these protections may leave Americans at greater risk of all kinds of health effects, including fertility issues, birth defects, and neurodevelopmental problems — all of which have been linked to chemical exposure. But among the most devastating of Trump’s legacies will be an increase in cancers.

Trump’s Cancer Gang

With the election of Donald Trump, a small and previously marginalized group of toxics apologists suddenly and unexpectedly took control over health and environmental regulations in the United States. Considered too fringe, too craven, and too fact-averse for mainstream politics, this closely connected group had long been dismissed for taking the idea of environmental deregulation well past the point of absurdity. Under Trump, the EPA has begun executing some of these extremists’ schemes to undercut the federal government’s ability to protect the public from life-threatening toxic chemicals.

Way back in 1996, a lawyer named Christopher Horner working for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company came up with an ambitious plan to fight back against scientific studies linking cancer to secondhand smoke. Such studies, he realized, were based on the private health data of thousands of individuals. And without that data, scientists would be unable to prove a connection between cigarette smoke and cancer. Imagine if the government required that the data used for regulations be public. If that were the case, none of the crucial private health information used by scientists would be usable. Problem solved!

Horner, who worked at the firm then called Bracewell & Giuliani, recognized that the approach had “global applicability to industry” beyond tobacco and could make it nearly impossible to regulate a wide variety of cancer-causing chemicals and pollution.Within a few years, a group funded by the Koch brothers tried to use the strategy to undermine the Clean Air Act, demanding that researchers produce their data so a pivotal study could be repeated.

That attempt to destroy air pollution protections ultimately failed, and the idea hovered on the sidelines until 2014, when a few Republican House members introduced the “Secret Science Act.” Because most members of Congress recognized the gambit as a bald attempt to subvert science — then-Sen. Barbara Boxer called it “insane,” Sen. Bernie Sanders dismissed it as “laughable” — the bill didn’t come close to becoming law that year or the next, when it was introduced again. Even in mid-2016, the only support for the idea came from the fringe.

But with the election of Donald Trump later that year, the prospects of the “secret science” scheme — and others hatched over the years to help free industry of what it saw as profit-hampering regulations — suddenly became deadly serious. Trump, who had already been dismissive of science, named Horner and others interested in undermining environmental protections to his EPA transition team and then staffed the agency with political appointees who used to work for the industries they would be regulating.In April 2018, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt proposed a rule based on the “secret science” plan, and Horner’s wildest dreams of dismantling environmental and health regulations were set to become reality.

[Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), speaks to members of the media after signing the Affordable Clean Energy Rule at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, June 19, 2019. President Donald Trump is scaling back sweeping Obama-era curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants burning coal, his biggest step yet to fulfill his campaign promise to stop a "war" on the fossil fuel. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesEPA administrator Andrew Wheeler, center, speaks to members of the media at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., on June 19, 2019. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images]

The war on cancer was meant to help banish a disease that by 1970 had become the second-leading cause of death in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency, created that year, was part of the government’s assault on the rising tide of cancer cases. For some contaminants, such as asbestos and chemicals used in dye-making, the link to cancer was already clear. Scientists were beginning to understand that even tiny amounts of certain chemicals could alter cells, setting off a series of mutations that grow into cancerous tumors. The hope was that the agency could counter increasing cancer rates by limiting environmental exposures.

Yet 50 years after the federal government took up arms against cancer, the disease is still the second-leading cause of death. Even though cigarette smoking, the leading cause of cancer in the 1970s, has declined sharply, the American cancer rate has actually gone up over the past 40 years. Among children, who are particularly vulnerable to environmental exposures, the cancer rate has risen dramatically, increasing nearly 50 percent since 1975.

During that time, environmental exposures have been mounting. More than 140,000 chemicals and pesticides have been introduced since 1950. Even though the vast majority have not been evaluated for safety, 5,000 of them are made in such great quantities practically everyone is exposed to them. Yet most of the government spending on cancer has remained focused on treating the disease rather than preventing cancer by limiting exposure to carcinogens, such as pesticides and other environmental contaminants.

graf:

Left/Top: Federal political contributions by members of the American Chemistry Council,including parent companies and individual employees, 2008 - 2019. Compiled for The Intercept by MapLight. Right/Bottom: Federal political lobbying expenditures by members of the American Chemistry Council, including parent companies and individual employees, 2008 - 2019. Compiled for The Intercept by MapLight.Graphics: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

Since the first major law that attempted to regulate toxic chemicals passed in 1976, chemical companies have spent billions of dollars on lobbying. The member companies of the American Chemistry Council have spent more than $1.4 billion on lobbying and $77.8 million on political contributions since 2008, according to an analysis by MapLight for this story. The ACC by itself has spent $103 million on lobbying. Though staggering, these numbers are a small fraction of the trillions generated by chemical sales over that same period.

Throughout its 50-year existence, the EPA has faced the daunting task of regulating industries that are far better resourced than the agency. But the effort to rein in powerful companies, which has been met with varying degrees of success under previous administrations, has been largely abandoned under Trump. The EPA, now headed by a former coal lobbyist and run by other former lobbyists, executives, and lawyers from polluting industries, has set about undoing health protections, some of which were specifically designed to prevent cancer.

Trump, who recently tried to take credit for a 2017 dip in cancer mortality rates and announced that he would be “curing childhood cancer very shortly,” at a rally in Cincinnati last August, presumably isn’t interested in actively causing disease and death. But his eagerness to please the polluting chemical and fossil fuel industries that support him comes at the expense of American lives.

A Mess in Texas

For ethylene oxide, the chemical that Ramirez was exposed to, the road to deregulation passes through Texas. It was there, in the summer of 2018, that regulators led by state toxicologist Michael Honeycutt began working with the producers of ethylene oxide on their own standard for the chemical.

Honeycutt, who has overseen chemical assessment for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality since 1996, is known for his extremely industry-friendly approach to chemicals. Until this administration, Honeycutt made his name fighting the EPA, challenging the limits the agency tried to place on emissions of chemicals, particularly those released by the oil and gas industry. He has argued that particulate air pollution, which causes lung cancer and other diseases, can help people live longer. And working with his longtime colleague and fellow toxicologist Michael Dourson, Honeycutt loosened state protections on dozens of chemicals — rollbacks that were encouraged and welcomed by chemical manufacturers. Now, under Trump, Honeycutt’s Texas agency has essentially become a shadow EPA and he has assumed a national role in cancer policy.

The assessment of ethylene oxide that Honeycutt oversaw and the TCEQ released last year no doubt pleased the companies that make the chemical — not least because it appears to have been written by them. In June 2018, before issuing a new safety limit for ethylene oxide, Honeycutt and members of the TCEQ’s toxicology staff met in Austin with Joanna Klapacz, a toxicologist from Dow; Bill Gulledge, a senior director at the American Chemistry Council; and three scientists from Exponent, a consulting company paid by the ACC to help fend off regulation of the chemical, among them two toxicologists named Abby Li and M. Jane Teta. Representatives of Shell, BASF, and Balchem, which together with Dow released more than 200,000 pounds of ethylene oxide over the previous six years, joined the conversation by phone, according to emails of TCEQ staff released in response to a FOIA from the Sierra Club.

Dr. Mike Honeycutt is an Air Toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the world's second largest environmental agency. RALPH BARRERA/ AMERICAN-STATESMANTexas state toxicologist Michael Honeycutt. Photo: Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman]

At the meeting, a presentation from the American Chemistry Council recommended adopting estimates of safety thresholds from a paper written by Ciriaco Valdez-Flores, a Texas-based consultant who received funding from both the ACC and the Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Association. The TCEQ had considered — and rejected — the paper in an assessment of ethylene oxide it released less than two years earlier because, it said, Valdez-Flores hadn’t captured all the cancer risk from ethylene oxide. Although an EPA summary of the 2016 IRIS report on ethylene oxide characterized its confidence in the breast cancer data as “particularly high,” and noted that the breast cancer component “is based on over 200 incident cases for which the investigators also had information on other potential breast cancer risk factors,” the Valdez-Flores paper didn’t include the breast cancer studies in its evaluation. And in a presentation to the group, Teta also argued against the inclusion of the breast cancer data.

Gulledge, who manages the ACC’s panel on ethylene oxide, emailed TCEQ toxicologist Jessica Myers after the meeting and offered to draft the assessment of the chemical for the state agency. “Thank you for hosting us this week,” Gulledge wrote. “We are working on several ‘white papers’ on the risk assessment modeling and our alternative approach that should be ready in the next month or so with the goal to have a draft risk assessment manuscript ready shortly thereafter.”

Asked about the email, Tom Flanagin, director of product communications for the American Chemistry Council, denied that the group drafted the risk assessment for the TCEQ. “Mr. Gulledge is referring to a separate, independent effort … for publication in a peer reviewed journal. TCEQ acted independently in preparing their risk assessment.” Flanagin did not explain why Gulledge would be communicating with TCEQ about a purportedly separate, independent effort. Ryan Vise, director of external relations for the TCEQ, also denied that the ACC drafted or edited the state agency’s assessment. Exponent did not respond to requests for comment.

Yet the proposed ethylene oxide standard that TCEQ released this summer included many of the elements that the ACC and its scientific consultants recommended at the Texas meeting. The state agency omitted the breast cancer studies and adopted the paper by Valdez-Flores as its key study, just as the industry scientists had recommended.

And minutes from a meeting of the Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Association held the next month also indicate that the chemical industry, led by Teta and Li, who were both at the Texas meeting, drafted the state’s assessment of the chemical. According to the minutes, first reported by the Chicago Tribune, the assessment, which would provide an alternative to the IRIS ethylene oxide value, was funded and led by the industry groups. “Jane Teta and Abby Li (Exponent) will be leading” the recasting of the assessment to the industry’s liking, the minutes explained, and “TCEQ has indicated its receptiveness to considering an alternative to the IRIS value.”

The result of this collaboration between the ethylene oxide industry and Texas was a proposed standard that was 3,500 times weaker than the IRIS threshold. The Texas number was also 50 times less protective than the standard the state had released only two years earlier. While Texas offered no scientific reason for weakening its 2017 standard, regulatory developments can help explain the oddly timed reassessment: the EPA’s recognition of ethylene oxide as a carcinogen in 2018 had led to public pressure on companies that emit the gas, which had in turn led to the industry group to ask the TCEQ to issue an alternate standard.

Just as the ACC has done, the Texas agency also attempted to justify its new number by arguing that IRIS’s calculations couldn’t be correct because the body produces some ethylene oxide on its own — an idea dismissed by scientists who are not supported by the ethylene oxide industry.

“They make a big deal of endogenous exposure and say that’s why EPA numbers can’t be meaningful,” said Jennifer Jinot, a toxicologist who worked for EPA for 26 years, 12 of which she spent working on the IRIS assessment of ethylene oxide. Jinot described the TCEQ’s focus on purportedly natural levels of the chemical as “disingenuous” and said it was just one of several tricks the state agency used to make the chemical appear safer than it actually is.

“Texas has done something completely unreasonable,” said Jinot. “They’re just low-balling the whole thing.”

In an emailed response to questions, Dow spokesperson Ashley Mendoza acknowledged that Joanna Klapacz attended the 2018 meeting at TCEQ, but noted that “she was not part of the technical presentation.” The email also said that “Dow has continued to improve our [ethylene oxide] emission reduction as part of our own sustainability goals. As science advances, our ongoing collaboration with other manufacturers and multiple agencies continues to ensure maximum human safety while delivering products consumers want and need.”

The TCEQ responded to questions for this piece with an email saying that its assessment of ethylene oxide was “on the side of the best available science.” The email also said that the more protective ethylene oxide standard, which the state agency issued in March 2017, was never intended to be permanent, but instead was “to be used until a thorough multi-year systematic review and dose-response assessment could be conducted under the extensive TCEQ toxicity factor guidelines.”

The proposed safety level could have a dramatic effect on people in Texas, where at least 27 facilities emit more than 48 tons of ethylene oxide every year. At one of these facilities, a Huntsman Petrochemical Plant in Conroe Texas, the EPA estimated the cancer risk due to the release of ethylene oxide and other chemicals to be 3,000 in a million, according to a risk assessment report the agency released in December. Nationwide, the average risk of cancer from air pollution is 32 in a million.

The Texas standard could also weaken protections for people far beyond Texas, since states often consider one another’s regulations when issuing their own. “It could mess with the legal landscape globally,” said Tracey Woodruff, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco school of medicine who studies how chemical exposures affect health. “Even if other states don’t adopt Texas’ levels, they tend to average them.”

Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019. Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow Chemical’s plant can be seen just beyond homes in Freeport, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

While Honeycutt was once one of EPA’s main opponents, the Trump administration is now relying on his agency’s industry-biased assessment of ethylene oxide to guide the federal government’s approach to the carcinogen.IRIS spent years calculating its safety threshold for ethylene oxide and noted in its 2016 report that scientists have been studying the chemical’s “DNA-damaging properties” since the 1940s. Yet in early November, the EPA indicated it would not be calling for the reduction of emissions as much as the IRIS report would suggest is necessary. Instead, the EPA’s proposed rule, which it is required to finalize by March, calculated risk levels that were six to nine times weaker than those issued in 2016. An explanatory document released by EPA cited the Texas estimate as well as the request for correction from the American Chemistry Council and attributed its decision to change its safety level to “uncertainties” in the science.

The people who will be affected by the weakening of ethylene oxide protections are disproportionately poor and nonwhite, as the EPA’s own analysis shows. While the U.S. population overall is 12 percent African American, the areas with elevated cancer risks due to ethylene oxide are 21 percent African American, according to the document the agency released in November. Latinos are also at greater risk of exposure, making up 18 percent of the U.S. population and 31 percent of those living in areas with elevated cancer risk due to the chemical.

Those demographics aren’t unusual. While black and Latino people produce less pollution, people of color have a higher burden of pollution and are more likely to live near industrial facilities. Penny Dryden, who grew up near several polluting plants in the Rosegate section of Wilmington, Delaware, was for years unaware of the disparity. Dryden, 62, has had cancer three times. The first, breast cancer, was diagnosed when she was just 19. But this seemed to be a fact of life in her mostly African American neighborhood. Many of her friends and relatives as well as both of her parents had cancer.

In 2018, a facility near Dryden’s home that makes chemicals used in antifreeze and some processed foods released so much ethylene oxide into the air that the nearby Delaware Bridge had to be temporarily shut down. That was a temporary inconvenience to commuters, but for people who live within a three-mile radius of the plant — 52 percent of whom are people of color, and 31 percent of whom are below the poverty level — the chemical poses an ongoing health threat.

Although the cancers have taken a toll, Dryden still considers herself lucky. “Lots of people here have died of it, whole families, so many of my friends,” said Dryden, who has come to recognize and fight against the extra burden of both pollution and disease that are clustered in several communities of color in Delaware. And while she has no experience living in a pollution-free area, she feels certain the people making decisions that affect pollution levels around the country have no idea how it feels to live with polluted air. “The people in D.C. don’t go into communities like ours,” said Dryden. “They probably have never heard of Rosegate.”

For people like Dryden and Ramirez, who live near the facilities around the country — more than 100 — that emit the carcinogenic gas, the weakening of the ethylene oxide standard will result in even greater risks of cancer. “By undermining the way risk assessments are done, Texas has allowed these plants to put out more pollution because it’ll look like it’s safe when it’s not,” said Woodruff, the reproductive health professor. “They’re resetting the bar to allow more pollution going out into the world.”

Children will also disproportionately bear the burden of this additional pollution. As the EPA has pointed out, children may also be especially vulnerable to the mutagenic effects of ethylene oxide — as they are for other carcinogens. Simon Strong came to recognize kids’ particular vulnerability after his son, Oliver, died suddenly in June 2015. An exuberant 12-year-old who played saxophone and tended goal for his soccer team, Oliver was diagnosed with leukemia a week after he complained of his first symptom: a headache. He died just 36 hours later, leaving his parents bereft and filled with questions.

Oliver-1578521871Oliver Strong. Photo: Courtesy of Simon Strong]

“We were there with his oncologist in floods of tears, and I said, ‘What caused this?’ and she just burst out, ‘It’s the environment,’” Strong remembered recently. He had no idea what she meant and had never thought much about cancer before Oliver’s illness. But after his son’s death, Strong, a reporter turned investigator, began researching the causes of pediatric cancer. He read with dismay about the alarming numbers of soccer players, particularly goalies, who have developed cancer; about the connection between cancer and Roundup, a weed killer he had used liberally in the family’s backyard in Florida; and about several pediatric cancer clusters in his home state.

The problem, as he learned, was also worsening. While pediatric cancer rates were increasing overall, there had been a particularly large jump in the number of cases in infants and children under 5. Yet the government seemed to be doing little to understand what was causing these cancers or to prevent them.

So Strong launched a project along with the Baylor College of Medicine to collect information about the environmental exposures of children with cancer from their families. It’s work he wishes the federal government was doing. But as Strong’s urgency about the problem was growing, the Trump administration was going in the opposite direction, unraveling the little work that was being done on the issue.

Indeed, in May, the EPA decided to pull its funding for a network of centers that had researched the effects of various substances, including chemicals, on children. One of those research hubs, the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment at Berkeley, had found that exposure to pesticides, traffic emissions, tobacco smoke, and solvents are associated with childhood leukemia, the most common children’s cancer. Staff there were continuing to research the environmental causes of the disease and to educate parents and physicians, according to the physician and epidemiologist who directs the center, Catherine Metayer. “There is still so much work to do,” said Metayer. But the center lost the $1.5 million per year it had been receiving from the EPA and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Barring intervention from Congress, the last of its federal money will be spent by this summer. “After that, our work will have to stop,” she said.

Known Killers

The closure of the pediatric environmental health centers is only one of many backward steps we’ve taken in our decades-long battle against cancer and cancer-causing exposures. The first major one came after the EPA attempted to use the Toxic Substances Control Act to ban asbestos in 1989. The ban was exactly what the EPA and the chemicals law were created to do: protect Americans from a substance that had been known for decades to cause cancer. But after the agency began the process, asbestos mining and manufacturing companies sued. A court struck down most of the government’s ban in 1991 and, since then, the agency has been wary of taking on regulatory battles it might not win. As a result, the EPA has not regulated a single chemical under the law in the almost 30 years after the 1991 ruling.

So, while 67 countries have already banned asbestos, we’re still importing it. And last year, the Trump EPA decided — against the advice of its own scientists — to continue to allow its use.

In a statement, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency “along with our state partners, is covering ALL bases under our legal authority to protect people’s health from asbestos exposure.” The spokesperson went on to explain an April 2019 rule that allows the agency to restrict or prohibit the use of products containing asbestos. But she declined to say why the EPA had chosen not to ban the substance altogether, as its own scientists and attorneys had recommended.

While the continued use of asbestos has deadly consequences, causing an estimated 39,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, it is just one of the chemicals the Trump administration is now in a position to greenlight. In 2016, Congress tried to improve our abysmal record on chemicals by fixing the broken Toxic Substances Control Act. The update of the law aimed to bring about greater protections by requiring the EPA to identify and restrict the most dangerous substances.But under Trump, the opposite is happening— and the opportunity to fix chemical regulation, 40 years in the making, has instead turned into another massive step backward. The assessment process, begun in the Obama era, is being carried out by an administration that is friendlier to the chemical industry than any other administration in history.

“There is no daylight between this EPA and what the big chemical companies want,” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of the federal toxics program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. “Whatever the term is for government by corporation, that’s what we’ve been living under for three years.” Lots of small decisions are involved in implementing the new law, including the choice of which chemicals to assess, what sources of information about them to use, and how to quantify the risks they pose. “And these details are all essentially being worked out by companies like Dow and DuPont and Chemours,” said Rosenberg. “It’s the worst-case scenario.”

Asbestos is now one of 10 compounds the EPA began assessing in 2016 under the new law. In August, the EPA announced that it was considering assessing an additional 20 chemicals and added another five in September. How these chemicals are assessed will affect Americans’ exposure levels and ultimately their risks for a range of health outcomes.

Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow Chemical’s Freeport plant is the largest chemical production facility in the western hemisphere. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

Having the Trump administration at the helm during a once-in-a-generation reassessment of toxic pollutants is especially disastrous for the effort to protect Americans from cancer. Of the 35 chemicals the EPA is now scrutinizing under the updated TSCA, 19 are widely considered by researchers to be carcinogenic. While only a tiny exposure can set off disease, more than 135 million pounds of these carcinogens were released in this country between 2014 and 2018, according to the most recent data from the EPA. And how dangerous they are found to be may ultimately impact federal and state limits on their use.

Obama administration officials were scrupulous when they began the assessment process back in 2016. “They clearly said we have to look at all the ways people are exposed because if we ignore even a single pathway, that can result in the difference between acceptable and unacceptable risk,” said Eve Gartner, an attorney who directs the toxics program at Earthjustice. But when Trump appointees came in to replace them at the EPA, that changed. Nancy Beck, who had been trying to convince the EPA to narrow the range of exposures it considered in chemical assessments when she was director of regulatory policy for the American Chemistry Council, joined the EPA in April 2017 and remade the rule exactly as industry wanted it.

Just as the environmental advocates feared, the first of the assessments under Beck’s rule, which were released over the past several months and will likely be finalized within the coming year, have minimized the risks posed by chemicals. “We’re seeing massive exclusions of known pathways for exposure,” said Gartner. “EPA is finding that chemicals that are universally understood to present massive risk are fine.”

Environmental groups, including Earthjustice, NRDC, and the Environmental Defense Fund, sued the EPA, arguing that the agency was wrong to rule out certain pathways of chemical exposures. In November, a federal appeals court agreed with them. If the ruling stands, EPA will be forced to consider exposures to chemicals through uses that have been phased out, which will affect the assessment of asbestos, for example, andPFOA, an industrial contaminant found in drinking water, even though the chemical is no longer used in the U.S.

Excluding consideration of certain exposures is just one of the ways industry insiders at the EPA appear to be underestimating the harms of toxic substances. “The specifics vary from one chemical to another, but by ignoring certain evidence, EPA uses the risk assessment process to put its thumb on the scales and come out with a result that is weaker and less health protective than it would otherwise be,” said Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Each time we see one of these assessments, there are ways in which the science has been played with.”

Denison pointed to the EPA’s recent handling of a likely carcinogen called 1,4-dioxane, which is used to make other chemicals and forms spontaneously in some shampoos, cosmetics, and cleaning products. In 2013, IRIS set a safety threshold for the chemical based, in part, on studies showing that female mice exposed to it developed cancerous tumors in their livers. Yet when the EPA released its draft risk assessment of 1,4-dioxane under the new TSCA law in June, “they conveniently omitted those tumors,” said Denison. “They removed the most sensitive endpoint and as a result came up with five-fold less protective risk value.”

Another dishonest technique the EPA has used to deem chemicals safe is to change safety thresholds when chemicals don’t meet them. Although the 1963 Clean Air Act mandated that the lifetime cancer risk to an average individual should be no greater than 1 in a million, since 2008 the agency has used a much less protective risk standard for carcinogens in the air: 1 in 10,000. NRDC sued in an effort to get the EPA under George W. Bush to stick with the more protective number, but a three-judge panel that included Brett Kavanaugh ruled against the environmental group in 2008. “They gutted the law and set the course for the next two decades,” said John Walke, the NRDC attorney who argued the case. When testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, Kavanaugh lied about the case, describing it as one in which he’d ruled for environmentalists.

Although previous administrations have used the 1-in-a-million standard when evaluating the safety of toxic chemicals, the Trump administration recently began using the 1-in-10,000 standard, Denison said. In several recent reports issued under the updated chemicals law, including a draft assessment of the deadly paint stripper methylene chloride, the EPA inexplicably used this lower bar for determining when a cancer rate for workers is unacceptable. “It looks to me like some scientists were doing the number-crunching, and somebody came up and said, ‘Yikes, look at all this risk. How do we make it go away?’” said Denison.

The EPA insists that it “is following the legal process in TSCA, which ensures that our risk evaluations are transparent and include a robust review of the available science,” according to an emailed statement from an EPA spokesperson. The statement also said, “The draft risk evaluations released so far represent the agency’s preliminary conclusions on these chemicals. EPA goes beyond what TSCA requires by peer reviewing the risk evaluations it releases in order to increase public transparency in the risk evaluation process and receive expert feedback on the science that underlies the risk determinations. If EPA’s final risk evaluations find there are unreasonable risks associated with these chemicals, the agency will propose actions to address those risks within the timeframe required by TSCA.”

Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow’s Freeport facility released more than 200 air pollutants in 2017 and has violated its permits in every quarter of the past three years, making it a high-priority violator of the Clean Air Act. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

A Polluter’s Paradise

There may be no better place to see the consequences of the unraveling of chemical regulation than in Texas.Home to roughly two-thirds of the nation’s petrochemical industry and a fast-growing number of factories that make plastic and its feedstocks, Texas is a hub for the production of carcinogenic compounds as well as a leader in the movement to weaken regulations of them. For years, Texas has been a polluter’s paradise. As the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries have exploded throughout the state, the TCEQ’s Honeycutt has presided over an easing of restrictions on their emissions even as his staff has been reduced.

With 1.7 million new cases estimated for 2019 in the United States, cancer is a particular problem in Freeport, Texas.Rates of Hodgkin lymphoma are elevated in this small town on the Gulf Coast, as are cancers of the liver and bile duct, lung, stomach, and nasal cavity and middle ear, according to a report that the Texas Department of State Health Services quietly released in 2018.

The report makes no mention of pollution as a possible cause of the elevated number of cancer cases, yet Freeport is home to the largest chemical production facility in the western hemisphere: 12,800 acres of holding tanks, machinery, canals, deep-water ports, and pipelines, owned by Dow. Alongside it are chemical production facilities owned by other companies, including BASF, Shintech, Huntsman, and the Olin Corporation, the largest chlor-alkali producer in the world, which bought part of its Freeport manufacturing site from Dow in 2015.

Dow’s Freeport plant produces more than 40 billion pounds of chemicals and other products, including the components of much of the world’s plastics. In the process, the plant emits hundreds of toxic chemicals. The facility released more than 200 air pollutants in 2017 and has violated its permits in every quarter of the past three years, making it a high-priority violator of the Clean Air Act. Between 2015 and 2018, the complex emitted more than 3 million pounds of unpermitted air pollution on top of what it was allowed to release, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project.

Cancer-2-08-1578686568On-site manufacturing releases of 18 of the 19 carcinogens currently being reviewed by the EPA under the revised 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act. All data drawn from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, 2014 – 2018, as reported by manufacturers. Locations include facilities within 50 miles. Data does not include releases at waste disposal/recycling facilities or on-site underground injection wells. Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept]

Among the pollutants being released by Dow in Freeport are 11 carcinogens that are now being assessed or considered for assessment by the EPA under the new toxic chemicals law, according to EPA data. Of those chemicals, five have been shown to increase levels of the very cancers that are elevated in Freeport. Over the past five years, the Dow plant released more than 221,000 pounds of these five chemicals, including 1,2-dichloropropane, which causes bile duct cancer and is a probable cause of cancer of the nasal cavity and inner ear; 1,3-butadiene, which has been shown to increase rates of stomach cancers (and was recently released in an explosion at another chemical plant on the Texas coast); 1,1,2-trichloroethane and 1,1-dichloroethane, both of which have been linked to liver cancer in mice; and 1,2-dichloroethane, a probable carcinogen that has been linked to stomach, liver, and lung cancers.

But initial reports that the EPA recently released on the chemicals it’s investigating omit information that the agency has in its own databases about where and in what quantities these chemicals are produced, which companies make them, and how they’re used. As a result, most people in Freeport — and other polluted communities — do not realize that the industrial facilities near them are releasing dangerous amounts of these carcinogens. Also, because they omit this critical information, the assessments themselves may not reflect the true dangers posed by these substances.

Dow has done little to address the prevalence of cancer in the area, though the company did sponsor a “Sparkles and Spurs” fundraiser in 2018 to help buy a CT scanner for the CHI St. Luke’s Health cancer center in Brazosport, Texas, which is just a 15-minute drive from the Dow Chemical plant. Some residents call it the “Dow Cancer Center” because it was built on land donated by the giant chemical company. The evening of food, fun, and “foot stompin’” country music helped the center purchase the CT scanner, which the hospital is still using to diagnose new cancer cases.

Although they are more likely to get certain cancers, residents of Freeport — where the median household income is less than $37,000 a year — may have a difficult time getting care at the local hospital. “The Dow cancer center won’t take indigent patients,” said Melanie Oldham, a Freeport resident and physical therapist who said that she has worked with hundreds of clients in the area who have had cancer. “People who don’t have good insurance end up having to drive back and forth to either Galveston or to MD Anderson, which is an hour away.” Many of them are workers at the Dow plant, according to Oldham. “These are great jobs until you’re 50 or so,” she said. “That’s when a lot of my patients develop cancer.”

Physical therapist, Melanie Oldham, in her Freeport, Texas home, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Physical therapist Melanie Oldham at her home in Freeport, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

Oldham pushed for years to get the state to conduct the cancer incidence study it released in 2018. The results confirmed her hunch that cancer rates in Freeport continued to exceed state and national rates. But the vindication brought no relief. “Dow could prevent a lot of these cancers,” said Oldham, “but instead it’s ‘Let’s put money into the local cancer center.’ It’s all about PR for them.”

The CHI St. Luke’s Health-Brazosport Hospital emailed a statement in response to inquiries from The Intercept saying, “CHI St. Luke’s Health is committed to serving all in our community including the poor and vulnerable. We have a consistent stewardship policy across our division that outlines our process for caring for underserved and vulnerable patients who can’t afford healthcare services.”

The Texas Department of State Health Services said it has not investigated the environmental causes of the increased number of cancer cases in Freeport. “Our protocol is to continue to monitor the situation and re-evaluate as more data becomes available,” department spokesperson Chris Van Deusen wrote in an email to The Intercept. In a separate email, Van Deusen wrote that the health department could not provide any earlier reports on cancer rates in Freeport because it doesn’t retain them after four years.

For Clarence Thompson, cancer came as no surprise. Many of the people he worked with at the Dow plant in Freeport have already died of the disease. Thompson, who was employed by a company that contracted with Dow, did pipe-fitting, welding, and machine operation at the Texas plant for more than 25 years and worked there when a cluster of brain cancer cases was identified among workers. Back then Thompson was in near constant motion, according to Eve Thompson, his wife of 43 years. “Even when he’d come in from work, he’d keep working, mow the yard, or tinker with something,” she recently recalled. “I did not marry a lazy man.”

Clarence Thompson stands outside of his Brazoria, Texas home assisted by a walking stick, on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Clarence Thompson stands outside of his home in Brazoria, Texas, assisted by a walking stick, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

The front yard of Clarence Thompson’s home in Brazoria, Texas, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Willie Leona Willow applies lotion to her father, Clarence Thompson’s face prior to going outside, at Clarence’s home in Brazoria, Texas, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.

Left/Top: The front yard of the Thompson’s home in Brazoria. Right/Bottom: Thompson's daughter, Willie Leona Willow, applies lotion to her father's face prior to going outside.Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

At 68, Thompson still wants to work, but these days he can barely walk. He has trouble remembering things and difficulty eating, and suffers from near constant pain in his lower back. At first Thompson thought his symptoms were just part of growing older. But Eve suspected that something was wrong. And when she took him to a doctor in June, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells. In the months since, Thompson, who is almost 6 feet tall, has lost 50 pounds and has been hospitalized with several life-threatening infections. Thompson said he was exposed to several carcinogens while working at the Dow plant, including ethylene oxide and asbestos, both of which have been linked to multiple myeloma.

Yet even as his vitality is draining away, Thompson worries about the dangers that chemicals from the plant may pose both to other workers and neighbors.

Residents of Freeport are not the only people living dangerously near facilities that emit the carcinogenic chemicals now under scrutiny from the EPA. An analysis performed for this story by Material Research, an environmental data analysis company, shows that the chemicals are being released in particularly large quantities in eight hubs for the production and disposal of plastic. Among the most polluted hotspots are industrial areas in Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Port Arthur and Houston, Texas; El Dorado, Arkansas; and Louisville and Calvert City, Kentucky.

Many people living in these highly polluted communities don’t know what chemicals they’re breathing, let alone the dangers they present, according to Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant who has worked in all of these hotspots. “But when you go there and say these are the chemicals and these are their known human health impacts, people start saying Oh, I have that, I have that, and I have that,” said Subra. “Most of those facilities have been there two or three generations and people are able to tell you not just what cancers they have but what cancers their parents and aunts and uncles had.”

More Leukemia, Please

While some carcinogenic chemicals that have already gone through the IRIS process are getting a more forgiving assessment through TSCA, the EPA is also refusing to release one IRIS report — on formaldehyde — even as it performs a new assessment of the chemical. Formaldehyde, used in building materials, glue insulation, and fabric, has been widely recognized as a cause of leukemia. In 2018, IRIS’s assessment of the chemical, which was expected to confirm the link to the blood cancer, was ready for “imminent release,” as then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt told the Senate.

Formaldehyde already accounts for more than half the nationwide cancer risk from air pollution. Because it’s so widespread — more than 93 million pounds have been released in the U.S. since 2014 — and because its safety threshold is now 30 years old and evidence of its carcinogenicity has mounted during that time, updating the number IRIS calculated would likely increase the official cancer risk in many places around the country and drive up the number of census tracts where the cancer rate is officially problematic. But in April, EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler announced that the agency would not be releasing the IRIS report on the chemical, which had been in the works for more than a decade.

The IRIS assessment was one of 11 the agency withheld from publication, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office. (In its statement, the EPA described these reports as “reduced from the IRIS workflow.”) Wheeler said that the EPA would instead assess formaldehyde through the new toxic chemicals law, thus indefinitely delaying the bad news about formaldehyde and cancer.

It’s worth noting that the Trump appointee who now heads the EPA’s Office of Research Development where IRIS assessments are produced, David Dunlap, used to work for Koch Industries. Georgia-Pacific Chemicals, a subsidiary of Koch, is one of the country’s largest producers of formaldehyde. Before working for Koch, Dunlap handled regulation for the Chlorine Institute, a trade group to which Dow and Olin belong. Dunlap also served on the ACC’s formaldehyde panel, which has disputed the link between the chemical and leukemia. Nancy Beck, the political appointee at the EPA who rewrote the rule determining how the agency would assess chemicals, also worked for the ACC. And David Fischer, the person who replaced her at the agency after she left this summer, is an ACC alum as well, having spent a decade working there on the TSCA.

Honeycutt, who gave the keynote address at the ACC’s “premier” regulatory conference in 2018, also has strong ties to the trade group. Even though he remains in Texas, Honeycutt has had an outsized impact on chemical policy beyond the state and is in close touch with EPA staff. Before the TCEQ publicly released its ethylene oxide assessment, Honeycuttsent it to Anne Idsal, a former TCEQ employee who is now running the EPA’s Air Office, which is steering the agency’s policy on ethylene oxide. A Texan with close ties to the oil and gas industry, Idsal’s father owned the ranch where Dick Cheney shot a Texas attorney while hunting quail.

Honeycutt also emailed an explanation of the assessment to Erin Chancellor, another former TCEQ employee who now heads the EPA’s regional office in Texas, telling her to “hold it close.” Texas’s top toxicologist may have written about ethylene oxide to other EPA staff and industry representatives, but the Texas agency has refused to provide some documents in response to a Sierra Club public records request specifically asking for communications between TCEQ staff and a long list of interested parties, including the American Petroleum Institute, the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, Chevron Phillips, Exxon Mobil, Formosa, Georgia-Pacific, and Dow/DuPont. In September, after the Sierra Club pushed to get the documents the TCEQ had withheld, the attorney general of Texas ruled in its favor. In response, the TCEQ took the unusual step of suing the attorney general rather than complying with the decision. That case is now pending.

Asked about Honeycutt’s emails to Idsal and Chancellor, the TCEQ’s spokesperson wrote in an email that “TCEQ routinely interacts and share information with EPA.” His email also said that the state attorney general didn’t rule on whether certain documents “fall within exceptions to disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act” and that the only way to get him to address the question was to sue.

Meanwhile, Honeycutt is also making changes that will affect how all cancer-causing chemicals are treated throughout the country. In 2017, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt named Honeycutt chair of the agency’s influential Science Advisory Board. The group is supposed to provide scientific advice to the administrator, but under Trump it has been stacked with industry apologists. This summer, Honeycutt, along with fellow advisory board members from Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and the American Chemistry Council, quietly began proposing profound and lasting changes to the EPA’s cancer guidelines.

Throughout the EPA’s almost 50-year history, the agency has held that there is no safe level of a carcinogen. But Honeycutt and his colleagues on the advisory board have proposed reversing that assumption. “They want to flip it so there can be safe levels of cancer-causing chemicals,” said Jen Sass, a senior scientist at NRDC, who sees the move as a ruse for allowing companies to freely release pollutants. “Their presumption is that low levels of carcinogens aren’t harmful and might even be good for you. And industry wants to define low level as whatever level you’re exposed to.”

In an emailed response to questions about the cancer guidelines, a spokesperson for the agency wrote, “The EPA is currently considering the SAB member’s individual comments as well as those provided by the public as they consider next steps for this project.”

Because the nation’s cancer guidelines are rewritten very infrequently — the most recent version was published in 2005 — Sass fears that the new ones will have an enduring impact. “Guidances like this last for decades,” she said. “I don’t know how this could be undone later.”

[A white substance resembling steam billows out of Vantage's factory in Gurnee, Ill. on Jan. 2, 2020. Vantage is one of the factories in Lake County that emits ethylene oxide, a gas known to cause cancer. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.Steam billows out of Vantage’s factory in Gurnee, Ill., on Jan. 2, 2020. Vantage is one of the factories in Lake County that emits ethylene oxide. Photo: Pat Nabong for The Intercept]

Making America Sick Again

Other hard-to-reverse plans that could result in increased cancers rates throughout the country are also quietly moving ahead. On December 31, the deregulatory dream of tobacco industry attorney Christopher Horner took another step closer to becoming national policy. While Trump was preparing to ring in the new year at Mar-a-Lago with Rudy Giuliani, Honeycutt released an analysis of the proposed secret science rule — now rebranded “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” — on behalf of the EPA’s science advisory board.The EPA now has to answer several questions the board posed in that document. Once it is finalized, the rule will have to undergo a 60-day comment period. But after that, the once pie-in-the-sky scheme is likely to become the law of the land.

If and when it does get finalized and survives the legal challenges it will certainly face, the secret science rule will be even more crippling to health-based regulations than Horner first envisioned. His original idea was to require that studies used to make regulatory decisions be reproducible — which sounds fine in theory until you understand that they are often based on confidential private health data of thousands of individuals. And an earlier version of the EPA’s proposed rule called for placing these restrictions only on certain studies. But the EPA amended the proposal last year to require that all raw data and models underlying regulatory decisions be made available for reanalysis, with exceptions possible only on the administrator’s whim.

The requirement would mean that even science that was used to guide past regulations may be up for grabs. The EPA’s 2016 ethylene oxide assessment was partially based on breast cancer incidence data that contained confidential personal information, so under the proposed secret science rule that data could be ruled illegitimate. The rule could also undercut the utility of all the data that Simon Strong is collecting in honor of his son. Because that information will be collected in accordance with standard privacy protocols, it wouldn’t be considered in regulatory decision-making.

And the EPA could be prevented from basing any regulation on studies of cancer clusters like the one near the Dow plant in Freeport, Texas. “The way you show a cluster is to go to a community and enter their confidential health information and compare that to other areas,” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, one of dozens of groups that oppose the proposed rule. “But you wouldn’t be able to release that raw data because it’s confidential.”

The rule could render other groundbreaking science useless for protecting public health, too, such as studies showing the link between air pollution and lung cancer, between smoking and various cancers, or between the industrial contaminant PFOA and testicular and kidney cancer. The change would mark a profound shift both for the U.S. government and for the American people. “It’s saying what’s important is no longer the public interest but the industrial interest,” said Rosenberg. “Cancer is the most obvious and feared sign of ignoring public interest. And this will lead to more cancer.”

good sum PM2.5 and secret sci BS:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28052020/contrarian-science-james-enstrom-epa-climate-change/

no lnx many

How a Contrarian Scientist Helped Trump’s EPA Defy Mainstream Science

James Enstrom’s work on particle pollution’s health effects contradicts the findings of dozens of studies, but that hasn’t stopped the agency from relying on it.

By Marianne Lavelle

May 28, 2020

In March 2017, a scientist named James Enstrom rattled many public health experts by publishing a study concluding that there was no link between fine soot air pollution and premature death.

The finding was drastically at odds with the consensus of medical researchers and with the evidence from nearly three decades of previous research.

But it was in line with arguments that Enstrom, a physicist-turned-epidemiologist, had been making for years. His dissent had played an essential role in his ascendance as a folk hero to far-right conservatives who oppose most environmental protection policies in the United States, especially those put in place by the Obama administration.

Enstrom argued that his analysis refuted one of the most influential papers in environmental health science: a 1995 study by the American Cancer Society showing that fine particulate matter pollution—or PM 2.5, as it is known—is associated with early death. PM 2.5 is produced primarily through the burning of oil, coal and wood.

Enstrom, 76, said he based his study on long-hidden cancer society data from an inside source whom he did not name. Throughout the article, which appeared in the journal Dose-Response, he took jabs at institutions that he believed had long marginalized him, including the cancer society (ACS), leading scientific journals, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other health researchers, who, he wrote, “need to promptly address my findings.” He hinted at scientific malfeasance and suggested that there was a conspiracy of silence against minority views like his. 

Big-name journals, Enstrom wrote in the article, were biased against publishing results showing no association between air pollution and mortality, adding that seven other peer-reviewed scientific journals had rejected his study. In an unusual footnote, he also included a link to the rejection letters.

Over the next months, Enstrom’s paper drew fierce criticism. The cancer society said it could not confirm his data’s authenticity. The scientists whose work he had critiqued—including some of the world’s renowned experts in air pollution health science—published a withering point-by-point take-down of Enstrom’s methods and analysis.

But in at least one realm, his paper won acceptance. Eight weeks before the study was published, President Donald Trump took office. And in an administration disdainful of scientific consensus and intent on dismantling restraints on the fossil fuel industry, Enstrom found a receptive audience.

When, last month, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced the agency’s decision that it would not raise the standards for air pollution because the science of PM 2.5 was too uncertain to justify doing so, he was relying in part on Enstrom’s work. Enstrom’s research was among the studies cited by Wheeler’s hand-picked committee of science advisers to raise doubts about the PM 2.5 consensus.

More broadly, Enstrom’s work has helped provide the underpinning for the Trump administration’s wide-ranging assault on environmental protection policy, from its retreat on climate change to its current effort to restrict the type of science used by the EPA by disqualifying studies that critics say are some of the most important in human health science. 

In a way, Enstrom’s journey from outsider to influencer is the story of the Trump administration’s monumental campaign to remake the rules of scientific evidence, and how that effort could shape U.S. environmental protection for years to come.

“These are changes that could have very major impacts on human health and on the environment itself,” said Bernard Goldstein, dean emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Health. “All of the laws we passed that cleaned up the environment so well—even with the challenges we still have—these have all been science-based. Well, if you knock the science out of the process, you can base the decisions on politics.”

Goldstein, who served as EPA’s assistant administrator for research and development under President Ronald Reagan, recently wrote that the leadership of the scandal-ridden agency in the early Reagan years “did nothing that even came close to the assault on the independence and expertise of the scientific advisory processes carried out by Wheeler and his predecessor, Scott Pruitt.”

‘Everything’s Been Turned on its Head’

Critics often call the Trump administration “anti-science,” but in fact, its retreat on climate change and public health and safety has only been possible with the help of science—the work of contrarians like Enstrom who have devoted themselves to challenging the mainstream consensus.

Trump’s appointees have found justification for their actions in the work and ideas of this stable of scientists, most of them industry aligned, who for years have provided ammunition to foes of federal regulation.

These contrarians have helped make the case in agencies, in Congress and in the courts, for coal, oil and other industries intent on maintaining their way of doing business in the face of increasing attention to the threats posed by climate change, and the growing imperative for cleaner air and cleaner energy.

President Trump has made clear decisions to upend environmental policy, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, but he has also made more subtle moves, like the purging of experts from science advisory committees, limiting the science that can be used by the EPA and the relying on contrarian studies like Enstrom’s work on PM 2.5. Credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

Fossil fuel companies were losing ground in this battle when Trump entered the White House: The Obama administration’s actions on global warming seemed as if they might presage the industry’s last stand. To change course, the Trump administration has sought to change fundamentally how science is evaluated in environmental decision-making.

Trump’s grand moves to upend environmental policy, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, are well known. But his legacy may be sealed more deeply in scores of arcane changes deep in the bureaucratic process, like the purging of experts from science advisory committees; the overhaul of cost-benefit analyses; the effort to limit the science that can be used by the EPA; and the reliance on contrarian studies like Enstrom’s work on PM 2.5.

“Everything’s been turned on its head by EPA, so that the consultants are considered the good guys and the academics are all biased,” said Goldstein.

Carol Browner, board chairwoman of the League of Conservation Voters, who was EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton and climate adviser to President Barack Obama, puts it this way: “What they’re doing in this whole line of insidious actions is to dismantle and fundamentally change how the agency does its business.”

A Plan to Discredit Pollution Science

A number of the actions have been aimed at neutralizing the power of one of the most important findings in environmental health science: The science showing that air pollution kills.

In the 1990s, two large, long-term studies, by the American Cancer Society and Harvard researchers, showed that breathing higher levels of PM 2.5—microscopic particles 2.5 microns in diameter or less that spew into the air when something is burned—was associated with premature death.

Virtually everyone is exposed to the PM 2.5 because it is produced by the burning of coal, oil and wood.

[PM 2.5 Explainer infograpic]

Groups allied with the fossil fuel and tobacco industries led an effort to discredit the science, but a reanalysis of the data by the Boston-based Health Effects Institute (HEI), a nonprofit research organization funded by the EPA and the auto industry, affirmed the findings. Since then, dozens of studies, including more than 30 long-term human health studies in North America, have documented the link between PM 2.5 and premature death.

Based on the science, Clinton enacted the first national air quality standards on PM 2.5 in 1997.

Even more important, the large-scale studies of PM 2.5 allowed policy makers to quantify the benefits of cleaner air in a way that had not been possible before. The EPA, after peer-reviewing the science, began using the number of lives saved from reduced PM 2.5 exposure in the cost-benefit analysis it was required to perform to justify new cuts in pollution from cars, trucks and power plants.

In 2011, the EPA estimated that the benefits yielded by U.S. air pollution rules from 1990 to 2020 at $2 trillion, a figure that outweighed the costs of the regulation by 30-to-1, savings primarily attributable to reduced PM 2.5. In addition, the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s signature climate initiative, was to result in PM 2.5 reductions that would account for up to 60 percent of the plan’s projected $34 billion to $54 billion in benefits, far outweighing its $8.4 billion in costs.

That lopsided calculus stood in the way of what Trump said was his plan to “quickly, very quickly” end U.S. climate policy and other restraints on the oil and coal industries. This was well understood by appointees like Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, and William Wehrum, Trump EPA’s assistant administrator for air pollution policy until 2019.

In 2014, Wehrum, a former industry lawyer, led an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to overturn the Obama EPA’s PM 2.5 standards, by invoking the work of contrarian scientists like Enstrom. But a federal court disagreed. “Petitioners simply have not identified any way in which EPA jumped the rails of reasonableness in examining the science,” wrote then-U.S. District Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Still, that loss pointed to an avenue for a future attack on PM 2.5 science. And soon after taking office, Trump’s appointees followed that path, overhauling EPA’s science advisory boards and replacing every member of its legally mandatedClean Air Science Advisory Committee or CASAC,which had sided with the mainstream consensus on PM 2.5.

By last year, the reshaped CASAC made clear that it had a far different view of the risks posed by PM 2.5. In a key review, the committee not only disputed EPA’s staff scientists on the need to act on new evidence of PM 2.5 health risks, the CASAC members were divided on the long-standing consensus that PM 2.5 caused premature death.

One of the studies the committee cited in its final report raising doubts about the science on PM 2.5 was Enstrom’s 2017 research report. It had taken a long time for Enstrom to have his work recognized, and he expressed his satisfaction when he called into a public teleconference of a CASAC meeting last December.

“This is a tremendous group, and I don’t believe it’s ever been done better in the 50-year history of EPA,” Enstrom said of the committee.

A Turning Point

In the Trump era, Enstrom may be a scientific influencer, but he has spent much of the last two decades as an outsider vocal about feeling unfairly maligned.

The point in his life when mainstream scientists turned against him, he believes, came 17 years ago, when he published a paper in the British Medical Journal challenging the scientific consensus that second-hand tobacco smoke causes heart disease and cancer.

The American Cancer Society condemned the study, funded by the tobacco industry through its now-defunct Center for Indoor Air Research, saying it misrepresented the cancer society’s data. The data Enstrom based his research on was from an early ACS long-term study group, whose members were recruited in the 1950s. But at that time, smoking was so ubiquitous that it was impossible to conduct a valid study comparing people who’d been exposed to second-hand smoke with people who hadn’t, the ACS argued in rebutting Enstrom’s study.

[ cf The Anti-Scientists series]

A host of other scientists also joined in: The medical journal published 10 letters disputing Enstrom’s method, findings and the conflict of interest they said was created by the industry sponsorship.

But Enstrom insisted that the work was sound. “This was peer-reviewed, and there’s not been one error identified in my paper,” he said in an interview with InsideClimate News.

As for the conflict of interest, Enstrom said he saw no difference between his acceptance of funding from a group controlled by tobacco executives and the practice of accepting research money from state cigarette tax funds and tobacco legal settlement money, as his scientist critics had. Both, he said, “originated with” the tobacco industry.

In Enstrom’s eyes, he was the target of relentless persecution, smears that had all but obscured the early achievements of his career.

“Up until 2003, I basically had a third of a century where I had a perfect record of integrity,” said Enstrom. Since then, he said, “my entire career has been under attack and the attack has never let up.”

‘If I Didn’t Fight I Could Have Disappeared’

Enstrom grew up in a middle class home in southern California, part of a wave of aspiring young Cold War-era scientists inspired by stories of the physicist Albert Einstein and Russia’s launch of Sputnik, the first manmade satellite.

Enstrom’s father, Elmer, was a courtroom clerk who longed to argue cases instead of swear in witnesses. Elmer Enstrom taught himself law and passed the California bar at 41, eventually serving as a U.S. Magistrate Judge in San Diego. But he became best known for his pro bono legal work in retirement, representing residents who were fighting court-ordered busing in the San Diego public schools.

The younger Enstrom said he learned the value of perseverance from his father’s example.

As a student at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont,California, a then-new institution aiming to nurture the technological talent the United States needed for the space race, Enstrom was co-valedictorian of the class of 1965. He went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford, where his dissertation adviser was Melvin Schwartz, who later won the Nobel Prize. Enstrom’s post-doctoral work at what is now known as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was carried out under another luminary, Luis W. Alvarez, also a Nobelist and a veteran of the Manhattan Project.

Physics, Enstrom recalled recently, was “exciting, exhilarating, because you’re on the very forefront of science.” But his studies left him unfulfilled.

“If you’re doing elementary particle physics, you’re basically doing something that’s not really that understandable to most people,” he said.

Through a college friend, Enstrom met Lester Breslow, California’s top health official in the 1960s, who promoted a healthy diet and abstention from smoking as key to a long life. Enstrom became so drawn to the study of human health that he switched fields, working with Breslow, the dean of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles, for many years on a multi-part study on the longevity of Mormons, work supported by the American Cancer Society.

But Enstrom, who obtained a master’s degree in epidemiology, was not on a tenure track at UCLA, and he relied on grant money to maintain his research position.

Over the next years, after public health advocates began blasting his work as suspect, Enstrom struck back. He accused those who questioned his integrity of liberal bias, and repeatedly clashed with his previous sponsors, colleagues, other scientists and government officials.

Among those Enstrom said were biased was a colleague, John Froines, a professor in UCLA’s environmental health sciences department. Froines was a science adviser to California regulators, and had supported strong air pollution rules.

Politically, the two men could not have been further apart. While Enstrom spent the Vietnam War studying in a defense-related field,Froines was one of the “Chicago Seven,” anti-war activists arrested during the riots outside of the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

In 2009, Enstrom helped initiate a lawsuit by a conservative legal group charging that Froines had overstayed his tenure on California’s air pollution science review panel. Amid the controversy, Froines was temporarily removed from the board, but later reinstated. Froines, contacted by email, declined comment for this story.

In 2010, UCLA gave Enstrom notice that he was being terminated. His research, the university said, was “not aligned” with the school’s academic mission and his research output and ability to secure continued funding did not meet the department’s minimum requirements.

Enstrom sued UCLA, charging that his termination, which came after a confidential vote by his department’s faculty, was in retaliation for his activism and his “whistleblowing” regarding Froines.

The case was eventually settled, with UCLA denying Enstrom’s allegations. UCLA “vigorously supports the principles of academic freedom,” the university said in an emailed statement. “Enstrom’s presence as a researcher for decades, despite his minority positions defending diesel emissions and tobacco, demonstrates that fact.” In the settlement, UCLA paid Enstrom $140,000 and gave him continued access to university resources, as well as permission to use the title “retired researcher.”

Enstrom told UCLA’s student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, that he was not entirely satisfied with the settlement, but thought it was the best compromise that could have been reached in the case.

“I am a good scientist, a very honest scientist,” Enstrom said. “If I didn’t fight I could have disappeared.”

A War Over PM 2.5

For Enstrom, a major battleground has always been his home state of California, which historically has led the way in U.S. air pollution regulation. Thousands of pages documenting his advocacy against air pollution regulations are collected at the website of the Scientific Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization he founded in Los Angeles.

In the 1990s, while he was still at UCLA, he began consulting for the tobacco industry, a role that would lead eventually to his study on second-hand smoking and his rift with the American Cancer Society.

Around the same time, Enstrom was contacted by Frederick Lipfert, a consultant for the industry-funded Electric Power Research Institute, who had seen Enstrom’s work with the early ACS research cohort.

Lipfert asked if Enstrom could delve into the cancer society data to explore a question of crucial importance to the operators of the nation’s power plants, more than half of which were fired by coal at the time: Were the invisible particles that their operations released into the air deadly?

With that, Enstrom joined the war over PM 2.5.

The buildings of downtown Los Angeles are partially obscured by smog at midday on Nov. 5, 2019. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

The buildings of downtown Los Angeles are partially obscured by smog at midday on Nov. 5, 2019. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

He soon became a one-man exemplar of the wide-ranging and high-stakes conflict over the pollutant. He testified before California state regulators, advised a Congressional committee, and filed a lawsuit over the makeup of EPA’s science advisory boards.

In 2005, Enstrom published a study funded by the Electric Power Research Institute that found no association between PM 2.5 and premature death in Californians from 1983 to 2002. That finding again put him at odds with the cancer society because it purported to shed doubt on the ACS’s influential PM 2.5 work. It had the flavor of personal payback, as well: A co-author of the cancer society’s PM 2.5 study was Michael Thun, then ACS’s vice president for research, the same scientist who had condemned Enstrom’s tobacco research two years earlier.

But at the time, Enstrom’s findings did not gain traction with government regulators.

For the EPA, the decisive flaw in Enstrom’s study was his reliance on county-level air pollution data. Rates of premature death in lightly polluted rural areas could skew the rates in heavily polluted cities in the same county, especially in a state like California, with some of the largest counties in the nation.

The original ACS study in 1995 also had inexact exposure estimates, based on urban census tracts that in some cases encompassed several counties. But the ACS researchers had recently published a follow-up study that used smaller zip code areas in Los Angeles and found an even stronger association between PM 2.5 and deadly health effects. The correlation between the pollutant and harmful health effects also was holding up in research that had begun to use satellite remote sensing to pinpoint PM 2.5 pollution levels in the vicinity of individual people’s homes.

So regulators gave little weight to Enstrom’s study in comparison with the original Harvard and ACS studies; the reanalysis of that data; the cancer society’s follow-ups; as well as research on the effects of PM 2.5 carried out in other places, using different groups of subjects and different methodologies. These studies were augmented by work in lab animals that provided evidence of how PM 2.5 can disturb the cardiovascular system. In 2009, the EPA concluded that a broad body of evidence affirmed PM 2.5’s deadly toll.

“The evidence that combustion-related fine particle pollution contributes to both respiratory and cardiovascular diseases is just pretty compelling,” said C. Arden Pope, an economist at Brigham Young University and a co-author of both the original Harvard and ACS studies and follow-up studies.

“There are probably no two studies in environmental health that have been more independently reanalyzed,” Pope said. “They have been scrutinized in really remarkable ways and have held up.”

A Campaign Against ‘Secret Science’

Enstrom, however, was convinced that the findings of the Harvard and ACS studies were biased and politically motivated, carried out by scientists who favored more U.S. government regulation.

“What I’m watching is the descent of epidemiology from what used to be a legitimate public health science into just pure activism,” he said.

The legal battle with UCLA had earned Enstrom stature on the right. The libertarian publication Reason Magazine produced an online video on his mistreatment at the hands of what it called “the Green Regulation Machine.” The conservative American Freedom Alliance honored Enstrom as a “Hero of Conscience,” along with his wife, Marta Villanea, an administrative law judge, who supported him throughout his trials.

“All I did is what a good wife should do,” Villanea said in her acceptance speech.

Enstrom joined the board of trustees of the American Council on Science and Health, an industry and Libertarian-funded group that describes itself as a “a pro-science consumer advocacy organization,” although critics note that its advocacy invariably takes the form of battling government regulation.

Enstrom also became a science advisor to the Heartland Institute, the conservative think tank that has long supported and promoted work that disputes the science on climate change.

Steve Milloy, a former tobacco and coal industry adviser who had been leading attacks on PM 2.5 science from the beginning, said that Enstrom brought to the fight a “personal story of persecution.”

“It’s hard for people to understand what’s going on unless you’ve been really intimately involved in this saga, and Jim has been,” said Milloy. “He’s actually had his career damaged by it, and so he feels it very personally.”

Milloy, working with a fossil fuel-industry funded legal advocacy group, represented Enstrom in a lawsuit against EPA in 2016, alleging bias in the choice of scientists who served on its scientific advisory boards.

Enstrom also began advising U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who after becoming chairman of the House Science Committee in 2013 took up the cause of discrediting the science on PM 2.5.

Smith derided the ACS and Harvard studies as “secret science,” adopting a line of attack launched two decades earlier by industry foes of regulation who characterized the studies’ routine protections of patients’ confidential medical data as nefarious.

Smith pelted the EPA with subpoenas seeking the raw data, and continued his efforts even after he was reminded that the studies had already been re-analyzed. However, he said he knew one legitimate researcher whose request for access to the raw data had been turned down by the American Cancer Society: James Enstrom.

The EPA ultimately complied with Smith’s subpoena, but Smith did nothing further with the data. Instead, he sponsored a “secret science” bill seeking to bar the EPA in the future from relying on studies that used confidential data in regulatory decision-making. Critics said it would bar the public health agency from using some of the most important human health science. The legislation, first introduced in 2014, passed three times in the GOP-led House, but was never taken up by the closely divided Senate.

By the time of the last vote in March 2017, however, Trump was in the White House, and the prospects for Smith’s proposal suddenly improved.

The Trump administration was in a position both to enact limits on the EPA’s use of mainstream science and to give more weight to contrarian work of scientists like Enstrom, who had just published his new study challenging the foundations of PM 2.5 science.

Enstrom’s ‘Odd Man Out’ Study

Enstrom’s study almost wasn’t published. “I have never read a paper that so willfully ignored the breadth of scientific evidence and attacked a specific study/group of investigators,” said a reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the scientific journals that rejected the manuscript.

But Enstrom finally got the paper in print by reaching out to Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts, who had submitted a letter in support of Enstrom during his fight with UCLA.

Calabrese was a founder of the International Dose Response Society, an organization that holds that exposure to low doses of toxic agents can be beneficial—a position embraced by many industry groups and rejected by many advocates of strong environmental protection policies.

He was also the editor of the society’s journal, Dose-Response. Aware of the controversy Enstrom’s study would stir, Calabrese agreed to publish, but warned Enstrom he would give the authors Enstrom challenged a chance to respond. “I said you’ll have to take your whacks by the people you’re going to hit, and they’re formidable people,” Calabrese recalled.

In fact, the authors of the original ACS study and the Health Effects Institute (HEI) reanalysis soon published a detailed response, citing a litany of problems they had identified in Enstrom’s work.

The most significant fault, they wrote, was Enstrom’s use of old, county-level PM 2.5 readings instead of employing newer methods now widely used to estimate exposure more precisely. The authors of the critique had just published their latest follow-up study of the ACS cohort, using seven different methods of estimating pollution, including satellite remote sensing, and finding even more significant associations between PM 2.5 exposure and premature death.

Enstrom rejected the critiques of his study—in fact, in an interview last year, he refused to accept that the substance of his work had been called into question at all.

“This is an old tactic that’s used by people who don’t want to address fundamental issues,” Enstrom said. “Instead of addressing what I did, they use the tactic of looking at what I didn’t do, and which they know I can’t do. It’s a miracle that I was able to do what I did do, because of all the efforts to stop me, and the fact that this data is not available outside their little clique.”

Changing the Rules

Enstrom’s study was well-timed to figure into U.S. air pollution policy decision-making. As Trump took office, the EPA was already launching its re-assessment of the state of current science on PM 2.5, as the law requires the agency to do every few years for key pollutants to ensure that Clean Air Act regulations are adequate.

This time around, there was major new science on PM 2.5 to consider, including one of the largest studies ever, a Harvard analysis of the health records of 60 million Medicare recipients. It indicated that lowering PM 2.5 pollution nationwide by just 1 microgram per cubic meter would save 12,000 American lives annually. The research found the risk of premature death for African Americans in the study was three times as great as that for the general population.

But how the EPA weighed the science was affected profoundly by the changes made at the agency by Trump’s team, who borrowed the ideas and rhetoric that industry foes of regulation had honed in the 25-year battle over PM 2.5. Several members of Trump’s transition team, including Milloy, were longtime warriors in the campaign to discredit the science.

Trump’s first EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, accelerated the schedule for considering the adequacy of the national PM 2.5 science by two years, so that the review could be concluded by the end of Trump’s first term in office. And in the name of “sound science” and “independence,” Pruitt barred recipients of EPA grants from serving on agency science advisory boards. Since the EPA is one of the largest funders of environmental science, the move had the effect of knocking prominent experts off the committees.

To replace them, Pruitt and his successor, Wheeler, named industry-friendly state regulators and consultants for regulated industries, who faced no similar conflict-of-interest bar. Wheeler eliminated altogether a separate 20-person expert panel on particulate matter. It was precisely the sort of overhaul that Milloy and Enstrom had sought in their 2016 lawsuit against the EPA.

The agency’s rank and file was still staffed with scientists who predated Trump, and they gave Enstrom’s paper little weight when they considered it against the bulk of evidence on PM 2.5. The staff scientists cited more than 2,600 scientific studies in a nearly 2,000-page analysis finalized on Dec. 31, 2019. It affirmed the EPA’s long-standing conclusion that PM 2.5 was a cause of early death. In a separate analysis, EPA staff recommended a stricter national standard for fine particulate matter pollution.

But the Trump administration’s revamped six-member Clean Air Science Advisory Committee saw things differently. Chaired by statistician Louis Anthony Cox, a Denver consultant for the American Petroleum Institute and other industry groups, the CASAC urged that the agency require a much higher burden of proof for assessing pollution’s health harms.

Enstrom’s 2005 study was included in the list of studies that the committee said raised doubt about the link between PM 2.5 and premature death. And one CASAC member, Sabine Lange, a toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, wrote in a separate attachment that Enstrom’s 2017 study could be an effective challenge to the seminal American Cancer Society research.

“The Enstrom study had a finer resolution, so one would guess that it had less exposure error and therefore possibly a greater effect estimate, or one with narrower confidence intervals,” she wrote.

Last month, when the EPA announced it would not strengthen the pollution standard, Wheeler cited the committee’s report and the doubts about the  PM 2.5 science to justify the decision. “We’ve identified a lot of uncertainties,” he said.

Currently, Wheeler is moving forward with an initiative to change how the agency weighs science in the future. The proposal, called “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science,” is essentially the idea that Smith attempted to move through Congress three years ago, barring the EPA from basing decisions on studies that rely on patients’ confidential medical data, as the original ACS and Harvard Six Cities PM 2.5 studies did.

A wide array of health, medical and science organizations oppose Wheeler’s decision not to raise the PM 2.5 standard decision. On April 14, 19 health and medical organizations, led by the American Lung Association, said in a statement that the Trump EPA had employed a “deeply flawed” process and ignored “powerful, overwhelming evidence” that the current PM 2.5 standard is inadequate.

Scientists and health organizations are also fighting the so-called “transparency” rule—critics say even the name has an Orwellian ring to it, because the proposed regulation is not transparent about its purpose.

The public comment period on the proposed rule ended May 18, while the deadline for the public to weigh in on the PM 2.5 standard is June 29. “The way I see it, now, all the pieces are falling into place” in the Trump administration’s plan for weakened regulation, said Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy.

She said the purge of the science advisory boards, the appointments of industry consultants to the advisory committee and other changes to the process have helped obscure the strong scientific consensus around the risks of PM 2.5, while elevating the importance of the work of scientists like Enstrom.

“These contrarian scientists really have the ear of the EPA in ways they never had before,” Goldman said. “People like Enstrom provide the appearance of an independent scientist weighing in, and It all works together to get where we are—a rule that does not protect health with an adequate margin of safety.”

H. Christopher Frey, a professor of environmental engineering at North Carolina State University, who was a member of the particulate matter expert panel that Wheeler disbanded, said that the changes made under the Trump administration amounted to a rigging of the process. “If I wanted to design a science review that would have a predetermined outcome favorable to the regulated industries, I would get rid of the real experts,” he said.

Members of the disbanded panel, in fact, felt so strongly about the issue that they met on their own and submitted a report to EPA endorsing the agency staff’s finding that the PM 2.5 standard needed to be strengthened.

Frey said Enstrom’s argument—that his study has refuted the 1995 ACS study, and therefore, the EPA’s PM 2.5 standard should be withdrawn—reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the process.

“The standards are not set based on a single study, and they’re not withdrawn based on a single study,” Frey said. “It’s the overall body of evidence that is important.”

‘A Journey Almost Impossible to Comprehend’

Enstrom said recently that although he thinks there is no need for a PM 2.5 standard at all, he is gratified by Wheeler’s decision to maintain the current standard and to move forward with the “transparency” rule.

“It shows the value of persistence in terms of believing in honest science and trying to penetrate what seems like an impenetrable wall of dishonesty and deception,” he said. His struggle to be recognized, he added, was “a journey that is almost impossible to comprehend. It’s just been incredibly contentious and for what purpose I’m not sure I know, other than just deliberate power, power and ego.”

During a recent phone interview, Enstrom detoured frequently into speculation about “the other side” in the air pollution science debate.

He complained that air pollution studies authored by “activist Canadians” should not be the basis for U.S. environmental regulations. And he noted that a Chinese businessman’s family foundation has helped fund the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and that Chinese doctoral students were co-authors on the school’s air pollution studies.

“Do you see any of these Harvard people going over to China or central Africa where you do have air pollution problems?” Enstrom asked. “No. Their only goal is to force more regulation on Americans.”

Enstrom expressed particular outrage about a pre-publication study recently released by a Harvard group that found PM 2.5 levels in the United States to be associated with higher death rates from Covid-19. (The researchers have since revised their findings to reflect a lower, but still significant, association). Enstrom has published his own calculations of the pandemic’s effects in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s publication, The Daily Signal. Averaging counts of total mortality in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the five weeks ending April 4, early in the pandemic, he concluded that deaths were no higher than expected. And based on those numbers, Enstrom wrote, “It’s possible that the lethality of Covid-19 is no greater than that of the seasonal flu.”

Since then, the CDC’s weekly death counts have been as much as 36 percent higher than expected, and the agency estimates that Covid-19 is at least 10 times more deadly than the flu. Enstrom said he remains convinced that the impact in the U.S. is limited geographically, primarily to New York, and that public officials have overreacted. Although the loss of life was significant in the flu pandemic of 1917-1918, Enstrom said, “The country dealt with it. It was terrible, but it was not something to shut down the entire economy.”

Recently, Enstrom has sent personal emails to scientists and public interest groups who have criticized the Trump administration’s review of PM 2.5 science, asking them to discuss his evidence that “there is NO causal relationship between PM 2.5 and total mortality in the U.S.” 

So far, he lamented recently, no one has responded.

what fresh hell?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-epa-chiefs-vision-would-create-an-apocalyptic-devastated-planet-critics-warn/

environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler is under fire for a Thursday speech laying out a vision for the agency that critics warn would unleash untold environmental devastation should it come to pass.

Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, delivered the remarks at the Nixon Library in southern California to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the EPA. The agency was established under the Nixon administration.

Wheeler also framed as positive steps the administration’s environmental protection rollbacks and attacks on science. The EPA chief said that “members of former administrations and progressives in Congress have elevated single issue advocacy—in many cases focused just on climate change—to virtue-signal to foreign capitals, over the interests of communities within their own country.”

“Communities that deal with the worst pollution in this country—and tend to be low-income and minority—face multiple environmental problems that need solving,” Wheeler said. He suggested President Donald Trump’s “opportunity zones” plan—recognized by expertsas a giveaway to the rich—as a remedy to environmental injustice.

wheeler declared it “very disappointing to see governors on the East Coast, such as [New York] Governor Cuomo, unilaterally block pipelines that would take natural gas from Pennsylvania to New York and New England.”

“We helped President Trump successfully implement the new NEPA regulations with the goal of reviewing federal permits within two years,” Wheeler said of the administration’s attack on the bedrock environmental law.

He also touted “a proposed rule that would remove onerous and expensive regulation of gene-edited plant protectants” and the administration’s “science transparency rules,” referring to what its critics call a “secret science rule” to limit scientific evidence the EPA will consider in its work.

Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former EPA official who helped found the agency’s environmental justice office, took issue with Wheeler’s plans for environmental justice.

“Every one of the actions the Trump administration has taken, either by weakening or rolling back basic air and water protections, has put #environmentaljustice communities in greater harm,” he tweeted Thursday. “No one believes a Trump second term would value Black and Brown lives!” he added.

Brett Hartl, government affairs director at conservation group Center for Biological Diversity, rebuffed Wheeler’s claimthat the Trump administration has been a champion of EPA’s mission.

“Wheeler and the Trump administration have done grave and lasting damage to the EPA by elevating polluters and their profits above all else, and no slick speech can change that fact,” said Hartl. He further accused Wheeler of being “ignorant of the immense environmental progress made over the last 50 years because Congress and President Nixon recognized when they established the EPA that no one has a right to pollute our air, water, or land.”

“If Wheeler’s vision becomes real in the decades ahead,” warned Hartl, “our children and grandchildren would inherit nothing less than an apocalyptic, devastated planet.”

Hartl continued: “Instead of following the proud bipartisan traditions of the EPA, Wheeler has decimated protections for our nations wetlands and rivers, rolled back protections for toxic pollutants spewed into the air, rubberstamped pesticides that cause brain damage in children, and utterly ignored the climate crisis. He is a horror-show, through and through.”

==

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/senate-advances-secret-science-bill-setting-possible-showdown-white-house

senate advances 'secret science' bill, setting up possible showdown with White House

By Puneet KolliparaApr. 29, 2015

Republicans in Congress appear to be headed for a showdown with the White House over controversial “secret science” legislation aimed at changing how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses scientific studies. A deeply divided Senate panel yesterday advanced a bill that would require EPA to craft its policies based only on public data available to outside experts. The House of Representatives has already passed a similar measure. But Democrats and science groups have harshly criticized the approach, and the White House has threatened a veto.

The House and Senate bills are the product of long-standing complaints—mostly from conservative lawmakers—that EPA relies too heavily on raw data that are not easily available to outsiders. Republicans on the House science committee, for instance, have been waging a long-running battle with EPA officials over the release of health data used to support air pollution regulations. The bill’s opponents, however, say the calls for transparency are aimed at blocking the agency from using certain types of confidential data, potentially delaying or imperiling new environmental regulations to industry’s gain.

Both perspectives got airtime during yesterday’s debate in the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works over S. 544, the Secret Science Reform Act. It would require EPA to base all its rules, assessments, and guidance on data that is “transparent” and “reproducible.” The legislation, sponsored by Senator John Barrasso (R–WY), serves as a companion to a measure that the House approved last month mostly with GOP votes.

Democrats on the panel objected to the Republican majority’s plan to vote on the bill, arguing that the panel had not yet held any hearings on the legislation. (The House did hold hearings on its bill in previous sessions of Congress). “We are considering a legislative conclusion before we have done the legislative investigation,” said Senator Ed Markey (D–MA), one of several Democrats who called for shelving the bill until a hearing could occur.

Panel leaders rejected that idea, and the bill cleared the committee on an 11 to 9 party-line vote. Prior to that vote, Republicans beat back a couple of Democratic-sponsored amendments: one that would have restored EPA’s ability to rely on any peer-reviewed science, and another that would have required EPA to disclose only the funding sources, not the raw data, of studies the agency wants to use. Barrasso said the amendments would “defeat the purpose of the bill.”

On a voice vote, the committee did adopt an amendment that would prohibit any effort to bar EPA and other federal scientists from using common scientific terms. In offering the amendment, Senator Barbara Boxer (D–CA), the committee’s top Democrat, said she was alarmed by efforts by Republican officials in Florida and Wisconsin to allegedly bar certain state employees from talking about climate change.

Democrats say they plan to use the bill to call out Republicans for their party’s rejection of climate science. And Boxer lashed out at Republicans for supporting the measure just after the panel had advanced another bill that would give EPA more power to request data on chemicals’ risks and to regulate toxic substances. “This is insane, it’s just a joke,” Boxer said.

The secret science bills represent just one front in Republicans’ efforts to attack President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda, which they view as too costly to businesses and the economy. House Republicans have also pushed a bill to overhaul how EPA obtains scientific advice from its panel of independent scholars, and another measure to boost public participation and agencies’ data disclosure and analysis requirements. All three bills, approved by the House on mostly party-line votes, have received veto threats from the White House.

White House officials—along with Democrats, a bevy of scientific organizations, and public-interest groups—argue that the secret science legislation would force EPA to ignore numerous studies. They say that not only do many studies contain public health or industry-submitted data that are confidential, but the legislation provides too little funding for EPA to obtain all the necessary raw data. And many studies, such as longitudinal surveys, are not realistically “reproducible,” scientific organizations worry.

S. 544 now moves to the full Senate, which could act on it at any time. The House and Senate would then have to reconcile any differences in their bills and approve one measure to send to the White House—where it’s sure to meet a cold reception.

----

https://republicans-science.house.gov/news/press-releases/house-passes-bill-usher-new-era-epa-transparency

off bs

House Passes Bill to Usher in New Era of EPA Transparency

Nov 19, 2014

Press Release

Washington, D.C. – The House of Representatives today approved theSecret Science Reform Act of 2014 (H.R. 4012). The legislation requires the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to base its regulations on data that is public.

Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas): “Costly environmental regulations should only be based upon data that is available to independent scientists and the public. However, the EPA does not adhere to this practice.  Nearly every major air quality regulation from this administration has been justified by data that has been kept secret. This bill requires the EPA to base its decisions on information to which all scientists have access.  This will promote sound science and confidence in the EPA decision making process. This bill ensures the transparency and accountability that the American people want and deserve."

The Secret Science Reform Act was introduced by Environment Subcommittee Chairman David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) and has received letters of support from over 80 scientists and experts, including the former head of the EPA Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and the former head of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.  It also enjoys the support of 30 national and state trade associations, including theU.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufactures.

Environment Subcommittee Chairman David Schweikert (R-Ariz.): “The Secret Science Reform Act rules 'secret science' a condition of the past. Public policy should come from public data. Unfortunately, for far too long, the EPA has approved regulations that have placed a crippling financial burden on economic growth in this country without public evidence to justify all their actions. This common-sense legislation forces the EPA to be transparent and accountable with their findings."

The Secret Science Reform Act requires that the EPA base its regulations on publically available and verifiable information without compromising protections for personal information.

A 2013 poll from the Institute of Energy Researchfound that 90 percent of Americans agree that studies and data used to make federal government decisions should be public. Provisions in the bill are consistent with White House policy, the data access provisions of major scientific journals, and the recommendations of the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Obama administration’s top science advisors. The Chair of EPA’s own Science Advisory Board testified that EPA’s advisors recommend “that literature and data used by EPA be peer-reviewed and made available to the public."

The Secret Science Reform Act affirms laws prohibiting the disclosure of confidential or proprietary information.  The Act is not retroactive; it applies only to new, future regulations issued by the agency.  The bill forges a new path forward embracing scientific integrity and open government.

Companion legislation has been introduced in the Senate by Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming.

Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.): “Transparency and accountability should be a priority for every government agency—and the EPA is no exception. After the House passed our bill today, we are one step closer to finally changing the way things are done at the EPA. Since the American people are paying the price for these expensive regulations they deserve to see the science used to justify them."

===

==

orwellian transparency, no press allowed?

secert sci bs:

:On April 24, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt released a proposed rule that would restrict which scientific studies EPA could use in creating new regulations. The move — already controversial when it was first revealed over a month ago — would prevent EPA from considering studies in which the data is not available to the public, including the private health information of individuals in medical studies, and which is based on one-time events, such as the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Prominent climate science deniers were in attendance at the EPA announcement, including Marc Morano, Steve Milloy, and Will Happer.

...

twit:"era of secret science @EPA is coming to an end. The ability to test, authenticate, & reproduce scientific findings is vital for integrity of rulemaking process. Americans deserve to assess legitimacy of the science underpinning Agency decisions"

March 16, E&E reported that EPA Admin Scott Pruitt is brewing more plans to further hobble how the EPA uses (or in this case, doesn’t use) science to protect the public. According to E&E, the effort will be similar to the Orwellian-esque HONEST Act that Lamar Smith sponsored a year ago but is stalled in the Senate. Pruitt’s idea is to apply a blanket set of new criteria to studies the EPA can cite. The “sound science” recommendations are designed to sound reasonable, but in practice would render lots of high quality, relevant research off-limits.

==

https://desmog.co.uk/2020/05/18/epa-clean-air-committee-cox-harvard-air-pollution-covid

The head of a federal committee tasked with advising the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on air quality science recently disparaged a new Harvard study examining the link between air pollution and coronavirus fatalities across the country. The EPA adviser’s critical remarks appear consistent with his track record of disregarding robust science on air pollution and health risks in his consulting work for industry clients such as tobacco and fossil fuel interests.

Dr. Louis Anthony (Tony) Cox Jr., who is chair of EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, criticized a preliminary study from the HarvardT.H. Chan School of Public Health in comments made to the Washington Examiner. Cox — who previously produced his own study on air pollution and health risks that was funded and edited by the American Petroleum Institute — questioned the validity of the Harvard study, which was released publicly in early April but has yet to undergo formal peer review.

The study, which links the type of fine particulate air pollution produced by cars and power plants to higher COVID-19 mortality rates, has been submitted for review and publication to the New England Journal of Medicine.

“It was rushed out without being properly vetted,” Cox said. He called the study a “bogus piece of analysis” and “technically unsound.” According to Cox, the study is “fundamentally flawed” and “has sensational policy implications, none of which are trustworthy.”

That study found that even small increases in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure is associated with a statistically significant increase in the COVID-19 death rate. It is the first study to examine the link between long-term particulate matter exposure and coronavirus risks in the U.S., and the results are consistent with other peer-reviewed studies finding a correlation between COVID fatalities and air pollution in Europe and, most recently, a preliminary analysis in Louisiana's Cancer Alley. ...[twt]

Harvard study has already garnered attention in Democratic policy circles. A trio of Democratic Representatives cited it in a letter expressing concerns over an EPA policy to relax environmental compliance obligations during the pandemic. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s office also cited it in a recent brief on environmental injustice and coronavirus.

Democractic presidential candidate Joe Biden referenced the study in an online fact sheet about his plan for a “clean energy revolution and environmental justice.” And in April the study authors discussed their findings with members of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.

According to H. Christopher Frey, who has studied air pollution for over 30 years and chaired EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee from 2012 to 2015, the Harvard study linking fine particulate matter exposure and worsened coronavirus outcomes “is no doubt the first of more to come.” He said the Harvard researchers behind this study previously published epidemiological research showing the harmful effects of human exposure to fine particles, which is part of a robust science indicating deadly impacts of fine particulate (or particle) air pollution.

“What is lost in the media coverage of the recent Harvard study is the strong causal link between human exposure to fine particles — before, during, and after the pandemic — and premature death,” Frey told DeSmog via email. “There is strong evidence, based on multiple peer-reviewed studies that span a wide range of locations, population demographics, housing characteristics, and so on, that exposure to fine particles at levels below the current air quality standards causes premature death and numerous disease outcomes.”

But for Cox, who now leads the EPA advisory committee that Frey formerly chaired, the Harvard study’s findings are not convincing. “I would have zero confidence in the published results of this study because its interpretation, design, and analysis are fundamentally flawed,” he told the Washington Examiner.

“The statistical models developed by the Harvard team ignore crucial real-world interactions among risk factors, such as that PM2.5 cannot kill people where there are no people to kill,” Cox explained to DeSmog. He said the models also “omit crucial information and demographic variables” that could help explain reported associations. “For example, the model omits a variable, the 'rural-urban continuum,' that could help examine whether the reported association between PM2.5 and COVID-19 mortality risk is explained by the fact that both are higher in more crowded areas,” he said.

Francesca Dominici, Harvard biostatistician and senior author of the COVID study, defended Cox's critiques to the Washington Examiner, saying the team took into account potential confounding variables such as population density and separately analyzed urban and rural counties, with “very similar” results.

A group of 10 agriculture and biofuels organizations called out Cox’s dismissive comments in a May 8 letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist.

“The Harvard School of Public Health has done work with EPA for years. It is shocking to see the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee be so dismissive of such a highly respected independent party,” a spokesman for the group said in a press release. The letter also points to Cox’s close association with the American Petroleum Institute, with the letter describing him as “the proverbial ‘fox in charge of the chicken coop.’”

Longtime Industry Consultant

Tony Cox is a statistician focusing on risk analysis and is president of Denver-based consulting firm Cox Associates. He has a long history of consulting work on behalf of corporate clients including in the tobacco, fossil fuel, and chemical industries. His industry ties include work in service of tobacco giant Phillip Morris and trade associations such as the American Chemistry Council, National Mining Association, and the American Petroleum Institute (API).

Cox “has a history of attacking established research on the health risks of air pollution,” according to E&E News, and his approach has been to emphasize scientific uncertainty and to question standard risk assessment. He has published studies, for example, that question the relationship between levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and mortality rates.

one of those studies, published in 2017 in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology, was not only sponsored, but also copy-edited, by API, a major oil and gas industry trade group. According to E&E News, “Cox denied that API influenced his work and said the organization did not suggest any substantive changes.” Cox has done other research backed by API into air pollution and health risks, as well as the carcinogenic risks of benzene, a chemical in gasoline.

When asked whether his past industry funding sources could affect his research approach and stance on health risks of air pollution, Cox said the short answer is no. He defended his**adherence to what he calls :{“sound science:(style="background-color:#ff9966;"):}:**:{”:(style="background-color:#ff9966;"):}: that demands a “more exacting” analysis and higher burden of proof compared to the traditional weight-of-evidence approach. “I believe that adhering to principles and methods of sound science, which leave no room for what funding sources believe or want, serves both science and the public interest far better than other approaches, and will continue to apply that approach in reaching conclusions,” Cox told DeSmog.

Studies show that industry-funded research may bias results and tends to produce more favorable results for its backers, in areas from psychology to medicine to sugar and obesity.

Cox acknowledged that his approach has been “met with enormous backlash.” Frey said Cox's treatment of air pollution risk assessment is “disregarding the law.”

“The Clean Air Act requires that EPA set air quality standards that protect public health with an adequate margin of safety. The standards should be set based not just on known, but also anticipated, adverse effects,” Frey explained. “With Dr. Cox leading the way, the current [Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee] has imposed a burden of proof for evidence of adverse effects far beyond that required by the Clean Air Act.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce nominated Cox to chair EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, and former EPA head Scott Pruitt ushered Cox into that role as part of a move that replaced many of the independent scientists on the agency’s Science Advisory Board with industry-affiliated experts.

Purging Independent Scientists From EPA Advisory Board

As noted in 2017, Cox was one of three nominees to the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee that raised red flags. The other two were S. Stanley Young, who is affiliated with climate science–denying Heartland Institute, and Deane Waldman, who directs the Koch, Exxon, and tobacco industry-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Public Health Center. Cox became chair of the committee and both he and Young were put onto EPA’s Science Advisory Board.

Senators Tom Carper (D-DE) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) raised concerns about these two ultimate appointments in a January 9, 2018 letter to then-EPA Administrator Pruitt. “Specifically, it appears that public commenters warned that Drs. Louis Anthony (Tony) Cox, Jr. (a researcher for the petroleum industry) and S. Stanley Young (a researcher for the pharmaceutical and petroleum industry) may have financial conflicts of interest, may risk an appearance of impartiality, and may lack the scientific expertise necessary to serve on one or more Federal Advisory Committees,” they wrote.

The senators also expressed concern with Pruitt’s decision to bar scientists who received EPA grant funding from serving on EPA advisory committees and to instead appoint individuals with clear ties to regulated industries.

“We are concerned that some of the newly-appointed members of these nonpartisan scientific advisory committees and boards may have financial and ethical conflicts of interests,” they wrote. “In addition, some of these individuals may not possess the appropriate level of scientific expertise or credentials. This underscores our concern that your actions to replace many highly-qualified members of these committees — including the unprecedented action to remove any scientist who was a recipient of EPA grants from eligibility — has led to Federal Advisory Committees that are not balanced in viewpoints, and to the appointment of committee members who are either not qualified or not impartial. This approach undermines the process of providing sound, science-based advice that EPA can use as a basis for environmental regulations that are aimed at protecting human health and the environment.”

A federal court recently ruled that the EPA cannot prohibit its grant recipients from serving on its advisory panels.

EPA’s Science Advisory Board generally does have some industry-affiliated scientists — they made up 40 percent of the board under President Obama — but under Trump they have come to dominate the agency’s science board, comprising 68 percent of the members.

As Reveal News explained in 2017, “Pruitt transformed the board from a panel of the nation’s top environmental experts to one dominated by industry-funded scientists and state government officials who have fought federal regulations.”

'Sidelining Science' 

In mid-April, just a week after the Harvard study came out, EPA posted a proposed decision to retain the current regulatory standards for fine particle pollution, a decision that ignored evidence showing that strengthening the standards would save lives.

“Leaving the standards alone is a threat to public health, because thousands of premature deaths each year could be prevented by a more stringent science-based standard that meets the legal requirements of the Clean Air Act,” Frey told DeSmog.

Gina McCarthy, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council and former EPA Administrator under the Obama administration, called EPA’s decision to retain the particle pollution (soot) standards “indefensible.”

“EPA’s own scientists say more than 12,000 lives could be saved every year by strengthening the national limits for soot,” she said in a statement.  ...

[twt]

but as Frey explained, Trump’s EPA appears to have little interest in heeding the science.

“EPA political appointees are ignoring, disregarding, and sidelining science in pursuit of their ideological agenda of regulatory rollback,” he said.

“Mr. Wheeler’s proposal to retain the current fine particle standards is a floundering example of red herrings, strawmen, and other logical fallacies,” Frey added. “The danger is that the courts may not be able to sort this out and, even if they do, it will take time during which Americans will continue to suffer under an inadequate standard.”

==

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22052020/contrarian-science-james-enstrom-epa-climate-change

no lnx many no pix graf

How a Contrarian Scientist Helped Trump’s EPA Defy Mainstream Science

James Enstrom’s work on particle pollution’s health effects contradicts the findings of dozens of studies, but that hasn’t stopped the agency from relying on it.

By Marianne Lavelle

MAY 28, 2020

In March 2017, a scientist named James Enstrom rattled many public health experts by publishing a study concluding that there was no link between fine soot air pollution and premature death.

The finding was drastically at odds with the consensus of medical researchers and with the evidence from nearly three decades of previous research.

But it was in line with arguments that Enstrom, a physicist-turned-epidemiologist, had been making for years. His dissent had played an essential role in his ascendance as a folk hero to far-right conservatives who oppose most environmental protection policies in the United States, especially those put in place by the Obama administration.

Enstrom argued that his analysis refuted one of the most influential papers in environmental health science: a 1995 study by the American Cancer Society showing that fine particulate matter pollution—or PM 2.5, as it is known—is associated with early death. PM 2.5 is produced primarily through the burning of oil, coal and wood.

Enstrom, 76, said he based his study on long-hidden cancer society data from an inside source whom he did not name. Throughout the article, which appeared in the journal Dose-Response, he took jabs at institutions that he believed had long marginalized him, including the cancer society (ACS), leading scientific journals, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other health researchers, who, he wrote, "need to promptly address my findings." He hinted at scientific malfeasance and suggested that there was a conspiracy of silence against minority views like his.

Big-name journals, Enstrom wrote in the article, were biased against publishing results showing no association between air pollution and mortality, adding that seven other peer-reviewed scientific journals had rejected his study. In an unusual footnote, he also included a link to the rejection letters.

Over the next months, Enstrom's paper drew fierce criticism. The cancer society said it could not confirm his data's authenticity. The scientists whose work he had critiqued—includingsome of the world's renowned experts in air pollution health science—published a withering point-by-point take-down of Enstrom's methods and analysis.

James Enstrom

James Enstrom

But in at least one realm, his paper won acceptance. Eight weeks before the study was published, President Donald Trump took office. And in an administration disdainful of scientific consensus and intent on dismantling restraints on the fossil fuel industry, Enstrom found a receptive audience.

When, last month, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced the agency's decision that it would not raise the standards for air pollution because the science of PM 2.5 was too uncertain to justify doing so, he was relying in part on Enstrom's work. Enstrom's research was among the studies cited by Wheeler's hand-picked committee of science advisers to raise doubts about the PM 2.5 consensus.

More broadly, Enstrom's work has helped provide the underpinning for the Trump administration's wide-ranging assault on environmental protection policy, from its retreat on climate change to its current effort to restrict the type of science used by the EPA by disqualifying studies that critics say are some of the most important in human health science.

In a way, Enstrom's journey from outsider to influencer is the story of the Trump administration's monumental campaign to remake the rules of scientific evidence, and how that effort could shape U.S. environmental protection for years to come.

"These are changes that could have very major impacts on human health and on the environment itself," said Bernard Goldstein, dean emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Health. "All of the laws we passed that cleaned up the environment so well—even with the challenges we still have—these have all been science-based. Well, if you knock the science out of the process, you can base the decisions on politics."

Goldstein, who served as EPA's assistant administrator for research and development under President Ronald Reagan, recently wrote that the leadership of the scandal-ridden agency in the early Reagan years "did nothing that even came close to the assault on the independence and expertise of the scientific advisory processes carried out by Wheeler and his predecessor, Scott Pruitt."

'Everything's Been Turned on its Head'

Critics often call the Trump administration "anti-science," but in fact, its retreat on climate change and public health and safety has only been possible with the help of science—the work of contrarians like Enstrom who have devoted themselves to challenging the mainstream consensus.

Trump's appointees have found justification for their actions in the work and ideas of this stable of scientists, most of them industry aligned, who for years have provided ammunition to foes of federal regulation.

These contrarians have helped make the case in agencies, in Congress and in the courts, for coal, oil and other industries intent on maintaining their way of doing business in the face of increasing attention to the threats posed by climate change, and the growing imperative for cleaner air and cleaner energy.

President Trump has made clear decisions to upend environmental policy, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, but he has also made more subtle moves, like the purging of experts from science advisory committees, limiting the science that can be used by the EPA and the relying on contrarian studies like Enstrom’s work on PM 2.5. Credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

Fossil fuel companies were losing ground in this battle when Trump entered the White House: The Obama administration's actions on global warming seemed as if they might presage the industry's last stand. To change course, the Trump administration has sought to change fundamentally how science is evaluated in environmental decision-making.

Trump's grand moves to upend environmental policy, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, are well known. But his legacy may be sealed more deeply in scores of arcane changes deep in the bureaucratic process, like the purging of experts from science advisory committees; the overhaul of cost-benefit analyses; the effort to limit the science that can be used by the EPA; and the reliance on contrarian studies like Enstrom's work on PM 2.5.

"Everything's been turned on its head by EPA, so that the consultants are considered the good guys and the academics are all biased," said Goldstein.

Carol Browner, board chairwoman of the League of Conservation Voters, who was EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton and climate adviser to President Barack Obama, puts it this way: "What they're doing in this whole line of insidious actions is to dismantle and fundamentally change how the agency does its business."

A Plan to Discredit Pollution Science

A number of the actions have been aimed at neutralizing the power of one of the most important findings in environmental health science: The science showing that air pollution kills.

In the 1990s, two large, long-term studies, by the American Cancer Society and Harvard researchers, showed that breathing higher levels of PM 2.5—microscopic particles 2.5 microns in diameter or less that spew into the air when something is burned—was associated with premature death.

Virtually everyone is exposed to the PM 2.5 because it is produced by the burning of coal, oil and wood.

PM 2.5 Explainer

Groups allied with the fossil fuel and tobacco industries led an effort to discredit the science, but a reanalysis of the data by the Boston-based Health Effects Institute (HEI), a nonprofit research organization funded by the EPA and the auto industry, affirmed the findings. Since then, dozens of studies, including more than 30 long-term human health studies in North America, have documented the link between PM 2.5 and premature death.

Based on the science, Clinton enacted the first national air quality standards on PM 2.5 in 1997.

Even more important, the large-scale studies of PM 2.5 allowed policy makers to quantify the benefits of cleaner air in a way that had not been possible before. The EPA, after peer-reviewing the science, began using the number of lives saved from reduced PM 2.5 exposure in the cost-benefit analysis it was required to perform to justify new cuts in pollution from cars, trucks and power plants.

In 2011, the EPA estimated that the benefits yielded by U.S. air pollution rules from 1990 to 2020 at $2 trillion, a figure that outweighed the costs of the regulation by 30-to-1, savings primarily attributable to reduced PM 2.5. In addition, the Clean Power Plan, Obama's signature climate initiative, was to result in PM 2.5 reductions that would account for up to 60 percent of the plan's projected $34 billion to $54 billion in benefits, far outweighing its $8.4 billion in costs.

That lopsided calculus stood in the way of what Trump said was his plan to "quickly, very quickly" end U.S. climate policy and other restraints on the oil and coal industries. This was well understood by appointees like Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, and William Wehrum, Trump EPA's assistant administrator for air pollution policy until 2019.

In 2014, Wehrum, a former industry lawyer, led an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to overturn the Obama EPA's PM 2.5 standards, by invoking the work of contrarian scientists like Enstrom. But a federal court disagreed. "Petitioners simply have not identified any way in which EPA jumped the rails of reasonableness in examining the science," wrote then-U.S. District Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Still, that loss pointed to an avenue for a future attack on PM 2.5 science. And soon after taking office, Trump's appointees followed that path, overhauling EPA's science advisory boards and replacing every member of its legally mandated Clean Air Science Advisory Committee or CASAC, which had sided with the mainstream consensus on PM 2.5.

By last year, the reshaped CASAC made clear that it had a far different view of the risks posed by PM 2.5. In a key review, the committee not only disputed EPA's staff scientists on the need to act on new evidence of PM 2.5 health risks, the CASAC members were divided on the long-standing consensus that PM 2.5 caused premature death.

One of the studies the committee cited in its final report raising doubts about the science on PM 2.5 was Enstrom's 2017 research report. It had taken a long time for Enstrom to have his work recognized, and he expressed his satisfaction when he called into a public teleconference of a CASAC meeting last December.

"This is a tremendous group, and I don't believe it's ever been done better in the 50-year history of EPA," Enstrom said of the committee.

A Turning Point

In the Trump era, Enstrom may be a scientific influencer, but he has spent much of the last two decades as an outsider vocal about feeling unfairly maligned.

The point in his life when mainstream scientists turned against him, he believes, came 17 years ago, when he published a paper in the British Medical Journal challenging the scientific consensus that second-hand tobacco smoke causes heart disease and cancer.

The American Cancer Society condemned the study, funded by the tobacco industry through its now-defunct Center for Indoor Air Research, saying it misrepresented the cancer society's data. The data Enstrom based his research on was from an early ACS long-term study group, whose members were recruited in the 1950s. But at that time, smoking was so ubiquitous that it was impossible to conduct a valid study comparing people who'd been exposed to second-hand smoke with people who hadn't, the ACS argued in rebutting Enstrom's study.

The Anti-Scientists

A host of other scientists also joined in: The medical journal published 10 letters disputing Enstrom's method, findings and the conflict of interest they said was created by the industry sponsorship.

But Enstrom insisted that the work was sound. "This was peer-reviewed, and there's not been one error identified in my paper," he said in an interview with InsideClimate News.

As for the conflict of interest, Enstrom said he saw no difference between his acceptance of funding from a group controlled by tobacco executives and the practice of accepting research money from state cigarette tax funds and tobacco legal settlement money, as his scientist critics had. Both, he said, "originated with" the tobacco industry.

In Enstrom's eyes, he was the target of relentless persecution, smears that had all but obscured the early achievements of his career.

"Up until 2003, I basically had a third of a century where I had a perfect record of integrity," said Enstrom. Since then, he said, "my entire career has been under attack and the attack has never let up."

'If I Didn't Fight I Could Have Disappeared'

Enstrom grew up in a middle class home in southern California, part of a wave of aspiring young Cold War-era scientists inspired by stories of the physicist Albert Einstein and Russia's launch of Sputnik, the first manmade satellite.

Enstrom's father, Elmer, was a courtroom clerk who longed to argue cases instead of swear in witnesses. Elmer Enstrom taught himself law and passed the California bar at 41, eventually serving as a U.S. Magistrate Judge in San Diego. But he became best known for his pro bono legal work in retirement, representing residents who were fighting court-ordered busing in the San Diego public schools.

The younger Enstrom said he learned the value of perseverance from his father's example.

As a student at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, a then-new institution aiming to nurture the technological talent the United States needed for the space race, Enstrom was co-valedictorian of the class of 1965. He went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford, where his dissertation adviser was Melvin Schwartz, who later won the Nobel Prize. Enstrom's post-doctoral work at what is now known as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was carried out under another luminary, Luis W. Alvarez, also a Nobelist and a veteran of the Manhattan Project.

Physics, Enstrom recalled recently, was "exciting, exhilarating, because you're on the very forefront of science." But his studies left him unfulfilled.

"If you're doing elementary particle physics, you're basically doing something that's not really that understandable to most people," he said.

Through a college friend, Enstrom met Lester Breslow, California's top health official in the 1960s, who promoted a healthy diet and abstention from smoking as key to a long life. Enstrom became so drawn to the study of human health that he switched fields, working with Breslow, the dean of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles, for many years on a multi-part study on the longevity of Mormons, work supported by the American Cancer Society.

But Enstrom, who obtained a master's degree in epidemiology, was not on a tenure track at UCLA, and he relied on grant money to maintain his research position.

Over the next years, after public health advocates began blasting his work as suspect, Enstrom struck back. He accused those who questioned his integrity of liberal bias, and repeatedly clashed with his previous sponsors, colleagues, other scientists and government officials.

Among those Enstrom said were biased was a colleague, John Froines, a professor in UCLA's environmental health sciences department. Froines was a science adviser to California regulators, and had supported strong air pollution rules.

Politically, the two men could not have been further apart. While Enstrom spent the Vietnam War studying in a defense-related field, Froines was one of the "Chicago Seven," anti-war activists arrested during the riots outside of the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

In 2009, Enstrom helped initiate a lawsuit by a conservative legal group charging that Froines had overstayed his tenure on California's air pollution science review panel. Amid the controversy, Froines was temporarily removed from the board, but later reinstated. Froines, contacted by email, declined comment for this story.

In 2010, UCLA gave Enstrom notice that he was being terminated. His research, the university said, was "not aligned" with the school's academic mission and his research output and ability to secure continued funding did not meet the department's minimum requirements.

Enstrom sued UCLA, charging that his termination, which came after a confidential vote by his department's faculty, was in retaliation for his activism and his "whistleblowing" regarding Froines.

The case was eventually settled, with UCLA denying Enstrom's allegations. UCLA "vigorously supports the principles of academic freedom," the university said in an emailed statement. "Enstrom's presence as a researcher for decades, despite his minority positions defending diesel emissions and tobacco, demonstrates that fact." In the settlement, UCLA paid Enstrom $140,000 and gave him continued access to university resources, as well as permission to use the title "retired researcher."

Enstrom told UCLA's student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, that he was not entirely satisfied with the settlement, but thought it was the best compromise that could have been reached in the case.

"I am a good scientist, a very honest scientist," Enstrom said. "If I didn't fight I could have disappeared."

A War Over PM 2.5

For Enstrom, a major battleground has always been his home state of California, which historically has led the way in U.S. air pollution regulation. Thousands of pages documenting his advocacy against air pollution regulations are collected at the website of the Scientific Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization he founded in Los Angeles.

In the 1990s, while he was still at UCLA, he began consulting for the tobacco industry, a role that would lead eventually to his study on second-hand smoking and his rift with the American Cancer Society.

Around the same time, Enstrom was contacted by Frederick Lipfert, a consultant for the industry-funded Electric Power Research Institute, who had seen Enstrom's work with the early ACS research cohort.

Lipfert asked if Enstrom could delve into the cancer society data to explore a question of crucial importance to the operators of the nation's power plants, more than half of which were fired by coal at the time: Were the invisible particles that their operations released into the air deadly?

With that, Enstrom joined the war over PM 2.5.

The buildings of downtown Los Angeles are partially obscured by smog at midday on Nov. 5, 2019. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

The buildings of downtown Los Angeles are partially obscured by smog at midday on Nov. 5, 2019. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

He soon became a one-man exemplar of the wide-ranging and high-stakes conflict over the pollutant. He testified before California state regulators, advised a Congressional committee, and filed a lawsuit over the makeup of EPA's science advisory boards.

In 2005, Enstrom published a study funded by the Electric Power Research Institute that found no association between PM 2.5 and premature death in Californians from 1983 to 2002. That finding again put him at odds with the cancer society because it purported to shed doubt on the ACS's influential PM 2.5 work. It had the flavor of personal payback, as well: A co-author of the cancer society's PM 2.5 study was Michael Thun, then ACS's vice president for research, the same scientist who had condemned Enstrom's tobacco research two years earlier.

But at the time, Enstrom's findings did not gain traction with government regulators.

For the EPA, the decisive flaw in Enstrom's study was his reliance on county-level air pollution data. Rates of premature death in lightly polluted rural areas could skew the rates in heavily polluted cities in the same county, especially in a state like California, with some of the largest counties in the nation.

The original ACS study in 1995 also had inexact exposure estimates, based on urban census tracts that in some cases encompassed several counties. But the ACS researchers had recently published a follow-up study that used smaller zip code areas in Los Angeles and found an even stronger association between PM 2.5 and deadly health effects. The correlation between the pollutant and harmful health effects also was holding up in research that had begun to use satellite remote sensing to pinpoint PM 2.5 pollution levels in the vicinity of individual people's homes.

So regulators gave little weight to Enstrom's study in comparison with the original Harvard and ACS studies; the reanalysis of that data; the cancer society's follow-ups; as well as research on the effects of PM 2.5 carried out in other places, using different groups of subjects and different methodologies. These studies were augmented by work in lab animals that provided evidence of how PM 2.5 can disturb the cardiovascular system. In 2009, the EPA concluded that a broad body of evidence affirmed PM 2.5's deadly toll.

"The evidence that combustion-related fine particle pollution contributes to both respiratory and cardiovascular diseases is just pretty compelling," said C. Arden Pope, an economist at Brigham Young University and a co-author of both the original Harvard and ACS studies and follow-up studies.

"There are probably no two studies in environmental health that have been more independently reanalyzed," Pope said. "They have been scrutinized in really remarkable ways and have held up."

A Campaign Against 'Secret Science'

Enstrom, however, was convinced that the findings of the Harvard and ACS studies were biased and politically motivated, carried out by scientists who favored more U.S. government regulation.

"What I'm watching is the descent of epidemiology from what used to be a legitimate public health science into just pure activism," he said.

The legal battle with UCLA had earned Enstrom stature on the right. The libertarian publication Reason Magazine produced an online video on his mistreatment at the hands of what it called "the Green Regulation Machine." The conservative American Freedom Alliance honored Enstrom as a "Hero of Conscience," along with his wife, Marta Villanea, an administrative law judge, who supported him throughout his trials.

"All I did is what a good wife should do," Villanea said in her acceptance speech.

Enstrom joined the board of trustees of the American Council on Science and Health, an industry and Libertarian-funded group that describes itself as a "a pro-science consumer advocacy organization," although critics note that its advocacy invariably takes the form of battling government regulation.

Enstrom also became a science advisor to the Heartland Institute, the conservative think tank that has long supported and promoted work that disputes the science on climate change.

Steve Milloy, a former tobacco and coal industry adviser who had been leading attacks on PM 2.5 science from the beginning, said that Enstrom brought to the fight a "personal story of persecution."

"It's hard for people to understand what's going on unless you've been really intimately involved in this saga, and Jim has been," said Milloy. "He's actually had his career damaged by it, and so he feels it very personally."

Milloy, working with a fossil fuel-industry funded legal advocacy group, represented Enstrom in a lawsuit against EPA in 2016, alleging bias in the choice of scientists who served on its scientific advisory boards.

Enstrom also began advising U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who after becoming chairman of the House Science Committee in 2013 took up the cause of discrediting the science on PM 2.5.

Smith derided the ACS and Harvard studies as "secret science," adopting a line of attack launched two decades earlier by industry foes of regulation who characterized the studies' routine protections of patients' confidential medical data as nefarious.

Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, during the House Judiciary oversight hearing with U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on the Department of Justice. Credit: Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images

Smith pelted the EPA with subpoenas seeking the raw data, and continued his efforts even after he was reminded that the studies had already been re-analyzed. However, he said he knew one legitimate researcher whose request for access to the raw data had been turned down by the American Cancer Society: James Enstrom.

The EPA ultimately complied with Smith's subpoena, but Smith did nothing further with the data. Instead, he sponsored a "secret science" bill seeking to bar the EPA in the future from relying on studies that used confidential data in regulatory decision-making. Critics said it would bar the public health agency from using some of the most important human health science. The legislation, first introduced in 2014, passed three times in the GOP-led House, but was never taken up by the closely divided Senate.

By the time of the last vote in March 2017, however, Trump was in the White House, and the prospects for Smith's proposal suddenly improved.

The Trump administration was in a position both to enact limits on the EPA's use of mainstream science and to give more weight to contrarian work of scientists like Enstrom, who had just published his new study challenging the foundations of PM 2.5 science.

Enstrom's 'Odd Man Out' Study

Enstrom's study almost wasn't published. "I have never read a paper that so willfully ignored the breadth of scientific evidence and attacked a specific study/group of investigators," said a reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the scientific journals that rejected the manuscript.

But Enstrom finally got the paper in print by reaching out to Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts, who had submitted a letter in support of Enstrom during his fight with UCLA.

Calabrese was a founder of the International Dose Response Society, an organization that holds that exposure to low doses of toxic agents can be beneficial—a position embraced by many industry groups and rejected by many advocates of strong environmental protection policies.

He was also the editor of the society's journal, Dose-Response. Aware of the controversy Enstrom's study would stir, Calabrese agreed to publish, but warned Enstrom he would give the authors Enstrom challenged a chance to respond. "I said you'll have to take your whacks by the people you're going to hit, and they're formidable people," Calabrese recalled.

In fact, the authors of the original ACS study and the Health Effects Institute (HEI) reanalysis soon published a detailed response, citing a litany of problems they had identified in Enstrom's work.

The most significant fault, they wrote, was Enstrom's use of old, county-level PM 2.5 readings instead of employing newer methods now widely used to estimate exposure more precisely. The authors of the critique had just published their latest follow-up study of the ACS cohort, using seven different methods of estimating pollution, including satellite remote sensing, and finding even more significant associations between PM 2.5 exposure and premature death.

Enstrom rejected the critiques of his study—in fact, in an interview last year, he refused to accept that the substance of his work had been called into question at all.

"This is an old tactic that's used by people who don't want to address fundamental issues," Enstrom said. "Instead of addressing what I did, they use the tactic of looking at what I didn't do, and which they know I can't do. It's a miracle that I was able to do what I did do, because of all the efforts to stop me, and the fact that this data is not available outside their little clique."

Changing the Rules

Enstrom's study was well-timed to figure into U.S. air pollution policy decision-making. As Trump took office, the EPA was already launching its re-assessment of the state of current science on PM 2.5, as the law requires the agency to do every few years for key pollutants to ensure that Clean Air Act regulations are adequate.

This time around, there was major new science on PM 2.5 to consider, including one of the largest studies ever, a Harvard analysis of the health records of 60 million Medicare recipients. It indicated that lowering PM 2.5 pollution nationwide by just 1 microgram per cubic meter would save 12,000 American lives annually. The research found the risk of premature death for African Americans in the study was three times as great as that for the general population.

But how the EPA weighed the science was affected profoundly by the changes made at the agency by Trump's team, who borrowed the ideas and rhetoric that industry foes of regulation had honed in the 25-year battle over PM 2.5. Several members of Trump's transition team, including Milloy, were longtime warriors in the campaign to discredit the science.

Trump's first EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, accelerated the schedule for considering the adequacy of the national PM 2.5 science by two years, so that the review could be concluded by the end of Trump's first term in office. And in the name of "sound science" and "independence," Pruitt barred recipients of EPA grants from serving on agency science advisory boards. Since the EPA is one of the largest funders of environmental science, the move had the effect of knocking prominent experts off the committees.

To replace them, Pruitt and his successor, Wheeler, named industry-friendly state regulators and consultants for regulated industries, who faced no similar conflict-of-interest bar.Wheeler eliminated altogether a separate 20-person expert panel on particulate matter. It was precisely the sort of overhaul that Milloy and Enstrom had sought in their 2016 lawsuit against the EPA.

The agency's rank and file was still staffed with scientists who predated Trump, and they gave Enstrom's paper little weight when they considered it against the bulk of evidence on PM 2.5. The staff scientists cited more than 2,600 scientific studies in a nearly 2,000-page analysis finalized on Dec. 31, 2019. It affirmed the EPA's long-standing conclusion that PM 2.5 was a cause of early death. In a separate analysis, EPA staff recommended a stricter national standard for fine particulate matter pollution.

But the Trump administration's revamped six-member Clean Air Science Advisory Committee saw things differently. Chaired by statistician Louis Anthony Cox, a Denver consultant for the American Petroleum Institute and other industry groups, the CASAC urged that the agency require a much higher burden of proof for assessing pollution's health harms.

Enstrom's 2005 study was included in the list of studies that the committee said raised doubt about the link between PM 2.5 and premature death. And one CASAC member, Sabine Lange, a toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, wrote in a separate attachment that Enstrom's 2017 study could be an effective challenge to the seminal American Cancer Society research.

"The Enstrom study had a finer resolution, so one would guess that it had less exposure error and therefore possibly a greater effect estimate, or one with narrower confidence intervals," she wrote.

Last month, when the EPA announced it would not strengthen the pollution standard, Wheeler cited the committee's report and the doubts about the  PM 2.5 science to justify the decision. "We've identified a lot of uncertainties," he said.

Andrew Wheeler, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, arrives for a House Appropriations Committee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on March 4, 2020.

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Currently, Wheeler is moving forward with an initiative to change how the agency weighs science in the future. The proposal, called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science," is essentially the idea that Smith attempted to move through Congress three years ago, barring the EPA from basing decisions on studies that rely on patients' confidential medical data, as the original ACS and Harvard Six Cities PM 2.5 studies did.

A wide array of health, medical and science organizations oppose Wheeler's decision not to raise the PM 2.5 standard decision. On April 14, 19 health and medical organizations, led by the American Lung Association, said in a statement that the Trump EPA had employed a "deeply flawed" process and ignored "powerful, overwhelming evidence" that the current PM 2.5 standard is inadequate.

Scientists and health organizations are also fighting the so-called "transparency" rule—critics say even the name has an Orwellian ring to it, because the proposed regulation is not transparent about its purpose.

The public comment period on the proposed rule ended May 18, while the deadline for the public to weigh in on the PM 2.5 standard is June 29. "The way I see it, now, all the pieces are falling into place" in the Trump administration's plan for weakened regulation, said Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists' Center for Science and Democracy.

She said the purge of the science advisory boards, the appointments of industry consultants to the advisory committee and other changes to the process have helped obscure the strong scientific consensus around the risks of PM 2.5, while elevating the importance of the work of scientists like Enstrom.

"These contrarian scientists really have the ear of the EPA in ways they never had before," Goldman said. "People like Enstrom provide the appearance of an independent scientist weighing in, and It all works together to get where we are—a rule that does not protect health with an adequate margin of safety."

H. Christopher Frey, a professor of environmental engineering at North Carolina State University, who was a member of the particulate matter expert panel that Wheeler disbanded, said that the changes made under the Trump administration amounted to a rigging of the process. "If I wanted to design a science review that would have a predetermined outcome favorable to the regulated industries, I would get rid of the real experts," he said.

Members of the disbanded panel, in fact, felt so strongly about the issue that they met on their own and submitted a report to EPA endorsing the agency staff's finding that the PM 2.5 standard needed to be strengthened.

Frey said Enstrom's argument—that his study has refuted the 1995 ACS study, and therefore, the EPA's PM 2.5 standard should be withdrawn—reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the process.

"The standards are not set based on a single study, and they're not withdrawn based on a single study," Frey said. "It's the overall body of evidence that is important."

'A Journey Almost Impossible to Comprehend'

Enstrom said recently that although he thinks there is no need for a PM 2.5 standard at all, he is gratified by Wheeler's decision to maintain the current standard and to move forward with the "transparency" rule.

"It shows the value of persistence in terms of believing in honest science and trying to penetrate what seems like an impenetrable wall of dishonesty and deception," he said. His struggle to be recognized, he added, was "a journey that is almost impossible to comprehend. It's just been incredibly contentious and for what purpose I'm not sure I know, other than just deliberate power, power and ego."

During a recent phone interview, Enstrom detoured frequently into speculation about "the other side" in the air pollution science debate.

He complained that air pollution studies authored by"activist Canadians" should not be the basis for U.S. environmental regulations. And he noted that a Chinese businessman's family foundation has helped fund the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and that Chinese doctoral students were co-authors on the school's air pollution studies.

"Do you see any of these Harvard people going over to China or central Africa where you do have air pollution problems?" Enstrom asked. "No. Their only goal is to force more regulation on Americans."

Enstrom expressed particular outrage about a pre-publication study recently released by a Harvard group that found PM 2.5 levels in the United States to be associated with higher death rates from Covid-19. (The researchers have since revised their findings to reflect a lower, but still significant, association). Enstrom has published his own calculations of the pandemic's effects in the conservative Heritage Foundation's publication, The Daily Signal. Averaging counts of total mortality in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the five weeks ending April 4, early in the pandemic, he concluded that deaths were no higher than expected. And based on those numbers, Enstrom wrote, "It's possible that the lethality of Covid-19 is no greater than that of the seasonal flu."

Since then, the CDC's weekly death counts have been as much as 36 percent higher than expected, and the agency estimates that Covid-19 is at least 10 times more deadly than the flu. Enstrom said he remains convinced that the impact in the U.S. is limited geographically, primarily to New York, and that public officials have overreacted. Although the loss of life was significant in the flu pandemic of 1917-1918, Enstrom said, "The country dealt with it. It was terrible, but it was not something to shut down the entire economy."

Recently, Enstrom has sent personal emails to scientists and public interest groups who have criticized the Trump administration's review of PM 2.5 science, asking them to discuss his evidence that "there is NO causal relationship between PM 2.5 and total mortality in the U.S."

So far, he lamented recently, no one has responded.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18052020/secret-science-epa-transparency-rule-wheeler-pollution-environment

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As the deadline approached for public comment on a controversial "transparency" rule proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, 39 top scientific organizations and academic institutions joined together on Monday to warn that if finalized, the regulation would greatly diminish the role of science in decisions affecting the environment and the health of Americans.

In a lettersubmitted to the EPA, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest scientific society, and a wide array of other professional groups and universities, strongly opposed the rule, which they said is "not about strengthening science, but about undermining the ability of the EPA to use the best available science in setting policies and regulations."

The groups signing the letter included organizations as diverse as the American Psychological Association and the Crop Science Society of America, and universities from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the University of California, Los Angeles.

The letter was part of an outpouring of opposition on the last day for public comment on the proposed rule, called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science." The rule would restrict the EPA's use of scientific studies relying  on health data that excludes names or other identifying information to protect patients' confidentiality or that are not "capable of being substantially reproduced."

critics say the regulation will knock out from consideration some of the most important human health research, while giving industry opponents of environmental protection rules a new avenue to challenge the agency's actions, even after President Donald J. Trump leaves the White House.

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, who has vowed to finalize the rule this year, has characterized the plan as a "good government" effort that will increase public confidence in the agency's decisions.

 "I fundamentally believe in Community Right to Know and the American public has the right to know what scientific studies underline the Agency's regulatory decisions," Wheeler said in a statement last month, thanking the agency's Science Advisory Board for "their support of the concept of the proposed rule." 

In fact, the 44-member board, made up of outside advisers, most of whom were appointed during the Trump administration, has expressed reservations about the proposed "transparency" rule.

 "There is minimal justification provided in the Proposed Rule for why existing procedures and norms utilized across the U.S. scientific community, including the federal government, are inadequate," the board wrote in a report to Wheeler last month, referring to practices like peer review that are routinely used by scientific journals and have long been in use at the EPA. 

"Moving forward with altered transparency requirements beyond those already in use, in the absence of such a robust analysis, risks serious and perverse outcomes," the advisory board added.

The idea of challenging EPA science as lacking in "transparency" dates back more than 25 years to a strategy developed  by tobacco and fossil fuel industry advisers to fight national air quality standards on particulate matter pollution produced by combustion. Industry advisers took an approach of raising doubts about the original scientific studies on the grave health risks of so-called PM 2.5. 

The EPA eventually set fine particle pollution standards, but the fight over the science never quieted, in large part because a wide range of regulations affecting  the fossil fuel industry, including those seeking to address climate change, have been based on that science. When Republicans were in control of Congress, the House three times passed legislation to rein in the EPA's use of science, but the bills were  never taken up by the Senate.

The Trump administration picked up the idea, and received 600,000 comments when the new rule was first proposed in 2018. Wheeler addressed some of the issues on public access to confidential data in a "supplemental" proposal initially released in March  with an April 17 public comment deadline.

That deadline was extended to May 18 after health and environmental groups blasted Wheeler for advancing the plan in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In public comments filed in the last eight weeks, scientific organizations have raised concerns that the changes that Wheeler made last month have substantially broadened the scope of the science that could be subject to challenge. For instance, the Seattle Aquarium, which conducts research on water quality and the impacts of pollution, said the revised plan could restrict the EPA's use of "situationally unique research" that by definition could not be reproduced—for example, science based on one-time events like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"Our lives, ocean and planet depend on maintaining a strong, science-driven EPA," wrote Robert W. Davidson, president and CEO of the aquarium.

But an EPA spokesman said in an email that in the revisions Wheeler made clear that such "situational" research would not be excluded simply because it could not be replicated. "Science transparency does not weaken science, and does not endanger health, quite the contrary," the spokesman said. "By requiring transparency, scientists will be required to publish hypothesis and experimental data for other scientists to review and discuss, requiring the science to withstand skepticism and peer review." 

Joel Green, water quality biologist for the Hoh Tribe in Washington State, said that the proposed rule raises concerns for the 20 Treaty Tribes of western Washington, which rely on the  harvest of fish from the Pacific Ocean and Washington rivers. Green included a list of 60 human health studies on the dangers of mercury that he said could be excluded from consideration or given less weight in future EPA rulemaking under the new "transparency" regulation.

"The proposed rule does nothing to advance the EPA's mission to protect human health and the environment, but rather would be an invitation to polluting industries to legally challenge regulations protecting human health, and for the EPA to weaken those regulations," Green said.

But other groups supported the proposed rule. The American Council on Science and Health, for example, a nonprofit advocacy group that often opposes EPA protections, submitted comments largely in favor of the transparency proposal.

"External validation, checking someone's work, is a reasonable approach," wrote Chuck Dinerstein, senior fellow at the American Council on Science and Health.

The pesticide industry, represented by CropLife America and including Bayer Crop Science, supports the rule and called for extra time to provide comments. After the Obama administration proposed banning the widely-used insecticide, chlorpyrifos, which has been linked to brain damage in children, CropLife America in 2016 petitioned EPA to halt regulatory decisions that are based on science for which the raw data is not available. The Trump administration announced in 2019 it would not ban chlorpyrifos.

Two members of the EPA's Science Advisory Board submitted comments that dissented from the board's report to Wheeler and supported  the EPA's proposal, with some qualifications. John Graham,  a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration, wrote, " I believe the public at large (including affected interest groups) are entitled to access the information used by government to support the regulations (or deregulatory actions) that impact them." But he noted that  the EPA was likely to need a process for considering case-by-case waivers from the transparency requirements. And he suggested that the EPA set up a standing committee of its Science Advisory Board to assist the agency in addressing such situations.

"Working the kinks out of the process will require that the Agency take some time, meet with scientific organizations, engage in dialogue about key concerns, and do some consensus building," Graham wrote.

The hundreds of comments filed in the last few weeks by scientific organizations overwhelmingly opposed the rule, suggesting that the EPA is a long way from building such consensus.

But Steve Milloy, a former coal industry executive who runs the website junkscience.com and has long called for a ban on the use of what he called "secret science" at the EPA,said in an interview that the effort to enact the transparency rule already has had the kind of impact he and other proponents had hoped to see.

"I think the most important thing about it is this issue has been moved to the forefront of the regulatory science debate," Milloy said. "That's all you can hope for in the end. This has drawn a lot of attention to the problem of secret science, and that's very gratifying."

Georgina Gustin contributed reporting to this article.

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420

t

secret sci BS jammed thru

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23032020/trump-epa-health-secret-science-coronavirus

With the nation in a state of emergency over the coronavirus and Americans confronting a pandemic, the Trump administration has moved to expand and fast-track a proposal to limit the use of human health science in environmental decision-making.

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The move by the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday has prompted an outcry from public health officials and environmental activists. California's top environmental official, the chair of the House Science Committee, the Union of Concerned Scientists and others have called for the EPA either to abandon the potentially far-reaching proposal or to extend the public comment period on the plan.

The Trump EPA's proposal, called the "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" rule, would restrict the agency's use of studies that rely on confidential human health data, including some of the seminal studies linking air pollution to premature death. The effort has been in the works for two years, but the Trump EPA published a "supplemental" notice last week that substantially extends the rule's scope—and then gave the public only until April 18 to comment.

Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists'Center for Science and Democracy, called for the EPA to schedule at least three virtual public hearings and extend the comment period at least 30 days beyond when the federal government lifts the national emergency. Although agencies are not always required to hold public hearings on regulatory proposals, the EPA must do so for proposals related to the Clean Air Act—a mandate some agency critics cited in their call for more time.

"Bringing this extensive proposal forward during the COVID-19 pandemic is reckless and would divert critical public health expertise from the singular mission of protecting the public and controlling the pandemic," Rosenberg wrote in a letter to the agency. "The supplemental greatly expands the scope of the draft rule and the researchers whose work would be subject to it."

California Secretary of Environment Jared Blumenfeld also requested in a letterthat the comment period be extended at least 90 days: "A comment period that short would be inadequate for such a complex and consequential rule even in ordinary circumstances and is especially so in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic," Blumenfeld wrote.

Dena Adler, legal fellow for theEnvironmental Defense Fund,in a letter of protest to the agency, wrote, "It is unconscionable, dangerous and in contravention of due process under our nation's laws, that you would take this action today and require the public—including public health experts on the front lines of saving lives imperiled by the coronavirus, and the millions of Americans heeding government and private sector responses to prevent harm by sheltering in place, closing schools and working remotely—to comment" by the proposed deadline.

An EPA spokeswoman said in an email that the agency is considering all public comments it received on its original 2018 proposal, which numbered some 600,000. The agency said it will also consider the comments received in response to the recently published supplement notice. The spokeswoman noted that after the rule is finalized, there will be additional scientific review; Congress, in approving the agency's budget for the current fiscal year, directed that the EPA commission a National Academy of Sciences assessment of how the rule alters the agency's ability to use publicly available peer-reviewed scientific and medical studies.

"These additions and clarifications to the proposed rule will ensure that the science supporting the agency's decisions is transparent and available for independent validation while still maintaining protection of confidential and personally identifiable information," said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, in a statement earlier this month announcing his plan to amend the proposed rule.

In one sense, the amendments acknowledge the problems that were raised in the wake of its original 2018 proposal—including the logistical andethical issues in making public raw data from all studies used by the EPA in decision-making. The new EPA proposal calls for a "tiered" approach, laying out a process for the regulated industry ("stakeholders," in the words of the proposal) to obtain access to health science data for reanalysis, even if it cannot be made available to the general public.

But Gretchen Goldman, research director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Center for Science and Democracy, argued that this provision lays bare the Trump administration's motive in advancing the proposal.

"This was never about promoting transparency," she wrotein a blog last week. "It was always about finding ways for those outside of the scientific community to undercut the science supporting EPA decisions."

In its effort to restrict the EPA's use of health science, the Trump administration is taking up a cause that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have been championingfor two decades, ever since studies by the American Cancer Society and researchers at Harvard University established the connection between exposure to particulate matter pollution and premature death.

If the Trump administration succeeds in pushing the regulation through and barring the EPA from using those two studies, it will make it more difficult for the agency to show that the benefits of air pollution regulations outweigh the costs. Without the data to show that reducing air pollution saves lives, the EPA would be more vulnerable to fossil fuel industry challenges of its actions on the basis that they impose unreasonable costs. 

When Republicans led the House, it passed legislation three times seeking to restrict the EPA's use of health science based on confidential data, but the Senate never took up any of the bills. 

After the Trump EPA published its original proposal in 2018, the agency received an unprecedented response from the academic and scientific community. The editors of four major scientific journals published a rare joint statement in opposition to the move, and Harvard President Lawrence Bacow signed a letter on behalf of nearly 100 other administrators and researchers—the first time such an array of Harvard's most prestigious faculty joined in opposition to any EPA proposal.

The agency's Science Advisory Board requested an opportunity to weigh in, but the board is still working on its final advice to the agency after a contentious public teleconference in January. That advice is not expected to be complete until some time in April, making it unlikely that the board will have an opportunity to weigh in on the revised proposal before the April 18 deadline. An EPA spokeswoman said that the agency expects to receive and consider the SAB's advice before finalizing the rule.

Public comments are a key part of U.S. regulatory decision-making, and the feedback that agencies receive during the comment period can make or break rules in the almost inevitable litigation that follows any major agency decision.

Agencies must catalog and respond to all of the comments that they receive in their final actions on proposed rules. Not doing so would bolster the case that opponents of those rules could muster in federal court to have an agency's actions overturned as "arbitrary and capricious" under the Administrative Procedure Act.

A shorter comment period could mean that the EPA will have fewer public comments to address on the new aspects of its proposal. That could prove important in Wheeler's effort to finalize the rule by the end of this year.

Editor's Note: The story has been updated to add additional comment from the EPA.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

REGULATION

CORONAVIRUS

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS

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https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-limits-science-public-health-2645395622.html

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used the cover of Super Tuesday to put out an update to its plans to limit scientific research in its decision-making on Tuesday evening, as the mass media world had its eyes focused on the election results trickling in.

The proposal, called Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, is part of the agency's ongoing push to rewrite "the foundation on which public health and environmental rules are crafted," as E&E News reported.

As Common Dreams reported, the timing of the release was curious. In a tweet, Rebecca Leber from Mother Jones wrote, "an incredible news dump by EPA this evening. After delays, EPA just moved forward its most controversial proposal of the Trump administration, limiting science and medical data that can be used by the agency. Still far from a final rule but inching closer."

Experts say the move, which would restrict the type of research that can be considered in public health and environmental regulations, is one of the government's most far-reaching restrictions on science, according to The New York Times.

The proposal, which was first put forth in April 2018 by former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, looked to exclude research where all the underlying data was not publicly available, even if that meant data was not shared because it would have violated medical privacy laws.The so-called "secret science" proposal received more than 600,000 comments during the public comment period. Most of them were critical of a proposal that would stop the agency from considering landmark public health research, according to The Hill. For example, under the proposal, the EPA would downplay studies that "definitively linked air pollution to premature deaths but relied on the personal health information of thousands of study subjects who had been guaranteed confidentiality," according to The New York Times.

"They're putting in nonscientific criteria to decide what science the agency can use," said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, as The New York Times reported. "Now the most important thing is whether the data is public, not the strength of the scientific evidence."

The new proposal makes a slight alteration. It would not flatly reject studies without publicly available information. Instead, it would create a tiered-system and give lower priority to studies where some of the data, even sensitive medical data, is not made public, according to The New York Times.

"In the midst of a public health crisis, Americans deserve a government that relies on the best available science to protect everyone against harm. This proposal does the opposite," said Gina McCarthy, former EPA administrator and now president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement.

"Now is not the time to play games with critical medical research that underpins every rule designed to protect us from harmful pollution in our air and in our water," McCarthyadded. "This move is even more egregious than the last proposal, which the administration's own hand-picked scientists criticized."

The proposal seems to be in lockstep with the administration's systematic efforts to dismantle environmental regulations and to finalize the rollbacks before this year's election. The effort to dilute scientific-research is particularly beneficial to the fossil fuel industry, which is often hampered by studies about the climate crisis, air pollution or the safety of drinking water, as The New York Times reported.

"These additions and clarifications to the proposed rule will ensure that the science supporting the agency's decisions is transparent and available for independent validation while still maintaining protection of confidential and personally identifiable information," said Andrew Wheeler, the EPA's administrator, as E&E News reported.

However, observers have a much different take on the intent of the rule.

"It's increasing the damage of the proposed rule," said Betsy Southerland, former director of EPA's Office of Science and Technology and a member of the Environmental Protection Network, as E&E News reported.

"Number 1, it expands the scope of the rule, and number 2, by no means does it demonstrate they have a legal authority to do this rulemaking.

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220 desmog not sectret sci per se, but attack on sci

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/02/07/dark-moneyed-denialists-fixing-science-symposium-doubt

The “Fixing Science” symposium, which is hosted by the National Association of Scholars and kicks off today in Oakland, California, includes credible speakers who want to improve some areas of science hurt by the use of poor statistical methods or making irreproducible claims.

Unfortunately, they are outnumbered by people who have often cast doubt on mainstream climate, environmental, and health sciences. For starters, who thinks that long-time fossil fuel–funded Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow with the climate science–denying Competitive Enterprise Institute, will “fix science”?  UPDATE 02/10/20: NAS Brochure at Symposium.

I was first tipped off to the swarm of climate science deniers at this meeting by Lenny Teytelman on Twitter, who said he found seven climate deniers (an undercount), and by Oxford professor Dorothy Bishopin her January 12 blog post, “Should I stay or should I go?…” about this meeting and whether scientists should engage with those with dissenting views in a situation like this.

Both provided useful insight and information, which I've consolidated with other research here.

Professor Bishop summarized well:

“But, I reiterate, the main point is not whether NatAsSchlols is left- or right-wing. It's the weird structuring of the meeting, which juxtaposes a set of experts in the 'reproducibility crisis' with a set of individuals who promote scientific views that are far from mainstream … You know your arguments would not survive scrutiny by experts familiar with evidence in the area, so you don't invite those (and to be fair, it's unlikely that they'd come anyway, as there are diminishing returns in engaging with those whose minds are fixed). But what you can do is to cast doubt on all scientific evidence by inviting along those who are questioning the solidity and credibility of current scientific practices. That's what is happening here.” [emphasis added]

Many speakers at this meeting have been affiliated with groups known for anti-science efforts, either ideologically or financially, funded mostly by dark money. When their funding sources are accessible, they include the usual companies (fossil fuels, tobacco, and chemical) and private conservative foundations, which lines up with 2013 research by sociologist Robert Brulle, summarized in my post “Study Details Dark Money Flowing to Climate Science Denial.”

A few other speakers have often worked in “product defense,” an area covered well by David Michaels in Triumph of Doubt(2020) (review). I'm compiling here a list of the speakers and organizations who are more often denying science than trying to fix it. People should be very wary of those listed in red, and I've included links to more information for those who want to do their own research.

The Fixing Science symposium sponsors are the National Association of Scholars (NAS, which should not be confused with the reputable U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which also goes by NAS) and The Independent Institute (TII). The former is led by Peter Wood and the latter by David Theroux, both vocal (but non-technical) climate science deniers.

Anti-science Groups

I've scoured IRS Form 990 data (line 8) for the four organizations affiliated with the most symposium speakers, a search that yielded total grants received each year from 2003-2017, shown in Table A. But such 501(c)(3) “public charities” need not report the sources of those grants. Using the candid.org website, I've compiled the information in the spreadsheet, “Grants To Think Tanks,whose two sheets each contain a Table 1 that lists all 1,528 grants, and a Table 2 that summarizes them.

The first sheet sorts by Recipient-Donor-Year, the second by Donor-Recipient-Year. Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) like Donors Trust and Donors Capital Funddo report grants they make, but their legal structure makes it impossible to know the original sources of the funding. Perhaps that was not dark enough for some donors. The huge Fidelity Charitable DAF started making grants to the same four organizations in 2015. It is impossible to know who got the idea first, but by 2016, Charles Koch was routing millions of dollars through that DAF.

In Table A, the Miss % is the fraction of total grant money given directly by corporations or others, so not reported on 990PF forms, and therefore, invisible to the public. Adding DAF% and Miss % yields Dark %, which shows the extent of dark money. The Heartland Institute's DAF% is high, as it receives roughly a third of its money (32%) via Donors Trust/Capital Fund.

In the tables below, CD indicates promotion of Climate Denial and TD shows persistent Tobacco Defense, with lower case implying a lesser degree. Appearing in red shows clear, well-documented anti-science behavior, generally to create doubt about science that conflicts with business interests.

DeSmog readers are likely familiar with many of the better known groups, or can click on the profiles, so this section will focus on lesser known groups...much more charts, see bak

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Big Tobacco’s smoke and mirrors revived by Pruitt’s science transparency policy

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/390638-big-tobaccos-smoke-and-mirrors-revived-by-pruitts-science

It turns out that the tobacco wars never ended.

It has been nearly 25 years since the first state lawsuits were filed against the tobacco industry, revealing that big tobacco had been deliberately seeking to cast unwarranted doubt on the science linking smoking with cancer. The tobacco companies lost that battle, but it is now clear that the war did not end but simply shifted arenas.

The same shady tactics are being used today by many of the same characters to try to create false uncertainty about the science demonstrating the public health risks of pollution. And their newest recruit is the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt recently proposed a new rule that will prevent the EPA from considering any scientific study unless all of its underlying data are made publicly available. Pruitt’s EPA claims this change in policy would improve the transparency and reproducibility of the science guiding agency actions.

In reality, it would preclude EPA from considering many important scientific studies that examine the effects of chemicals and pollutants on human health because they often rely on research whose underlying data cannot be made public because it contains confidential personal medical information.

Using the false mantle of transparency to cast doubt on public health science and create barriers to regulations is not a new idea. It is a decades-old industry trope pioneered by tobacco companies concerned about the increasing number of studies linking tobacco smoke with health problems. Big Tobacco realized the best chance of avoiding regulation lay not in attempting to combat each study as it came out, but rather in changing the standards to which those studies were held. To do this, they sought to use transparency and reproducibility as rhetorical cover to raise questions about the reliability of the science on secondhand smoke.

In a memo written for R.J. Reynolds in 1996, lawyer Chris Horner explained that the goal of this so-called “secret science” strategy is to create “explicit procedural hurdles” that will hinder EPA and other agencies’ review of unfavorable scientific studies. The game-plan described by Horner was famously carried out by a lawyer named Steve Milloy, who for years headed an industry-funded PR group for Phillip Morris called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASCC),and who has by his own account made a career of advocating for the secret science agenda.

This tactic of using the banner of “transparency” and “sound science” as a guise to prevent regulation has been enthusiastically adopted and adapted by others seeking to prevent regulation of air pollution, including greenhouse gases. In fact, Horner and Milloy have both gone on to work with an organization called the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), a coal-funded climate denial group. Following the “secret science” playbook, E&E Legal has weaponized transparency laws in hopes that it can uncover emails it can use to discredit and embarrass climate scientists.

While the strategy behind the rule Pruitt proposed in April is not new, what is new is that it now has strong supporters among EPA leadership, and its proponents have significant, direct influence on EPA policy. To illustrate: EPA developed the proposed rule after consultation with staff for House Science Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) who’s tried, and failed, to pass similar legislation. And remember former tobacco lobbyists Chris Horner and Steve Milloy? They were both members of the Trump EPA transition team.Though some members of the press were not allowed at the announcement of this “transparency” initiative, Smith and Milloy were both in attendance.  

This coordinated assault on science in the name of transparency will ultimately harm not only the health of the American people, but the scientific endeavor as a whole. If regulators arbitrarily deny important findings from scientific studies simply because they rely on confidential health information, subsequent policies won’t adequately protect us from pollution or accurately account its public health costs.

Good scientists may understandably hesitate to pursue important lines of scientific inquiry if doing so will make them targets for regulators, interest groups and legislators who seek to impugn their credibility and troll through their emails looking for ways to publicly embarrass them. When sound science is disparaged and ignored, we all lose.

Transparency in scientific research and policy making is critically important, and real improvements could be made. In the case of EPA, the agency could respond to legitimate FOIA requests and inquiries from Congress in a complete and timely manner. It could restore the ability of scientists who are EPA grant recipients to serve on advisory committees. It could put back the information about climate change it has removed from its websites. It could ensure that EPA scientists and grantees are allowed to conduct their research without interference, and to discuss it with the public and at professional conferences with their peers.

But restricting the EPA’s ability to consider significant amounts of relevant scientific evidence bearing directly on its core mission is not transparency. It’s smoke and mirrors.

Augusta Wilson is an attorney for the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

On February 6, Smith and Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) introduced the Secret Science Reform Act.

The bill is less than a page long, but it is breathtaking in scope. It forbids the EPA from taking any kind of action – regulatory, advisory, or enforcement – unless the action relies entirely on scientific research that has had all of its data made public.

Unlike the “secret science” subpoena effort, the bill doesn’t try to force the disclosure of confidential data. Instead, it calls for the exclusion of any such research in EPA actions.[ //E&E]

EPA Science Advisers Push Back on Wheeler, Saying He's Minimizing Their Role

BY: MARIANNE LAVELLE

Under Trump, the EPA administrator — a former coal lobbyist — is also pushing a plan to reduce the use of science in policy making. Read More

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05062019/epa-wheeler-science-advisory-board-meeting-limiting-scientific-studies-trump-methane-rule

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler vowed on Wednesday to make greater use of the agency's official board of science advisers. But soon after he spoke, some of those advisers and other outside experts protested that the agency was instead limiting their role.

Wheeler took the unusual step of addressing the first meeting in a year of the Science Advisory Board (SAB), a group of advisers established by law who should be holding six to eight meetings annually, according to its charter. The reason he was there, Wheeler said, was to show his commitment to a better process.

"I'm glad to be here to lay out a new direction for how EPA interacts with and uses the SAB," he said. "I will be the first to admit we have not utilized you the way that we should. We can and we will do better."

The Science Advisory Board has become a center of controversy as President Donald Trump's administration has sought to remake the federal agencies. Researchers who receive EPA grant money have been barred from serving on the board, while several industry consultants and contrarian scientists have been brought aboard. Although some holdovers remain from previous administrations, Trump-era appointees now make up a large portion of the 44-member body. Some of them are known for their outlying views beyond the prevailing scientific consensus, or for representing the interests of regulated businesses.

Noting the lengthy vetting process for appointees, Wheeler said, "Why should we have talented public servants go through all of that only to use you sparingly? Today we are beginning the transition to a new process. It's no secret that the process was broken, and was not beneficial to the EPA, the board, or the public we all serve."

But some members of the board parried with Wheeler and other EPA officials at the meeting over exactly what part of the process is broken—the advisory process, or how the Trump administration is proceeding with a deregulatory agenda that gives less weight to some of the science that has guided the agency for years.

One SAB member who is a holdover from before Trump, Steven Hamburg, chief scientist of the Environmental Defense Fund, asked Wheeler why the Science Advisory Board had not had an opportunity to weigh in on some of the latest science in the agency's repeal of the Obama administration's regulations on control of methane emissions from oil and gas operations. The SAB raised concerns over that proposal when it met a year ago, and it had an opportunity to confer with another group of outside EPA experts, the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, but Hamburg said their focus was more on technology than science. EDF, an environmental group, has been involved in a number of large scientific studies on the extent of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, released by the oil and gas industry.

Wheeler said that in the future, he hoped to involve the Science Advisory Board earlier in the process—soon after proposals are made public, but he couldn't change what happened in the past.

"The one you cite—I'm sorry, it's too late in the regulatory process," Wheeler said. "I can't go back and reopen some of the regulations we've already done." The agency finished taking public comment on its methane proposallast December, but has not yet finalized a rule.

One public commenter, John Bachmann, a 33-year veteran of the EPA who is now retired, said that under the 1978 law that governs the EPA's use of its science advisory board, the agency is actually required to provide its regulatory proposals and the underlying science to the Science Advisory Board before a proposal is made public. Bachmann now works with the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former agency scientists and other staffers who have been critical of the EPA's moves under the Trump administration.

Wheeler's Controversial 'Secret Science' Plan

But much of the debate at the first day of a two-day meeting centered on a controversial policy proposal that Wheeler said he was committed to finalizing this year even though it had provoked an outcry that left him "a little shocked."

The proposal, called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science," would limit the kinds of science the agency can use in its decision-making. The agency received some 600,000 comments on the proposal, including from leading scientific journals, professional organizations and universities. Because many human health studies rely on information gathered under confidentiality agreements, and the raw data has not been made public, the proposal could prevent the agencyfrom using some of the seminal studies underpinning air pollution regulations, for example.

Barbara Morrissey, of Washington State's Department of Health, sitting on the board on an ex officio basis as chair of another advisory group, the Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee, told Wheeler she was concerned about how EPA could meet its legal requirement of using the best available science, if that science can't be replicated in the manner the EPA envisions.

Wheeler said there would be "a safeguard" in the system, giving the EPA Administrator the discretion to include an important study even if it can't be replicated. "I do fundamentally believe that the more information we put out, the more sound our decisions will be and the more easily understood and accepted by the public," Wheeler said.

But one public commenter, Veena Singla, associate director of the reproductive and environmental health program at the University of California, San Francisco, said her concerns about the proposal were not assuaged.

"Having a political appointee deciding what science is in or out of policymaking is not a safeguard, but rather a fundamentally biased process," Singla said.

Before the meeting, the EPA had given the Science Advisory Board a charge to weigh in on two narrow aspects of that rule—how the agency should deal with confidential business information, and how to shield personally identifiable information in the large health studies that in the past have been the basis for much of the agency's decision-making.

SAB 'Should Be Giving an Independent Look'

Allison Cullen, associate dean of the school of public policy and governance at the University of Washington, was one of several board members who objected to the fact that the scope of comments that the EPA sought from the SAB was being limited—in contrast, she said, the public had been asked to comment on the proposed regulation broadly.

"The SAB is an independent body that should be giving an independent look at this, not necessarily responding to what the public comments are," Cullen said.

Hamburg said that the time frame that the SAB had been given to weigh in on the measure was also too compressed for the board to weigh in effectively. "There's a lack of transparency about this 'transparency' proposal," said Hamburg. "It's inconsistent with what the administrator says about wanting to fix a broken system."

New Appointees Side with Wheeler

But several of the board members who were appointed by Wheeler and by his predecessor, former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, praised the agency for its effort.

New SAB member Robert Phalen, an air pollution researcher at the Irvine campus of the University of California, has long been critical of the air pollution studies that the EPA has relied on, which use raw data not available to the public. "A short cut—if a study cannot be replicated for privacy concerns, probably the alternative is to simply drop that from consideration and rely on the vast amount of other studies. That's just a raw suggestion from an SAB member."

Stanley Young, a statistician who did work for the pharmaceutical industry and others before being appointed to the SAB by Pruitt, said that there should be no privacy concerns in epidemiology studies that track mortality. "Once a person is dead, they are not considered a person," he said. He said he hoped that the agency was prepared for "epidemiological foot dragging and stonewalling" about release of its data.

The SAB will be holding a teleconference with the EPA later this summer to further discuss the transparency rule.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

REGULATION

ANDREW WHEELER

EPA

DONALD TRUMP

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25042019/trump-omb-secret-science-policy-memo-pollution-health-studies-heritage-foundation-vought

Donald Trump's administration has launched yet another attempt to control the use of science in federal policymaking—this time with a memorandum to government agencies from the White House budget office.

Thememo, quietly released on Wednesday, appears aimed at putting into effect some long-sought goals of industry foes of environmental regulations.

Described as "guidance" for executive branch agencies, it offers numerous new avenues for regulated industries to challenge the science used in policymaking. The memo was signed by Russell Vought, a former top official at the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation who is now acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Observers say the OMB is seeking to implement by fiat restrictions on environmental and health science that have failed to garner support in Congress and have foundered in a formal rulemaking process begun last year by the Environmental Protection Agency.

"There's been no consultation with the scientific community, no opportunity to comment, no analysis on the costs or impacts," said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Vought's memo, titled "Improving Implementation of the Information Quality Act," sets out new guidance for all federal agencies on identifying and using "influential scientific, financial, or statistical information."

It says that such data should be held to higher standards than other information, with a more in-depth peer review required. That review should evaluate "the objectivity of the underlying data and the sensitivity of the agency's conclusions to analytic assumptions," with additional peer review required in some circumstances.

Data of this kind, such as health surveys, are often used to support controls on pollutants, including those like smog and soot that come from burning fossil fuels. The guidance could also affect how limits on greenhouse gas emissions are devised.

Vought writes that influential analysis must be disseminated to the public "with sufficient descriptions of data and methods to allow them to be reproduced by qualified third parties who may want to test the sensitivity of agency analyses."

Echoes of EPA's 'Secret Science' Effort

The OMB memo appears aimed at achieving the same goals as EPA's proposal last year, the so-called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" rule, which sought to prevent the EPA from relying on public health studies where the raw data had not been made public due to confidentiality concerns. It mirrored legislation sponsored by former Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), then chairman of the House Science Committee, that was passed by the House of Representatives three times but never been taken up by the Senate.

Under the guise of transparency, the EPA rule would have excluded from environmental policymaking some of the seminal studies linking air pollution to increased mortality.

The EPA received more than 500,000 public comments on the transparency proposal, including an extraordinary outpouring of opposition from the scientific community—including the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; the leaders of physicians' groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics; health organizations like the American Lung Association; and the editors of major scientific journals.

No further public action has occurred on the rule since the comment period closed last August. An EPA spokesperson said in an email that the agency "is considering the new OMB memorandum as we move forward with the 'Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science' rulemaking."

'It's About Delay'

It is not clear exactly what impact the OMB guidance will have—in part because this kind of guidance doesn't have the force and effect of law. (In other words, the requirements and deadlines of environmental statutes would weigh more heavily before a judge.) Also, Vought does not specify what the EPA or other agencies are to do about influential scientific studies that do not meet the new requirements. But Rosenberg said it appears to offer the regulated industry new avenues to challenge actions that rely on science.

"It's about delay," said Rosenberg. "Every piece of this allows industry to make a claim that will delay the process of regulations.

"It essentially says that anyone—mostly industry—can challenge the data or technical information, and the agency then has to develop a response to every challenge, and then the person who challenged the data can appeal, and you have to go through this cycle again, apparently endlessly."

Vought, known as a conservative firebrand who served as an aide to Vice President Mike Pence when Pence was a member of Congress, played a key role in the budget controversies that engulfed the White House early this year. He reportedly designed Trump's initial proposal for border wall funding and led the decision to continue processing tax refunds during the government shutdown.

Vought's memo on information quality portrays the new guidance as a good government measure. "Prudent decision making depends on reliable, high-quality information," Vought wrote. "Congress has long recognized that federal agencies should make decisions using the best data reasonably available, and Congress has entrusted OMB with the statutory role of ensuring that federal agencies collect, use, and disseminate information that is fit for its intended purpose."

Published Under:

Regulation

Climate Science

Donald Trump

https://thinkprogress.org/oil-lobby-groups-epa-secret-science-proposal-clean-water-rules-9de63644deed/

no lnx twt?

EPA’s ‘secret science’ proposal being used by Big Oil to undermine clean water rules

Fossil fuel trade groups don't want the EPA to update a 1970s-era list of polluting petroleum chemicals.

KYLA MANDEL

MAR 22, 2019, 8:00 AM

Internal emails reveal two major fossil fuel trade groups are lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from updating a decades-old list of toxic chemicals found in petroleum wastewater — and they’re using the Trump administration’s controversial “secret science” proposal to make their case.

The EPA currently monitors for 16 types of chemicals in wastewater, or effluent, released by petroleum refineries under the Clean Water Act. However, in the more than 40 years since the list was developed, scientific understanding around the number of chemicals and their toxicity levels has grown. As a result, the EPA is in the early stages of determining whether the priority list of chemicals needs to be updated.

But according to emails released to the Sierra Club and reviewed by ThinkProgress, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) are lobbying to limit the scope of the EPA’s study.

The fossil fuel trade groups want to ensure that two categories of chemicals known to be toxic to aquatic life, and potentially harmful to humans, are excluded from the study: alkylated polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (alkylated-PAHs) and naphthenic acids (NAs). The industry even goes so far as to state that including these in a study would risk “legal challenges.”

These two sets of chemicals are not currently on the EPA’s priority list. There are hundreds of different variations of PAH chemicals and levels of toxicity (alkylated-PAHs, for instance, are a derivative of the main “parent” PAH compounds). Burning coal and oil is the main source for these chemicals.

Yet, according to Jan Andersson, a chemistry professor at the University of Münster in Germany who has studied the EPA’s list, roughly 97 percent of the PAH chemical compounds found in crude oil are alkylated chemicals, making any lobbying against their inclusion quite significant. Meanwhile, NAs are found primarily in the byproduct of tar sands oil; the non-biodegradable compounds are stored in giant tailings ponds.

Excluding these types of chemicals from the EPA study would therefore serve to preemptively limit the scope of any potential rule changes in the future.

“They’re trying to cook the books at the very earliest stages of a study for petroleum refinery and ignoring the considerable data that’s out there that alkylated-PAHs are absolutely at least as toxic, if not more toxic, than the ones everybody monitors for right now,” Betsy Southerland, former director of the EPA’s Office of Water’s Office of Science and Technology, told ThinkProgress. Southerland worked for the EPA for 30 years before resigning in 2017 in response to the change in leadership.

At high or prolonged exposure, PAH chemicals can cause tumors in aquatic life and birds as well as impact their reproduction, development, and immunity. Studies show that NAs have similar impacts, along with causing liver and heart damage in mice. Some known health effects to humans from PAH exposure include eye and skin irritation, nausea, and diarrhea, as well as longer-term impacts such as kidney or liver damage and asthma-like symptoms.

Scientists are still studying how the various chemicals impact humans; a range of PAH chemicals are classified as suspected or possibly carcinogenic to humans. What is known though, is that alkylated-PAHs are likely more toxic than other types of PAHs. They also take a longer time to biodegrade in the environment.

The ‘secret science’ argument

Issued by the EPA in 1976, the list of 16 types of PAH chemicals is used to determine which chemicals must be monitored for risks to drinking water and human health. Under the Clean Water Act, petroleum wastewater effluent guidelines establish a national floor — a baseline limit — for these chemicals. So, if there is a discharge of waste such as the release of industrial wastewater, stormwater runoff, or oil spills, only these 16 chemicals are tested to determine the level of toxicity.

The simplicity of the list has made the process easily applicable and cost-effective, and other countries have also turned to it as a resource. The list hasn’t just been used to monitor wastewater, either — environmental studies frequently use it as a basis for research. However, as a 2015 article co-authored by Andersson and published in the academic journal Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds notes, the list leaves out three large groups of these chemical compounds, including alkylated-PAHs. As the paper states, crude oil and coal are “rich” in alkyl compounds.

Despite the potential impact on human health and the environment, the levels of these chemicals currently found in petroleum wastewater is unknown; that’s one thing the EPA’s study would determine. PAH concentrations can vary from site-to-site and by the source of the crude oil. The findings would then help guide any necessary changes to the list of chemicals that should be regulated.

As part of its argument against the EPA measuring these chemicals, the trade groups are using the EPA’s proposed “secret science” rule to argue against disclosure of NAs because that would constitute a risk to companies’ proprietary data.

The proposed rule, also known as the “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule, was introduced last April by former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. The rule has been supported by climate science deniers and effectively aims to restrict the use of scientific evidence in the rule-making process. The plan has been stalled under Administrator Andrew Wheeler, but if adopted, it would require the EPA to rely only on scientific studies where the underlying data used by the researchers is made public. Critics argue the bill would severely limit the kind of science the EPA could use in justifying regulations (excluding public health data, for instance) and would place a number of unnecessary burdens on EPA scientists.

Some in the chemical and fossil fuel industries, both of which maintain close ties with the Trump administration, have also warned that the rule would expose confidential corporate information. In a June 8, 2018 letter attached to an email to Brian d’Amico, branch chief at the EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, API and AFPM wrote that using the industry’s own proprietary method of analyzing naphthenic acids would be a “clear contradiction” to the EPA’s proposed secret science rule.

“Independent validation is clearly not possible when a proprietary analytical method is used to generate the data,” the organizations argued. “In the interest of transparency, per its own proposed rule, EPA should abandon the use of this proprietary method in the Detailed Study.”

“Data derived from these methods could result in the EPA facing substantial scientific and legal challenge,” API and AFPM warned.

In other words, under the hypothetical scenario where the EPA decides to update its chemicals list at a time when the secret science rule is officially adopted, it would require the results of the EPA’s effluent study be made public, as that would be considered underlying data used to introduce the new chemicals rule. But doing so would, in the eyes of the fossil fuel industry, violate their proprietary methods used to analyze the chemical and so the chemicals should instead be simply excluded from the very beginning to avoid such a scenario.

“Quoting a rule that has not even gone final yet for the reason why [the EPA] shouldn’t be allowed to monitor it is pretty outrageous,” said Southerland.

The EPA did not respond to a request for comment from ThinkProgress about whether or not it will be studying the two types of chemicals the fossil fuel industry has been lobbying against. The API and AFPM also did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Obsolete’ list

The fossil fuel industry is also arguing that the EPA doesn’t have sufficient data to claim that these two groups of chemicals should be regulated. As Roger E. Claff, senior scientific adviser at API, wrote in a February 2018 email to d’Amico, among the concerns is a “lack of toxicity data for decision-making.”

But as Southerland explained, that’s precisely why the EPA is initiating its study; growing scientific findings suggest these chemicals are highly toxic and therefore updates might be warranted. Meanwhile, she said, “API is saying ‘hell no.'”

Andersson made the case for updating the list in his 2015 paper. The 1976 list was created based on what was commercially available at the time, but many more variations of PAH chemicals exist now. Meanwhile, toxicology has improved understanding of the adverse health impacts of a wide range of these chemicals, and “a wealth of new compounds have been added to the inventory of confirmed or suspect carcinogens.”

“This list of compounds is not suitable,” Andersson told ThinkProgress. “Most of them are pretty innocuous… [there are] many that are much more toxic that don’t appear on this list because in 1976, people didn’t know about them. This list looks pretty obsolete.”

‘Collaboration through the years’

The first meeting between the EPA and the fossil fuel trade groups on this issue occurred in May 2016, under the Obama administration. And as a January 2018 slide show presentation to the Trump administration shows, the industry highlighted its “collaboration through the years” with the EPA.

Internal emails released to the Sierra Club show a January 2018 presentation by API to the EPA.

INTERNAL EMAILS RELEASED TO THE SIERRA CLUB SHOW A JANUARY 2018 PRESENTATION BY API TO THE EPA.

Of course, some degree of collaboration is needed in order for the EPA to properly conduct its study and gather the necessary data. However, the internal emails provide insight into the scale of influence the fossil fuel lobby is trying to exert at the very early stages of decision making.

Dalal Aboulhosn, who works on federal water policy for the Sierra Club, said this shows how under the current administration industry “is allowed to come in and pretty much write their wish list.”

On water specifically she said, there has been a pattern of industry approaching the EPA under both Pruitt and Wheeler with policy ideas before the EPA has actually decided to move on the issue. Shortly after, a change is announced.

“It’s very blatant and it’s across the board when it comes to issues in the agency, and we’re seeing it very starkly on water issues,” Aboulhosn said.

Indeed, after arguing last June that “the science and data for the toxicity of NAs and alkylated-PAHs are still a work in progress,” the two trade groups go so far as to suggest that, should the EPA wish to study them, the agency must address these two groups of chemicals “in a project outside of the Study.”

They argue the EPA should make a new official rule in order to create a new “method” for studying these chemicals. This separate project should undergo “the appropriate public notice and comment period required to gain method approval,” the trade groups’ letter states.

This, however, would be highly uncommon given public notice and comment periods typically apply to new regulations, or changes to existing regulations (such as repealing the Obama-era Clean Power Plan or introducing the “secret science” rule); it would also serve to delay the process by several years.

“It sounds like they’re trying to set some new bar to any future detailed studies,” Southerland said, “where no analyses can be done unless there’s a standard method… that would be a bar not just for petroleum refinery but every industry category.”

It quickly becomes a “chicken and egg” situation, Southerland said; you need a study to determine if a new rule is needed, but the industry is arguing you need a new rule before conducting the study.

But as the June 2018 industry letter to the EPA reads, “API and AFPM members believe in due diligence and support EPA in developing sound science.”

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https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060084931

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Back to E&E News index page.

EPA

Pruitt science plan may block use of major Harvard study

Corbin Hiar, E&E News reporter

Greenwire: Monday, June 18, 2018

Joseph Allen and green building study. Photo credit: @WorldGBC/Twitter]

Harvard University researcher Joseph Allen speaks about the results of a green building study in 2016. @WorldGBC/Twitter

This story was updated June 19 at 2:38 p.m. EDT.

Harvard University is working on an international survey that researchers believe could revolutionize the world's understanding of how buildings affect public health.

There's just one problem: Because of a change to scientific standards proposed by Administrator Scott Pruitt, EPA regulators likely won't be able to use the study's findings to better protect Americans.

"This speaks to the central issue with that regulation," Harvard's Joseph Allen, the principal investigator of the global buildings study said of EPA's regulatory science transparency proposal.

...

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whoohoo but temp?

EPA Delays 'Agenda to Sideline Science' After Receiving Nearly 600,000 Comments

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is delaying the roll out of a controversial science proposal after receiving nearly 600,000 comments on the plan, The Hill reported Wednesday.

The proposal would have limited the kinds of studies the EPA could use to make regulations to only studies that relied on data that was publicly available and therefore reproducible. But scientists and environmentalists warned that would exclude many important public health studies that relied on confidential patient medical records, ABC News reported.

Keep reading...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15082018/epa-secret-science-rule-opposition-health-environmental-data-public-comments

Arguing that public health and safety are at risk, researchers, health experts and administrators from leading scientific institutions across the nation have joined in opposition to a controversial Trump administration proposal that would restrict the use of science in federal policy making.

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As the comment period draws to a close Thursday on a plan to limit the science that the Environmental Protection Agency can use in decision-making, the scientific and academic communities are flooding the agency with letters arguing the proposal would hobble EPA and wreak havoc on research.

"The proposed rule would—for no rational reason—prevent EPA from relying on much of the research that ... public health and environmental exposure researchers have conducted and continue to conduct," said one letter, organized by Harvard University, its health and medical schools and its affiliated hospitals. It was signed by Harvard President Lawrence Bacow and nearly 100 other administrators and researchers—the first time such an array of Harvard's most prestigious faculty have joined in opposition to any EPA proposal, according to former agency officials and observers.  

The EPA proposal has long been sought by fossil fuel interests. It could be used to weaken health-based standards for limiting some of the pollution caused by burning coal, oil and natural gas, and ties in with the Trump administration's broad attempt to roll back climate and pollution rules.

But the Harvard letter, drafted by the school's legal experts, lays out a roadmap that opponents surely will rely on to challenge the approach as illegal.

They note that Congress has mandated that EPA use the "best available science" in at least a half dozen separate laws. "The rule will cripple EPA's ability to implement [these environmental laws] and will jeopardize the health and safety of infants, children, and adults in the United States and beyond," they wrote.

The so-called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" proposal, also known as the "secret science" rule, would prohibit the EPA from relying on studies where raw data has not been released publicly, perhaps even including information that could reveal the identities and medical records of research subjects.

That could exclude studies where participants were promised confidentiality, including some of the seminal research on environmental health threats—such as the first studies linking small particle soot pollution with increased mortality. One of these was published in 1993 by Harvard scientists.

Broad Opposition, Particularly in Health Care

If acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler forges ahead to finalize the proposal, it will be against the advice not only of Harvard and many other health and medical research institutions, but also the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the leaders of physicians' groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, and health organizations like the American Lung Association.

The editors of four major scientific journals published a rare joint statement. EPA's own Science Advisory Board has recommended the proposal be delayed until the board can undertake a review. Even the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent nonprofit funded by electric power generators, warned that its recent studies on pollutants and health could be sidelined by EPA under the plan.

"I've never seen such a broad spectrum of opposition," said Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator early in President George W. Bush's administration.

"It's not just environmentalists," she said. "It's health care people, and frankly all people who recognize the constrictions this would put on good science and the ability to get comprehensive data, which is what you need in order to make the decisions the agency has to make."

Wendy Wagner, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an authority on science in the regulatory process, noted the "high caliber of some of the commenters, who are usually not engaged in these issues at all. I don't know in my life whether I've seen a rule attract interest from this kind of spectacular group of all-stars."

"To me, that alone signals to some sector of the public that there is a problem," Wagner said.

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University Law School, said the broad condemnation reflects the deep impact the rule could have on how the EPA carries out its mission.

"This proposal goes to fundamental scientific methodology, and is an effort to turn a blind eye to some of the most useful scientific evidence for environmental rulemaking," Gerrard said. "Regardless of how you feel about the outcome of any regulation in particular, this seems like an attack on the overall scientific enterprise."

Where Did 'Secret Science' Plan Come From?

The proposal was one of the final gambits of former Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt before his resignation in July amid a swirl of ethics investigations. It mirrored legislation sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science Committee, that has been passed by the House of Representatives three times but has never been taken up by the Senate.

Smith had picked up the idea from fossil fuel industry allies who have waged a years-long campaign to discredit the science on the dangers of fine soot pollution. Attacking that research has been a cause célèbre for some fossil fuel industry advocates, because it has been an underpinning of EPA's calculation of health benefits and co-benefits for rules to cut air pollution from power plants—including efforts to rein in greenhouse gas pollution, like the Clean Power Plan.

But the EPA proposal would have an impact far beyond how the agency weighs the risks of soot pollution.

The agency also would be forced to ignore the studies that established the dangers of arsenic, lead, methylmercury, radionuclides and numerous other environmental hazards, Harvard officials argued in their 50-page submission.

For example, the EPA currently is considering setting maximum contaminant levels for two widespread industrial chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), which are polluting drinking water sources around the country. But the Harvard letter argues the agency would be prevented from taking action under the "transparency" proposal, since the raw data in the most important science on those chemicals is under court-ordered seal. (A study involving 70,000 participants funded as part of a lawsuit settlement agreement over drinking water contaminated near a DuPont facility in Parkersburg, West Virginia.)

Supporters with Close Ties to Fossil Fuels

The EPA proposal has its supporters. The Heartland Institute, a conservative policy group with close ties to fossil fuel interests, said the plan would remedy what it characterizes as a "scientific crisis" at EPA.

In its comments, it called the mainstream modeling of climate and pollution science "a waste of time and money, as well as self-delusional."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce applauded the Trump administration's effort to address what it characterized as a "longstanding problem."

"Citizens have a right to the data and information that are used in the development of public policy," Dan Byers, head of the chamber's Global Energy Institute, said in a prepared statement for a hearing the agency held on the proposal in July.

But others argue that the Trump administration's proposal, developed without consultation with the science community, mischaracterizes the issues.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation, the world's largest nonprofit funder of research for Parkinson's disease, said it "strives for open data in its own research where possible, and encourages funded researchers to make data available based on the nature of the study and the feasibility of adequate de-identification."

But the foundation said "there are many studies where the exposure of data is infeasible, counterproductive or dangerous. The types of studies most vulnerable to exclusion, human-based clinical trials or epidemiology (observational) studies, form the bedrock of knowledge vital for determinations about the environment's impact on human health."

Regulation Would Depend on 'Opinion', 'Whim'

To support its proposal, the EPA invoked the work of John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, known for his 2005 research paper "Why Most Published Findings Are False."

But Ioannidis published an editorial early this spring arguing that the EPA proposal was misguided, since most of the raw data from past studies are not publicly available.

"If the proposed rule is approved, science will be practically eliminated from all decision-making processes," he wrote. "Regulation would then depend uniquely on opinion and whim."

The EPA also cites studies that were conducted by the Administrative Conference of the U.S., an agency dedicated to improving the regulatory process, and the Bipartisan Policy Center, a public policy think tank.

But Wagner, who authored both of those studies, said there is no overlap between the EPA proposal and the recommendations of those groups. To the extent they dealt with transparency, it was on issues such as the need for better disclosure of the financing of industry-funded studies.

Wagner points out that because the EPA proposal would give the administrator discretion to grant exemptions on a case-by-case basis, it would mark a profound change.

"It's anyone's guess how that discretion can be used," she said. "It's by design a political decision. We don't really have criteria as we typically like to see in accountable democratic systems to measure or even assess the administrator's decisions. It significantly departs from process honed over the past 40 years. Not that it's been perfect, and not that there aren't a lot of things to fix. But it's hard to think of any case, ever, where we simply created a process rule that said it's up to a political administrator to decide what science counts and what doesn't."

It remains to be seen how influential the response from the scientific community will be with the EPA under Wheeler's leadership. "In a normal world, where facts and science matter, this kind of outpouring would be quite influential," said Gerrard. "Under Trump, who knows?"

But he said the arguments made by the commenters will be important in the inevitable legal challenges that Wheeler will face if he does move forward with the proposal.

"I think the courts may be the more important audience," Gerrard said."If Andrew Wheeler does decide to bolt ahead with the rule, he will be sued in a matter of minutes."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

CLIMATE SCIENCE

REGULATION

EPA

ANDREW WHEELER

SCOTT PRUITT

DONALD TRUMP

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https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/6/as_scott_pruitt_resigns_former_epa

...we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by two former EPA officials who have left the agency under Pruitt. Mustafa Ali is the former head of the environmental justice program at the Environmental Protection Agency. And Chris Zarba is a career EPA employee, who retired in February after leading the agency’s Scientific Advisory Boards. Also joining us from Washington, D.C., is Kristin Mink, the mother and teacher in Washington, D.C., who confronted Pruitt earlier this week at a restaurant, calling on him to resign. Also with us, Emily Atkin, staff writer at The New Republic whose latest piece is headlined “Scott Pruitt Is Gone. His Assault on the Environment Continues.”

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Mustafa Ali. You were one of the first to quit the EPA when Scott Pruitt became its chief. Talk about your response. What do you think brought him down?

MUSTAFA ALI: Well, I think it was a number of things, Amy, that brought him down. Folks should definitely be focused on the policy and how the choices that were being made were placing our country and our citizens in much greater harm. So I think that that’s the first place that we should always start, because that actually affects public health and the environment. You know, the scandals that he was a part of also were just the extra added incentive for him to need to leave. I think that he actually didn’t understand what the job description was, which was to protect public health and the environment. So, if he couldn’t do that, he should have never accepted the position.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was the spark for you to leave, Mustafa Ali? And when was that? It was almost at the very beginning of his term.

MUSTAFA ALI: Yeah, I left on March the 8th of 2017. And, you know, I took a look at some of the decisions that were being proposed and actions that were being moved forward on. And I knew that the vulnerable communities that I had worked for—communities of color, low-income communities and indigenous populations—would sort of be placed in a much more dangerous situation by the things that they were proposing. So I knew that I could not be a part of that, and I decided to walk away.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Zarba, you left in February. Talk about the reasons you left. You’re ex-director of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board.

CHRIS ZARBA: Actually, I was planning on retiring a year before I really retired. And I had identified a number of excellent candidates that I would recommend for people to take my position when I retired. After the election, those people who were interested in the position backed down. And I actually decided to stay an additional year, because I truly believed in the agency and the mission of the Science Advisory Board, and I thought if I stayed another year, I could be helpful in helping the organization get through a very difficult time.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was your reaction yesterday when President Trump tweeted that Scott Pruitt was out?

CHRIS ZARBA: Well, my immediate reaction was—I mean, I think there’s 12 or 14 individual investigations on his ethical behavior. And while I think they all should continue, they really are quite trivial compared to some of the other things that Scott Pruitt was pushing for. And that’s why I’m here. And at the top of that list is the bill that he has proposed that’s called transparency in regulatory science. And the implications are huge to the health of the American public. And it’s important that that message get out there and people be aware of what’s happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the EPA Science Advisory Board and what was happening to it, Chris Zarba.

CHRIS ZARBA: So, the Science Advisory Board—anything that EPA does that is based on science of consequence, it really requires—sometimes it’s by law, and sometimes you just have to do it—an independent science review. So the Science Advisory Board consists of—and the panels and the standing committees underneath it—200 to 300 nationally recognized scientists. They’re all cleared for ethics conflicts of interest. They come from industry, academia, state and local government. They conduct independent reviews, and they write reports that summarize the strengths and limitations of the science that the EPA is going to be using.

What happened in the past year, the rules of governing the Science Advisory Board changed quite substantially as a result of an October 31st directive from Scott Pruitt. And there were a variety of changes, but some of the key ones were that the term limit for SAB members went from six years to three. So each year we went from an 18 percent turnover rate to over a 36 percent turnover rate. The second thing was, is that any SAB member that had an active EPA grant needed to be terminated. So I had to pick up the phone and fire quite a few of these nationally recognized scientists. And at the same time, if these scientists had a grant from industry, there was no issue with that. It was only if you had an EPA grant. And the third and most concerning thing that we had to do is that in considering new members of the SAB, we couldn’t consider anyone that had an active EPA grant, which meant that a huge portion of some of the most qualified scientists in the nation could not even be considered for these positions. And when you put all those three things together, it certainly leads to the perception that the Science Advisory Board could be compromised, and it would make people question the reports that will be coming out in the coming months.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us who Steven Milloyis, the architect of the tobacco industry’s defense of the dangers of cigarette smoke?

CHRIS ZARBA: Yeah. So, in the past several years, Congress has tried to pass a bill called the HONEST Act.And it was an act that would apply just to EPA, and it would limit the kind of data that we could use to set policy. It never passed. But it then was proposed by Scott Pruitt, and it’s called the transparency in—transparency in regulatory science. And what that does is it prevents EPA from using any data where all the information is not made publicly available.

So, much of the data EPA uses is human subject data, where people, let’s say, in a community were accidentally exposed to contaminated drinking water. They were—got sick, had problems with that. It was found out, unfortunately, and then scientists would come in and study what happened and what exposures people had and what the consequences were. Well, while that was a terrible—those things are terrible, they do provide a unique opportunity for scientists to get real data on what’s safe—what the safe level is or dangerous level is for different contaminants. In getting the public to agree to let the scientists use their data, they frequently sign confidentiality agreements, which means that we, the scientists, cannot share the person’s name or phone number or address, so that they have that anonymity. And basically, this act is proposing that if all of that data isn’t made publicly available, scientists and EPAcan’t use it to set regulations, which means that the vast majority of science that EPA has to set clean levels for different contaminants and classes of contaminants in the environment goes away, and all of those rules go away.

There was a recent study done by a group called the Environment Protection Network, and they calculated thatif this law had passed 20 years ago, approximately 50,000 Americans would have died each year in the past 20 years. So, if you add that up, it comes out to about a million Americans could have died prematurely as the result of that bill. So, when I said earlier that the ethical issues with Scott Pruitt are trivial compared to some of these bigger issues, this is what I’m referring to. A million Americans is important.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking with Chris Zarba, ex-director of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board—he left the EPA in February—and Mustafa Ali, one of the first to resign last year after EPA chief Scott Pruitt started. Well, yesterday, it was announced Scott Pruitt is out. When we come back, we’ll speak to the mother who confronted Scott Pruitt this week in a restaurant, demanding he resign.

...

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H.R.1430 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): HONEST Act | Congress.gov ...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1430

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:{Summary of H.R.1430 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): :{HONEST Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

**Sponsor**‎: ‎Rep. Smith, Lamar(Introduced 03/08/...

Committees‎: ‎House - Science, Space, and Tec...

Roll Call Votes‎: ‎There have been 2 roll call vot...

HONEST Act (H.R. 1430) - GovTrack.us

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hr1430

:{:(style="text-align:left;border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

2.

:{Another :{bill:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: that passed the :{House:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: would curtail the ability of the EPA to issue ... :{Sponsor:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. Representative for Texas's 21st congressional district. Republican.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act would hamstring ...

https://govtrackinsider.com/honest-and-open-new-epa-science-treatment-act-would-ha...

:{:(style="text-align:left;border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{May 23, 2017 - The :{HONEST Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: requires EPA to base new regulations on sound ... :{House:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: lead :{sponsor:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:Smith's biggest donors are oil and gas companies.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

House votes to restrict EPA's use of science | TheHill

thehill.com/policy/energy.../326380-house-votes-to-restrict-epas-use-of-science

:{:(style="text-align:left;border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

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:{Mar 29, 2017 - The :{HONEST Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is similar to the Secret Science Act, which leaders in the :{House:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Science Committee :{sponsored:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: in previous congresses and ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

HONEST Act needs honest engagement of scientific community | TheHill

thehill.com/.../339048-honest-act-needs-honest-engagement-of-scientific-community

:{:(style="text-align:left;border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Jun 23, 2017 - Earlier this spring the :{House:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has passed—along almost entirely party ... Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment (:{HONEST:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:) :{Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of 2017.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

House Approves HONEST Act | Committee on Science, Space, and ...

https://science.house.gov/news/press-releases/house-approves-honest-act

:{:(style="text-align:left;border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

2.

:{Mar 29, 2017 - WASHINGTON- The U.S :{House:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of Representatives today approved H.R. 1430, the :{Honest:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:and Open New EPA Science Treatment :{Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of 2017 ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: sponsor ‎| ‎Must include: ‎sponsor

H.R.1430: HONEST Act | Represent | ProPublica

https://projects.propublica.org/represent/bills/115/hr1430

:{:(style="text-align:left;border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

2.

:{Bill :{Sponsor:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) ... not been amended since it was introduced. The expanded summary of the :{House:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: reported version is repeated here.) Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017 or the :{HONEST Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (Sec.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

The Transparency Bills That Would Gut the EPA - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/how-to...honesty/519462/

:{:(style="text-align:left;border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

2.

:{Mar 15, 2017 - His solution is a pair of bills—the :{HONEST Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and the EPA Science ... ranking Democrat member of the :{House:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Committee on Science, Space, ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: sponsor ‎| ‎Must include: ‎sponsor

The House just passed two bills that would stifle science at the EPA ...

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/3/30/.../transparency-epa-bills-not

:{:(style="text-align:left;border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Mar 30, 2017 - Over the past two days, the :{House:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has passed the “:{HONEST Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:” and the ... formerly called the “Secret Science Reform Act.” Its :{sponsor:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is Rep.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Critics say HONEST Act undercuts EPA's use of science - Marketplace

https://www.marketplace.org/.../honest-act-seen-critics-undercutting-epa-s-use-science

:{:(style="text-align:left;border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Apr 10, 2017 - The Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment (:{HONEST:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:) :{Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has strong ... The legislation's chief :{sponsor:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, :{House:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Science Committee ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

==https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1430/cosponsors

28:1

cuellar

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https://theconversation.com/why-the-epas-secret-science-proposal-alarms-public-health-experts-96000

Later this month, the EPA could finalize a controversial rule to limit what scientific research the agency can use in writing environmental regulations.

I write as an academic who has been involved in air pollution issues for over 50 years and a former EPA assistant administrator for research and development, a political appointment position, under President Reagan. To understand why this proposed change is so controversial in the scientific community, including the EPA’s own Science Advisory Board, one needs to understand a landmark study in the history of air pollution control and science policy.

Done by Harvard researchers, the 1993 Six Cities study identified fine particulate pollutionthat goes deeply into the lungs, largely produced from fossil fuel combustion, as being harmful to health. This core finding, along with other studies, led to new standards that saved thousands of lives.

But under the current proposal, data from that study could not be used to inform EPA policy because the underlying data was not made publicly available.

Attacking the Harvard Six Cities study as “secret science” has been central to a long and fierce onslaught in the much broader battle over the role of science in protecting the environment. This attack is now poised for success under industry-friendly EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

Industry pushback

When the EPA was formed in 1970, among its major challenges was controlling smoke from coal-fired power plants and industries as demanded by the Clean Air Act. The CAA requires that science, not economics, determines enforceable outdoor standards.

The gold standard for epidemiology, or the study of diseases and its causes, is the double-blind randomized control trial. In these trials half of an affected volunteer group is given the potential therapy and the other half a placebo – and neither the researcher nor the patient knows which until the code is broken.

But that is an impossible standard for environmental epidemiology. Imagine the outcry if scientists were to secretly expose half of a community to a pollutant.

Instead, public health researchers look at differences in pollution exposure among individuals or communities, such as the extent of pollutant sources. And we do our best to account for potentially confounding factors, such as cigarette smoking. Validation of findings occurs through addressing the same question in different ways by different researchers.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s move to eliminate so-called ‘secret science’ has long been sought by conservatives. 

The Six Cities study found a clear correlation between pollutant levels and pertinent adverse health effects, including a higher risk of mortality.

In response, representatives from different industries attempted to get the raw data and derail new regulations. Similarly today, Pruitt’s allies, including those in industry, say that making data publicly available ensures that scientific studies can be reproduced, and thus that any regulations based on that science are justified.

Then as now, many scientific investigators viewed these efforts as a way to pore over the complex data sets so as to find minor blemishes that could be falsely magnified into scars. The result would force these academic scientists to spend much of the rest of their careers defending this one study.

The Harvard researchers refused to release the confidential data on about 8,000 people in six cities to representatives from industry. In an interview, one of the lead authors of the study, Frank Speizer, expressed concern over “biased groups” having access to the data which could set a precedent that “will undermine future research by academic institutions.”

Special board

Left out of industry’s current narrative is that the raw data were turned over to the Health Effects Institute. HEI is an independent research organization funded equally by the EPA and the American automobile industry. Their thorough reanalysis of this and the even larger American Cancer Society study concluded:

“Overall, the reanalyses assured the quality of the original data, replicated the original results, and tested those results against alternative risk models and analytic approaches without substantively altering the original findings of an association between indicators of particulate matter air pollution and mortality.”

Most importantly, many subsequent studies in the U.S. and internationally provide a coherent body of information that confirmed the core findings of the Six Cities study.

But industry continued its attack. In 1999 Congress passed the Shelby Amendment. It requires that data from all federally funded studies be made publicly available subject to the FOIA Act.

A 2013 Congressional Research Service analysis showed that this provision has not been used regularly. Yet it has been used to challenge existing regulations: Recently, industry spuriously claimed that data obtained by FOIA invalidates a study that supported the causation of leukemia by formaldehyde.

Other options for Pruitt

Success in selling their assertion of secrecy and of bias has led to the current Republican-led House to pass what I would consider anti-science bills. One would require raw data be made available for studies on which regulation is based, which would greatly reduce the number of studies used by the EPA. The other would change EPA advisory processes to limit involvement by knowledgeable academics. When these bills failed in the Senate, Pruitt moved to institute them administratively.

Administrator Pruitt has other avenues to address his concerns. He could fund further research on the subject of particulate health effects. He could develop an HEI-like independent organization that mixed EPA funding with funding from the fossil fuel industries to fund such research. He could ask the National Academies of Sciences, or set up his own expert committee, to review the specific issues presented by the Harvard or similar studies or to evaluate whether EPA regulatory actions would be improved by changing its advisory process or by requiring raw data for the underlying science. He could work toward nominating a new assistant administrator for research and development with a mandate to pursue these scientific and organizational issues.

Instead, Pruitt is moving to rid the EPA of the science needed for effective regulation. He has particularly focused on academic scientists, who are more independent and whose careers are at risk if they get the science wrong, in favor of those industry consultants who get further industry funding if they can cleverly find blemishes and magnify them into scars.

This attack on American science has shrewdly used the alleged shortcomings of the Six Cities study to cloak its goals. Its potential impact goes well beyond the EPA’s regulatory effectiveness to the underlying role of science in American society.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17052018/scott-pruitt-epa-secret-science-health-fossil-fuel-industry

nvironmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt faces harsh criticism from members of the agency's Science Advisory Board (SAB)—including from some he named to the panel himself—over his plan to restrict the types of scientific evidence the agency can use in writing EPA rules.

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Ten members of an SAB work group, in a signed memorandum, called for the full board to scrutinize Pruitt's proposal at a meeting on May 31, saying his approach was designed without necessary input from the scientific community. Leading national science organizations have mounted a campaign to reject Pruitt's approach.

Pruitt's proposal would no longer allow the EPA to use scientific studies where the underlying data is not public. The move could rule out health studies that promised participants confidentiality—some of which have served as the underpinning of regulations, especially clean air standards. The policy takes up a cause long-championed by the fossil fuel industry and its allies in Congress.

"The era of secret science has come to an end," Pruitt said in announcingthe proposal on April 24.

The SAB advisers, all outside experts in a range of environmental sciences, said curbing EPA's use of epidemiological health studies could skew regulatory outcomes with long-term consequences.

"The development of guidelines and rules in this arena requires careful collaboration between the government and the scientific community," the science advisers said in the memo, first reported by InsideEPA.

Although the advisers applauded the purported goal of transparency, they said "the precise design of the rule appears to have been developed without a public process for soliciting input from the scientific community."

according to the advisers, Pruitt's proposal did not take into consideration previous steps that the EPa had taken to enhance transparency, nor efforts by the scientific community to ensure greater public access to data. The group said the proposal also "oversimplifies" the effort that would be involved in redacting scientific data to meet the new EPA requirements.

"Without access to the restricted data, regulatory programs could become more or less stringent than they otherwise would be, with consequences for both regulatory costs and benefits," the memo said. It noted that a similar proposal had stalled in Congress for several years.

"The rule could have the effect of removing legal, ethical, and peer-reviewed studies of health effects as sources to support the agency's regulatory efforts," it added.

Appointed by Scott Pruitt Himself

Four of the 10 SAB work group members who criticized the proposal are new members of the Science Advisory Board, appointed by Pruitt.They are the SAB's new chairman, Michael Honeycutt, who is Texas's chief state toxicologist; John D. Graham, dean of the  School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, who was a senior regulatory official in President George W. Bush's White House; Arkansas environmental official Bob Blanz; and Robert W. Merritt, a retired oil industry geologist and independent consultant from Houston.

They are among the 66 new experts Pruitt has placed on three different EPA scientific committees. Many of them are critics of the agency and come from industry or state government. The six other members of the group, including its chair, Allison Cullen, a professor at the University of Washington, were members of the SAB before the Trump administrationtook over.

EPA's SAB has a long-standing process of assigning work groups to review the adequacy of the science supporting regulatory actions, and to report to the larger board.

John Walke, clean air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has called Pruitt's proposal an effort "to censor science," said the work group's harsh review was significant.

"It's encouraging that EPA's scientific advisors are standing up for independent, peer-reviewed research, and leveling strong criticisms at Pruitt's harmful proposal," he said. "Let's hope this important critique from EPA's scientific advisors will convince Pruitt to abandon this insidious idea."

Can Pruitt Be Influenced?

It is unclear how the full SAB will review the agency's science proposal, or whether its input will come soon enough to influence Pruitt's plan. The 30-day public comment period on the proposal is set to close on May 30, a day before the SAB meeting.

EPA's press office did not reply to queries on whether the agency was considering extending the comment period, or whether the memo would be part of the agency's consideration on the rulemaking.

he press office did provide a short statement, asserting it was "on background," a condition of attribution that InsideClimate News had not agreed to.

"EPA's Science Advisory Board plays an important role in informing EPA actions on policy and regulatory matters," the press office said. "We value the Board's expertise, and we welcome feedback from the chartered panel on areas in which they are interested in getting additional scientific information that is relevant to the rulemaking process."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

REGULATION

SCOTT PRUITT EPA DONALD TRUMP

==

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/05/05/scott-pruitt-epa-secret-science-plan-defend-tobacco-clean-air-rules?utm_source=dsb%20newsletter

In early 1998, lobbying and PR company Powell Tate was busy with a strategy to protect its tobacco industry clients from health and safety regulations.

Costing roughly $200,000, the plan was called “Secret Science” and would be a public affairs campaign “mounted in three phases” to influence the public, scientists, corporations, and policymakers. 

After “laying the groundwork,” the plan was to build “a critical mass of outrage” and then offer a solution to all the outrage and division the campaign had whipped up.

The plan’s aim, according to a separate memo, was clear.

“Focus public attention on the importance of requiring the disclosure of taxpayer-funded analytical data upon which federal and state rules and regulations are based, as well as the analytic data underlying health and safety studies funded by the government…”

Held in the “Phillip Morris” collection of tobacco litigation archives at the University of California San Francisco, the plan’s aims will today sound eerily familiar to anyone following the Trump administration's attempts to restrict the science its key environment agency can use.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt has put forth a proposed rule that many experts say will hamstring the agency’s ability to use scientific studies as a basis for rulemaking and, in turn, for protecting millions of Americans.

“The era of secret science @EPA is coming to an end,” Pruitt tweeted, as he announced the proposal that is currently in the middle of a 30-day comment period.

The era of secret science @EPA is coming to an end. The ability to test, authenticate, & reproduce scientific findings is vital for integrity of rulemaking process. Americans deserve to assess legitimacy of the science underpinning Agency decisions. ➡️ https://t.co/eBbdX4UTGw

— Administrator Pruitt (@EPAScottPruitt) April 24, 2018

“I’ve been working on this for 20 years,” said Steve Milloy in an interview with The New Yorker.

From Tobacco Defender to Climate Science Denier

Milloy is a climate science denier and former coal executive who, 20 years ago, was the executive director of a group known as The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition — or TASSC. More recently, he was a member of President Trump's EPA transition team.

TASSC was funded by the tobacco industry, initially Philip Morris, and had been launched in the early 1990s with another lobbying firm, APCO Associates.

This was not the earliest sign of a tobacco-sponsored campaign to restrict the EPA’s ability to build rules around scientific evidence.

As reported by The Intercept, another former EPA transition team member, lawyer Christopher Horner, was working on the same issue for his client, RJ Reynolds, in 1996.

Both Horner and Milloy are part of the machinery of corporate-funded climate science denial that has worked for years to block action on climate change — action that would damage the bottom line of the people who have funded their careers over the years.

An October 2017 academic paper in the International Journal of Health Planning and Managementfound how groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute, where Milloy and Horner hold positions, were part of a network of “strategic allies” for the tobacco industry.

Both men argue that they are acting in the interests of “transparency” and claim to be fighting against “junk science” (for all this talk of transparency, Horner was not so keen to talk about his coal funding when approached on the fringes of the Paris climate talks in 2015).

Horner and Milloy are both connected to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute — a right-wing group that has specialized in targeting EPA officials and climate scientists with legal requests for their emails.

Milloy attended Pruitt’s launch event for his proposed “secret science” rule alongside another climate science denier, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow’s Marc Morano.

From yesterday's science transparency event at EPA:

Climate skeptic barbarians @JunkScience and @ClimateDepot.

Not just at the EPA's gate, but inside the administrator's office eating the greens' lunch. pic.twitter.com/2QkYQo6iOk

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) April 25, 2018

Pruitt’s rule — Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science — would mean that the EPA would be unable to use scientific studies as a basis for policy unless the data underlying the research was public and could be reproduced.

According to emails released under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws, the proposal was developed after EPA officials consulted with Republican congressman Lamar Smith, who has a bill now sitting before the Senate that would put similar requirements on the agency.

Scientists, science advocacy and professional groups, and environmental advocates have heaped heavy criticism on Smith’s bill and Pruitt’s proposed rule.

The rule could be unworkable, as many health studies rely on personal and confidential information and so would “violate healthy privacy laws,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

An open letter signed by almost 1,000 scientists and coordinated by the Union of Concerned Scientists said: “In reality, these are phony issues that weaponize ‘transparency’ to facilitate political interference in science-based decision making, rather than genuinely address either. The result will be policies and practices that will ignore significant risks to the health of every American.”

The American Geophysical Union, a professional society representing 60,000 earth and atmospheric scientists, also addressed a letter to Pruitt, criticizing the rule: “At a time when the Administration is proposing significant cuts to EPA funding, this policy would become an unnecessary burden on the agency and further hamstring its ability to protect public health and the environment. In general, to exclude vital scientific information from consideration would put our local communities’ health and well-being at risk.”

At the end of the letter, the society also couldn't help calling out the atmosphere of climate science denial Pruitt introduced to the agency, especially talking points instructing employees to emphasize uncertainty around humans' role in causing climate change.

Polluted Air Denial

The focus for Milloy has been regulations around fine particulate air pollution or, more specifically, particulate matter that is less than 2.5 micrometers across (PM2.5).

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journalin March, Milloy argued that PM2.5 particles were “not associated with death” and that EPA rules formed from studies linking PM2.5 to death were based on “dodgy science to advance a political agenda.”

A May 2018 World Health Organization (WHO) report estimated that about 7 million people a year die from air pollution linked to heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“PM2.5 includes pollutants, such as sulfate, nitrates, and black carbon, which pose the greatest risks to human health,” the WHO said.

Sources of the deadly airborne particles include agriculture, transport, wood burning, and coal-fired power plants. On release of the report, Milloy wrote: “Air pollution kills no one.”

Just days ago, the EPA announced $30 million in grants to improve air quality, which, according to Pruitt, would “enhance public health.”

Air Pollution Causes Premature Death

Professor Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health and an internationally recognized authority on health effects of pollution and smoking, said the EPA and others had “systematically considered the evidence on PM2.5” and found it was “causally linked to premature mortality.”

He told DeSmog that EPA head Pruitt was bound by the Clean Air Act to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards that protect the public health with an “adequate margin of safety.”

Samet said: “This is a legal requirement on the Administrator and any relaxation of standards would require evidence supporting such a change.”

While the explanatory notes around Pruitt’s proposed rule claims that the confidentiality issues could be addressed, Samet said: “The complexities of sharing of private and confidential information are not adequately addressed in the proposed rule.”

“There are other considerations not addressed, such as costs. I note that evidence-based decisions are made in many sectors, including clinical care, without any requirements similar to those proposed.”

“The proposed rule has the potential to restrict consideration of a broad body of evidence relevant to regulatory decision-making, such as studies from outside the U.S.”

The EPA is accepting public comments on the proposed rule until May 30, 2018.

Tags:

Scott Pruitt

steve milloy

TASSC

the advancement of sound science coalition

Lamar Smith

Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science

==

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/24/pruitt-s-transparency-rule-would-use-big-tobacco-plan-gut-epa-science-protecting-public

secret sci bs:

:On April 24, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt released a proposed rule that would restrict which scientific studies EPA could use in creating new regulations. The move — already controversial when it was first revealed over a month ago — would prevent EPA from considering studies in which the data is not available to the public, including the private health information of individuals in medical studies, and which is based on one-time events, such as the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Prominent climate science deniers were in attendance at the EPA announcement, including Marc Morano, Steve Milloy, and Will Happer.

...

"era of secret science @EPA is coming to an end. The ability to test, authenticate, & reproduce scientific findings is vital for integrity of rulemaking process. Americans deserve to assess legitimacy of the science underpinning Agency decisions"

March 16, E&E reported that EPA Admin Scott Pruitt is brewing more plans to further hobble how the EPA uses (or in this case, doesn’t use) science to protect the public. According to E&E, the effort will be similar to the Orwellian-esque HONEST Act that Lamar Smith sponsored a year ago but is stalled in the Senate. Pruitt’s idea is to apply a blanket set of new criteria to studies the EPA can cite. The “sound science” recommendations are designed to sound reasonable, but in practice would render lots of high quality, relevant research off-limits.

Sharon Lerner at The Intercept wrote last summer that that this “sound science” concept — demanding all science used to inform regulations be made publicly accessible — comes straight from a 1996 memo from lobbyist/lawyer Chris Horner to tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds. Horner advised the tobacco company that because the EPA was probably going to be looking further into the health impacts of smoking, the agency should “construct explicit procedural hurdles [it] must follow in issuing scientific reports.”

Horner’s memo gives specific attention to the fact that these efforts should target “extra-judicial” documents, meaning those that can’t be ruled on by the courts. In particular, the 1996 memo referenced the agency’s Science Advisory Board reviews, underpin regulations but aren’t legally bound by the Administrative Procedures Act. He suggested the tobacco industry should be “initiating reforms by playing a strong role in molding and guiding Congress’s oversight of EPA’s latest Clean Air Act initiative (on PM 2.5/ozone.)”

Lerner explains that along with Chris Horner (whose career has gone from strategizing for tobacco to evade regulation to working on behalf of coal companies to harass climate scientists), another major advocate of this push to identify “extra-judicial” approaches is Steve Milloy. Like Horner, Milloy has worked on behalf of both coal and tobacco and is now affiliated with the Energy and Environment Legal Institute.

Milloy was present at Heritage for Pruitt’s announcement earlier this week, per E&E, and told them this will happen “sooner rather than later.” Remember that Milloy successfully pushed to have PM2.5-skeptical industry-friendly researchers installed on the Science Advisory Boards.

Pruitt’s scheme — which is, of course, strongly opposed by scientists and scientific organizations — appears to be twenty years in the making. The '90s really are back: Pruitt stands ready to turn Big Tobacco’s 1996 dream into yet another one of 2018’s nightmares.

While Pruitt’s financial connections to the fossil fuel industry have been well-reported, there doesn’t seem to be any clear ties between him and his organizations to big tobacco. But we did find that as Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt decided not to join a bipartisan group of AGs calling for retailers to stop selling tobacco products.

There’s really no telling if the industry is giving money to Pruitt-affiliated groups like the fossil fuel industry has.

But where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and be it from a cigarette or a coal plant, it’s not good for public health.

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