partic holocaust 2 bak
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see PARTIC THREE SOOT
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3/24
wASHINGTON (AP) — A new Biden administration rule that sets tougher standards for deadly soot pollution faced a barrage of legal challenges Wednesday, as 25 Republican-led states and a host of business groups filed lawsuits seeking to block the rule in court.
Twenty-four states, led by attorneys general from Kentucky and West Virginia, filed a joint challenge stating that new Environmental Protection Agency rule would raise costs for manufacturers, utilities and families and could block new manufacturing plants and infrastructure such as roads and bridges. Texas filed a separate suit, as did business groups led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers.
“The EPA’s new rule has more to do with advancing President (Joe) Biden’s radical green agenda than protecting Kentuckians’ health or the environment, said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, who is leading the joint lawsuit along with West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.
The EPA rule “will drive jobs and investment out of Kentucky and overseas, leaving employers and hardworking families to pay the price,” Coleman said.
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The soot rule is one of several EPA dictates under attack from industry groups and Republican-led states. The Supreme Court heard arguments last month on a GOP challenge to the agency’s “good neighbor rule,” which restricts smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas.
Three energy-producing states — Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia — challenged the rule, along with the steel industry and other groups, calling it costly and ineffective. The rule is on hold in a dozen states because of the court challenges.
In opposing the soot rule, Republicans and industry groups say the United States already has some of the strictest air quality standards in the world — tougher than the European Union or major polluters such as China and India.
Tightening U.S. standards “wouldn’t improve public health, but it would put as many as 30% of all U.S. counties out of compliance under federal law, leading to aggressive new permitting requirements that could effectively block new economic activity,’' Coleman said.
The EPA rule sets maximum levels of fine particle pollution — more commonly known as soot — at 9 micrograms per cubic meter of air, down from 12 micrograms established a decade ago under the Obama administration.
Environmental and public health groups hailed the rule as a major step to improve the health of Americans, including future generations. EPA scientists have estimated exposure at previous limits contributed to thousands of early deaths from heart disease and lung cancer, along with other health problems.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the new soot rule, finalized last month, would create $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032, including prevention of up to 800,000 asthma attacks and 4,500 premature deaths. The rule will especially benefit children, older adults and those with heart and lung conditions, Regan said, as well as people in low-income and minority communities adversely affected by decades of industrial pollution.
“We do not have to sacrifice people to have a prosperous and booming economy,″ Regan said.
Biden is seeking reelection, and some fellow Democrats have warned that a tough new soot standard could harm his chances in key industrial states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The EPA and White House officials brushed aside those concerns, saying the industry has developed technical improvements to meet previous soot standards and can adapt to meet the new ones. Soot pollution has declined by 42% since 2000, even as the U.S. gross domestic product has increased by 52%, Regan said.
The new rule does not impose pollution controls on specific industries. Instead, it lowers the annual standard for fine particulate matter for overall air quality. The EPA will use air sampling to identify counties and other areas that do not meet the new standard. States would then have 18 months to develop compliance plans for those areas. States that do not meet the new standard by 2032 could face penalties, although EPA said it expects that 99% of U.S. counties will be able to meet the revised annual standard by 2032.
Industry groups and Republican officials dispute that and say a lower soot limit could put hundreds of U.S. counties out of compliance.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned the White House in January that 43% of total particulate emissions come from wildfires, and called the pollution standard “the wrong tool to address this problem.’'
The EPA said it will work with states, counties and tribes to account for and respond to wildfires, an increasing source of soot pollution, especially in the West, where climate change has led to longer wildfire seasons, with more frequent and intense fires. The agency allows states and air agencies to request exemptions from air-quality standards due to “exceptional events,” including wildfires and prescribed fires.
Besides Kentucky, West Virginia and Texas, other states challenging the EPA rule include: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming.
All three cases were filed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
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no lnx twit vid
With Canadian wildfires, Fox News follows its COVID playbook
Fox guest on hazardous smoke: “There's no health risk. … Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles — they're innocuous.”
Special PROGRAMS
CLIMATE & ENERGY
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 06/08/23
Fox News hosts and guests and other right-wing media figures are minimizing the public health risk of the cloud of particulate matter from Canadian forest fires that descended on much of the United States this week and mocking people for taking steps to protect themselves.
The coverage is reminiscent of Fox’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly its early days, when the network downplayed the potential danger posed by the virus.
Smoke from wildfires in Ontario and Quebec inundated the Midwest and East Coast on Wednesday. Major metropolises were under hazardous air quality warnings, and a reddish-orange haze choked New York City, which at one point had the lowest air quality of any major city in the world. On Thursday, the smoke-filled air is expected to spread further into the Midwest and South even as conditions improve in the Northeast.
Scientists say such wildfires are becoming larger and more frequent as “forests around the world increasingly dry out amid the warming climate,” a fact calmly observed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal but furiously derided by his Fox employees.
Many major news outlets published reports noting that experts recommend people in affected areas wear high-quality masks to prevent health problems caused by the smoke. Those can include “trouble breathing, burning eyes, dizziness, headache or nausea,” particularly among high-risk populations including children, seniors, and people with respiratory problems including asthma. As Fox medical correspondent Dr. Janette Nesheiwat put it during a Wednesday appearance on Fox News Tonight, “If you do have to go outside, an N-95 can help protect you from that large particulate matter.”
Nesheiwat has a lot of work to do within Fox’s own building if she hopes that message will sink in for its audience. Hosts elsewhere on the network treated the idea of wearing masks in response to the wildfire smoke as a punch line.
On Wednesday afternoon, Jeanine Pirro presented the notion as a left-wing conspiracy, saying, “Democrats are pumping upclimate hysteriaand bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.” That night, Sean Hannity mocked “young, healthy people” for putting on masks, Jesse Watters lashed out at government officials for recommending their use, and Laura Ingraham claimed they “seem a little giddy to be back in the masks” and arepromoting “panic porn.”
In fact, Fox’s influential hosts repeatedly downplayed the idea that the wildfire smoke poses any health risk at all.
“I keep reading and hearing reports and people being interviewed — 'I had a hard time breathing' — and I'm like, I'm walking in the same place you're walking in and I don't feel a thing, and I'm trying to understand, and my -- I work out regularly, so I think I'm relatively in tune with my body,” Hannity said. “I think if it was difficult -- if I was having difficulty breathing, I would notice. But these are young people saying this. Are they all snowflakes?”
“Yes,” OutKick host Charly Arnolt replied. “I think people just like to make a big deal out of nothing.”
“Everybody is saying stay inside, but I didn't listen,” Watters said at the top of his show over the chyron “Jesse Braves ‘Hazardous’ Air Quality.”
“Why? Because I love you,” he continued. “I came into the city for you tonight. I braved the smoke so you could watch your favorite show. The air quality is hazardous. ‘Worse than 9/11.’ But, I said, I don't care. The show must go on.”
Ingraham decided that the perspective her viewers needed to hear about the potential health impacts of smoke on the respiratory system was that of Steve Milloy, a notorious climate denier and former cigarette and coal lobbyist who told them they had nothing to fear.
“Steve, no one's denying it is unpleasant. My eyes are pretty itchy and watery, yesterday and a little bit today, and it might go on for a couple more days,” Ingraham said after introducing her guest. “But is this wholly out of the ordinary?”
“No. This happens anytime there's a wildfire in the West. I mean, it's unusual in the East. Look, the air is ugly, it's unpleasant to breathe, and for a lot of people, they getanxietyover it. But the reality is there's no health risk,” Milloy replied. “We have this kind of air in India and China all the time — no public health emergency.” (Both countries reportedly see more than 1 million premature deaths a year from air pollution.)
“This doesn't kill anybody, this doesn't make anybody cough, this is not a health event,” he further explained.
“Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles — they’re innocuous,” Milloy later added. “There's nothing in them. They have no effect.”
Video
CitationFrom the June 7, 2023, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
Meanwhile, at Fox’s cable news competitor Newsmax, host Greg Kelly highlighted the upside of the hazardous levels of smoke blanketing New York City. “I'll tell you, it actually smells like wood smoke. It's not an unpleasant odor, to be honest,” he said. “It is pretty, it actually is pretty. It's a beautiful, interesting aura the city has right now.”
The modern right-wing media ecosystem is defined less by its ideology than its grievances. Popular figures within that milieu,for reasons financial and partisan, despise Democrats, liberals, experts, and the mainstream press, which they consider one and the same, and reflexively oppose whatever those hated entities support.
That reflexive opposition became lethal when COVID-19 spread across the United States. Fox News hosts initially told their viewers, incorrectly, that the virus was no more deadly than the flu and urged them to treat it as a Democratic hoax to damage President Donald Trump. Later, they endorsed untested and ineffective COVID-19 “cures” while downplaying the effectiveness of masks, social distancing, and vaccines.
This irresponsible coverage assuredly led to the deaths of Fox viewers. But virtually no one at the network was held accountable for their actions during a public health crisis, so now they are following the same playbook.
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good sum PM2.5 and secret sci BS:...https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28052020/contrarian-science-james-enstrom-epa-climate-change https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28052020/contrarian-science-james-enstrom-epa-climate-change/ ...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.
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https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063720073
wheeler on way out the door 12/20 ignores sci
:{with six weeks left in President Trump's term, EPA has cemented plans to bypass tighter soot standards, despite agency career staff conclusions and concerns about tens of thousands of additional deaths every year. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler has signed a final rule to keep the existing ambient air quality standards for soot in place at least another five years,according to people familiar with the matter both inside and outside the agency, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified. A formal public announcement is scheduled for later this afternoon. An EPA spokesman declined to comment in advance of that announcement The decision, which marks a victory for the fossil fuel industry but is certain to be challenged in court, comes as no surprise. In signing the draft rule this spring, Wheeler said he believed the existing limits sufficed to protect public health
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2020-01/documents/final_policy_assessment_for_the_review_of_the_pm_naaqs_01-2020.pdf"
report this year that the existing annual limit on soot exposure could be too weak to prevent "a substantial number" of premature deaths each year. An overview of 30 urban areas, for example, tied exposure to as many as45,000 annual deaths from heart disease and other causes, with minority communities at greater risk. Those findings didn't take into account more recent research suggesting that long-term exposure to soot may also heighten vulnerability to COVID-19...As E&E News has previously reported, critics are already angling to reverse the decision under the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden (Greenwire, Nov. 23). In a letter late last month, for example, Democratic attorneys general from 16 states urged EPA to reopen the review on the grounds that fresh evidence of soot's perils had surfaced.}:
Equally contentious was the process by which the Trump administration pursued the legally required review of standards for what is formally known as fine particulate matter or PM2.5.< >Under a fast-track timetable put in motion in mid-2018, the review is ending roughly two years ahead of its previous schedule ">While Wheeler cited the recommendation of an agency advisory committee in opting to stick with the status quo, that committee is chaired by a consultant who had previously done work for the American Petroleum Institute and was nominated for the position by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In late 2018, in what he later described as a streamlining move, Wheeler fired an auxiliary panel of researchers who were providing additional expertise to the review.
In statements today, environmental and scientific advocacy groups denounced his decision to stick with the status quo.
"The Trump administration rigged the rule-making process to achieve exactly this result by cutting science and scientists out of the picture at every turn," said Gretchen Goldman, research director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Center for Science and Democracy, which last year reconvened the fired panel to conduct a competing unofficial review, which found the evidence warranted tighter standards.
"The worst part of all of this is that low income communities and communities of color will bear the brunt of Wheeler's heartless decision," said Al Armendariz, an Obama-era EPA official who is now a senior director at the Sierra Club. "We look forward to the new administration following the scientific evidence and setting the air quality standard that meets legal requirements to protect public health." Soot is known as PM2.5 because it is no bigger than 2.5 microns in diameter, or one-thirtieth the width of a human hair; its formation is closely associated with the burning of coal and oil products. With an ability to penetrate deep into the lungs and even get into the bloodstream, the tiny particles are associated with an array of respiratory and cardiovascular problems, including a greater risk of premature death under some circumstances.
EPA's current annual exposure threshold for PM2.5, set in 2012, is 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air; the daily limit, dating back to 2006, is 35 micrograms. In this year's report, EPA career staff concluded that the evidence justified an annual standard as low as 8 micrograms per cubic meter of air >Under the Clean Air Act, particulate matter is among a half-dozen common pollutants for which EPA must set and periodically review ambient air quality standards at least every five years. While the agency rarely meets that timetable, the newly signed final rule is intended to keep the existing standards in place through 2025 at a minimum.< On Friday, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs completed a routine review of the final draft rule, according to a government tracking website. In sending the rule back to EPA, OIRA officials canceled several meetings that had previously been scheduled with the California Air Resources Board, Environment America and the Natural Resources Defense Council, representatives for the three organizations confirmed in email messages and via Twitter.< ===
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/attack-on-coal-will-not-save-lives-states-the-association-of-american-physicians-and-surgeons-aaps-275119731.html
no lnx
attack on Coal Will Not Save Lives, States the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)
NEWS PROVIDED BY
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)
Sep 15, 2014,
TUCSON, Ariz., Sept. 15, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --The Obama Administration's attack on coal-fired electricity, through draconian "carbon" rules imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), makes bogus claims about lives to be saved, states the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).
The Administration is lumping together carbon dioxide—the basic building block of all living things and also a weak greenhouse gas—and soot. So is the American Lung Association, which also lumps "carbon pollution" with arsenic, lead, and mercury.
The American Academy of Pediatrics joins the chorus, echoing the EPA's claim that the new rules will avert 2,700 to 6,600 "premature deaths" and 140,000 to 150,000 asthma attacks in children by 2030. The EPA told Congress that it neither possesses nor can produce the data used in developing the rules.
Claims of such harm from small particulates (dust or soot) are extrapolated from small associations reported in poorly designed and non-replicated epidemiological studies, writesJohn Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., in the spring 2014 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
"The adverse health effects of Obama's promised skyrocketing of the costs of electricity, not to mention unemployment, are simply being ignored," states AAPS executive director Jane M. Orient, M.D.
Hillary Clinton, in a September 4 speech, also claimed that the war on coal would address both "climate change" and children's respiratory illness. "This 'two-fer' also depends on conflating two entirely different forms of carbon," stated Orient. "And there is no actual evidence that shutting off all coal-fired electricity (40% of the total) would either make the climate more benign or help asthmatics."
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a national organization representing physicians in all specialties, founded in 1943 to preserve private medicine and the patient-physician relationship.
SOURCE Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)
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update
https://cei.org/content/cei-comments-epas-proposed-review-national-ambient-air-quality-standards-particulate-matter
CEI Comments on EPA's Proposed Review of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Particulate Matter
Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2015-0072
Marlo Lewis, Jr. • June 29, 2020
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on EPA’s review of the national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for particulate matter (PM).[[1]](https://cei.org/content/cei-comments-epas-proposed-review-national-ambient-air-quality-standards-particulate-matter#_ftn1)
EPA proposes to retain the existing PM standards without revision. EPA’s proposal is consistent with the advice of the agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) on the primary 24-hour PM2.5 standard, the primary PM10 standard, and the secondary standards. However, not all CASAC members agree with EPA’s proposal to retain the annual primary PM2.5 standard. That proposal, moreover, is strongly opposed by many blue state politicians, progressive punditry, and, for want of a better term, the Regulatory Industrial Complex.[[2]](https://cei.org/content/cei-comments-epas-proposed-review-national-ambient-air-quality-standards-particulate-matter#_ftn2)
Accordingly, this letter addresses only EPA’s proposal to retain the annual primary PM2.5 standard. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) strongly supports EPA’s proposed decision not to tighten the standard.
Summary of Argument...
==
Particulate Holocaust
https://www.csldf.org/2016/12/09/trump-adds-lawyer-history-harassing-climate-scientists-transition-team/
many lnx
Trump Adds Lawyers with History of Harassing Climate Scientists to Transition Team
December 9, 2016 By Lauren Kurtz
“For years, David Schnare, with funding from polluting interests, has hounded me and other climate scientists, abusing open records laws in an effort to get ahold of personal emails that he might use to try to embarrass and smear us. His efforts were rejected by the lower court and then the Virginia Supreme Court, but not before many thousands of dollars were spent defending the University of Virginia and me from his frivolous lawsuits, and not before many hours I could have spent advising students, doing research, and advancing our understanding of Earth’s climate, were wasted dealing with his bad faith assaults. I find it appalling that he has been granted any role whatsoever in the transition of an agency that does so much important science.” – Dr. Michael Mann
We are deeply troubled by a large number of appointments by President-elect Trump that deny the science of climate change, and we are alarmed that he has expanded his team to include people who target individual scientists. Much attention has been focused on Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump’s disastrous pick for EPA Administrator, but other dangerous appointments have gone largely unnoticed: for one, David Schnare was named to the EPA transition team.
Schnare, a former EPA employee, has been a major proponent of using the legal system to harass and intimidate climate scientists. He and his colleagues have argued before courts that open records laws should permit fossil fuel-funded lawyers to sift through climate scientists’ private emails. Their goal is, purportedly, to use these emails “to convince the public to believe human-caused global warming is a scientific fraud.” In reality, they intend to scare scientists into silence.
Much of Schnare’s recent work was done as General Counsel for the coal-funded Energy & Environment Legal Institute (also known as E&E Legal and formerly known as the American Tradition Institute). Schnare and E&E Legal have gone after climate scientists in – at least – Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
Update: another coal-funded lawyer with a history of attacking climate scientists, E&E Legal senior fellow Christopher Horner, has also been added to Trump’s transition team. CSLDF could not be more dismayed.
CSLDF was founded partly in response to one of Schnare and Horner’s lawsuits, against climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann. The case was rejected by the Virginia Supreme Court, which found that their proposals would cause “harm to university-wide research efforts, damage to faculty recruitment and retention, undermining of faculty expectations of privacy and confidentiality, and impairment of free thought and expression.” (It is worth noting that when the lawsuit was initiated in 2011, Schnare was employed by the EPA – an arrangement that may have violated federal ethics laws.)
In that case and many others, E&E Legal’s claims have been shot down by courts – yet they nonetheless circumscribe scientists’ inquiry. Daunted by expensive and time-consuming legal cases, scientists may hesitate to explore climate change. Only a strong legal defense fund can mitigate such strategies.
In all of Schnare and Horner’s cases, the justifications for opening scientists’ private records are dubious; in some, they are offensive. As part of one ongoing suit to obtain climate scientists’ emails, Schnare argued that female scientists may take, in his words, a “mommy sabbatical” and then ignore their publicly-funded research in lieu of “sitting around folding clothes.” Given this risk, Schnare claimed, scientists’ “abandoned” emails regarding “preliminary unpublished work” should be released to the public. Were this scheme to come to fruition, it would expose these women scientists to sexist and anti-scientific fishing expeditions during maternity leave, and seriously hamstring their research efforts.
In 2012, Schnare filed a lawsuit challenging EPA-funded studies of human exposure to airborne particulates, claiming those studies were equivalent to the Nazi experiments on Jews during the Holocaust. The judge dismissed the suit at the first opportunity. Once again, Schnare proved only that he would use any pretense to suffocate scientific thought and advance fossil fuel interests.
Perhaps most perplexingly, Schnare once sued Dog News for defamation and emotional distress, over an article on the classification of Labrador retrievers that mentioned him, which was also dismissed and affirmed by the Fourth Circuit.
Schnare and Horner join a transition that not only rejects the scientific evidence for climate change, but has other members involved in legal bullying to go after climate scientists. Myron Ebell, in charge of the EPA transition team, comes from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, another major player in dragging climate scientists into court. (In addition to his role at E&E Legal, Christopher Horner is also a senior fellow at CEI.)
And Trump’s chief of staff, Steve Bannon, himself comes from Breitbart News – a so-called “alt-right” site that has approvingly covered many of the court cases harassing climate scientists. Meanwhile, for the NASA transition team, Trump has named Chris Shank, a staffer for the House Science committee chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX); in recent years, the committee has held multiple hearings aiming to discredit climate science and subpoenaed climate scientists’ emails when their research shows that climate change is, in fact, happening.
Schnare and Horner, along with their colleagues at E&E Legal, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and similar groups have spent years attempting to use the legal system to attack climate scientists. We can’t put into words how strongly we feel that those who have attacked individual scientists should not be involved in the management of federal agencies that employ some of this country’s best researchers.
CSLDF was created to protect scientists, their research, and their freedom of inquiry from pernicious attacks. In this new political environment, our work has become more important than ever.
==
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24072020/how-harvard-covid-19-study-became-center-partisan-uproar
the shock of Covid-19 hit in different ways for Xiao Wu, a 27-year-old Ph.D. student in Harvard's public health school, and his academic adviser, biostatistician Francesca Dominici.
Wu, a former national high school math champion in China, was shaken in January as he absorbed reports from his native country about Covid-19's exponential spread. "Considering that infection rate, it was almost guaranteed this would be a global pandemic," he said. "It was transmitted too fast."
But reality didn't sink in for Dominici until she walked across Harvard Yard on March 10, the day the university sent students home. "These kids were crying," she recalled. "They were sitting on the curb, literally, with their suitcases. I think that's when I realized—gosh, this is bad. This is huge."
when Dominici went home, she saw her work—quantifying the health effects of pollution—in the stark new light of a respiratory illness that was likely to be the biggest public health crisis of her lifetime.
She said she could only think about one thing: "What can I do about it?" "How can I help?"
Dominici soon emailed Wu and other members of their research group at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with an idea. Could they build upon their previous work—documenting links between fine particle air pollution, known as PM 2.5, and premature deaths—and examine whether there was a relationship between air pollution and Covid-19?
The study that emerged less than a month later, with Wu as lead author and Dominici as senior author, has become both a spark for advocacy and a lightning rod for critics. Although the paper, posted online on the health sciences platform MedRxiv on April 7, had not yet been peer reviewed, it made waves immediately.
The researchers found that Covid-19 patients who lived in polluted areas were more likely to die than those in less polluted areas, with asmall increase in PM 2.5 associated with a large increase in the risk of premature death. If the results held up, it would be striking evidence of the need for a more expansive public policy to control Covid-19 that included environmental, as well as personal, protection.
But the paper instantly touched off a political scrum, in large part because the Harvard team's conclusion was directly at odds with the Trump administration's drive to aggressively roll back environmental regulation. Democrats and environmental advocates cited the research in their battle against the Trump agenda, while Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Wheeler's science advisers, Republican members of Congress and anti-regulation lobbyists all blasted the study.
When the Harvard researchers revised their findings in an update three weeks after the original paper was released, and came up with a slightly smaller, but still significant, association between PM 2.5 and Covid-19 mortality, their critics pounced on the change, characterizing it, erroneously, as tantamount to a retraction.
Now, even as the results of other studies emerge, from different teams in different countries, that support a relationship between air pollution and Covid-19 deaths, there already are signs that the response to the science is dividing predictably along partisan lines. In one sense, the Harvard paper is a case study in how quickly science becomes politicized in the Trump era. But because the study, like so much Covid-19 research, was released online as a "preprint" before it underwent peer review, it also has become an object lesson in the peril and promise of the rapid-fire dissemination of research in the midst of a public health crisis. Even some advocates of stronger air pollution regulation have criticized the Harvard team for releasing the paper prior to its formal review by other scientists. [but only b/c of partiz BS?]
Dominici maintains the controversy was inescapable, given that the researchers were tackling not only the charged topic of Covid-19, but PM 2.5—the fine soot pollution, with particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter, caused by combustion. The study brought attention to the risks of burning fossil fuels—a primary contributor to climate change—and to the disproportionate health burden on minority communities, where PM 2.5 exposure is greatest and which are seeing the highest Covid-19 death rates.
The study landed "in the middle of the controversy over Covid, climate change, and environmental justice and racism," said Dominici. "In a way, I couldn't have had a better strike, dealing with all three at the same time."
A Controversial Review
As the spread of the new coronavirus upended life around the world in the first half of 2020, another public health drama was unfolding behind the scenes in Washington, D.C. The Trump administration was racing to complete a series of air pollution policy decisions, having made clear its goal of finalizing them by the end of the president's first term.
On the list was a legally required review of the adequacy of the national air quality standards for PM 2.5, which three decades of science had linked to premature death due to heart and lung disease. There was alarming new science documenting PM 2.5's deadly health effects, even at levels that met the current U.S. standards.
Dominici was the principal investigatoron one of the new PM 2.5 studies. [grapic]
In one of the largest epidemiological studies ever conducted, she and her team at Harvard had analyzed the health records of more than 60 million Medicare recipients. Thestudy, published in 2017, indicated that strengthening the nation's air pollution standard so that the maximum allowed concentration was 11 micrograms per cubic meter instead of 12, would save 12,000 American lives annually. The research also found that the risk of premature PM 2.5-related death for Blacks was three times greater than the national average.
In January—the same week the World Health Organization (WHO) issued its first situation report on a new coronavirus that was causing respiratory illness in Wuhan, China—career staff scientists at the EPA recommendedthat the Trump administration adopt a stronger PM 2.5 standard.
The process of reviewing the standard was fraught with controversy, with the Trump EPA's hand-picked outside science advisers casting doubt on the agency's long-standing conclusions about PM 2.5's health harms. The Trump administration's new chairman of EPA's Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, statistician Louis Anthony Cox, a Denver consultant for the American Petroleum Instituteand other industry groups, urged that the agency require a much higher burden of proof when judging the risks of pollutants.
Dominici was prominent among the public health experts criticizing Cox's proposed approach. "We risk the health of thousands breathing unhealthy air," she said last year in a commentary in the journal Science she wrote with Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists' Center for Science and Democracy.
The Trump EPA did not overhaul its scientific assessment process, as Cox had proposed. But by early March, Wheeler had made clear his plan was to reject the call for a stronger PM 2.5 standard.
Dominici and her colleagues at Harvard were following developments at the EPA closely. They planned to weigh in when the public comment period on this and other proposals weakening environmental regulations formally opened. But before that could happen, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, Trump announced a national state of emergency, and the scientists—like their fellow citizens—retreated to their homes and watched the crisis unfold.
Would Pollution Make Covid-19 Worse?
Dominici immediately began thinking about air pollution's interplay with Covid-19. She and her colleagues hadpublished research in 2019 showing that long-term exposure to PM 2.5 and ozone were associated with an increased risk of hospitalization for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in older U.S. adults, and ARDS was killing Covid-19 victims.
"We have an enormous amount of knowledge and data regarding the adverse health effects of fine particulate matter," Dominici said. "We know that it penetrates very deep into the lungs and causes serious inflammation. At the same time, Covid is attacking the lungs."
She added, "From a biological standpoint, from an epidemiological standpoint, and just from a common sense standpoint, where you have two agents attacking the lungs at the same time, to me it was very natural to pose the question of whether exposure to air pollution would make Covid worse."
Harvard's public health school researchers know well the challenges of air pollution studies. Scientists can't control exposure in such research, but instead have to study real-world conditions, taking into account as many confounding factors as possible. Over two decades, the Harvard team had built a research platform that allowed them to control for other possible causes of illness and premature death, like population density, age distribution, smoking and obesity. "We have, I would say, really good scientific tools to do this kind of study," said Wu.
To do a study on air pollution's effects, though, the Harvard researchers would need to know the locations of Covid-19's victims.
That data first became available on March 23, when the Johns Hopkins University's coronavirus resource center, which had been tracking the spread of the disease globally, began breaking down information on Covid-19 cases and fatalities in the United States by county.
County-level data is often used in epidemiological studies. But the Harvard researchers knew it was not ideal. In the United States, the size of counties vary widely. Some are quite large and include both lightly polluted rural areas and heavily polluted cities. Instead of being able to pinpoint pollution hot spots in those counties, the researchers only could consider average pollution county-wide.
Also, without the medical records of the individual research subjects in their study, the Harvard researchers would only be able to draw limited conclusions. The study would be much stronger if they knew the ages and races of the each of the Covid-19 patients, which of them had diabetes or other underlying conditions, which ones smoked, and which were obese—all potentially confounding factors.
"If you don't have the individual-level data, clearly the research is less accurate," Dominici said. "Unfortunately, at a time of a pandemic, we live in a less-than-ideal world."
At some point, researchers and health institutions may be able to work out health privacy agreements that allow access to enough medical data about individual patients with Covid-19 to more precisely study the impact of air pollution on the pandemic. (The Trump administration meanwhile is working on rules that would instead limit the EPA's use of such individual-level studies—a proposal vigorously opposed by the scientific community, including the public health science team at Harvard.)
"I think eventually we might be able to get there, but it's not something that's going to be available in a month or two, or even a year," Dominici said, referring to the data on individual patients. "So I think in the meantime, I think we need to do the best that we can with the data that we have and act responsibly.
"That's how science progresses," Dominici said. "You have to put out there the best you can do at the time, and be honest about the limitations of your study. Then you can find out what further data you need, and you can get it and do better. But we've got to start somewhere."
A Hard Decision
The previous work on air pollution by Dominici and her colleagues gave her team an enormous head start on the Covid-19 analysis.
Thanks to the large Medicare study, they already had well-validated estimates for pollution exposure across the entire continental United States. Based on a combination of satellite and ground-level monitors, they included data about PM 2.5 pollution at a level of detail less than a mile square. This enabled them to produce pollution estimates for more than 3,000 U.S. counties, encompassing 98 percent of the population, and meld it with Johns Hopkins' Covid data, adjusting the results to account for more than 20 possible confounding factors.
By early April, when Covid-19 cases had risen to more than 200,000 in the United States, with the number in New York alone surpassing cases in China, they had their initial result, and it was significant: An increase of only 1 microgram per cubic meter in PM 2.5, they calculated, was associated with a 15 percent increase in the death rate.
Now the team faced the question of when and how to publish their results—a decision made far more complex both by the pandemic and by rapidly changing practice in the biomedical world. Typically, it takes months to get research published, as manuscripts are peer reviewed for scientific accuracy, novelty and importance. Authors may be asked to make revisions, and may have to submit their work to more than one journal. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), perhaps the most prestigious medical journal, only publishes 5 percentof the 16,000 papers submitted to it each year.
But there was another option. Scientists increasingly were disseminating their work more quickly by posting their papers online on so-called "preprint" servers, soliciting feedback from colleagues around the world before formal peer review and publication. Biomedical science had come late to this practice (social scientists and engineers had been doing it for years), but now scores of new Covid-19 research papers were appearing daily on a health sciences preprint server calledmedRxiv (pronounced like "med-archive"), established in June, 2019 by Yale University and the nonprofit Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
In an editorial in February, NEJM said it was taking steps to expedite peer review, but encouraged authors of Covid-19 manuscripts to post on preprint servers, noting, "Practitioners and public health authorities need actionable information as soon as possible."
Wu said the Harvard study team knew that preprints remained controversial for many of their colleagues. Furthermore, the subject of their study would put the work instantly in the spotlight.
"Research like this, as soon as it's out on preprint, we will have a lot of attention," Wu said. "So we had discussions. It was a hard decision. But as long as the research is helpful in fighting against the Covid-19 pandemic, we decided we should let the public know as soon as possible."
As Covid-19 cases and fatalities were escalating in the United States, the Trump administration took several actions on pollution that—in the researchers' view—lent urgency to their work. On March 26, EPA Administrator Wheeler took the extraordinary step of announcing a suspension of environmental law enforcement because of Covid-19—relief that had been sought by the oil and gas industry. Wheeler insisted that companies were only being relieved of reporting requirements, not their pollution limits.But in fact, without self-reporting by the companies EPA would not know whether they were violating pollution limits or not.
On March 30, the EPA finalized a rollback in vehicle fuel economy standards, a step the administration's own regulatory analysis concluded would increase adverse health impacts due to PM 2.5. Meanwhile, any day Wheeler was expected to open for public comment his decision not to strengthen the national air quality standard for PM 2.5.
"At the time of a pandemic that attacks the lungs, it's really inconceivable not to clean the air," Dominici said. "I wanted to put this study out there as soon as possible—considering all of the limitations, and being very open about discussing the limitations—to raise the urgency and the importance of this issue.
"We are in the middle of a pandemic, which honestly, we don't know how to fight, even without what I think are really unwise decisions by the Trump administration," she said.
Dominici checked with some of the major scientific journals, and was assured that they would still be eligible to submit their manuscript for peer review and publication if it was posted as a preprint first.
In New York, mobile morgues were set up outside strained hospitals. U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said that it would be the "hardest and the saddest" week for "most Americans' lives."
Shortly after 8 a.m. on April 7, New York City's deadliest day in the pandemic, with 597 coronavirus fatalities, the Harvard team's study was posted on MedRxiv. The paper didn't mention the Trump administration by name, but took its Covid enforcement policy to task.
"Despite the inherent limitations of the ecological study design, our results underscore the importance of continuing to enforce existing air pollution regulations to protect human health both during and after the COVID-19 crisis," the authors wrote.
By noon, The New York Timesposted a story about the new study, noting it could have "far-reaching implications" in regard to the Trump administration's environmental rollbacks.
Controversy, and a Revision of Findings
Reaction to the Harvard study was swift, and divided.
Joe Biden, then close to securing the Democratic presidential nomination (Bernie Sanders would drop out of the race the next day), shared the Times story on Twitter. "We're starting to see evidence that long-term exposure to air pollution—which disproportionately affects communities of color & low-income communities—is linked to COVID-19 death rates," he posted. "It's past time we treat pollution like the threat to our health it is."
Fifteen environmental groups cited the Harvard research in the lawsuit they filed the following week against the Trump administration over its pandemic-related rollback of environmental enforcement. "EPA's policy is especially dangerous in light of recent research showing that increased air pollution causes a statistically significant increase in the COVID-19 death rate," said the complaint led by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Meanwhile, former coal industry executive Steve Milloy, who served on Trump's EPA transition team and is a vocal supporter of the president's environmental rollbacks, blasted the study as "totally absurd" on his web site, junkscience.com. He repeated his oft-stated position, which conflicted with the consensus science and even the stance of Trump's EPA, that PM 2.5's link to premature death was not "biologically plausible."
For his part, EPA Administrator Wheeler dismissed the Harvard results as preliminary, then lit into the researchers.
"We look forward to reviewing the Harvard study once it's completed and peer reviewed, but at this point, it's not," he said on April 14, the day he announced his long-anticipated decision not to strengthen the air quality standard for PM 2.5.
"I have to say, at least in the press, that the scientists seem to have a bias," Wheeler added. "They are talking about our enforcement discretion memo, and either they didn't read it or they didn't understand it." Wheeler repeated that there would be no pollution increase due to the enforcement memo, an assertion impossible to document at that point.
Dominici, in an interview, defended the rigor of the team's scientific results, given the limitations of the available data. But she bristled at the notion that concern over the health impacts of air pollution was an improper bias.
"I've worked with EPA and I've been funded by EPA," said Dominici. "My own bias is that I'm biased in favor of protecting the public. And I'm biased in favor of protecting the most vulnerable. So yes, you know, this is a bias I'm really proud to have."
But the Harvard researchers also faced criticism from within the scientific community.
Two scientists who have published extensively on the associations between air pollution and adverse health effects said the Harvard research had so many shortcomings they were not convinced of its results. In an essay on April 21 for The Conversation, Paul Villeneuve, an epidemiologist at Carleton University, and Mark Goldberg, a professor of medicine at McGill University, noted why county-level data was inadequate for drawing conclusions. They brought up a number of potentially problematic factors that the Harvard study had not taken into account, including varying physical distancing policies and the possible underreporting of deaths. Interactions among the factors were so complex, they argued, it was impossible to account for them without information about individuals.
"Proper peer review must not be bypassed—and the onus for respecting its role falls not just on journalists but also on scientists to communicate the correct information accurately," Villeneuve and Goldberg wrote.
The following week, on April 27, the Harvard team updated and revised their results. They added three more weeks worth of coronavirus fatalities and nearly doubled the number of potentially confounding variables in the analysis—including, for example, the stage of the pandemic and the state stay-at-home orders. The result was a slightly weaker but still significant association between PM 2.5 and Covid-19 deaths:an 8 percent—instead of 15 percent—greater risk of death for every 1 microgram per cubic meter increase in PM 2.5.
"As soon as you get the preprint out, you can receive feedback from scientists all around the world," said Wu. "As a result we have much stronger models in the second version of the paper."
The American Petroleum Institute, however, argued that the revision was evidence of the study's underlying weakness. The update was "an action that suggests some fragility in the overall study results, and sets a precedent that the findings will likely continue to change due to the preliminary nature of the work," API said, in an analysisof the Harvard study that the industry trade group submitted to EPA's science advisory committee.
Cox, chair of the EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, had harsher words, in an interviewwith The Washington Examiner.
"This whole thing is a bogus piece of analysis," he said. "It's technically unsound. It has sensational policy implications, none of which are trustworthy."
Views on the Harvard study—and on the connection between air pollution and Covid-19—were hardening along political fault lines.
"In his inaugural address, Trump spoke of 'American carnage.' He is delivering just that," said former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NRDC president Gina McCarthy, who served as EPA administrator under Obama, in an editorial on May 4. Citing the Harvard study, they blasted Trump for "his push to increase air pollution in the midst of an unprecedented respiratory pandemic—jeopardizing people's ability to survive it."
The reliably conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journalshot back the same day, lamentingthat "opponents of fossil fuels are flogging a sloppy study that ties pollutants to coronavirus deaths.
"It may be that long-term exposure to PM 2.5 modestly raises the coronavirus death risk, but more rigorous studies are needed to prove this, and shutting down fossil-fuel production now won't save lives," the Wall Street Journal said. "It will deny livelihoods to hundreds of thousands of people."
'A Bit of a Wild West Out There'
Somewhat lost in the debate over the Harvard study was the fact that more research was emerging on the links between air pollution and Covid-19.
Some of these studies, like the Harvard study, were preprints that had not yet been peer reviewed—including research out of Italy, England, and China. But scientific journals were catching up, and publishing the first peer-reviewed studies showing an association between air pollution and Covid-19.
A particularly striking peer-reviewed studycame out of the Netherlands, where researchers were able to use detailed demographic and air pollution data available at the level of small municipalities, much smaller than the U.S. county-level data available to the Harvard group. The study found a 13 percent to 16.6 percent increase in Covid mortality related to a 1 microgram per cubic meter increase in PM 2.5, a risk that their findings suggested was not just due to the dense population of cities. Some of the highest PM 2.5 levels, and associated Covid-19 risk, were in rural areas where the pollution was related to intensive agricultural activity.
"We're kind of wiping out that big city complication, and we still find a very strong relationship, making it even more intriguing," said Matthew Cole, an economist at the University of Birmingham in England.
Cole believes that individual-level medical data will still be necessary for scientists to draw more definitive conclusions on the link between air pollution and Covid-19. But he believes it is worthwhile for researchers to begin to explore the question with the imperfect data now available. "Anything that increases our understanding of the patterns of the impact of Covid across regions is obviously very useful," he said.
"I must admit, I've seen some awful Covid papers," said Cole. "Truly awful data and analysis—junk, essentially, and you should infer nothing from it. And it's a little difficult for a non-academic to judge whether a piece of work is meaningful or not. But actually, when you find a useful preprint done by a credible group, then it gives you some evidence that there's something that maybe we need to look into further."
He added, "I think we need to be a little careful that we don't dismiss all of these studies as being flawed, because I think increasingly, some of this evidence is looking quite convincing."
Some efforts are underway to speed up the peer review process to address the need for reliable scientific information in the response to Covid-19. Scientific journals do have a rapid review process that has been used for many coronavirus-related studies, primarily studies that could inform life-saving changes in medical practice. The MIT Press and University of California, Berkeley late last month launched an online journal that is designed to accelerate peer review of Covid-19-related studies released as preprints.
"All of a sudden we have a global health emergency, yet with the complete lack of scientific information, and so a desperate hunger for scientific information about every aspect of this virus—from the basic science of it to the socio-economic correlations," said Stefano Bertozzi, dean emeritus of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, who will co-edit the journal. "And, as a result, the preprint servers really came into their own, with all their warts."
Bertozzi said the journal is "an experiment," an effort to provide some scientific verification that will be useful to policymakers, the public health community and journalists as they navigate the proliferation of pre-publication Covid-19 studies now circulating.
"I mean, it's a bit of a Wild West out there," he said.
A Long-Term Challenge
Dominici said the attention to her team's Covid-19 study has been "totally unexpected," and unlike anything the group had faced previously in its high-profile research, but she defended the decision to release the results as soon as they could.
"It makes you uncomfortable to go out there and have so much attention for something that hasn't gone through peer review," she said. "In retrospect, I'm comfortable with this decision. It's not like I'm recommending a drug that could harm you. The worst I'm saying is that air pollution is bad for you, which we know is true."
The Harvard team submitted the study to NEJMwhich ultimately passed on publishing it. The manuscript is currently under review at another journal. Dominici said the team is re-running its analyses to take into account the deaths that have occurred since they first posted the study. So far, she said, the results are consistent with the earlier findings and she anticipates their conclusions will remain the same.
One unanticipated advantage of the early release is that the Harvard group inspired researchers around the world to do similar studies, making use of the data sets and models that her team made public when they posted their preprint. Teams are working on studies on air pollution and Covid-19 in Brazil, India, China, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, drawing on their work. Dominici said she also had a group of graduate and undergraduate students who meet by video conference weekly to work together on future and deeper research on whether environmental factors are significant in Covid's spread or severity.
"In April, I thought this was going to be really bad, but it was going to pass," Dominici recalls. "I thought, 'Let's write this paper and feel like we're being helpful.' Now, I've been shifting my mindset completely, to where I realize we're going to be with this for a very long time. This is not a single project, but this is going to be my research for the next few years."
:{:{Wu and another of the five co-authors of the paper recently gave }
on their work to a meeting of an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Air Pollution in the United Kingdom that is considering environmental policy related to Covid-19}::{. In an interview, Wu said he believes the research also could help inform policymakers on where to prioritize social distancing measures, personal protective equipment distribution, and other measures to stem the spread of the virus.}:
"The takeaway message is that we wanted this message to be delivered to the public as soon as possible," Wu said.
The Trump administration, for its part, has not shown any inclination to move quickly.
"I have no thoughts on what EPA's role should be, other than to note that, to date, the papers I have seen relating Covid-19 risks to air pollution do not provide reason to conclude (or suspect) that Covid-19 risks depend on air pollution," saidCox, the chair of the agency's clean air science advisory committee, in an email.
At EPA, officials said the agency is tracking and reviewing studies, but those published to date cannot show causation. They can only identify hypotheses for further research.
Asked whether the EPA plans any such studies, an EPA spokeswoman said by email, "We currently do not have research underway in this area."
==
is all lawsuit here?
Landon Huffman was a University of North Carolina undergraduate studying sports administration in 2006 when he signed up for an air pollution test on campus.
bak 919
some new here
promote primary 1/18
see brain neuro
8/17 repurpose to particulate in general // Ozone? [rentatom premonition?]
1/18 morphing into sci supp 3; "trench warfare" on sci set off by Soon outing, maybe Happer, ie existential threat to hack and hackademics
[and maybe tied to 3x whammy death match?]
science transparency BS scam
also hit Lisa jackson on email acc't? (proto-hillary, but gop did routinely, Tillerson]
Don’t Sleep on the EPA’s “Secret Science” Proposal
The EPA has forged ahead with finalizing new rules that will upend how the agency uses science to inform important anti-pollution regulations. Since first announced in 2018, scientists, public health groups, and environmentalists have steadily denounced this Trump administration effort as a ruse to sever environmental regulations from key scientific findings, notably 1993's landmark "Six Cities" study proving that tiny particle pollution (PM2.5) severely harms human health; it's created primarily by burning fossil fuels, The rule changes will also give regulated industries unprecedented power in shaping the agency’s use of science by “allow[ing] stakeholders to reanalyze the data and models and explore the sensitivity of the conclusions to alternative assumptions.” Public comment period closes May 18, 2020.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18052020/secret-science-epa-transparency-rule-wheeler-pollution-environment
lavelle
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. [mass v EPA? EPA has strictly regulated PM2.5 under its Clean Air Act since 1997.]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.
==
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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last update 2013?
https://epahumantesting.com/
top and center:
Has EPA experimented on you? [junkman email] https://www.prwatch.org/news/2010/08/9369/dirtiest-sport">https://www.prwatch.org/news/2010/08/9369/dirtiest-sport...https://www.prwatch.org/users/35286/maxwell-abbott" title="View user profile." class="username" style="text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgb(204, 51, 51) 0px 3px 0px 0px; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s;">Maxwell Abbott ...The recession affected every sector and industry of the economy. Amongst those hardest hit was the sport that some feel rivals baseball as America's pastime: NASCAR. With less spending money in the average American's pocket, all professional sports leagues suffered -- but NASCAR, which experienced tremendous growth in the early 2000s, saw reduced attendance at every race this past year. Earlier this week, theNew York Times reported that NASCAR added new elements to its races to lure fans into spending huge sums of money once again. The league's executives have cut ticket prices, worked with hotels to waive minimum-stay requirements, and encouraged drivers to be more vocal in criticism of their competition. But as the consequences of the BP oil spill are just beginning to be felt, it is an opportune time to take a closer look at professional stock car racing, the most polluting sport in America by far. Perhaps something should be done to ensure it does not make a return to its glory days.
Massive Numbers
A NASCAR race consists of 43 cars circling a track for between 250 to 500 miles. The NASCAR season consists of 36 "point races," which count towards the Nextel Cup, and "non-point races" for up-and-coming drivers who have not qualified to compete for the cup. In addition, there are practice-races before each official race. These numbers may not seem to shocking on their own, but when one considers that each stock car in the race gets only five miles per gallon, the harm done to the environment by this sport becomes more apparent. Most street cars operate at about 20 miles per gallon and some hybrid cars top out at 60 miles per gallon. But it just wouldn't be fun unless NASCAR can burn off 2 million gallons of gasoline per year at this ridiculous mileage rate. The carbon footprint of NASCAR is equally amazing.In one weekend, http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/nascar-environment1.htm" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgb(204, 51, 51) 0px 3px 0px 0px; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s;">120,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted. That number is equivalent to the yearly footprint of three average houses. The gasoline burned also contains particulate matter, sulfur oxides and a host of other pollutants that destroy air quality.
A Free Ride
Since its inception, NASCAR has not received adequate scrutiny for the environmental impact it causes. There seem to be more positive references to NASCAR (including conservative romanticizing of NASCAR dads) than there are serious investigations into the problems associated with the sport. What is most striking is that NASCAR stock cars are unregulated by Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA mandates certain levels of of cleanliness from everyday passenger cars, but NASCAR cars have been granted a loophole and can spew toxins in the air without using mufflers, catalytic converters or any sort of emissions control devices. All that matters to NASCAR and its fans is speed, and the government has turned a blind eye to the amount of pollutants these cars are allowed to generate. Maybe NASCAR will never recover from the recession and become a relic of the ancient past, like Roman Gladiators. If this destructive sport does rebound, the very least we should ask is for a sensible set of regulations that will bring these toxic machines under the control of technology that can make a big difference to the well-being of the planet, and our lungs.
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new 320
II. Parties
A. Plaintiffs
- The American Tradition Institute is a 501(c) (3) organization dedicated to the
advancement of rational, free-market solutions to America's land, energy, and environmental
challenges. It has members throughout the nation, including in Virginia. The Institute and its
Law Center were formed to find and challenge at law governmental actions that violate the core
principles of good science, honest government and the rights of citizens and man. See, Schnare
Verified Complaint 3
Decl. at ¶9.
- The American Tradition Institute has no central offices. Like many national
public interest policy and law institutes, its staff works from locations throughout the nation.
The hub of its environmental law activities are in Burke, Virginia. The mailing address of the
Environmental Law Center is 9033 Brook Ford Road, Burke, Virginia 22015. ATI and its
Environmental Law Center litigates matters on behalf of its members where those members
could otherwise assert their own rights, as in this case. Id at ¶ 10.
- Landon Huffman is a member of the American Tradition Institute who supports
and shares the ATI's purposes. See Huffman Decl. at ¶ 7.
- In November 2006 and May 2007 Mr. Huffman participated in human
experimentation conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the kind at
issue in this matter. Id at ¶ 2.
- He received a consent form that did not explain that he would be exposed to
something that the EPA claims to be lethal. Nor was he ever informed that human
experimentation was only supposed to be done in a manner that would potentially and directly
benefit those subjected to human experimentation. Id at ¶ 3.
8.He was lead to believe that the benefit of the experiment would be to help people
with asthma, something from which he suffers. He was not informed that the pollution EPA was
forcing into his lungs could actually cause him to have an asthma attack. Nor was he ever given
anything from EPA that would possibly relieve his asthma. Id at ¶ 4.
9. Since learning that the EPA considers the gases to which he was exposed were
lethal, he has been distraught and experienced emotional distress , such as a fear of becoming ill
or dying. His health is of utmost importance to him and he is disturbed by the fact that because&...of his participation in EPA's human experimentation, his health is in greater jeopardy than when
he voluntarily agreed to participate in those studies. As a result of those studies, he is distressed
that he may not be able to provide for his wife and family in the short-term as well as long-term....ongoing studies. He believes no one should be falsely and unknowingly exposed to a lethal gas
and only by stopping this human experimentation will he be relieved of his continuing concern
that others not suffer what he now does. Id at ¶ 6.
11.Steven J. Milloy is a member of the American Tradition Institute who supports
and shares the ATI's purposes.See Milloy Decl. at ¶ 7.
- One of the great horrors Mr. Milloy and his family suffer is the memory of the
incarceration of Mr. Milloy's uncle, Zoran Galkanovic, at the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Upon threat of death, Mr. Galkanovic was forced to rise each morning and identify those
individuals at the concentration camp too ill to work, knowing they would subsequently be
executed. Id at ¶ 2.
- German physicians conducted large-scale human experimentation at the
Mauthausen concentration camp. "German doctors subjected Mauthausen prisoners to
pseudoscientific medical experiments, including testing levels of testosterone, experimenting
with delousing chemicals, medicines for tuberculosis, and nutrition experiments. Camp physician
Hermann Richter surgically removed significant organs--e.g., stomach, liver, or kidneys--from
living prisoners solely in order to determine how long a prisoner could survive without the organ
in question. Eduard Krebsbach, the executive camp doctor between autumn 1941 and autumn
194 3, killed an undetermined number of prisoners by injecting phenol directly into their hearts."
Verified Complaint 5
See, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Mauthausen Killing Operations," Holocaust
Encyclopedia, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?Moduleid=l0007729 (accessed
September 11, 2012. "It was behind the gray stone walls of Mauthausen, in his native Austria,
that Dr. [Aribert] Heim committed the atrocities against hundreds of Jews and others that earned
him the nickname Dr. Death and his status as the most wanted Nazi war criminal still believed by
the Simon Wiesenthal Center to be at large. Dr. Heim was accused of performing operations on
prisoners without anesthesia; removing organs from healthy inmates, then leaving them to die on
the operating table; injecting poison, including gasoline, into the hearts of others; and taking the
skull of at least one victim as a souvenir. See, New York Times, "Uncovering Lost Path of the
Most Wanted Nazi," February 4, 2009. Id at ¶3.
14. Because of the inhumanity forced on Mr. Galkanovic, Mr. Milloy has accepted as
a family responsibility the fight against any government who subjects its citizens to inhumane
treatment. Id at ¶ 4. He is deeply aggrieved by the kind of human experimentation being
conducted by the U.S. EPA and will not be relieved until it stops. Id at ¶ 5.
- After learning of how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was
risking the lives and health of human study subjects and was failing to honestly represent the
nature of the human experimentation that is the subject of the instant matter, Mr. Milloy was
appalled by this inhumanity. Id at ¶ 4.
- Mr. Milloy has dedicated a majority of his current work effort to expose and stop
the EPA's improper, unethical and illegal human experimentation. Mr. Milloy is deeply
aggrieved by the kind of human experimentation being conducted by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency and will not be relieved until it stops. Id at ¶ 4.
- Mr. Milloy owns and maintains two websites dedicated to exposing government
excess and dishonest science. Since 1996, JunkScience.com (http://www.junkscience.com) has
been dedicated to exposing the abuse of science by special interests, including the EPA. Since
September 2012, EPAHumanTesting.com (http://www.epahumantesting.com) has focused on
exposing EPA's unlawful and immoral failure to protect human study subjects. These efforts
reflect Mr. Milloy's dedication to ensuring honest, ethical government, especially in cases where
the government engages in science and human experimentation. Id at ¶ 6.
18. David Schnare is a member of the American Tradition Institute who supports and
shares the ATI's purposes. See Schnare Decl. at ¶ 9.
- Dr. Schnare's parents selected his name, David, to honor the last male relative to
die before his birth. That man's name was David Steiner, a Jew who died in Buchenwald
concentration camp on May 3, 1945, 21 days after the camp was liberated. Tattooed on his body
was the number 59059. See, http://www.buchenwald.de/totenbuch/. Id at ¶ 2.
- German physicians conducted large-scale human experimentation at Buchenwald.
Some 729 inmates were used as test subjects, of whom 154 died. This human experimentation
included determining the dose of a poison necessary to cause death. See, Spitz, Vivien, Doctors
from hell: the horrific account of Nazi experiments on humans, Sentient Publications, Boulder,
CO ISBN 1-59181-032-9 (2005).
- Dr. Schnare more than abhors current governmental experimentation on humans
for the purposes of determining the effect of poisons. It is not only that such activity dishonors
those who should have been the last to have suffered in such a manner, it sickens and angers him.
It causes him to stand up for those who could not and cannot. Dr. Schnare does not hold the
name David as a whim or merely as a naming tradition. He views his name as an honor to one
who did not survive the horrors of a government utterly without ethics. He believes he can do no
less than rise in opposition to any government who would experiment on subjects without their
well-informed willingness, and where they have they do not have the opportunity to personally
benefit from such an experiment. Schnare Decl. at ¶ 4.
- Dr. Schnare was employed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
for 33 years, first as a scientist and policy analyst, finally as an enforcement attorney. In the last
years with the Agency, he realized that EPA had abandoned much of the even-handed, sciencebased
approach to protection of human health and the environment which marked its early years
and left the Agency, in part, because senior appointees and employees had rejected the core
values held by honest scientists and civil servants. When he learned of the human
experimentation at issue in this case, he realized a duty to challenge EPA's misanthropic
activities, if for no other reason than to preserve his own legacy of having worked assiduously on
behalf of public health. Id at ¶ 5.
- The University of North Carolina (UNC) awarded Dr. Schnare a Doctor of
Philosophy in Environmental Management and its School of Public Health awarded him a
Master of Science in Public Health. During his graduate matriculation at UNC, he served on the
Dean's Cabinet, the advisory and decision-making body assisting the Dean of the School of
Public Health. Among the many subjects addressed during his tenure on the Cabinet, the Dean
and Faculty took special interest in ensuring the faculty fully complied with all requirements
mandated by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and federal and state statutes and rules
dealing with human experimentation. Id at ¶ 6.
- After learning of how EPA failed to honestly represent the nature of the human
experimentation that is the subject of the instant matter, he was appalled that the UNC
Biomedical IRB review process failed to conduct the kind of independent review necessary to
[Verified Complaint 8]
ensure the representations by EPA were not only true but complete and fully reflected EPA's
knowledge about the poisons with which they intended to force into the lungs of unsuspecting
and inadequately informed human subjects. As an alumnus of the University, he is deeply upset
at this failure and it adds to his great angst and the emotional harm he suffers from the on-going
illegal human experimentation. Id at ¶ 7.
- The relief sought in the instant matter will significantly ameliorate his suffering
and will help return honor to the memory of David Steiner and all those who died at the hands of
the "Doctors from hell." Id at ¶ 8.
B. Defendants
- Defendant United States Environmental Protection Agency is the federal agency
responsible for conducting experiments on humans that involved exposing those persons to toxic
substances the Agency believes will cause death and which the Agency therefore regulates under
the auspices of the Clean Air Act, 42 U.S. C. Chapter 85.
- Defendant Lisa P. Jackson is the Administrator of the United States
Environmental Protection Agency and, as such, is charged with the supervision and management
of all decisions and actions of the agency, including those that authorized human
experimentation. She is sued in her official capacity only.
- Wayne Cascio, Martha Sue Carraway, Andrew J. Ghio, Jon R. Sobus, Joachim D.
Pleil and Michael C. Madden are self-identified by as EPA employees subject to oversight and
management control by Defendant Lisa P. Jackson and are the EPA employees who personally
ordered human subjects be placed into a gas chamber and exposed to a lethal gas.1
They are also
1 See, Ghio, A. et al, Swiss Med Wkly. 2012;142:w13597 "Controlled human exposures to diesel exhaust" (citing
their organizational association as "National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory and National
Exposure Research Laboratory, US Environmental Protection Agency, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA." See,
http://www.smw.ch/content/smw-2012-13597/ (accessed 9/12/2012... https://donnyferguson.blogspot.com/2012_09_24_archive.html With Canadian wildfires, Fox News follows its COVID playbook
Fox guest on hazardous smoke: “There's no health risk. … Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles — they're innocuous.”
Special PROGRAMS
CLIMATE & ENERGY
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 06/08/23
Fox News hosts and guests and other right-wing media figures are minimizing the public health risk of the cloud of particulate matter from Canadian forest fires that descended on much of the United States this week and mocking people for taking steps to protect themselves.
:{
}:
The coverage is reminiscent of Fox’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly its early days, when the network downplayed the potential danger posed by the virus.
Smoke from wildfires in Ontario and Quebec inundated the Midwest and East Coast on Wednesday. Major metropolises were under hazardous air quality warnings, and a reddish-orange haze choked New York City, which at one point had the lowest air quality of any major city in the world. On Thursday, the smoke-filled air is expected to spread further into the Midwest and South even as conditions improve in the Northeast.
Scientists say such wildfires are becoming larger and more frequent as “forests around the world increasingly dry out amid the warming climate,” a fact calmly observed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal but furiously derided by his Fox employees.
Many major news outlets published reports noting that experts recommend people in affected areas wear high-quality masks to prevent health problems caused by the smoke. Those can include “trouble breathing, burning eyes, dizziness, headache or nausea,” particularly among high-risk populations including children, seniors, and people with respiratory problems including asthma. As Fox medical correspondent Dr. Janette Nesheiwat put it during a Wednesday appearance on Fox News Tonight, “If you do have to go outside, an N-95 can help protect you from that large particulate matter.”
Nesheiwat has a lot of work to do within Fox’s own building if she hopes that message will sink in for its audience. Hosts elsewhere on the network treated the idea of wearing masks in response to the wildfire smoke as a punch line.
On Wednesday afternoon, Jeanine Pirro presented the notion as a left-wing conspiracy, saying, “Democrats are pumping upclimate hysteriaand bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.” That night, Sean Hannity mocked “young, healthy people” for putting on masks, Jesse Watters lashed out at government officials for recommending their use, and Laura Ingraham claimed they “seem a little giddy to be back in the masks” and arepromoting “panic porn.”
In fact, Fox’s influential hosts repeatedly downplayed the idea that the wildfire smoke poses any health risk at all.
:{
}:
“I keep reading and hearing reports and people being interviewed — 'I had a hard time breathing' — and I'm like, I'm walking in the same place you're walking in and I don't feel a thing, and I'm trying to understand, and my -- I work out regularly, so I think I'm relatively in tune with my body,” Hannity said. “I think if it was difficult -- if I was having difficulty breathing, I would notice. But these are young people saying this. Are they all snowflakes?”
“Yes,” OutKick host Charly Arnolt replied. “I think people just like to make a big deal out of nothing.”
“Everybody is saying stay inside, but I didn't listen,” Watters said at the top of his show over the chyron “Jesse Braves ‘Hazardous’ Air Quality.”
“Why? Because I love you,” he continued. “I came into the city for you tonight. I braved the smoke so you could watch your favorite show. The air quality is hazardous. ‘Worse than 9/11.’ But, I said, I don't care. The show must go on.”
Ingraham decided that the perspective her viewers needed to hear about the potential health impacts of smoke on the respiratory system was that of Steve Milloy, a notorious climate denier and former cigarette and coal lobbyist who told them they had nothing to fear.
“Steve, no one's denying it is unpleasant. My eyes are pretty itchy and watery, yesterday and a little bit today, and it might go on for a couple more days,” Ingraham said after introducing her guest. “But is this wholly out of the ordinary?”
“No. This happens anytime there's a wildfire in the West. I mean, it's unusual in the East. Look, the air is ugly, it's unpleasant to breathe, and for a lot of people, they getanxietyover it. But the reality is there's no health risk,” Milloy replied. “We have this kind of air in India and China all the time — no public health emergency.” (Both countries reportedly see more than 1 million premature deaths a year from air pollution.)
“This doesn't kill anybody, this doesn't make anybody cough, this is not a health event,” he further explained.
:{
}:
“Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles — they’re innocuous,” Milloy later added. “There's nothing in them. They have no effect.”
Video
CitationFrom the June 7, 2023, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
Meanwhile, at Fox’s cable news competitor Newsmax, host Greg Kelly highlighted the upside of the hazardous levels of smoke blanketing New York City. “I'll tell you, it actually smells like wood smoke. It's not an unpleasant odor, to be honest,” he said. “It is pretty, it actually is pretty. It's a beautiful, interesting aura the city has right now.”
The modern right-wing media ecosystem is defined less by its ideology than its grievances. Popular figures within that milieu,for reasons financial and partisan, despise Democrats, liberals, experts, and the mainstream press, which they consider one and the same, and reflexively oppose whatever those hated entities support.
That reflexive opposition became lethal when COVID-19 spread across the United States. Fox News hosts initially told their viewers, incorrectly, that the virus was no more deadly than the flu and urged them to treat it as a Democratic hoax to damage President Donald Trump. Later, they endorsed untested and ineffective COVID-19 “cures” while downplaying the effectiveness of masks, social distancing, and vaccines.
This irresponsible coverage assuredly led to the deaths of Fox viewers. But virtually no one at the network was held accountable for their actions during a public health crisis, so now they are following the same playbook.
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With Canadian wildfires, Fox News follows its COVID playbook
06/08/23 12:19 PM EDT
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06/07/23 zzz
...Zoran Galkanovic, was incarcerated at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Upon threat of death, Mr. Galkanovic was forced to rise each morning and identif ...
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https://www.ecowatch.com/air-pollution-cardiac-arrests-2644941669.html
Researchers now say there is "no safe level" of air pollution exposure after a large-scale study found a correlation between exposure to fine particle matter, known as PM2.5, and cardiac arrests, according to the The Sydney Morning Herald.
The researchers found that exposure to PM2.5 that even fell below global standards was hazardous, suggesting that tighter regulations and cleaner energy is required, according to the study, which was published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health.
Scientists from the University of Sydney led the study, which analyzed air quality in Japan against 249,372 cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. They concluded that even low-level exposure was associated with an increased risk of cardiac arrest for people over 65, as The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
The researchers noticed that the risk of cardiac arrest grew by up to 4 percent for every increase of 10 units in the PM2.5 levels.
"Our study supports recent evidence that there is no safe level of air pollution — finding an increased risk of cardiac arrest despite air quality generally meeting the standards," said report author professor Kazuaki Negishi from the University of Sydney School of Medicine, as The Canberra Times reported.
Negishi pointed out that previous research into air pollution and acute cardiac events had been inconsistent, particularly at PM2.5 levels that met the World Health Organization guidelines. However, the large scale of this study meant that past inconsistencies could be addressed.
"Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is a major medical emergency – with less than one in 10 people worldwide surviving these events – and there has been increasing evidence of an association with the more acute air pollution, or fine particulate matter such as PM2.5," said Negishi in a University of Sydney statement. "We analyzed almost a quarter of a million cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and found a clear link with acute air pollution levels."
The findings are troubling for Australia, which has seen its usually pristine air plummet in quality due to the recent bushfires. In the study, more than 90 per cent of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occurred at levels below the Australian standard of 25 micrograms per cubic meter. Put another way, the air quality levels ranked as "fair," "good" or "very good" under Australian standards, as the The Sydney Morning Herald reported. The U.S. and Japanese standard is less strict at 35 micrograms per cubic meter.
Australia had a particularly awful year, with air quality in Canberra ranking as the worst in the world on Dec. 31. Sydney had 81 days of hazardous, very poor or poor air quality in 2019, which was more days of bad air than the last decade combined, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
The researchers expect the worsening air quality will lead to more heart attack fatalities in Australia, especially among older people.
"Given the fact that there is a tendency towards worsening air pollution – from increasing numbers of cars as well as disasters such as bushfires – the impacts on cardiovascular events, in addition to respiratory diseases and lung cancer – must be taken into account in health care responses," said Negishi in a university statement.
Unfortunately, the researchers did not identify a threshold that is safe for exposure to PM2.5. Instead, Negishi said that existing standards should be reevaluated.
"It might not be a good idea to continue to seek [a new] threshold, but try to continuously improve our air quality. If a threshold exists, it should be very, very close to zero," Negishi said, as The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
larry bell forbes
EPA Charged With Lethal Experiments On Hundreds Of ...
https://www.forbes.com › sites › larrybell › 2012/11/13 › epa-charged-wit...
1.
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:{:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/11/13/epa-charged-with-lethal-experiments-on-hundreds-of-unsuspecting-subjects/
a suit filed in federal court charges the Environmental Protection Agency with conducting illegal and potentially lethal experiments on hundreds of financially needy people who were paid $12/hour without even informing them of risks. Based upon thousands of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, procedures undertaken since 2004 and continuing through the Obama administration exposed subjects at theUniversity of North Carolina’s School of Medicine to very high levels of toxic air pollutants. Many of these subjects were already health-impaired, suffering from asthma, metabolic syndrome, and aging (up to 75 years old).
One of the pollutants was a fine particulate substance known as PM2.5, a major component of diesel exhaust which EPA had determined to be unsafe for inhalation at any level, particularly for health-impaired and elderly populations. The administration’s own Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council chairman, Jon Samet, stated that in a 2011 commentary published in the New England Journal of Medicine. House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) reiterated EPA’s position on this in a February 2012 letter to EPA air chief, Gina McCarthy.
EPA has strictly regulated PM2.5 under its Clean Air Act since 1997. Those air quality standardscosting multi-billions of dollarsare being dramatically tightened. Two of the biggest new ones under its recently D.C. District Circuit Appeals Court-rejected Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and the Mercury Air Toxics Standard, are heavily premised upon condemnation of PM2.5 as a killer. As EPA Administrator Jackson testified in Congress in September 2011, “…particulate [PM2.5] matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick.It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.” She added, “If we could reduce particulate matter to levels that are healthy we would have an identical impact to finding a cure for cancer.”
Today In: Opinion
So if this is the case, why did EPA fail to warn their test subjects that the substances they would be exposed to in high doses were so dangerous? While the administration has repeatedly told Congress and the public that PM2.5 can kill within hours of exposure, they only told them, for example, that “You may experience some minor degree of airway irritation, cough or shortness of breath or wheezing. These symptoms typically disappear two to four hours after exposure, but may last longer for particularly sensitive people.”
One such “sensitive person” is an obese woman with a history of heart disease. She had to be rushed to a hospital for an overnight stay after suffering a cardiac arrhythmia during an experiment. And although EPA attributed her heart problem to PM2.5 in a published report, no one ever bothered to warn subsequent subjects of cardiac arrhythmia risk.
The American Tradition Institute (ATI) which filed the law suit against EPA and its administrator asserts that such practices are not only illegal, but run afoul of virtually every rule of ethical standard established since World War II and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments to protect human study subjects from rogue scientific research. The egregious Tuskegee experiments were influential in prompting Congress to pass the National Research Act of 1974 creating a commission to develop principles for protection of human subjects in scientific experimentation.
ATI believes that EPA has both civil and criminal liability. The litigation was filed on behalf of lead plaintiff Landon Huffman, an ATI member who participated in the EPA’s human experimentation after receiving a consent form that did not explain that he would be exposed to something that the agency claims to be lethal. He was also never informed that such human experimentation was only supposed to be conducted in a manner that would potentially and directly benefit the study subjects.
To the contrary, Mr. Landon maintains that he was led to believe the experiment would help people with asthma, a condition he suffers…not told that the pollution that was forced into his lungs could actually cause an asthma attack. Nor was he ever given anything by EPA that would possibly [?] relieve his asthma. [test done by UNC, dr present?]
Since learning that EPA considers that the gases he was exposed to are lethal, Landon reports being distraught and consumed with emotional distress. This includes a fear of dying and future inability to support his wife and family. He is also distressed that other participants may suffer in the same way.
ATI member and plaintiff Steven Milloy recalls horrific family memories of his uncle, a prisoner at the WWII German Mauthausen concentration camp where grisly pseudoscientific medical experiments were conducted. There, upon threat of death, he was forced to identify fellow prisoners who were too ill to work, knowing they would subsequently be executed. Milloy is a well-known author and publisher of JunkScience.com.
Another ATI plaintiff, David Schnare, formerly served for 33 years as an EPA scientist, policy analyst and enforcement lawyer. He left the agency after realizing that it had abandoned even-handed science-based approaches of earlier times. David is named in honor of family member David Steiner, a prisoner at the Buchenwald concentration camp who died on May 3, 1945, just 21 days after liberation. Some 729 inmates were subjects of barbaric medical experiments. Of those victims, 154 died.
Guided by painful lessons of such tragedies, it is difficult to imagine any possible justification for the EPA’s experiment program on plausible ethical or legal grounds. Section 42 of U.S. Code 3515b addressing prohibition on funding certain experiments involving human participants states that: “…[no] funds appropriated by this Act ….shall be used to pay for any research program, project, or course which is of an experimental nature, or any other activity involving human participants, which is determined by the Secretary or a court of competent jurisdiction to present a danger to the physical, mental, or emotional well-being of a participant or subject of such program, project, or course, without the written, informed consent of each participant or subject.”
Since three of the EPA researchers connected with its human experiments are North Carolina-licensed physicians, thatstate’s medical board is now investigating their participation. The University of North Carolina which provided the EPA with a required institutional review board (IRB) for approving the experiments is also conducting an inquiry. And while the Obama-appointed Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has refused multiple requests to get involved in the issue, Senator Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, is now calling for investigatory hearings on the matter.
In a letter to committee chair Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) Inhofe wrote: “It is extremely disturbing that EPA may have conducted illegal human experiments, exposing people with conditions such as asthma and metabolic syndrome to concentrated high levels of substances like fine particulate matter and diesel exhaust.” He then charged that: “EPA has repeatedly said that these substances can cause cancer and lead to death, so if these allegations of human experiments are true, it just validates the problem that the Obama-EPA’s mission is not about public health.”
So there it is. Either such devastating charges are warranted, or the agency’s assessments of toxic dangers presented by diesel PM2.5 emissions are greatly exaggerated and unsupportable. In the second event, EPA is at least guilty of gross scientific incompetence, public misrepresentation of facts, and costly abuse of regulatory authority. Either way, they must be required to clear the air and clean up their act.
I am a professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where I founded and direct the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and head the grad...
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professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where I founded and direct the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and head the graduate program in space architecture. My background deals extensively with research, planning and design of habitats, structures and other support systems for applications in space and extreme environments on Earth. I have recently written a new book titled "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax". It can be previewed and ordered at www.climateofcorruption.com. Additional information about my book and views can be found on my YouTube address: http://www.youtube.com/climateofcorruption.
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omfg
huffman:
He is also distressed that others may suffer the way he does if they participate in
ongoing studies. He believes no one should be falsely and unknowingly exposed to a lethal gas
and only by stopping this human experimentation will he be relieved of his continuing concern
that others not suffer what he now does. Id at ¶ 6.
- Steven J. Milloy is a member of the American Tradition Institute who supports
and shares the ATI’s purposes. See Milloy Decl. at ¶ 7.
- One of the great horrors Mr. Milloy and his family suffer is the memory of the
incarceration of Mr. Milloy’s uncle, Zoran Galkanovic, at the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Upon threat of death, Mr. Galkanovic was forced to rise each morning and identify those
individuals at the concentration camp too ill to work, knowing they would subsequently be
executed. Id at ¶ 2.
- German physicians conducted large-scale human experimentation at the
Mauthausen concentration camp. "German doctors subjected Mauthausen prisoners to
pseudoscientific medical experiments, including testing levels of testosterone, experimenting
with delousing chemicals, medicines for tuberculosis, and nutrition experiments. Camp physician
Hermann Richter surgically removed significant organs--e.g., stomach, liver, or kidneys--from
living prisoners solely in order to determine how long a prisoner could survive without the organ
in question. Eduard Krebsbach, the executive camp doctor between autumn 1941 and autumn
194 3, killed an undetermined number of prisoners by injecting phenol directly into their hearts."
Verified Complaint 5
See, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Mauthausen Killing Operations," Holocaust
Encyclopedia, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?Moduleid=l0007729 (accessed
September 11, 2012. "It was behind the gray stone walls of Mauthausen, in his native Austria,
that Dr. [Aribert] Heim committed the atrocities against hundreds of Jews and others that earned
him the nickname Dr. Death and his status as the most wanted Nazi war criminal still believed by
the Simon Wiesenthal Center to be at large. Dr. Heim was accused of performing operations on
prisoners without anesthesia; removing organs from healthy inmates, then leaving them to die on
the operating table; injecting poison, including gasoline, into the hearts of others; and taking the
skull of at least one victim as a souvenir. See, New York Times, "Uncovering Lost Path of the
Most Wanted Nazi," February 4, 2009. Id at ¶3.
- Because of the inhumanity forced on Mr. Galkanovic, Mr. Milloy has accepted as
a family responsibility the fight against any government who subjects its citizens to inhumane
treatment. Id at ¶ 4. He is deeply aggrieved by the kind of human experimentation being
conducted by the U.S. EPA and will not be relieved until it stops. Id at ¶ 5.
- After learning of how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was
risking the lives and health of human study subjects and was failing to honestly represent the
nature of the human experimentation that is the subject of the instant matter, Mr. Milloy was
appalled by this inhumanity. Id at ¶ 4.
- Mr. Milloy has dedicated a majority of his current work effort to expose and stop
the EPA's improper, unethical and illegal human experimentation. Mr. Milloy is deeply
aggrieved by the kind of human experimentation being conducted by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency and will not be relieved until it stops. Id at ¶ 4.
- Mr. Milloy owns and maintains two websites dedicated to exposing government
Verified Complaint 6
excess and dishonest science. Since 1996, JunkScience.com (http://www.junkscience.com) has
been dedicated to exposing the abuse of science by special interests, including the EPA. Since
September 2012, EPAHumanTesting.com (http://www.epahumantesting.com) has focused on
exposing EPA's unlawful and immoral failure to protect human study subjects. These efforts
reflect Mr. Milloy’s dedication to ensuring honest, ethical government, especially in cases where
the government engages in science and human experimentation. Id at ¶ 6.
- David Schnare is a member of the American Tradition Institute who supports and
shares the ATI’s purposes. See Schnare Decl. at ¶ 9.
==
A Comparative Analysis of the College-Choice Factors of NCAA Football Student-Athletes at a Southeastern University Public Deposited
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Last Modified
March 19, 2019
Creator
Huffman, Landon T.
Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Exercise and Sport Science
[something from which he suffers,” the complaint states. “He was not informed that the pollution EPA was forcing into his lungs could actually cause him to have an asthma attack. … Since learning that the EPA considers the gases to which he was exposed were lethal, he has been distraught and experienced emotional distress, such as a fear of becoming ill or dying.... “In experiments conducted by EPA employees and approved by an EPA contractor serving as an Institutional Review Board, EPA has unethically, immorally, repeatedly and ultimately illegally exposed human subject to PM2.5, a pollutant EPA states is lethal and can cause death within hours of exposure without informing the human subjects of this fact,” the complaint states... The group seeks to halt the “EPA’s human experimentation which intentionally exposes human subjects, including some ‘more susceptible to the effects of air pollutants’ to ‘fine particles’ such as those ‘produced by car and coal-fired power plants,’ that EPA and its administrator have described as ‘lethal’ and for which EPA has concluded there is no exposure level ‘below which there is no risk at all.'... In addition to the injunction against future testing, the group also says that the EPA should abandon tainted data... “To repair ethical lapses and as a matter of equitable relief, plaintiffs ask the court to stay implementation of any rules authorized under the Clean Air Act to control fine particulate matter until such time as the agency can review the regulatory basis it used in their promulgation, amend its support documents and otherwise reevaluate the risks from the fine particulate matter to ensure EPA does not rely in any fashion upon illegal human experimentation,” the complaint states... The American Tradition Institute is represented by the director of its environmental law clinic, David Schnare.... In the complaint, Schnare says he is one of many members of the institute who fights inhumane human testing because of a personal connection to the medical experimentation in Nazi concentration camps.](http://constantinereport.com/epa-tests-lethal-fine-particles-on-human-subjects-think-tank-says/
http://constantinereport.com/epa-tests-lethal-fine-particles-on-human-subjects-think-tank-says/%20...Courthouse%20News%20Service,%20September%2026,%202012...
EPA%20is%20seeking%20human%20subjects%20suffering%20from%20mutations%20of%20the%20gene%20GSTM1,%20glutathione-S-transferase,%20and%20thus%20‘more%20susceptible%20to%20the%20effects%20of%20air%20pollutants,’%20for%20the%20express%20purpose%20of%20exposing%20them%20to%20excessive%20levels%20of%20PM2.5%20in%20a%20study%20they%20have%20titled%20‘Captain,'”%20according%20to%20the%20complaint....The%20complaint%20links%20to%20a%20list%20of%20EPA%20studies%20compiled%20by%20volunteer%20recruiter%20Westat.%20Captain%20still%20appears%20as%20a%20study%20on%20epastudies.org,%20when%20Courthouse%20News%20visited%20the%20site%20Wednesday%20morning.
http://constantinereport.com/epa-tests-lethal-fine-particles-on-human-subjects-think-tank-says/
American%20Tradition%20Institute%20says%20that%20the%20EPA%20has%20conducted%20other%20studies%20involving%20PM2.5%20in%202004,%202007%20and%202008,%20and%20plans%20to%20run%20more,%20despite%20having%20found%20“that%20there%20is%20no%20safe%20level%20of%20PM2.5.”
In%20September%202011,%20“EPA%20Administrator%20Lisa%20Jackson%20testified%20to%20Congress%20that%20of%20all%20deaths%20occurring%20in%20the%20United%20States,%201%20in%204%20‘is%20attributable%20to%20PM2.5,'”%20the%20complaint%20says...
The%20institute%20says%20one%20of%20its%20members,%20Landon%20Huffman,%20previously%20participated%20in%20an%20EPA%20experiment%20on%20PM2.5....
He%20was%20led%20to%20believe%20that%20the%20benefit%20of%20the%20experiment%20with%20asthma,)
[Schnare says he was named after a relative who died in Buchenwald concentration camp, where 729 inmates were used as test subjects to determine the lethal dose of a poison. He allegedly quit a job at the EPA after 33 years of service because of the agency’s conduct.](http://constantinereport.com/epa-tests-lethal-fine-particles-on-human-subjects-think-tank-says/
http://constantinereport.com/epa-tests-lethal-fine-particles-on-human-subjects-think-tank-says/%20...Courthouse%20News%20Service,%20September%2026,%202012...
EPA%20is%20seeking%20human%20subjects%20suffering%20from%20mutations%20of%20the%20gene%20GSTM1,%20glutathione-S-transferase,%20and%20thus%20‘more%20susceptible%20to%20the%20effects%20of%20air%20pollutants,’%20for%20the%20express%20purpose%20of%20exposing%20them%20to%20excessive%20levels%20of%20PM2.5%20in%20a%20study%20they%20have%20titled%20‘Captain,'”%20according%20to%20the%20complaint....The%20complaint%20links%20to%20a%20list%20of%20EPA%20studies%20compiled%20by%20volunteer%20recruiter%20Westat.%20Captain%20still%20appears%20as%20a%20study%20on%20epastudies.org,%20when%20Courthouse%20News%20visited%20the%20site%20Wednesday%20morning.
http://constantinereport.com/epa-tests-lethal-fine-particles-on-human-subjects-think-tank-says/
American%20Tradition%20Institute%20says%20that%20the%20EPA%20has%20conducted%20other%20studies%20involving%20PM2.5%20in%202004,%202007%20and%202008,%20and%20plans%20to%20run%20more,%20despite%20having%20found%20“that%20there%20is%20no%20safe%20level%20of%20PM2.5.”
In%20September%202011,%20“EPA%20Administrator%20Lisa%20Jackson%20testified%20to%20Congress%20that%20of%20all%20deaths%20occurring%20in%20the%20United%20States,%201%20in%204%20‘is%20attributable%20to%20PM2.5,'”%20the%20complaint%20says...
The%20institute%20says%20one%20of%20its%20members,%20Landon%20Huffman,%20previously%20participated%20in%20an%20EPA%20experiment%20on%20PM2.5....
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http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/09/26/50640.htm
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For two years, the Trump administration has been planting seeds of change in the Environmental Protection Agency—installing allies of regulated industries onto its elite panels of science advisers. That effort now has borne fruit in dramatic fashion.
The EPA's new science advisers, sweeping aside decades of research on the grave health risks of fine particle air pollution, have launched a drive to force the agency to give greater weight to a handful of contrarian studies that dispute the harmful effects of soot.
Particulate matter is the pollution caused by combustion, a mixture of solid and liquid droplets that forms in the burning of fossil fuels or wood. The health risks of particulate matter have been an underpinning of the EPA's cost-benefit analysis of a number of air pollution regulations, including those meant to address climate change, like the Obama administration's Clean Air Act.
The science is well-established—the World Health Organizationestimates that there are 4.2 million premature deaths a year due to fine particle pollution, making it one of the leading environmental health risks globally. But allies of the fossil fuel industry have vigorously disputed the validity of fine particle pollution studies since they first emerged in the 1990s.
Significantly, the health damages from particle and other pollution coming from the combustion of fossil fuels have also been used by the EPA to justify controls on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Controlling climate change has important co-benefits, the agency has reasoned. The Trump administration and its industry allies oppose this logic.
More Weight for 'Discordant' Claims?
The latest scientific dispute centers around the EPA's draft assessment of the science on particulate matter (PM), a comprehensive review that the agency is required by law to conduct every few years to update the state of the science on several key pollutants. EPA released its draft review last fall.
It affirmed the agency's previous findings that the science points consistently and overwhelmingly to a "causal relationship" between PM pollution and premature deaths. The assessment concludes the greatest risk is due to particles less than 2.5 microns in width, and that PM2.5 is associated with a range of cardiovascular and respiratory effects.
For the first time, the EPA concluded that the evidence was strong enough to show a "likely" causal relationship between long-term PM2.5 exposure and cancer, as well as nervous system effects. The EPA concluded, as it has in the past, that there is evidence of health risks even at extremely low levels of PM exposure.
Now, in a harshly worded draft review, the Trump administration's science advisors are blasting those findings as based on "unverifiable opinions" and lacking in scientific support.
The advisers are members of a seven-member panel called the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee. Although it is clear the members are not unified in their critique—individual members attached separate letters—the document calls for "substantial revisions" to EPA's assessment of PM, including giving more weight to what it called the "discordant" evidence among the 2,800 published studies cited in the EPA's 1,900-page science assessment.
"Substantial discordant and conflicting evidence remains ignored or unresolved," the Trump administration-appointed CASAC wrote, "leading to repeated assertions that the literature shows consistent and coherent positive associations when in fact it shows a mixture of positive and negative results."
When asked for comment on the critique, a spokesperson for the EPA said by email: "We appreciate the work of the CASAC and we will review the report."
Who Are New Committee Members Listening To?
The CASAC, now chaired by Louis Anthony "Tony" Cox,Jr., a Denver-based consultant, offers a few examples of the studies it wants to see the EPA give more weight to. Among them are studies that are authored, in fact, by Cox himself—whose clients have included theAmerican Petroleum Institute, the tobacco industry and the chemical industry.
Other studies mentioned by the CASAC are by S. Stanley Young, a former pharmaceutical industry statistician based in Raleigh, N.C., who is an adviser to the HeartlandInstitute, a conservative think tank that has led a years-long campaign to discredit climate science. Young is now also an EPA science adviser.
The CASAC also pointed to the work of James Enstrom, a Los Angeles epidemiologist who for years has questioned the health risks of particulate matter. A former tobacco industry researcher, Enstrom was a plaintiff in a 2016 lawsuit brought by the fossil fuel industry-funded Energy and Environment Legal Institute that challenged the makeup of the previous CASAC.
Many of the environmental scientists who were appointed to EPA's advisory panels had received funding from EPA at some point in their careers, which the Enstrom suit said was a conflict of interest. In 2017, Trump's first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, made the same argument when he replaced scientific experts from the existing science advisory boards with new appointees—including a number of industry allies and consultants, like Cox and Young.
'CASAC Itself Lacks Necessary Expertise'
One scientist who was among those removed from the CASAC last year, H. Christopher Frey, an environmental engineer at the University of North Carolina, said the harsh science critique from the Trump administration-appointed committee comes amid "numerous major changes to the [air quality standards] review process that collectively undermine its quality, integrity and credibility."
"Most astonishing is the arrogant and insulting tone of this letter toward EPA scientific staff," Frey, a former chairman of the CASAC, said in an email to InsideClimate News. Frey dismissed as "patently absurd" the document's assertion that the EPA's approach on particulate matter was unscientific. "The statement is ironic given that the CASAC itself lacks necessary expertise," he said.
In fact, the CASAC recommended that it be given access to additional technical expertise in order to complete its review of EPA science on particulate matter. Two members of the CASAC called for the EPA to reconstitute a 20-member special review panel on particulate matter that EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler disbanded in October, just prior to the start of the peer review. That panel included experts in the science of particulate matter and health effects—expertise that is now missing on the CASAC. Although much of the science on the health risks of particulate matter is from large human studies, there are no epidemiologists on the current CASAC.
In one striking passage of its draft peer review, the CASAC said it is unable to reach consensus on the link between particulate matter and mortality—the "causality determination of mortality from PM2.5 exposure." Some members "are of the opinion that, although uncertainties remain, the evidence supporting the causal relationship between PM2.5 exposure and mortality is robust, diverse, and convincing," the document said. But other committee members think EPA should provide a better justification for its determination that there is a causal relationship between PM exposure and premature death.
Daniel Greenbaum, president of the Boston-based Health Effects Institute (HEI), a research institute that has conducted major studies on air pollution, said that he was surprised at that passage.
"Given that there is more than a decade worth of work now looking at the epidemiology, the toxicology, and a number of other things to see whether or not PM can contribute to mortality, there's pretty robust literature that says that," said Greenbaum. HEI has offered its own critiques of some aspects of EPA's assessment—for example, it does not agree with EPA's conclusion on nervous system effects. But HEI does not dispute EPA's fundamental conclusion on mortality risk. "By most standards, people would say that the evidence has strengthened over the last 20 years," Greenbaum said.
But Greenbaum noted that the committee's review document is only a draft. The CASAC has set a conference call for March 28 to discuss the document and the next steps before submitting its final recommendations to Wheeler.
===
https://thinkprogress.org/experts-warn-trumps-epa-policies-mean-more-cases-of-autism-41360fe83430/
no lnx
Experts warn Trump’s EPA policies mean more cases of autism
Small particles of air pollution can travel directly from the nose to the brain, causing damage.
JOE ROMM
MAR 1, 2019,10:37 AM
Some of the country’s leading experts on healthy brain development have come together to warn the public that President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back science-based air pollution standards will come at a high cost to our children.
Published in the American Journal of Public Health this week, these scientists and doctors cite “mounting evidence linking air pollution to neurodevelopmental disorders in children, like autism, ADHD, memory deficiencies and reduced IQ.”
The article makes several specific recommendations for how the government can protect children, one of the most important being to “strengthen and enforce federal fuel efficiency standards.” As the article explains, “Increasing evidence links prenatal exposure to traffic-related air pollutants and PM2.5 [tiny particulates] to autism spectrum disorder.”
But that’s in sharp contrast to the work being done by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has started the process of weakening existing standards.
The Trump administration released a proposal to roll back Obama-era federal fuel economy standards and revoke California’s ability to set its own fuel mileage and emissions standards. CREDIT: David McNew/Getty Images]
Widespread disapproval greets Trump’s rollback of auto emissions and fuel efficiency standards
Co-author Dr. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, director of the University of California DavisEnvironmental Health Sciences Centerfunded by the National Institutes of Health, told ThinkProgress that starting with the Clean Air Act of 1970 — and for decades after — the EPA used the growing scientific evidence connecting serious health effects to air pollution as the basis for stronger and stronger air pollution rules.
“But under our current administration, many of these rules are being rolled back,” she warned. This is despite the overwhelming evidence, she said, that “energy produced from fossil fuels has really caused a lot of premature death and illness in people for decades.”
She explained that the reason she and her colleagues came together to write this article is that “we now have yet another reason besides the cardiovascular and respiratory impacts” to tighten air pollution standards: the impact on children’s brains.
Hertz-Picciotto, who is also director of the Program in Environmental Epidemiology of Autism at UC Davis, has been researching the environmental causes of autism for many years. She points out that there is increasing evidence that the very small particles (PM2.5) associated with fossil fuel combustion can “travel directly from nasal passages to the brain.”
PM2.5 is particulate matter (PM) smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. In comparison, a strand of human hair is more than 20 times wider than PM2.5.
Scientist have previously noted that the link between PM2.5 exposure andAlzheimer’s may also be due to the fact that tiny air pollution particles can travel from the nose to the brain.
Researchers have found that particulates from coal plants (like this one in Kansas) and vehicles increase the risk of dementia. Credit: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel
Trump’s EPA policies risk more Alzheimer’s cases, doctors warn
Hertz-Picciotto explained that cutting carbon pollution is a double win because not only does it reduce the harmful particles, it also reduces the risk of global warming — which comes with a slew of other impacts that endanger children’s brains.
“Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires, which cause short-term, high-level exposure to combustion-related pollutants,” the study notes. Also, simply exposing pregnant women to higher and higher temperatures “increases risk for premature delivery, itself a risk factor for developmental delay.”
Since even low levels of the smallest particles are dangerous to humans, Trump’s plans to roll back EPA air pollution rules are even more cruel and immoral than they first appeared.
As the authors conclude, if their recommendations to tighten air pollution standards are taken seriously, “fewer children will face the challenge of living with neurodevelopmental disorders and more people will be able to fully participate in society across their life span.”
==
https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-science-panel-air-pollution-2611852549.html
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EPA Cuts Science Panel That Reviewed Deadly Air Pollutants
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It seems that every day scientists discover more about the dangers of air pollution. It is well known that it causes heart and lung disease, but studies this year have linked it to dementia and found soot particles in placenta. Most recently, a study published in the Journal of Investigative Medicine found a connection between particulate matter and mouth cancer risk.
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But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn't seem to be paying attention. The agency, under the direction of former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is moving to disband a panel of scientists that advise the agency on setting safe levels of particulate matter pollution, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
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An EPA official confirmed to The New York Times that the 20-person Particulate Matter Review Panel, which advises the agency on setting safe levels of the microscopic pollutants, was not listed as continuing to meet next year.
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"To me this is part of a pattern," Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) Research Director Gretchen Goldman told The New York Times. "We're seeing EPA trying to cut science out of the process."
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Goldman cited recent agency decisions such as nixing the senior science advisor position and issuing a proposal that would limit the types of scientific studies the EPA can use to make decisions. In the case of particulate matter, this could have deadly consequences, as Goldman explained in a Twitter thread about the decision.
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"The end result here could be a weaker particulate standard, not based on science and not protective of public health. PM is responsible for thousands of premature deaths annually in the US. A weaker standard does not help," she wrote.
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In a separate blog post, Goldman explained more of the nuances of the EPA's most recent polluter-friendly move.
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The U.S. has succeeded in reducing deadly particulate matter pollution because of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), which are reviewed every five years with the help of scientific experts. The teams working on those reviews include the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) and the separate pollution review panels.
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Goldman explained why both are essential:
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These review panels are comprised of experts on the pollutant under review specifically, allowing the agency to benefit from subject matter expertise. For example, CASAC will include folks with air pollution modeling or monitoring expertise and epidemiologists, but the PM review panel might include experts on the toxicology of particulates or an expert on particulate measurement error. This is especially important because CASAC is small (seven people). No matter how expert, it would not be possible for this group to have working expertise of all elements of the relationship between a pollutant and health AND have that knowledge for all six criteria pollutants under CASAC's purview. As a result, EPA decisions on pollution standards can benefit from scientific expertise on all facets of the science on particulates and health.
But in a Wednesday news release, Wheeler announced that he would add five people to CASAC and task that group with revising particulate matter and ozone standards, with no mention of the separate advisory panels.
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Goldman speculated that the Trump administration was attempting to fast-track the air quality standards review process in order to set new standards before the end of its time in office. That would be a boon to polluting industries at the expense of America's lungs.
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RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
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https://www.ecowatch.com/air-pollution-placentas-pregnancy-2605967194.html
Air Pollution Particles Discovered in Placentas
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Researchers have found the first evidence that soot from polluted air can travel from a pregnant woman's lungs and reach the placenta via the bloodstream, according to a press release from Queen Mary University of London.
The study examined the placentas of five women living in London after they gave birth. The women were all non-smokers, had uncomplicated pregnancies and delivered healthy babies.
For the study, the research team examined 3,500 macrophage cells from the five placentas. Macrophages, which are white blood cells that reside all over the human body, protect the immune system as they work to engulf harmful particles, such as bacteria and pollution particles.
Using a high-powered microscope, the researchers detected 72 small, black particles among the placental macrophages, which the scientists believe are tiny carbon particles typically created by burning fossil fuels, the press release noted.
"We can't think of anything else they could be. It is very evident to us they are black sooty particles,"
...
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https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060095511
zc
When EPA announced yesterday it wasreconsidering a power plant rule with which major utilities already comply, many saw it as a largely fruitless exercise.
But struggling coal-fired power plants saw it as a lifeline.
Whatever damage came from theMercury and Air Toxics Standards, or MATS, is already done in the eyes of big players like Duke Energy Corp. and American Electric Power Co. They've installed the technology to reduce pollution that MATS required. Aging reactors that shut down rather than add the costly kit aren't coming back(:{Greenwire:(style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;border:0px;margin:0px;outline:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:, Aug. 29).
But a clutch of coal-saturated utilities see an avenue for avoiding "Armageddon," according to an industry attorney.
Those utilities want to move regulations for mercury and other pollution out of one section of the Clean Air Act and into another — the one EPA is using to set limits for carbon — to avoid more stringent future regulations that could signal a death knell for the nation's most coal-intensive reactors.
"Legally what he's suggesting is bonkers, but it's fascinating," John Walke, director of the federal clean air, climate and clean energy program with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the case being raised by those attorneys.
At issue is what's known as the "Risk and Technology Review" under the Clean Air Act's Section 112, a provision that requires a check-in eight years after developing pollution standards to see whether initial controls have done enough to eliminate or reduce the risks of cancer, heart and lung ailments, and other public health problems. There's no negotiating; that review comes in 2020 for power plants so long as the MATS rule developed in 2012 remains in effect.
What concerns coal-saturated power operators is that environmental groups will use the findings from those reviews to press for stricter standards on a host of pollutants. That would include particulate matter — tiny soot particles — the reduction of which generated a significant amount of benefits for the Obama administration's now-defunct climate rule, the Clean Power Plan.
Officially, those utilities are arguing that re-evaluating MATS and placing it under Section 111(d) — which the Trump and Obama administrations used to impose carbon emissions rules for power plants — would satisfy the "112 exclusion."
That argument claims EPA cannot regulate power plants under Section 111(d) if those facilities also face rules under Section 112. They see EPA's move yesterday to reassess whether the Obama administration's determination to regulate mercury and air toxins was "appropriate and necessary" as the starting point for shifting the program from 112 to 111(d).
"The EPA has an excellent opportunity now to streamline its regulatory approach under Section 111(d), encourage the states to play a meaningful role in the regulatory process, and allow the kind of flexibility and sensitivity to local needs that the Clean Air Act was intended to promote," Andrew Grossman, an attorney with BakerHostetler, said in an email.
Unofficially, the situation is a little different.
"It's about what the environmental groups will use those reviews to do and what D.C. Circuit Court judges would do to EPA," the utility attorney said. "The first war on coal was about [sulfur dioxide]. And the second will be on particulate matter."
In fact, many utilities want EPA to keep the MATS rule. Because most have complied with the rules — chalked up as the costliest in EPA history — there's little upside to ditching it now.
Trade groups Edison Electric Institute and National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, along with labor unions, wrote a July letter urging EPA air chief Bill Wehrum to maintain the rule and to "complete the statutorily mandated Residual Risk and Technology Review (RTR) for power plants as expeditiously as possible" (:{Greenwire:(style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;border:0px;margin:0px;outline:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:, July 11).
The developing strategy from those looking to squash the 112 program exposes a subtle division among utility industry lawyers, Walke said.
Some attorneys who represent utilities that have spent billions of dollars complying worry that undoing and rewriting the MATS rule would take too long. That means it could park the Risk and Technology Review squarely within a Democratic administration rather than a more sympathetic Trump EPA.
"That July letter strongly promotes moving straight to that process, to the residual risk process," Walke said of the letter from utility organizations and labor unions. "They want the Trump EPA to complete it. They want Bill Wehrum to say, 'We don't want you to do any more.'"
But industry attorneys on the other side of that argument worry about the effects the reviews would have on power plants that use only electrostatic precipitators to remove pollutants rather than scrubbers, the latter of which Walke said are more effective. Those are the types of facilities that could come under greater pressure from actions resulting from that review.
"The issue going forward is there is a future round of standards," the utility attorney said.
Proponents of that legal opinion argue that the section the Obama administration used for MATS was always imperfect for power plants. That part of the Clean Air Act was intended for a national program, but power plants use different types of coal for various reasons and compete regionally, not across the whole country.
"This claim is valid. In general, coal plants that burn eastern coal had a much more expensive compliance pathway than coal plants that burn [Powder River Basin] coal," Brian Potts, an environmental and energy attorney and partner at Perkins Coie, said in an email, though he wasn't commenting on the overarching legal play.
Still, doing what those utilities envision — shifting the regulatory program from Section 112 to Section 111(d) — is no easy task, Potts said.
That, essentially, is what EPA tried to do under President George W. Bush, Potts said. Courts struck down the Clean Air MercuryRule because they said the agency lacked authority to simply delist power plants from Section 112 and replace it with a cap-and-trade program.
"Plants are already complying with the current standards now. Certainly if the current standards are made more stringent, that could impact some plants," Potts said. "But it seems a bit odd to me to preemptively revoke standards in order to avoid the possibility of a future administration making them more stringent — especially when the current administration is in its first term."
==
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http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/silencing-science-tracker/epas-use-of-scientific-studies-restricted/
EPA’s Use of Scientific Studies Restricted
Date: March 19th, 2018
Agency: US EPA
Explanation: Bias and Misrepresentation
Scientist: Other
On March 19, 2018, Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt announced a new “science transparency policy” that restricts the scientific studies used in agency rulemakings.Under the policy, EPA will no longer use studies incorporating non-public scientific data in rulemakings, as has been its longstanding practice.
Administrator Pruitt has argued that the new policy is needed to prevent the use of so-called “secret science” that cannot be tested by third parties. In an interview published in The Daily Caller, Administrator Pruitt said:
“If we use a third party to engage in scientific review or inquiry, and that’s the basis of rulemaking, you and every American citizen across the country deserve to know what’s the data, what’s the methodology that was used to reach that conclusion that was the underpinning of what — rules that were adopted by this agency.”
According to Pruitt, if a study’s data and methodology are not published, “it’s not transparent. It’s not [able to be] objectively measured, and that’s important.” Others, however, point out that the studies undergo peer review. In an op-ed published in The New York Times, former top EPA officials Gina McCarthy and Janet McCabe wrote:
“Peer review ensures that the analytic methodologies underlying studies funded by the agency are sound . . .
[Administrator Pruitt] and some conservative members of Congress are setting up a nonexistent problem in order to prevent the E.P.A. from using the best available science. These studies adhere to all professional standards and meet every expectation of the scientific community in terms of peer review and scientific integrity.”
McCarthy and McCabe also emphasized that the new policy would restrict the studies able to be used in EPA rulemakings. They wrote:
“Some of [the] studies [at issue], particularly those that determine the effects of exposure to chemicals and pollution on health, rely on medical records that by law are confidential because of patient privacy policies. These studies summarize the analysis of raw data and draw conclusions based on that analysis. Other government agencies also use studies like these to develop policy and regulations, and to buttress and defend rules against legal challenges. They are, in fact, essential to making sound public policy . . .
For instance, foundational epidemiological research into the effects of air pollution on health by scientists at Harvard and the American Cancer Society established a clear connection between exposure to fine particles and increased mortality. This research led to further studies that supported the development of air quality standards and rules requiring industry to reduce pollution, improving health and reducing costs for millions of Americans.
Yet, because the personal health data associated with individuals participating in the studies were obtained with guarantees of confidentiality, Mr. Pruitt apparently would have argued for those studies to be tossed out had he been at the helm then.”
Update:On April 24, 2018, Administrator Pruitt signed a proposed rule intended to implement the “science transparency policy.” The rule provides that, “when EPA develops regulations, including regulations for which the public is likely to bear the cost of compliance, with regard to those scientific studies that are pivotal to the action being taken, EPA should ensure that the data underlying those are publicly available in a manner sufficient for independent validation.” On May 17, 2018, E&E News reported that the science transparency policy “closely resemble[s]” proposals put forward by industry groups, including the National Association of Manufactures and American Petroleum Institute. |
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def fund:
:{The federal government has now tried to restrict science 155 times — about once every four days — since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to the Silencing Science Tracker we maintain with the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s a pretty constant drumbeat,” Lauren Kurtz, our executive director, told Earther.
More than three-quarters of the Tracker entries involve attempts to silence climate science, with the highest number of attacks occurring at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
One of the most troubling is the "**science transparency" rule** proposed by the EPA, which would prohibit the agency from taking many scientific studies into consideration when making policy decisions. The EPA received nearly half a million comments on this proposal; among them are comments we submitted explaining our opposition to the rule.
While climate scientists often face harassment, for women in climate science there is frequently another layer of hostility. Lauren Kurtz recently spoke with E&E News about how women in this field are attacked based on their gender.}:
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https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/6/as_scott_pruitt_resigns_former_epa
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...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 EPA can’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 that if 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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horner ggl doc:
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Particulate Holocaust:
11/2012 Horner sues EPA and Lisa Jackson on particulate matter research (pm 2.5),
Here Horner seems to finally have jumped the shark, accusing UNC of Nazi-style human experimentation:
This seems really bizarre on its face, but is probably more an extension of earlier efforts than a radical departure. The charge is that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, under the auspices of the EPA, did not tell the participants that they were being gassed with diesel exhaust and, more worrying, particulate matter, which, to hear them tell it, can kill almost immediately. To support this contention, they brought inACSH's John Dunn, MD JD, which is not surprising since they have been hired liars for corporations for decades, but what is surprising is that Dunn had been making precisely the opposite argument for decades against air pollution regulations (ozone, CO2, etc.). One person who volunteered to participate claims severe coughing/lung damage, and is asking two million dollars for treatment presumably, but also pain and suffering/trauma (where is tort reform when you need it?). Another plaintiff is listed as a member of ATP?
Even more heartbreaking, the lawyers themselves have been terribly traumatized:
FlackMilloy claims to have an uncle in a concentration camp where medical experiments were done, and thus is traumatized by the EPA: “16. Mr. Milloy has dedicated a majority of his current work effort to expose and stop the EPA's improper, unethical and illegal human experimentation. Mr. Milloy is deeply aggrieved by the kind of human experimentation being conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and will not be relieved until it stops.”...
He’s not alone:
“19. Dr. Schnare’s parents selected his name, David, to honor the last male relative to
die before his birth. That man’s name was David Steiner, a Jew who died in Buchenwald
concentration camp on May 3, 1945, 21 days after the camp was liberated.”
horner on case? Trauma?
Schnare? States he was married near the campus where the experiments were done, and can not even walk by EPA building (and enjoy the aesthetics of the building?) in DC without anguish.
They make many demands to ease their trauma, but here their true aim becomes clear: “"Fourth, Plaintiffs seek injunctive relief requiring EPA to withdraw anddestroy or excise any publications in any formthat are based, even in part, on results of illegal human experimentation.” [emphasis mine;also a bit hypocritical in light on his 2015 testimony to House Science Comm on preservation of EPA records]
…
or to regulate based on the study:
G. Seventh Claim for Relief
“To repair ethical lapses and as a matter of equitable relief, Plaintiffs ask the Court
to stay implementation of any rules authorized under the Clean Air Act to control fine particulate matter until such time as the Agency can review the regulatory basis it used in their promulgation, amend its support documents and otherwise reevaluate the risks from fine
particulate matter to ensure EPA does not rely in any fashion upon illegal human
experimentation. “ (emphasis added)
http://eelegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2012-09-21-Complaint-as-Filed.pdf
end ggl
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https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/12/18/16532/texas-weakens-chemical-exposure-guidelines-opens-door-polluters
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AUSTIN— In 2007, Texas regulators quietly relaxed the state’s long-term air pollution guideline for benzene, one of the world’s most toxic and thoroughly studied chemicals. The number they came up with, still in effect, was 40 percent weaker, or less health-protective, than the old one.
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The decision by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) was a boon for oil refineries, petrochemical plants and other benzene-emitting facilities, because it allowed them to release more benzene into the air without triggering regulatory scrutiny. But it defied the trend of scientific research, which shows that even small amounts of benzene can cause leukemia. The American Petroleum Institute, lobbyist for some of the nation’s largest benzene producers, privately acknowledged as early as 1948 that the only "absolutely safe" dose was zero.
It’s "the most irresponsible action I've heard of in my life," said Jim Tarr, an air-quality consultant who worked for the TCEQ’s predecessor agency in the 1970s. "I certainly can't find another regulatory agency in the U.S. that's done that."
The benzene decision was part of Texas’ sweeping overhaul of its air pollution guidelines. An analysis by InsideClimate News shows that the TCEQ has loosened two-thirds of the protections for the 45 chemicals it has re-assessed since 2007, even though the state’s guidelines at the time were already among the nation’s weakest.
The changes are being supervised by TCEQ toxicologist Michael Honeycutt, who began updating the way Texas develops its guidelines in 2003, when he was promoted to division chief. A genial, bespectacled man who takes great pride in his work, Honeycutt is a trusted advisor to top TCEQ officials and often acts as the agency’s scientific spokesman. He is also a frequent critic of federal efforts to reduce air pollution.
Honeycutt's actions reflect Texas’s pro-industry approach to air quality, which InsideClimate News and the Center for Public Integrity have been examiningfor the past year and a half. Most of the air-quality guidelines the state’s oil and gas producers are supposed to meet are not legally enforceable regulations. That means violators are rarely punished, and residents who complain about foul air near drilling sites have few places to turn for help.
Texas has made its anti-regulatory stance known on the national front. Attorney General Greg Abbott, the state’s governor-elect, has taken legal action against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 19 times since 2010, arguing that overly restrictive regulations stifle business growth, cost jobs and threaten the state’s economy. The EPA is “a runaway federal agency that must be reined in,” Abbott said last year when he challenged greenhouse gas regulations.
Honeycutt has publicly criticized the EPA for being overzealous in its regulation of ozone, which exacerbates asthma; particulate matter, a known respiratory hazard; and hexavalent chromium, the cancer-causing chemical that launched the Erin Brockovich case. In testimony before a congressional committee in 2011, hesaid the EPA had been overly cautious in evaluating the toxicity of mercury, a powerful neurotoxin known to lower IQ. Mercury is particularly harmful to developing fetuses.
"EPA ignores the fact that Japanese eat 10 times more fish than Americans do and have higher levels of mercury in their blood, but have lower rates of coronary heart disease and high scores on their IQ tests," Honeycutt said in a letter responding to written questions from one of the committee members after the hearing.
State Rep. Lon Burnam, a Fort Worth Democrat who has tried for years to strengthen Texas public health regulations, said Honeycutt's role as chief toxicologist is more political than scientific.
"I consider him an apologist for the polluters," Burnam said. "I think he doesn't give a tinker's dam about public health."
Honeycutt said the toxicologists on his staff are good scientists who take their jobs seriously.
...
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ref PM holocaust "secret science"
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/john-walke/political-vendetta-against-health-safeguards-founded-shocking-falsehoods
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Political Vendetta Against Health Safeguards Founded on Shocking Falsehoods
August 01, 2013 John Walke
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Some Congressional Republicans have mounted a feverish campaign against long-established science showing a clear causal association between fine soot pollution (PM2.5) and premature death. Their all-too-transparent agenda is to attack clean air health safeguards that are projected to save tens of thousands of lives and avoid hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks and heart attacks annually, while delivering health benefits to Americans that outweigh costs to polluters by tens of billions of dollars. Republicans have failed in numerous prior attempts to eliminate these safeguards legislatively.
So now they have revived and ramped up a political tactic from the late 1990's that already has been discredited, when Republicans and industry lobbyists unsuccessfully challenged EPA's 1997 smog and soot standards.(Query: where were Republican members of Congress with their indignation and assaults when the George W. Bush administration relied upon these same studies and science for 8 years?)
Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX ) has vowed to subpoena EPA to seize confidential patient data underlying a subset of the medical studies showing this soot-death linkage. Smith took to the pages of the Wall Street Journalthis week to level a fusillade of charges against EPA that was as notable for its cascade of misrepresentations and omitted facts, as it was for its vehemence.
In this post I will examine some of the facts you would never know from hearing just the politicized Republican view of soot pollution, as well as crucial information that these politicians are misrepresenting, selectively misquoting and ignoring.
Misrepresenting the Full Body of Scientific Evidence: Republican lawmakers pretend that the massive body of scientific evidence showing a causal association between soot pollution and mortality comes down to “secret” data from just two studies. This pretense is flat out false. The most basic investigation of public resources reveals a much broader body of scientific studies examining and reaffirming the causal association between fine soot pollution and mortality. These studies post-date the so-called "Harvard Six Cities" and "American Cancer Society" studies, some of them independently re-analyze the studies, and they consistently find the same causal soot-mortality relationship.
- In revising and updating National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for fine particulate matter, EPA devotes an entire chapter of its Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) to cataloguing and reviewing updated health effects studies, and explaining how they were incorporated into the agency's 2012 standards review. See, e.g., here (at pp. 5-7 to 5-8 listing 5 updates from the proposed 2012 RIA; fig 5-4 at p. 5-73; pp. 5-31 to 5-35).
- In 2009, Dr. C. Arden Pope published “Fine-Particulate Air Pollution and Life Expectancy in the United States,”reaffirming past studies and finding “improvements in life expectancyduring the 1980s and 1990s were associated with reductions in fine-particulate pollution across the study areas, even after adjustment for various socioeconomic, demographic, and proxy variables.”
- In 2013, Dr. Andrew W. Correiapublished “Effect of Air Pollution Control on Life Expectancy in the United States: An Analysis of 545 U.S. Counties for the Period from 2000 to 2007.” This study found increases in mean life expectancy with decreases in PM2.5 concentrations, with stronger associations “in more urban and densely populated counties.” The study concludes that “[r]eductions in PM2.5 were associated with improvements in life expectancy for the period from 2000 to 2007. Air pollution control in the last decade has continued to have a positive impact on public health.”
I could go on and on listing individual studies. But the first bullet above contains some of those studies for readers wishing to dive deeper than Congressman Smith has.
Misrepresenting Independent Scientific Reanalysis: Congressman Smith charges in his Wall Street Journal op-ed that the data in the Harvard and American Cancer Society studies “have not been subjected to scrutiny and analysis by independent scientists.” This is anespecially outrageous falsehood.
In December 2012, a seminal report [pdf] entitled the 2010 Global Burden of Disease "estimate[d] over 2.1 million premature deaths and 52 million years of healthy life lost in 2010 due to ambient fine particle air pollution, fully 2/3 of the burden worldwide." Drawing upon a broad body of data and studies from around the world, the report examined the risks of premature mortality linked to soot pollution andindependently affirmed the results of the Harvard Six Cities study. The Global Burden of Disease researchers found significant mortality impacts from fine particulate pollution. They concluded that “[t]he magnitude of disease burden from particulate matter is substantially higher than estimated in previous comparative risk assessment analyses.”
As explained in a release by theesteemed Health Effects Institute, a contributor to the report, "[t]he 2010 [Global Burden of Disease report] was produced by a rigorous scientific process involving over450 global expertsand led by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington along with its partner institutions: the World Health Organization, the University of Queensland, Australia, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University."
Similarly, in July 2000, the Health Effects Institute issued a special report entitled “Reanalysis of the Harvard Six Cities Study and the American Cancer Society Study of Particulate Air Pollution and Mortality.” The explicit goal of that study was “to conduct a rigorous and independent assessment of the findings of the Six Cities and ACS Studies of air pollution and mortality.” (p.ii) To accomplish this goal, the team of researchers had “access to the original data” once they entered into contractual agreements and a Memorandum of Understanding to ensure that confidentiality was protected. (p.4). The report concluded that “reanalyses assured the quality of the original data, replicated the original results, and tested those results against alternative risk models and analytic approaches” (pp.iii-iv).
(For those unfamiliar with HEI, it is "a nonprofit corporation chartered in 1980 as an independent research organization to provide high-quality, impartial, and relevant science on the health effects of air pollution." Funded jointly by the federal government and industry, it is an honest broker that has garnered widespread respect for its scientific expertise, integrity and research excellence.)
EPA's Integrated Science Assessment for the PM2.5 standards explained (p. 7-95) that the Harvard and ACS studies have "undergone extensive independent reanalysis," and "were based on cohorts that were broadly representative of the U.S. population." Reviewing this assessment and the broader body of epidemiological and toxicological studies,EPA's official Clean Air Science Advisory Committee (CASAC) recommended “'upgrading' the causal classification for PM2.5 and total mortality to 'causal' for both the short-term and long-term time frames." CASAC further found "[t]here are epidemiological studies showing a positive association of all-cause mortality with PM2.5.”
A 2010 American Heart Associationstudy, entitled "Particulate Matter Air Pollution and Cardiovascular Disease: An Update to the Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association," concluded that "intensive independent reanalyses corroborated the original findings of both [the Harvard and ACS] studies and resulted in innovative methodological contributions that demonstrated the robustness of the results to alternative modeling approaches." "Since 2004, there have been further reanalysis of both studies."
So even if the entire body of soot-mortality causation evidence did rest on the solid foundation of the Harvard and American Cancer Society studies—a cramped view that is demonstrably false—those studies have been independently and repeatedly reanalyzed and reaffirmed by other peer-reviewed scientific studies and initiatives.
Misrepresenting Views of the National Academy of Sciences: Congressman Smith's op-ed took further aim at the scientific data EPA has relied upon for its clean air health standards with this oblique, abbreviated claim: "The National Academy of Sciences declared in 2004 that the data EPA is using is of 'little use for decison-making.'"
This claim is immediately puzzling,since a more recent 2010 report from EPA's Science Advisory Board, which includes members of the Academy, concludes that the soot-related mortality "benefit estimates that EPA derives for [particulate matter] are based on two well-researched and highly respected cohort studies of air pollution health effects, the Harvard Six Cities Study and the American Cancer Study (ACS) Cancer Prevention Study. These are good foundations for the health benefits estimates for PM and these studies are supported by other recent studies and expert evidence gathered by the EPA project team."
The puzzle is cleared up by a must-read, devastating letterto Chairman Smith from Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX)that I will simply quote in relevant part:
This is a gross mis-characterization of what the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report says. What is most remarkable about this mischaracterization is that you actually provided the original NAS document in one of your previous letters which you attached to the July 22 letter. The relevant sentence you purport to paraphrase reads in full:
"Although these cohorts have provided critical evidence for long-term effects, evidence from further follow-up of these two U.S. cohorts alone will have little use for decisionmaking." (emphasis added)
I assume that the mis-characterization in your July 22 letter is due to a misunderstanding between a research finding and a cohort. However, if this is a case of misunderstanding then it gives me great pause in considering the prospect of you and your staff receiving the underlying data being sought.
An especially intemperate July 22 letter from Congressman Smith to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy repeats the selectively misquoted snippet above while continuing to ignore the broader body of supportive scientific studies. Then Congressman Smith's letter actually has the gall to accuse EPA of "practice[s] border[ing] on scientific misonduct" in his own missive that commits serial violations of scientific misconduct.
One could also add, as amply demonstrated above, that EPA is not relying upon these two cohorts or the Harvard and ACS studies alone in the agency's decionmaking or rulemakings.
Misrepresenting With Salacious “Secrecy” Charges: The Republican political campaign against clean air health standards has settled on a "secret data" talking point that owes more to an overarching,conspiratorial political narrativeto characterize the current administration (think IRS, NSA) than it does to any truth. EPA has flat out rejected this secrecy charge:
The EPA is transparent with regard to the scientific bases of agency decision making and disagrees with assessments and your assertion that the agency relies on "secret" data in regulatory actions and of health benefits. In setting the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) in assessing health benefits anticipated from air pollution regulations, the EPA relies on the scientific studies that are published in the peer-reviewed literature. The EPA provides the information used in regulatory decisions, including the epidemiological studies, in the publicly available docket accompanying each rulemaking.
As EPA already has explained to Senator David Vitter (R-LA) in April and July, 2013 letters that Congressman Smith's office either is unaware of or ignores:
- "The complete, linked set of data underlying these studies is held by the scientific researchers that conducted the relevant research, not the EPA."
- "With regard to your request for the underlying raw data from the relevant studies, the EPA has requested from the relevant researchers the research data required to be provided under the Shelby Amendment, consistent with applicable protections for private medical and similar information. As indicated in the enclosed letters, this request has been made for the two remaining studies that are the subject of your request that are subject to the Shelby Amendment."
So why is Congressman Smith preparing to subpoena data from EPA that the agency does not have; that EPA has told Congress it does not have; and that the agency has requested from the researchers that do have the data? Who knows, but it's hard not to conclude that the House GOP subpoena enterprise is politically motivated and publicity-driven.
The truth is there is a basic difference between secrecy and confidential patient data subject to confidentiality agreements. The researchers and reanalysis initiatives that committed to the confidentiality policies of therelevant research institutions, as HEI and the GBD teams did, were able to access the data.
Congresswoman Johnson's letter offered a searing commentary with one possible, indeed obvious, motivation behind the Republican subpoena:
Others may suggest that these are efforts to supply outside parties with data that they otherwise could not obtain. I would also strongly object to obtaining this data for outside parties, who would not otherwise be given access to this sensitive data. That is not our job. ....
I am forced to question the scientific legitimacy of groups which cannot already obtain this data. They must not be legitimate scientists or must be untrustworthy with human research subject data, or they could simply apply to the American Cancer Society directly. I certainly don't think Congress should be obtaining confidential human research data to supply to outside groups that can't pass ethical muster, and I sincerely hope that is not the goal of this endeavor.
The Congresswoman's letter asks the simple question: "And for what purpose?"
It is noteworthy that industry attorneys challenging EPA’s various ambient air quality standards have not even bothered or deigned to waste words in their legal briefs on the salacious “secret data” charge because it is demonstrably false and lacks any legal weight. [hmmn, not e&e?] These highly capable industry attorneys know that EPA has more than enough studies, data and support in the publicly available rulemaking records to justify stronger clean air standards. And they are right, with federal courts upholding every one of EPA’s air quality standards in the face of industry lawsuits.
Some Congressional Republicans have chosen to manufacture a false political controversy over the clear scientific evidence, precisely because there is no serious legal or scientific dispute about the validity of the evidence.
Misrepresenting White House Statements: Congressman Smith’s op-ed also asserts that “President Obama's Office of Management and Budget recently acknowledged that ‘significant uncertainty remains’ about the EPA's claims based on its data sets, saying that the claims ‘may be misleading’ and should be treated with caution.” This misrepresentationrivals the outrageous falseness of the independent reanalysis claim.
The OMB report snippets quoted in the congressman’s op-ed were not directed at the causal association between fine soot pollution and mortality found in the Harvard and American Cancer Society studies. The passage from the OMB report (p.15) makes abundantly clear that the Congressman's selectively (mis)quoted characterizations of the report concerned entirely different issues: (1) “the ranges of benefits and costs” that OMB believed should be “treated with some caution”; and (2) “aggregating high and low-estimates” of benefits and costs that could “result in totals that may be misleading.”
I suspect EPA would readily admit the uncertainties associated with the ranges, high-end and low-end estimates of avoided premature deaths, along with other health endpoints and cost projections. But this is wildly different from charging that OMB agrees with contentions that the causal association between soot and death is itself uncertain or EPA’s findings are misleading. What is shockingly misleading, instead, is the way that Congressman Smith’s op-end misrepresents the OMB report.
And what of uncertainty? Scientists would be the first to acknowledge that uncertainty is a perennial feature of scientific inquiry and research. A 2002 National Research Council report, aptly entitled “Estimating the Public Health Benefits of Proposed Air Pollution Regulations,” makes the following sensible points that some politicians willfully ignore:
"Even great uncertainty does not imply that action to promote or protect public health should be delayed. Decisions about whether to act, when to act, and how aggressively to act can only be made with some understanding of the likelihood and consequences of alternative courses of action. The potential for improving decisions through research must be balanced against the public health costs incurred because of a delay in the implementation of controls. Complete certainty is an unattainable ideal. (pp.126-127)
There is a common misperception that a high degree of certainty is required for regulatory actions to take place to protect public health. As a result, primary health benefits analyses that more fully and accurately portray the uncertainties might not be considered useful. It is unrealistic for EPA to defer decisions until it can make them on the basis of perfect science. A careful and deliberate balancing of the benefits and costs is required, and this balancing must be informed by a fair assessment of the current levels of uncertainty and a realistic evaluation of the likely reductions in uncertainty attainable through further research. (p.148)"
So even the OMB report’s statements about uncertainty in benefit-cost totals and ranges must be understood in light of the NRC’s sensible commitment to public health.
Misrepresenting EPA’s Responsiveness to Congress: While this is more political theatrics than scientific insult, Congressman Smith’s recent letter to EPA attempts to paint the agency as unresponsive to legitimate congressional inquiries, by cataloguing a series of correspondence to which EPA allegedly has failed to respond. The problem with this, as Congresswoman Johnson’s letter points out, is that“EPA has responded on at least two occasions with detailed information pertaining to the studies you requested.” And EPA has responded separately to similar inquiries by Senator Vitter leading up to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s confirmation. It’s one thing if those responses have not satisfied Congressman Smith; but it just seems petty and sensationalist to imply wrongly that the agency has not responded to earlier inquiries.
This is not new, this politicized campaign against clean air health safeguards founded on attacking and misrepresenting established science. As I wrote in a June 2012 blog post following a House committee hearing where I testified:
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), while noting helpfully that he was not a “medical doctor,” nonetheless asserted at a congressional hearing that there was no “medical negative” to mercury and soot pollution. He went on to claim that EPA’s numbers on premature deaths that the mercury and air toxics standards helped avoid were “pulled out of the thin air.” Unsurprisingly, real doctors at the American Lung Association, American Public Health Association and American Academy of Pediatrics wrote Barton expressing that they “were shocked at such statements.” [pdf]. These actual doctors responded to Barton’s outrageous statements as “professionals that treat patients who are impacted by lung, cardiovascular and neurological impairments” linked to air pollution. These doctors “see in the patients we treat what [] the scientific literature lets us know to expect: that air pollution makes people sick and cuts lives short.”
The doctors’ letter included an attachment listing dozens of studies showing the “medical negatives” from soot pollution, including premature death. To my knowledge, Congressman Barton never did respond to the doctors’ letter.
If Congress establishes the practice through legislation or subpoenas or political gamesmanship in which any American can expect their most private medical information to fall into the hands of lawyers and lobbyists and corporations or even the Internet, more thoughtful elected leaders will have to ask themselves how we are going to conduct these health studies in the future. Why would anyone sensibly participate in studies knowing that confidential patient data could become the play thing of politicians and industry?
As Congresswoman Johnson put it in her letter to Chairman Smith: "The truth is that there is no reason to warrant violating the trust of hundreds of thousands of American citizens who volunteered their personal information to make everybody's lives better."
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- congress
- epa
- ozone
- ozonestandard
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- protectionnotpollution
- soot
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MUCH OF THE COUNTRY has been watching in horror as Donald Trump has made good on his promises to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Agency — delaying 30 regulations, severely limiting the information staffers can release, and installing Scott Pruitt as the agency’s administrator to destroy the agency from within. But even those keeping their eyes on the EPA may have missed a quieter attack on environmental protections now being launched in Congress.
On Tuesday, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is expected to hold a hearing on a bill to undermine health regulations that is based on a strategy cooked up by tobacco industry strategists more than two decades ago. At what Republicans on the committee have dubbed the “Making EPA Great Again” hearing, lawmakers are likely to discuss the Secret Science Reform Act, a bill that would limit the EPA to using only data that can be replicated or made available for “independent analysis.”
The proposal may sound reasonable enough at first. But because health research often contains confidential personal information that is illegal to share, the bill would prevent the EPA from using many of the best scientific studies. It would also prohibit using studies of one-time events, such as the Gulf oil spill or the effect of a partial ban of chlorpyrifos on children, which fueled the EPA’s decision to eliminate all agricultural uses of the pesticide, because these events — and thus the studies of them — can’t be repeated. Although it is nominally about transparency, the bill leaves intact protections that allow industry to keep much of its own inner workings and skewed research secret from the public, while delegitimizing studies done by researchers with no vested interest in their outcome.
The top-billed witness scheduled to provide testimony at the House hearing on Tuesday is a lawyer named Jeffrey Holmstead, who has has worked to block the EPA’s efforts to limit mercury pollution while representing coal companies including Duke Energy, Progress Energy, and Southern Company. Meanwhile, Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican chair of the House Science Committee who has been zealously promoting the“secret science” bill, is also in the pocket of the energy companies. Though he’s also received funding from Koch Industries and iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications), Smith’s biggest contributors are oil and gas companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Also testifying on Tuesday will be Kimberly White of the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry trade group.
This bald industry bid to subvert public health-based regulations that can cut into profit isn’t new. What’s new is that this upside-down environmental attack, in which those who benefit directly from polluting industries are policing the independent scientists who can show the harms of their products, could now succeed. Although the House passed the secret science bill in 2014 and 2015, it never made it to the Senate floor. After it passed the House in 2015, Barbara Boxer called the bill “insane,” Bernie Sanders called it “laughable,” and President Obama promised to veto it. This time, it’s not a joke. With a Republican majority in both houses and Trump in the White House, the secret science act could easily become law.
[epa wrecking crew]
no links
The small group of lawyers and PR strategists orchestrating the secret science effort are closely tied to those attacking the EPA from within. All have connections to either big tobacco, oil, or both — and almost all have been affiliated with a small, right-wing group called the Energy & Environment Legal Institute. It’s interesting that E&E should fixate on transparency since the group has gone to great lengths to conceal its donors. Nevertheless, public records document some of the group’s ties to big coal companies, including the now bankrupt Alpha Natural Resources, Peabody Coal, and Arch Coal.
E&E senior policy fellow Steve Milloy, a former tobacco industry attorney, has perhaps written the most — at least publicly — about the secret science strategy, both in an ebook and for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. Milloy calls Myron Ebell, who oversaw Trump’s EPA transition team, his “friend and hero.” In the late 1990s, Milloy and Ebell were both members of the American Petroleum Institute’s Global Climate Science Communications Team, which laid out the oil industry’s strategy to undermine the science of global warming. Meanwhile, three of Milloy’s colleagues from E&E are also members of the EPA landing team. Among them are David Schnare, E&E’s general counsel, who is perhaps best known for harassing Michael Mann and other environmental scientists with FOIA requests, and Amy Oliver Cooke, an energy industry think tanker who created MILF, Mothers In Love with Fracking.
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Amy Oliver Cooke describes her love for fracking.
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Two other E&E associates have been wrapped up in the secret science strategy for years. The first is Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at both E&E and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who is also a member of Trump’s EPA landing team. Back in the 1990s, Horner worked for Bracewell LLP, the law firm (formerly known as Bracewell & Giuliani) supplying the top witness at Tuesday’s hearing. The dawning awareness of the dangers of second-hand smoke was putting tobacco companies on the defensive, including Horner’s client, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.In a 1996 memo, which seems to be the earliest known reference to the secret science strategy, Horner laid out a plan to fight back.
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Horner to RJR Reynolds 1996 Bracewell Giuliani
6 pages
“We propose creating, beginning with congressional oversight and a goal of enacting legislation, required review procedures which EPA and other federal agencies must follow,” Horner wrote in his memo. “This is important to your organization because, at some point in the near future, EPA will most likely be ordered to re-examine ETS [environmental tobacco smoke].” Horner’s plan? “To construct explicit procedural hurdles the agency must follow in issuing scientific reports. Because there is virtually no chance of affecting change on this issue if the focus is ETS.”
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Horner already saw that the secret science approach could subvert far more than the imminent regulations based on the science about second-hand smoke.“Our approach is one of addressing process as opposed to scientific substance, and global applicability to industryrather than focusing on any single industrial sector,” he wrote, going on to explain how the strategy could be used to interfere with the EPA’s efforts to address mercury emissions, hazardous waste, and dioxins as well as restrictions on air pollution.
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The Attack on Air Pollution Protections
By 1998, Powell Tate, a lobbying firm that represented R.J. Reynolds, had helped organize a secret science working group to look at questions of “data access,” according to one internal memo. The memo clarified that its intention was to “focus public opinion on the importance of requiring the disclosure of tax-payer funded analytical data.”
Though it was the brainchild of tobacco strategists, the energy industry soon followedHorner’s advice and adopted the secret science approach as a way to hamper air quality improvement efforts. In the 1990s, the EPA began efforts to reduce the amount of tiny particles in the air, a kind of pollution known as PM 2.5, that are produced by combustion from power plants, cars, and manufacturing. The clearest evidence of the need to limit such particles came from the “Six Cities” study, in which a team of Harvard researchers clearly tied higher levels of PM 2.5 particles to increased mortality, as well as lung cancer, asthma, and sudden infant death syndrome.
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While the new limits were designed to save lives — preventing 15,000 premature deaths annually, according to EPA projections — the rules would also increase costs in some sectors by, for instance, making energy companies install pollution equipment. In response, a group funded by theKochbrothers rose up to challenge the EPA and the scientists on the grounds that scientists were hiding their data from the public. Citizens for a Sound Economy, a forerunner of the Koch brothers’ current Freedom Works, demanded that the Harvard researchers provide their original data so an “independent” scientist could analyze it.
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At first the researchers refused to share the data, which they had collected from individuals with the promise that their health information would remain confidential. Eventually, after an elaborate and expensive pressure campaign, the Six Cities researchers agreed to allow their data to be reanalyzed by two separate teams of researchers. Both confirmed the group’s findings that rates of PM 2.5 were correlated with increased mortality.
The EPA went on to institute the changes.And scientists throughout the world have since come to recognize the dangers posed by small particle air pollution, which accounted for “over 2.1 million premature deaths and 52 million years of healthy life lost in 2010,” according to the 2010 Global Burden of Disease report. The report drew on research by more than 450 experts from around the world and was led by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington; the World Health Organization; the University of Queensland, Australia; Johns Hopkins University; and Harvard University.
Despite the scientific consensus, a small group of extremists has continued to fixate on the idea that the science on the dangers of air pollution is somehow a sham. Even more disturbingly, this small extreme group now holds sway in key parts of the U.S. government. Not least among them is Rep. Lamar Smith, who in 2013 subpoenaed the EPA in yet another effort to obtain the data from the Six Cities study.
In an op-ed that ran in the Wall Street Journal shortly afterward, Smith noted that “the data in question have notbeen subjected to scrutiny and analysis by independent scientists.” Smith pressed his point in a House Science Committee hearing a few days later, insisting that independent scientists were being denied access to the air pollution data. When Democrat Donna Edwards pressed Smith about who these scientists were, he mentioned the name Jim Enstrom.
Enstrom, you may not be surprised to learn, has been a research fellow at E&E and has received money from the Council for Tobacco Research, the Tobacco Institute, Philip Morris, and R.J. Reynolds. In part because he didn’t disclose his tobacco industry ties in a study he did on the connection between second-hand smoke and mortality (which he found to be inconclusive), he was widely criticized by the scientific community, including the American Cancer Society, and was subsequently dismissed from UCLA.
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Correction: Feb. 7, 2017
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An earlier version of this article gave the incorrect name of a representative of the American Chemistry Council who testified today before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Her name is Kimberly White, not Kimberly Smith ...
... that the CASAC PM Panel be independent and unbiased,”& ...>
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===
oops 2x
MUCH OF THE COUNTRY has been watching in horror as Donald Trump has made good on his promises to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Agency — delaying 30 regulations, severely limiting the information staffers can release, and installing Scott Pruitt as the agency’s administrator to destroy the agency from within. But even those keeping their eyes on the EPA may have missed a quieter attack on environmental protections now being launched in Congress.
On Tuesday, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is expected to hold a hearing on a bill to undermine health regulations that is based on a strategy cooked up by tobacco industry strategists more than two decades ago. At what Republicans on the committee have dubbed the “Making EPA Great Again” hearing, lawmakers are likely to discuss the Secret Science Reform Act, a bill that would limit the EPA to using only data that can be replicated or made available for “independent analysis.”
The proposal may sound reasonable enough at first. But because health research often contains confidential personal information that is illegal to share, the bill would prevent the EPA from using many of the best scientific studies. It would also prohibit using studies of one-time events, such as the Gulf oil spill or the effect of a partial ban of chlorpyrifos on children, which fueled the EPA’s decision to eliminate all agricultural uses of the pesticide, because these events — and thus the studies of them — can’t be repeated. Although it is nominally about transparency, the bill leaves intact protections that allow industry to keep much of its own inner workings and skewed research secret from the public, while delegitimizing studies done by researchers with no vested interest in their outcome.
The top-billed witness scheduled to provide testimony at the House hearing on Tuesday is a lawyer named Jeffrey Holmstead, who has has worked to block the EPA’s efforts to limit mercury pollution while representing coal companies including Duke Energy, Progress Energy, and Southern Company. Meanwhile,Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican chair of the House Science Committee who has been zealously promoting the“secret science” bill, is also in the pocket of the energy companies. Though he’s also received funding from Koch Industries and iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications), Smith’s biggest contributors are oil and gas companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Also testifying on Tuesday will be Kimberly White of the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry trade group.
This bald industry bid to subvert public health-based regulations that can cut into profit isn’t new. What’s new is that this upside-down environmental attack, in which those who benefit directly from polluting industries are policing the independent scientists who can show the harms of their products, could now succeed. Although the House passed the secret science bill in 2014 and 2015, it never made it to the Senate floor. After it passed the House in 2015, Barbara Boxer called the bill “insane,” Bernie Sanders called it “laughable,” and President Obama promised to veto it. This time, it’s not a joke. With a Republican majority in both houses and Trump in the White House, the secret science act could easily become law
The small group of lawyers and PR strategists orchestrating the secret science effort are closely tied to those attacking the EPA from within. All have connections to either big tobacco, oil, or both — and almost all have been affiliated with a small, right-wing group called the **Energy & Environment Legal Institute**. It’s interesting that E&E should fixate on transparency since the group has gone to great lengths to conceal its donors. Nevertheless, public records document some of the group’s ties to big coal companies, including the now bankrupt Alpha Natural Resources, Peabody Coal, and Arch Coal.
E&E senior policy fellow Steve Milloy, a former tobacco industry attorney, has perhaps written the most — at least publicly — about the secret science strategy, both in an ebook and for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. Milloy calls Myron Ebell, who oversaw Trump’s EPA transition team, his “friend and hero.” In the late 1990s, Milloy and Ebell were both members of the American Petroleum Institute’s Global Climate Science Communications Team, which laid out the oil industry’s strategy to undermine the science of global warming. Meanwhile, three of Milloy’s colleagues from E&E are also members of the EPA landing team. Among them are David Schnare, E&E’s general counsel, who is perhaps best known for harassing Michael Mann and other environmental scientists with FOIA requests, and Amy Oliver Cooke, an energy industry think tanker who created MILF,
[vid]:amy Oliver Cooke describes her love for fracking.
Two other E&E associates have been wrapped up in the secret science strategy for years. The first is Christopher Horner,a senior fellow at both E&E and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who is also a member of Trump’s EPA landing team. Back in the 1990s, Horner worked for Bracewell LLP, the law firm (formerly known as Bracewell & Giuliani)supplying the top witness at Tuesday’s hearing. The dawning awareness of the dangers of second-hand smoke was putting tobacco companies on the defensive, including Horner’s client, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In a 1996 memo, which seems to be the earliest known reference to the secret science strategy, Horner laid out a plan to fight back.
:{
}:
The Attack on Air Pollution Protections
:{By 1998, Powell Tate, a lobbying firm that represented R.J. Reynolds, had helped organize a secret science working group to look at questions of “data access,” according to :(style="font-style:normal"):}:one internal memo. The memo clarified that its intention was to “focus public opinion on the importance of requiring the disclosure of tax-payer funded analytical data.”
Though it was the brainchild of tobacco strategists, the energy industry soon followed Horner’s advice and adopted the secret science approach as a way to hamper air quality improvement efforts. In the 1990s, the EPA began efforts to reduce the amount of tiny particles in the air, a kind of pollution known as PM 2.5, that are produced by combustion from power plants, cars, and manufacturing. The clearest evidence of the need to limit such particles came from the “Six Cities” study, in which a team ofHarvard researchers clearly tied higher levels of PM 2.5 particles to increased mortality, as well as lung cancer, asthma, and sudden infant death syndrome.
While the new limits were designed to save lives — preventing 15,000 premature deaths annually, according to EPA projections — the rules would also increase costs in some sectors by, for instance, making energy companies install pollution equipment. In response, a group funded by the Koch brothers rose up to challenge the EPA and the scientists on the grounds that scientists were hiding their data from the public. Citizens for a Sound Economy, a forerunner of the Koch brothers’ current Freedom Works, demanded that the Harvard researchers provide their original data so an “independent” scientist could analyze it.
At first the researchers refused to share the data, which they had collected from individuals with the promise that their health information would remain confidential. Eventually, after an elaborate and expensive pressure campaign, the Six Cities researchers agreed to allow their data to be reanalyzed by two separate teams of researchers. Both confirmed the group’s findings that rates of PM 2.5 were correlated with increased mortality.
The EPA went on to institute the changes. And scientists throughout the world have since come to recognize the dangers posed by small particle air pollution, which accounted for “over 2.1 million premature deaths and 52 million years of healthy life lost in 2010,” according to the 2010 Global Burden of Disease report. The report drew on research by more than 450 experts from around the world and was led by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington; the World Health Organization; the University of Queensland, Australia; Johns Hopkins University; and Harvard University.
Despite the scientific consensus, a small group of extremists has continued to fixate on the idea that the science on the dangers of air pollution is somehow a sham. Even more disturbingly, this small extreme group now holds sway in key parts of the U.S. government. Not least among them is Rep. Lamar Smith, who in 2013 subpoenaed the EPA in yet another effort to obtain the data from the Six Cities study.
In an op-ed that ran in the Wall Street Journal shortly afterward, Smith noted that “the data in question have not been subjected to scrutiny and analysis by independent scientists.” Smith pressed his point in a House Science Committee hearing a few days later, insisting that independent scientists were being denied access to the air pollution data. When Democrat Donna Edwards pressed Smith about who these scientists were, he mentioned the name Jim Enstrom.
Enstrom, you may not be surprised to learn, has been a research fellow at E&E and has received money from the Council for Tobacco Research, the Tobacco Institute, Philip Morris, and R.J. Reynolds. In part because he didn’t disclose his tobacco industry ties in a study he did on the connection between second-hand smoke and mortality (which he found to be inconclusive), he was widely criticized by the scientific community, including the American Cancer Society, and was subsequently dismissed from UCLA.
==
bs
https://eelegal.org/ee-legal-letters-xi-ee-legal-sues-epa%E2%80%88for-stacking-independent-science-panel/
by Steve Milloy, Senior Policy Fellow
On May 13, The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for illegal formation of a key science advisory committee. The committee at issue is the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee Particulate Matter Review Panel for 2015-2018 (CASAC PM Panel). E&E Legal filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of its members who include the Western States Trucking Association and Dr. James Enstrom, a Research Fellow and epidemiologist retired from the University of California, Los Angeles.
EPA has stacked the panel, which is required by law to be independent and unbiased, with researchers who have received over $190 million in discretionary EPA grants. This clearly violates the law and makes a mockery of the notion of ‘independent’ scientific review.
We are asking the court to prevent the EPA from convening the panel until the panel can be formed in a balanced manner in compliance with applicable laws,” said Dr. David Schnare, E&E Legal’s General Counsel and a33-year veteran of the EPA.
The EPA’s regulation of ambient airborne fine particulate matter, soot or dust in outdoor air also called “PM2.5” (pronounced Pee-Em-Two-Point-Five”), has been scientifically controversial since the EPA began the process of regulating it in the early 1990s. The EPA claims that any inhalation of PM2.5 can cause death within hours and that PM2.5 in outdoor air kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. Not only has the EPA hidden from public scrutiny for over 20 years key scientific data that its PM2.5 regulation relies on, but also the agency stacks the legally required CASAC panel with EPA-paid researchers.
EPA’s claims about the lethality of PM2.5 have been a primary basis for the agency’s justification of its air quality standards for particulate matter and ozone, as well as regulations key to the Obama administration’s so-called “war on coal”, including the: Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, Mercury Air Transport Standard and Clean Power Plan. State implementation of EPA’s PM2.5 standards is also quite costly as evidenced by E&E Legal member Western States Trucking Association, whose own members are forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars retrofitting truck engines to comply with California state PM2.5 emissions requirements as mandated by the EPA.
Not only does the EPA pay researchers to produce controversial research that advances its PM2.5 regulatory agenda, but the agency pays the very same researchers to review their own controversial work. Of the 26 members the EPA selected to be on the CASAC PM Panel, 24 of them have been paid or are currently being paid by the EPA a total sum in excess of $190 million. The EPA’s supposedly ‘independent’ review process is entirely rigged to advance EPA’s agenda.
“Both the Clean Air Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act require that the CASAC PM Panel be independent and unbiased,” Schnare said. “We are asking the court to determine that an EPA advisory panel that operates on a consensus basis but that is 90 percent comprised of highly-paid EPA cronies does not meet the requirements of the law,” Schnare added.
The EPA process for commissioning and evaluating PM2.5 research has been so rigged and so biased for so long that many scientists don’t even try to get nominated for CASAC panels any more. They’ve simply given up. A case study of this is E&E Legal member and PM2.5 researcher Jim Enstrom who, in questioning EPA’s PM2.5 science, has lost professional opportunities because of the extreme biases of the EPA, CASAC and current and former CASAC panel members. CASAC is a cabal, not an independent committee.
“As the EPA is at the very beginning a new round of review of PM2.5 regulation, as required by the Clean Air Act, our lawsuit is intended to make sure that process is conducted in an independent and unbiased manner as required by the law and expected by the public and Congress,” Schnare said.
Joe Rajkovacz, with the Western States Trucking Association, noted in a Truck.com article, that it’s important to have an impartial committee review the EPA’s findings because of the negative financial impact the agency’s rulings could have on small-business truckers.“Federal law requires the EPA to run all of its rule-makings through an advisory committee, who is supposed to be an independent committee that weighs the science they are basing their rule-makings on,” he said. “What kind of science do you think we will get if most of the independent researchers’ financial well-being is dependent on grant money from the EPA?”
Also according to Truck.com, “James E. Enstrom, a retired UCLA epidemiologist, also is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. He published a critical analysis in the peer-reviewed medical journal Inhalation Toxicology that failed to support a relationship between PM2.5 and premature deaths in California.” [BMJ?]
Subsequently, E&E Legal has filed a petition for a temporary restraining order to prevent any action by the panel until the suit is heard.
==
ozone particulate PM2.5 6 cities milloy api, blk coc alford
why wd DC caller batasch out funding?! b/c thinks look legit?
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/14/debunked-study-exposes-the-huge-flaws-in-epa-science/
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nb this is E&E publishing, legit vs horner lower case
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http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060013033
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EPA:
Scientists defend human testing program as critics lay siege
Robin Bravender and Amanda Peterka, E&E reporters
Greenwire: Friday, February 6, 2015
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Wanted: Nonsmoking, active adults to inhale nitrogen dioxide and ozone during a workout.
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Those people will help U.S. EPA study the physiological changes caused by the exposure to dirty air. Participants would breathe clean air laced with pollution; exercise on and off during exposures; and have their breathing, blood pressure and heart rates monitored. If subjects participate in all four three-day sessions, they'll get $2,216.
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It's one of several studies of human subjects currently being advertised by EPA.
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The testing program is controversial. Critics have blasted EPA for exposing people to harmful pollutants,with one conservative group going as far as likening the tests to experiments conducted by Nazi doctors who intentionally poisoned, maimed and killed prisoners during World War II (Greenwire, Sept. 24, 2012).[find orig?]
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But EPA researchers say the studies provide valuable data that help the agency set limits on harmful air emissions.
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Recruits of various ages and demographics are brought into "study chambers" at EPA's Human Studies Facility at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where they're exposed to air pollutants like diesel exhaust, ozone or concentrated air particles from car exhaust. They can get paid from $50 to more than $1,000 for completing a study.
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For another test, EPA is recruiting asthmatic African-American teenagers from Raleigh, N.C., to determine how airborne chemicals and dust affectasthma control. They'd get paid $594 for six weekly visits where they'd answer questions about their health and have their breathing, blood, temperature and heart rate tested. An adult who takes them to appointments would get a $35 gift card each week.
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Some EPA tests might involve doctors removing cell samples from participants' lungs by inserting a thin tube through their noses and throats, or subjects being asked to cough lung-coating mucus into a cup to help researchers understand the effects of pollutants.
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The human testing program has a relatively small staff and budget within a big agency. Between 2009 and 2013, EPA spent about $3.5 million a year on human subjects research, according to a report released last year by the EPA inspector general. The program had about 20 full-time employees during that time.
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Contractors hired by EPA enlist subjects in a variety of ways -- recruiting websites, university newspapers and social media.
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In addition to getting cash, participants are told they'll be helping humanity.
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"Thanks to people like you who have participated in studies at the Human Studies Facility, the EPA has set air pollutant regulations that help improve the health of millions of individuals every year," the recruitment website says. "Your participation will help make the world a better and healthier place for us all."
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EPA scientists say the program has been given a bad rap.
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Bob Kavlock
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EPA's deputy science chief, Bob Kavlock, said the effects of the tests can be compared to smoking. “If you smoked one cigarette in your lifetime, you would not have an elevated risk of lung cancer.”
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"We do an extremely diligent job when we undertake this research," said Bob Kavlock, the deputy science chief in EPA's Office of Research and Development. "We really do take safety of the subjects with the utmost seriousness."
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Would-be participants are screened before testing to make sure they're healthy enough to participate, according to EPA officials. They get detailed, written descriptions of the studies and orientations ahead of time to show them what the tests will involve. And there's a doctor on hand to monitor volunteers throughout the studies.
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"There are a series of ... safety protocols that one has to get through before one becomes even a candidate to participate in one of these research studies," said Toby Schonfeld, EPA's human subjects research review official. "Any condition or any situation that an individual might be in that the scientists are concerned might -- even in a small way -- endanger their health, they would not be invited to participate."
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Kavlock noted that the short-term exposures are equivalent to what people would experience if they lived in a city like Los Angeles for a day or two. "You can compare this a little bit to smoking," he said. "Smoking is bad, we know smoking is bad, we know smoking causes lung cancer. But if you smoked one cigarette in your lifetime, you would not have an elevated risk of lung cancer."
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'Extremely disturbing'
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But EPA's assurances haven't quelled criticism.
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Landon Huffman was a University of North Carolina undergraduate studying sports administration in 2006 when he signed up for an air pollution test on campus. He saw an ad for the study in the college newspaper, and he was eager for the extra cash.
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"I was 18 years old and just interested in making a little extra money. It seemed like a relatively easy and safe thing to do," Huffman told Raleigh, N.C.-based news station WNCN a few years ago. He made $3,000 over a year for participating in the studies, he said.
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[EPA test chamber treadmills
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Some human studies involve exposing subjects to air pollution during exercise to test the effects. Photo]
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But in 2012, he sued over the testing, arguing that he hadn't properly been informed about the potential health risks. Huffman was a party to a 2012 lawsuit filed by the American Tradition Institute, a free-market advocacy group. A federal court dismissed that lawsuit in 2013, saying those disputing the program lacked standing, meaningthey did not prove they were harmed by the agency's decision(Greenwire, Feb. 1, 2013).
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Critics also seized on the case of a 58-year-old woman who was sent to the hospital with heart arrhythmia after a test of the effects of inhaling particle pollution, although the symptoms went away after she left the chamber.
Researchers from EPA and the University of North Carolina published a paper on that test in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, saying it was the first-ever case report to show the long-suspected link between air pollution exposure and heart problems (Greenwire, May 15, 2012).
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As the controversy heated up in 2012, Sen. JamesInhofe (R-Okla.), now chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, called the reports of EPA's tests "extremely disturbing" and urged further investigation into the claims made by critics(E&ENews PM, Oct. 1, 2012).
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And this year, critics lodged another protest. A pair of conservative organizations released176 pages of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Actthat they said showed EPA had funded illegal experiments at independent institutions that subjected children to diesel exhaustin the name of science.
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The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Energy and Environment Legal Institute said that the documents showed that the scientists had failed to adequately represent cancer risks to participants and their parents.
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As part of a project conducted by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California between 2003 and 2010 through their Center for Children's Health, researchers sprayed diesel exhaust in the noses of 20 children between 10 and 15 years old.
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"EPA and its researchers have perverted science and morality in using children as guinea pigs in what amount to pseudoscientific experiments," CFACT Executive Director Craig Ruckersaid in a statement.
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The lead researcher of the diesel research, David Diaz Sanchez, is now chief of the clinical research branch at EPA.
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Research 'carefully reviewed and approved'
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Frank Gilliland, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California, called the groups' accusations about the project unfounded.
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Gilliland was a recipient of the Center for Children's Health grant and conducted epidemiological studies of children in their communities across Southern California; he was not directly involved in the diesel part of the grant but is knowledgeable about the project.
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EPA test chamber
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EPA exposes volunteers to air pollution concentrations in specialized chambers at its research center in North Carolina. Photo courtesy of EPA’s Office of Inspector General.
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Both parents and children had informed consent about the exposures to diesel and the potential for some small increase in cancer, Gilliland said, but that the risk was approximately equal to two days of exposure that children experience in polluted Los Angeles. All the research was "carefully reviewed and approved" by relevant committees tasked with reviewing human subjects research, he said.
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The attacks by conservative groups on EPA's human studies research program are part of a broader attempt to discredit the agency's science, Gilliland said.
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"I think that their arguments are not science-based and that they're largely made to try to sway public opinion against the regulatory science that EPA needs to do and has done to be able to protect people's health," he said.
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EPA's human studies research hasn't been immune to criticism from environmental groups. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, environmental groups raised the alarm about EPA's use ofindustry-funded studies that exposed humans to pesticides.The agency, however, issued new regulations on the use of third-party pesticide studies in 2006 and an update in 2013 that's mostly quelled criticism in the area of pesticides research.
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In its report released in March 2014, EPA's Office of the Inspector General examined the treatment of 81 human test subjects who were exposed to airborne particles and diesel exhaust in five experiments conducted between 2010 and 2011 and found that the agency had "followed applicable regulations."
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But the IG also said there were improvements that could be made "to enhance protection of study subjects."
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Although EPA obtained informed consent for all the experiments, the agency was inconsistent in the way it represented risk and did not include information on long-term cancer risks linked to diesel exhaust.The agency did not have well-established policies for following up with test subjects after the studies were over.
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The IG's recommendations have since been carried out, according to the report.
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BPA cookies
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Despite the criticism against EPA for exposing humans to pollutants, using humans as test subjects is actually a common practice in medical and public health research.
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"The idea that this is somehow unusual in medical research is not the case," Gilliland of the University of Southern California said. "Studies are routinely reviewed by the relevant human subjects protection groups, and people are informed of risk in terms that they can understand."
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That's because it's difficult to tease out all the potential effects on the human body by doing tests of how animals react to environmental pollutants and other stressors, researchers say. And epidemiological experiments involving the observation of large samples of people can illuminate average effects and trends in human populations but do not provide information at the individual level.
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"Those experiments are not well-controlled, and they're sometimes hard to interpret," said David Resnik, a bioethicist and chairman of the institutional review board at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. "For instance, we had epidemiological data on smoking and lung cancer for years, but it still took a long time to tease out all the effects of cigarette smoke on the lungs just from doing epidemiology. It was still hard to pin that down."
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EPA is not the only federal agency to participate in this type of research. According to Resnik, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in recent years has increased its human testing for environmental pollutants.
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The institute, for example, has recently been studying how bisphenol A enters and circulates through the human body, Resnik said. In one controlled lab study, NIEHS researchers gave subjects cookies spread with a concentrated BPA solution. In another study, researchers put BPA on the subjects' skin. In both cases, the researchers measured how much BPA was excreted in the participants' urine.
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NIEHS also has exposed humans to ozone-laden air and then run a variety of tests to determine how ozone pollution affects lung function, Resnik said.
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The institute actually used to conduct human subjects studies at EPA's laboratory in North Carolina before it had the proper facilities for performing bronchoscopies, or tests that involve sticking a tube down a person's nose and into the nasal cavity and trachea to get samples of lung tissue.
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Resnik said that NIEHS has not been subjected to the same type of backlash that EPA has received.
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"We haven't had that criticism that I'm aware of," he said about the public reception of the institute's studies. "But we're definitely aware that people may have this feeling, and that's why we want to make sure that the study is reviewed carefully for the science and the ethics to make sure that people are being treated well."
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Twitter: @apeterka | Email: apeterka@eenews.net
==
==
holocaust BS :
http://eelegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2012-09-21-Complaint-as-Filed.pdf
sept 2012?]
:{
}:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/landon-t-huffman-ph-d-a8883251
cv xian: https://landonhuffman.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/landon-huffman-cv-website.pdf
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA
ALEXANDRIA DIVISION
THE AMERICAN TRADITION INSTITUTE
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW CENTER
0033 Brook Ford Rd.
Burke, VA 22015
Plaintiffs,
v.
UNITED STATES ENVIRONMENTAL
PROTECTION AGENCY, and
LISA P. JACKSON, ADMINISTRATOR
1200 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Washington, DC 20460,
:{
}:
Defendants.
:{
}:
Civil Action No. ___
:{
}:
VERIFIED COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF
I. Nature of the Action
1. On behalf of its members, the American Tradition Institute (ATI), by and through
counsel, brings this action pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2201and the Administrative Procedure Act
(“APA”), 5 U.S.C. Part I, Chapter 7, et seq, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against the
United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA or the Agency). Pursuant to 5 U.S.C.
§ 702, ATI also files against EPA AdministratorLisa P. Jackson.
:{
}:
2. Plaintiffs ask the Court to find EPA failed to comply with laws controlling human
experimentation and to order the Agency to fully comply. Specifically, through a companion
filing Plaintiffs will seek a Temporary Restraining Order and through this filing seeks a
Preliminary Injunction to immediately halt EPA’s human experimentation which intentionally
[Verified Complaint 2p]
exposes human subjects, including some “more susceptible to the effects of air pollutants” to
“fine particles” such as those “produced by car and coal-fired power plants”, that EPA and its
Administrator have described as “lethal” and for which EPA has concluded there is no exposure
level “below which there is no risk at all.”
:{
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Second, Plaintiffs seek declaratory relief finding EPA
has failed to adequately inform project participantsthat the pollution they will inhale imposes a
risk to their health and that there is no benefit whatever to the participants of the study, as well as
other violations of controlling laws, regulations and policies as described below. Third,
Plaintiffs seek injunctive relief barring any human experimentation by EPA absent an
independent determination that the Agency is in full compliance with human experimentation
laws, regulations and policies.
:{
}:
Fourth, Plaintiffs seek injunctive relief requiring EPA to
withdraw and destroy or excise any publications in any form that are based, even in part, on
results of illegal human experimentation.
:{
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Lastly, Plaintiffs seek a stay in implementation of any
rules authorized under the Clean Air Act to control fine particulate matter until such time as the
Agency can review the regulatory basis it used in their promulgation, amend its support
documents and otherwise reevaluate the risks from fine particulate matter to ensure EPA does
not rely in any fashion upon illegal human experimentation.
:{
}:
II. Parties
A. Plaintiffs
3. The American Tradition Instituteis a 501(c) (3) organization dedicated to the
advancement of rational, free-market solutions to America's land, energy, and environmental
challenges. It has members throughout the nation, including in Virginia. The Institute and its
Law Center were formed to find and challenge at law governmental actions that violate the core
principles of good science, honest government and the rights of citizens and man. See,Schnare ...
---
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===
milloy junk sci guest posts/ john1282
:{
}:
- Documents contradict EPA claim that it stopped diesel fume tests on kids January 29
- US Environmental Protection Agency tested diesel fumes on children January 23
- EPA experiments on children, hides dangers of inhaling diesel fumes January 22
- Report: EPA Tested Deadly Air Pollutants On Children January 20
- EPA Used 10-Year Old Children in Illegal Diesel Exhaust Experiments January 20
- 2014
- The Obama EPA’s Heinous Human Experiments (FrontPageMag) April 4
- This is how EPA finds people for its pollution exposure experiments**(Breitbart**) April 4
- Report: EPA fails to disclose risks in human tests (WNCN-TV) April 3
- EPA Conducted Air Pollution Experiments on Children (Breitbart.com) April 2
- :{Report: EPA did not properly disclose pollutant risks to study participants (:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{The Hill:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{):(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}: April 2
- Senate EPW: New IG Report on Human Testing Highlights Further Need for Transparency at EPA April 2
- House Science Committee: EPA Conducted Experiments on Humans with Cancer-Causing and Lethal Pollutants April 2
- :{Report: EPA tested deadly pollutants on humans to push Obama admin’s agenda (:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Daily Caller):(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: April 2
- Inspector General Report on Illegal EPA Human ExperimentsMarch 31
- Bill Prohibits EPA from Using Secret Science February 6
- Study: ‘No Statistical Correlation’ Between Fine Airborne Particles, Premature Death January 8
- 2013
- EPA air pollution scare debunked by best data set ever assembled on particulate matter and deaths December 26
- :
November 14}: - Michigan medical board refuses to investigate doc who admits to unsafe EPA human experiments October 14
==
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bb bs
:{
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/04/03/this-is-how-the-epa-finds-people-for-pollution-exposure-experiments/
This Is How the EPA Finds People for Pollution Exposure Experiments
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This Is How the EPA Finds People for Pollution Exposure Experiments
by KERRY PICKET 3 Apr 2014215
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“Are you over weight and out of shape?” asked one ad.
“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is seeking Older Adults With Asthma,” said another.
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The federal government wasn’t selling diet pills, and it wasn’t seeking victims for a class action suit – it was soliciting human subjects for experiments that would expose them to air pollution.
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The EPA is under fire this week after an Inspector General investigation found the agency exposed people to harmful chemicals without adequately disclosing the risks involved.
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Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told Breitbart News on Thursday he found the IG’s report “disturbing.”
:{
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Finding volunteers to participate in Environmental Protection Agency experiments is often tasked to contractors like FEFA LLC who place ads in Newspapers, around communities, and online. These ads use money lures to find individuals within specific demographics to partake in EPA studies.
Flyers calling for adult volunteers between the ages of 35 and 55 to engage in a pollution study who have metabolic syndrome.The research takes place at the Human Studies Division at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, the same facility the EPA Inspector General released a critical report on.
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The paper advertiser for the EPA study asks that male volunteers should have waist sizes greater than 40? and waist sizes for females should be more than 35? or at least a Body Mass Index greater than 30.
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Another flyer for the same experiment asks, “Are you over weight and out of shape?” This particular study involves 25 hours of 3 screening visits and 4 study visits. Volunteers are told they will be compensated for their time.
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Another flyer asking for adult participants between the ages of 50 and 75 at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, advertises an EPA study about genetics, diet supplementation and exposure to air pollution. This particular advertisement states the total commitment to the experiment is 15 hours over a 6 to 7 week period and volunteers will be paid.
:{
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A similar ad at UNC-CH asks for non-smoking adults between 45 and 65 but with mild asthma. This pollution experiment is said to examine genetics and “requires screening and two exposures with follow up bronchoscopy.” The EPA studies website describes a bronchoscopy as a way to get a lung cell sample:
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During the procedure, a doctor passes a thin tube through your nose and throat into the airways. Cells are removed either by a squirt of salt water or a gentle brushing. Before inserting the tube, the doctor will give you anesthetic to numb your nose and throat. You will get an intravenous (IV) line placed in your vein in case you need medications or fluids. After the procedure, nurses will monitor your heart rate and blood pressure. The bronchoscopy itself usually lasts about 30 minutes. But the entire procedure, including preparation and recovery time, takes about 4 hours.
:{
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The EPA also broadcasts their pitches for volunteers on the radio. The pitch goes like this:
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“Are your triglycerides, cholesterol, blood sugar or blood pressure a little too high? Is your waist bigger than 40 inches for men and 35 inches for women? If you can answer yes to any of those, you could be one of 40 million Americans who might be especially sensitive to air pollutants. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is seeking volunteers like you, ages 19 to 55, to participate in research about air pollution. Those who complete the entire study may be paid as much as $1200. To find out more, call…”
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The flyers and radio ads direct those who are interested to a phone number and web site: epastudies.org. The website has information where individuals can sign up or “refer a friend.”
==
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/04/02/epa-conducted-pollution-experiments-on-children/
:{
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Environmental Protection Agency is under fire for exposing children to pollution as part of an experiment at the University of Southern California.
:{
}:
This information is coming to light from the website junkscience.com after an investigation from the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General stated in a recent report that the EPA’s pollution experiments on older people, done at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, were more harmful to the subjects than what the EPA presented.
The IG also said that while the experiment’s subjects did consent to exposure, the “risks were not always consistently represented.”
“Further, the EPA did not include information on long-term cancer risks in its diesel exhaust studies’ consent forms. An EPA manager considered these long-term risks minimal for short-term study exposures,” the IG report said.
In February of 2013, JunkScience.com reported that the EPA gave USC money in the mid 2000’s to find out whether diesel exhaust could “induce reproducible gene expression” in children. From a USC grant in the EPA extramural research grants database, the original December 14, 2012 document showed diesel exposures to children. What now sits on that database is a strongly edited description of the diesel tests on the children. Part of the the experiment’s goal was to examine how particulate matter affects “Asthma in Susceptible Children.”
Junk Science made a Freedom of Information Act request to the EPA to explain the deletion and alteration of its database of the documentation regarding diesel experiments on children. The EPA’s response to JunkScience was that the deletion was due to a technical mishap.
==
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