REPUBLICAN AGENDA - Anti-Science and Anti-Regulation

From the Alternate Universe

"Trump Administration Says It Isn't Anti-Science As It Seeks to Slash EPA Science Office" by Lisa Song, ProPublica 5/24/2017

The Office of Research and Development has been at frontlines of virtually every environmental crisis.  Trump wants to cut its funding in half.

When the city of Toledo temporarily lost access to clean drinking water several years ago after a bloom of toxic algae, the Environmental Protection Agency sent scientists from its Office of Research and Development to study health effects and formulate solutions.

The same office was on the front lines of the Flint water crisis and was a critical presence in handling medical waste from the U.S. Ebola cases in 2014.

Thomas Burke, who directed ORD during the last two years of the Obama administration and was the agency's science adviser, calls the office the nation's “scientific backstop in emergencies.”

President Trump's 2018 budget would slash ORD's funding in half as part of an overall goal to cut the EPA's budget by 31 percent.

A statement from EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt did not directly address the cuts to ORD, but offered broad defense of the proposed agency budget, saying it “respects the American taxpayer” and “supports EPA's highest priorities with federal funding for priority work in infrastructure, air and water quality, and ensuring the safety of chemicals in the marketplace.”

ORD has no regulatory authority, but it conducts the bulk of the research that underlies EPA policies.  ORD scientists are involved in “virtually every major environmental challenge the nation has,” Burke said.  Diminishing the role and input of the office, he said, risked leaving the country “uninformed about risks and public health.”

“In time, you're flying blind,” he said.  “Everything becomes a mystery.”

Trump's budget, released Tuesday, reflects the president's wish list.  The numbers likely will change by the time it goes through the congressional appropriations process, but the proposed cuts are consistent with the administration's push against environmental regulation and scientific funding.  Many of the cuts fall on agencies involved with climate change research, including the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told reporters in a Tuesday briefing that the budget reduces climate science funding without eliminating it.

“Do we target it?  Sure,” Mulvaney said in response to a reporter's question.  “Do a lot of the EPA reductions aim at reducing the focus on climate science?  Yes.  Does it mean that we are anti-science?  Absolutely not  (WTF! my comment).  We're simply trying to get things back in order to where we can look at the folks who pay the taxes, and say, look, yeah, we want to do some climate science, but we're not going to do some of the crazy stuff the previous administration did.”

Much of the EPA's climate research takes place in the Office of Air and Radiation, which is separate from ORD.  But ORD studies the strategic, long-term effects of climate change, including the effects on agriculture and the oceans, Burke said.

Christine Todd Whitman, a former EPA administrator who worked for George W. Bush from 2001 to June 2003, said the proposed ORD cuts are more drastic than anything she can remember.

Whitman said she expects Congress will restore much of the funding, but she worries about the message behind the budget.

“A budget to me was always a policy document,” she said.  Regardless of what Congress does, this administration's policy “indicates to me [that] they'll be looking for other ways to … stifle the research and slow it down,” she said.

OMB and the EPA did not return requests for comment about the ORD cuts.

ORD is one of several EPA programs listed under a section of the budget called “2018 major savings and reforms.”  The others include EPA enforcement (24 percent cut); Superfund, which cleans up toxic waste sites (30 percent); categorical state grants (45 percent); and funding for watershed protection, energy efficiency and voluntary climate programs, which would be eliminated.

The budget states the ORD reductions would allow the EPA to “focus on core Agency responsibilities … At lower funding levels for the Office of Research and Development, the Agency would prioritize intramural research activities that are either related to statutory requirements or that support basic and early stage research and development activities in the environmental and human health sciences.”

Whitman and Burke said ORD already does that — and halving the budget would make it virtually impossible to meet EPA's regulatory mandate.

ORD is “the backbone of the scientific research that goes on,” Whitman said.  “Every regulation promulgated by EPA is based in science.”

Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said he worries Congress will use the budget to justify serious but less drastic cuts to the agency.  This administration's philosophy seems to be “if you don't measure it, you don't have to be held accountable for it.”

ORD also helps regional EPA offices.  Michael Mikulka, president of AFGE Local 704, a union representing scientists, engineers and attorneys at EPA's Region 5 office (in the Great Lakes area), said he relies on ORD's Cincinnati lab for advice on toxic waste cleanup.  “If their staff is cut significantly, there would be less people to advise us.”

Burke said ORD was always going to be a target.  The office came under fire from environmentalists in 2015 when it released a draft study that said hydraulic fracturing had no “widespread, systemic impacts” on drinking water.  After considering comments from the EPA's independent Science Advisory Board, the report authors reversed their findings, concluding there was insufficient evidence to support their previous statement.  This time, the report was widely criticized by the oil and gas industry.

ORD is also home to the IRIS (Integrated Risk Information System) program that sets exposure guidelines for chemicals.  The program has been criticized for dragging its feet and bowing to the interests of the chemical industry.

“I'm very concerned the IRIS program will be zeroed out,” Burke said.  “There's an endless challenge by polluters to delay the science.”

But aside from a few high-profile issues, much of ORD's work takes place under the radar.  The office has laboratories all over the country, working on air pollution, ocean acidification and vehicle emissions.

One of ORD's lesser-known responsibilities is dealing with homeland security.  “God forbid, if we have to clean up a water supply after a terrorist activity, it [would be] in this office,” Burke said.

Whitman said the EPA was tasked with cleaning up the Hart Senate Office Building in 2001 after then-Sen.  Tom Daschle received an envelope containing anthrax powder.  Whitman remembers asking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for a safe standard of anthrax exposure.  The CDC didn't know, she said, so ORD did the research and set it at zero.

“These are the kinds of things you lose” when you de-fund the “national nerve center of the science challenges facing not just the EPA, but all the states and all the communities,” Burke said.

GREED FILES - EPA's Revolving Door

"Why the United States Leaves Deadly Chemicals on the Market" by Valerie Brown and Elizabeth Grossman, In These Times 11/2/2015

Excerpt (very long article)

A 6-month investigation finds that the revolving door between government and the chemical industry has led the EPA to rely on easily manipulated research.  The result? Toxic substances remain in everyday products.

Scientists are trained to express themselves rationally.  They avoid personal attacks when they disagree.  But some scientific arguments become so polarized that tempers fray.  There may even be shouting.

Such is the current state of affairs between two camps of scientists, health effects researchers and regulatory toxicologists.  Both groups study the effects of chemical exposures in humans.  Both groups have publicly used terms like “irrelevant,” “arbitrary,” “unfounded” and “contrary to all accumulated physiological understanding” to describe the other’s work.  Privately, the language becomes even harsher, with phrases such as “a pseudoscience,” “a religion” and “rigged.”

The rift centers around the best way to measure the health effects of chemical exposures.  The regulatory toxicologists typically rely on computer simulations called “physiologically based pharmacokinetic” (PBPK) modeling.  The health effects researchers—endocrinologists, developmental biologists and epidemiologists, among others—draw their conclusions from direct observations of how chemicals actually affect living things.

The debate may sound arcane, but the outcome could directly affect your health.  It will shape how government agencies regulate chemicals for decades to come; how toxic waste sites are cleaned up, how pesticides are regulated, how workers are protected from toxic exposure and what chemicals are permitted in household items.  Those decisions will profoundly affect public health; the rates at which we suffer cancer, diabetes, obesity, infertility, and neurological problems like attention disorders and lowered IQ.

The link from certain chemicals to these health effects is real.  In a paper published earlier this year, a group of leading endocrinologists concluded with 99 percent certainty that environmental exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals causes health problems.  They estimate that this costs the European Union healthcare system about $175 billion a year.

Closer to home, Americans are routinely sickened by toxic chemicals whose health effects have been long known.  To cite one infamous example, people exposed to the known carcinogen formaldehyde in FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina suffered headaches, nosebleeds and difficulty breathing.  Dozens of cancer cases were later reported.  Then there are workplace exposures, which federal government estimates link to as many as 20,000 cancer deaths a year and hundreds of thousands of illnesses.

“We are drowning our world in untested and unsafe chemicals, and the price we are paying in terms of our reproductive health is of serious concern,” wrote the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics in a statement released on October 1.

Yet chemical regulation in the United States has proceeded at a glacial pace.  And corporate profit is at the heart of the story.

That the chemical industry exerts political influence is well documented.  What our investigation reveals is that, 30 years ago, corporate interests began to control not just the political process but the science itself.  Industry not only funds research to cast doubt on known environmental health hazards; it has also shaped an entire field of science—regulatory toxicology—to downplay the risk of toxic chemicals.

Our investigation traces this web of influence to a group of scientists working for the Department of Defense (DOD) in the 1970s and 1980s—the pioneers of PBPK modeling.  It quickly became clear that this type of modeling could be manipulated to minimize the appearance of chemical risk.  PBPK methodology has subsequently been advanced by at least two generations of researchers—including many from the original DOD group—who move between industry, government agencies and industry-backed research groups, often with little or no transparency.

The result is that chemicals known to be harmful to human health remain largely unregulated in the United States—often with deadly results.  For chemicals whose hazards are just now being recognized, such as the common plastics ingredient bisphenol A (BPA) and other endocrine disruptors, this lack of regulation is likely to continue unless the federal chemical review process becomes more transparent and relies less heavily on PBPK modeling.

Here we lay out the players, the dueling paradigms and the high-stakes health consequences of getting it wrong.

The dawn of PBPK simulation

The 1970s and 1980s saw a blizzard of environmental regulation.  The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Toxic Substances Control Act, along with the laws that established Superfund and Community Right-to-Know Programs, for the first time required companies— and military bases—using and producing chemicals to account for their environmental and health impacts.  This meant greater demand for chemical risk assessments as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to establish safety standards for workplace exposures and environmental cleanups.

In the 1980s, the now-defunct Toxic Hazards Research Unit at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, was investigating the toxicity and health effects of chemicals used by the military.  Of particular concern to the DOD were the many compounds used by the military to build, service and maintain aircraft, vehicles and other machinery; fuels and fuel additives, solvents, coatings and adhesives.  The military is responsible for about 900 of the approximately 1,300 currently listed Superfund sites, many of which have been contaminated by these chemicals for decades.

In the mid-1980s, scientists at the Wright-Patterson Toxic Hazards Research Unit began using PBPK simulations to track how chemicals move through the body.  Known as in silico (in computers) models, these are an alternative to testing chemicals in vivo (in live animals) or in vitro (in a test tube).  They allow scientists to estimate what concentrations of a chemical (or its breakdown products) end up in a particular organ or type of tissue, and how long they take to exit the body.  The information can then be correlated with experimental data to set exposure limits—or not.

PBPK simulations made testing faster and cheaper, something attractive to both industry and regulators.  But the PBPK model has drawbacks.  “It tells you nothing about effects,” says Linda Birnbaum, director of both the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and National Toxicology Program (NTP).  Observational studies and laboratory experiments, on the other hand, are designed to discover how a chemical affects biological processes.

Even regulatory toxicologists who support PBPK acknowledge its limitations: “[PBPK models] are always going to be limited by the quality of the data that go into them,” says toxicologist James Lamb, who worked for the NTP and EPA in the 1980s and is now principal scientist at the consulting firm Exponent.

The late health effects researcher Louis Guillette, a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina famous for studies on DDT’s hormonedisrupting effects in Florida alligators, put it more bluntly: “PBPK?  My immediate response; Junk in, junk out.  The take-home is that most of the models [are] only as good as your understanding of the complexity of the system.”

Many biologists say PBPK-based risk assessments begin with assumptions that are too narrow, and thus often fail to fully capture how a chemical exposure can affect health.  For example, a series of PBPK studies and reviews by toxicologist Justin Teeguarden of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., and his colleagues suggested that BPA breaks down into less harmful compounds and exits the body so rapidly that it is essentially harmless.  Their research began with certain assumptions; that BPA only mimics estrogen weakly, that it affects only the body’s estrogen system, and that 90 percent of BPA exposure is through digestion of food and beverages.  However, health effects research has shown that BPA mimics estrogen closely, can affect the body’s androgen and thyroid hormone systems, and can enter the body via pathways like the skin and the tissues of the mouth.  When PBPK models fail to include this evidence, they tend to underestimate risk.

Because of its reliance on whatever data are included, PBPK modeling can be deliberately manipulated to produce desired outcomes.  Or, as University of Notre Dame biologist Kristin Shrader-Frechette, who specializes in human health risk assessment, says: “Models can offer a means of avoiding the conclusions derived from actual experiments.”  In other words, PBPK models can be customized to provide results that work to industry’s advantage.

That’s not to say PBPK itself is to blame.  “Let’s not throw the baby out completely with the bathwater,” says New York University associate professor of environmental medicine and health policy Leo Trasande.  “However, when you have biology telling you there are basic flaws in the model, that’s a compelling reason that it’s time for a paradigm shift.”

A handy tool for industry

That PBPK studies could be used to make chemicals appear safer was as clear in the 1980s as it is now.  In a 1988 paper touting the new technique, Wright-Patterson scientists explained how their modeling had prompted the EPA to stop its regulation process for a chemical of great concern to the military, methylene chloride.

Methylene chloride is widely used as a solvent and as an ingredient in making plastics, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and other industrial products.  By the 1990s, the U.S. military would be the country’s second greatest user.  Methylene chloride was—and remains—regulated under the Clean Air Act as a hazardous air pollutant because of its carcinogenic and neurotoxic effects.

Between 1985 and 1986, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimated that about 1 million workers a year were exposed to methylene chloride, and the EPA classified the compound as a “probable human carcinogen.”  A number of unions, including United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers, also petitioned OSHA to limit on-the-job exposure to methylene chloride.

In 1986, OSHA began the process of setting occupational exposure limits.  Stakeholders were invited to submit public comments.

Among the materials submitted was a PBPK study by Melvin Andersen, Harvey Clewell—both then working at Wright-Patterson—and several other scientists, including two employed by methylene chloride product manufacturer Dow Chemical.  Published in 1987, this study concluded, “Conventional risk analyses greatly overestimate the risk in humans exposed to low concentrations [of methylene chloride].”

Later that year, the EPA revised its previous health assessment of methylene chloride, citing the Wright-Patterson study to conclude that the chemical was nine times less risky than previously estimated.  The EPA “has halted its rulemaking on methylene chloride [based on our studies],” wrote Wright-Patterson scientists in 1988.

OSHA, too, considered the Wright-Patterson study in its methylene chloride assessment—and its rulemaking dragged on another 10 years before the agency finally limited exposure to the chemical.

The usefulness of PBPK modeling to industry did not escape the Wright-Patterson researchers.  “The potential impact,” wrote Andersen, Clewell and their colleagues in 1988, “is far reaching and not limited to methylene chloride.”  Using PBPK models to set exposure limits could help avoid setting “excessively conservative”—i.e., protective— limits that could lead to “unnecessary expensive controls” and place “constraints on important industrial processes.”  In other words, PBPK models could be used to set less-stringent environmental and health standards, and save industry money.

So far, they’ve been proven right.  The work done at Wright-Patterson set the stage for the next 30-plus years.  Results obtained using PBPK modeling—especially in industry-funded research, often conducted by former Wright-Patterson scientists—have downplayed the risk and delayed the regulation of numerous widely used and commercially lucrative chemicals.  These include formaldehyde, styrene, tricholorethylene, BPA and the pesticide chlorpyrifos.  For many such chemicals, PBPK studies contradict what actual biological experiments conclude.  Regulators often defer to the PBPK studies anyway.

A web of influence

At the time that PBPK modelling was being developed, the chemical industry was struggling with its public image.  The Bhopal, India, disaster—the methyl isocyanate release that killed and injured thousands—happened in 1984.  The following year, a toxic gas release at a West Virginia Union Carbide plant sent about 135 people to hospitals.

In response to these incidents, new federal regulations required companies to account for the storage, use and release of hazardous chemicals.  The minutes from a May 1988 Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) meeting show industry was feeling the pressure.  Noting the federal scrutiny and the growing testing requirements, the CMA recommended that industry help “develop exposure data” and “explore innovative ways to limit required testing to that which is needed.”

Industry had already begun to do this by founding a number of research institutes such as the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT), a nonprofit toxicology research institute (renamed the Hamner Institutes in an act of linguistic detoxification in 2007).  This period also saw the rise of for-profit consulting firms like Environ (1982), Gradient (1985), ChemRisk (1985) and K.S. Crump and Company (1986), with which industry would collaborate advantageously in the following decades.

“Our goal was to do the science that would help the EPA and other regulatory bodies make the policies,” explained William Greenlee, Hamner president and CEO, in an interview for a business website.  Indeed, over the past 30 years, Hamner and these consultancies have produced hundreds of PBPK studies, often with the support of chemical companies or trade groups.  Overwhelmingly, these studies downplay or cast doubt on chemicals’ health effects—and delay regulation.

“I have seen how scientists from the Hamner Institutes can present information in a way that carefully shapes or controls a narrative,” says Laura Vandenberg, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst.  She explains that Hamner scientists often use narrow time windows or present data in a limited context, rejecting information that does not conform to their models.  “These are the kinds of tactics used to manufacture doubt,” she says.

A close look at the authors of studies produced by these industry-linked research groups reveals a web of influence traceable to Wright-Patterson (see chart on following page).  At least 10 researchers employed at or contracted by Wright-Patterson in the 1980s went on to careers in toxicology at CIIT/Hamner, for-profit consulting firms or the EPA.  About half have held senior positions at Hamner, including the co-authors of many of the early Wright-Patterson PBPK studies: Melvin Anderson, now a chief scientific officer at Hamner, and Harvey Clewell, now a senior investigator at Hamner and principal scientist at the consulting firm ENVIRON.  “I’m probably given credit as the person who brought PBPK into toxicology and risk assessment,” Andersen told In These Times.

A revolving door between these industry-affiliated groups and federal regulators was also set in motion.  More than a dozen researchers have moved from the EPA to these for-profit consultancies; a similar number have gone in the other direction, ending up at the EPA or other federal agencies.

Further blurring the public-private line, CIIT/Hamner has received millions of dollars in both industry and taxpayer money.  The group stated on its website in 2007 that $18 million of its $21.5 million annual operating budget came from the “chemical and pharmaceutical industry.”  Information about its corporate funders is no longer detailed there, but Hamner has previously listed as clients and supporters the American Chemistry Council (formerly the CMA, and one of the most powerful lobbyists against chemical regulation), American Petroleum Institute, BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow, ExxonMobil, Chevron and the Formaldehyde Council.  At the same time, over the past 30 years, CIIT/Hamner has received nearly $160 million in grants and contracts from the EPA, DOD and Department of Health and Human Services.  In sum, since the 1980s, these federal agencies have awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to industry-affiliated research institutes like Hamner.

But the federal reliance on industry-linked researchers extends further. Since 2000, the EPA has signed a number of cooperative research agreements with the ACC and CIIT/ Hamner.  All involve chemical toxicity research that includes PBPK modeling.  And in 2014, Hamner outlined additional research it will be conducting for the EPA’s next generation of chemical testing—the ToxCast and Tox21 programs.  Over the past five years, Hamner has received funding for this same research from the ACC and Dow.

Meanwhile, the EPA regularly contracts with for-profit consultancies to perform risk assessments, assemble peer review panels and select the scientific literature used in chemical evaluations.  This gives these private organizations considerable sway in the decision-making process, often with little transparency about ties to chemical manufacturers.  The upshot: Experts selected to oversee chemical regulation often overrepresent the industry perspective.

These cozy relationships have not gone unnoticed; the EPA has been called to task by both its own Office of Inspector General and by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.  “These arrangements have raised concerns that ACC or its members could potentially influence, or appear to influence, the scientific results that may be used to make future regulatory decisions,” wrote the GAO in a 2005 report.

Asked for comment by In These Times, the EPA said these arrangements do not present conflicts of interest.

SUPREME COURT - End-Term Rulings

"Supreme Court ends term with rulings on EPA, voter redistricting and lethal injection" PBS NewsHour 6/29/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The Supreme Court ended a dramatic session with high-profile rulings on three issues:  how the EPA regulates air pollution, how to map voting lines and the death penalty by lethal injection.  Judy Woodruff learns more from Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  The U.S. Supreme Court closed out a dramatic session today with three more high-profile decisions.  The latest rulings touched on how the Environmental Protection Agency regulates our air, how to map voting lines and how states carry out the death penalty.

Justices also put on hold a Texas law that was set to close a number of clinics that perform abortions in the state this week.

And joining me to discuss it all is our hardworking court expert, Marcia Coyle, with “The National Law Journal.”

No shortage.  They went out — they’re going out with a bang.  Let’s put it that way.

MARCIA COYLE, The National Law Journal:  They absolutely are, Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  So, let’s start with this Texas decision.  This was an emergency appeal that the court granted this afternoon to block the state of Texas from immediately imposing these stricter regulations on abortion clinics.  What was happening here?

MARCIA COYLE:  Right.

A lower federal court had ruled against the Whole Women’s Health clinic and other abortion clinics in Texas in their challenge to the Texas law, which requires the clinic to meet all the standards of ambulatory surgical facilities, which the clinics claim they are not, and also that their physicians have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of the clinic.

This is a temporary delay to allow the clinics to file what we call a petition for cert, their appeal of that lower court decision.  Four justices would have allowed the lower court’s decision to go into effect immediately, the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito.

July 1 was the deadline.  That’s when the lower court decision was to take effect.  So, it’s now on hold.  The appeals by the clinics have not yet been filed in the Supreme Court.

"What the Supreme Court’s mercury ruling means for the EPA" PBS NewsHour 6/29/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The Supreme Court ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency in a case on how federal regulators set limits on mercury emitted from power plants, finding that the EPA failed to take economic costs into account.  Jeffrey Brown examines the implications with Dr. Lynn Goldman of the George Washington University and Jeffrey Holmstead of Environmental Strategies Group.

SUPREME COURT - EPA Limits on Mercury and Work Accommodations for Women

"Supreme Court tests EPA’s limits on mercury air pollution" PBS NewsHour 3/25/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The Supreme Court heard arguments over federal pollution mandates.  The EPA says its limits on toxic contaminants like mercury in power plant emissions are vital to human health, but energy producers are arguing the EPA didn’t take costs into consideration when the limits were created.  Gwen Ifill gets debate from Vickie Patton of the Environmental Defense Fund and David Rivkin of BakerHostetler.

"Supreme Court weighs in on accommodations for pregnant workers, Alabama redistricting" PBS NewsHour 3/25/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The Supreme Court released two significant decisions on Wednesday.  In one, the court revived a lawsuit by a UPS worker who sued her employer after she was put on unpaid leave when she could not perform normal duties because she was pregnant.  In another, the justices split 5-4 over voter redistricting in Alabama.  Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal joins Gwen Ifill to discuss the cases.

WYOMING - Reaction to EPA Plan to Cut Carbon Emissions

"How an EPA plan to cut carbon emissions is playing out in coal-rich Wyoming" PBS NewsHour 1/16/2015

COMMENT:  Again, the personal profit of a few before the welfare of our planet, and by extension, the welfare of our world's human beings.

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In Wyoming, people care about issues that affect their land and energy resources.  A recently announced EPA initiative to cut carbon emissions, the Clean Power Plan, aims to move American electricity generation away from coal -- the economic lifeblood for that state.  Special correspondent Leigh Paterson of Inside Energy looks at both sides of the fight.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  The rise in greenhouse gases and temperatures are the reasons why the president has issued new restrictions on coal-fired power plants in this country.

But now that Republicans hold control of Congress, one issue high on their agenda, blocking or delaying the EPA’s plans.

We get a report on how that’s viewed in a key energy-producing state, Wyoming.

It comes from Leigh Paterson of Inside Energy.  That’s a public media collaboration on energy issues, working with the NewsHour.

LEIGH PATERSON, Inside Energy:  Caring for a few hundred cows during the Wyoming winter is hard work.  Subzero temperatures and hurricane-force winds are normal.

Rancher Dave Hamilton say it’s part of the disconnect between people who live off the land and those who regulate the environment.

DAVE HAMILTON, President, Natural Gas Processing Co.:  We seem to have people that have never, ever even set foot on — in the state of Wyoming, that don’t understand farming, don’t understand ranching pass rules that affect us all, when, in fact, we all want to keep our land together.  I can’t make a living if I destroy my land.

ENVIRONMENT - EPA's Coal Ash Decision

"EPA decision not to classify coal ash as hazardous angers environmentalists" PBS NewsHour 12/19/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  The past few years, and a pair of major spills into waterways and communities have brought a whole new concern about the coal industry to the forefront.  It’s about a byproduct called coal ash.

After a six-year battle, the Environmental Protection Agency has now set the first national standards for how to regulate and deal with it.  But some argue the federal government pulled its punches.

Jeffrey Brown has the story.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  December 22, 2008, more than a billion gallons of coal ash, a by-product of coal-burning energy production, mixed with water, burst through the banks of a containment pond in Kingston, Tennessee.

The coal ash slurry flooded homes, farmland and poured into the Emory River, prompting what would become a billion-dollar cleanup.  Earlier this year, more than 80,000 tons spilled from a Duke Energy holding pond into North Carolina’s Dan River.  According to the EPA, more than 100 such breeches, though usually smaller, happen every year.

Coal ash contains toxic contaminants like mercury, arsenic and lead, and environmental groups have long warned holding ponds are not only prone to ruptures, but also leak into groundwater.  They had pushed for coal ash to be classified as a hazardous material.  That would give regulatory authority of the substance to the EPA.

But in announcing new standards for coal ash storage and disposal today, EPA head Gina McCarthy said that power would remain with the states.

GINA MCCARTHY, Environmental Protection Agency:  This rule sets a commonsense, consistent baseline for industries and states to follow, and that communities can rely on to prevent health risks, as well as costly cleanups.

COAL - Producer to Pay $200 Million Cleanup Fine

"Leading coal producer agrees to pay record fine to clean polluted waters across Appalachia" PBS Newshour 3/5/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  We return now to the EPA’s settlement today with one of the largest coal producers in the country over pollution in five Appalachian states.

Dina Cappiello, the national environment reporter for the Associated Press, joins us now.

Twenty-seven-and-a-half million dollars in fines, $200 million for the cleanup, in the range of penalty, how does this rank?

DINA CAPPIELLO, The Associated Press:  Well, it’s the biggest ever for a company that violated its water pollution permits.

So, obviously, other companies have paid big fines in the past.  In 2008, the EPA settled with Massey Energy, another coal company, for $20 million.  But this is the biggest ever for a company that violated permits it had from states.

GWEN IFILL:  Now, describe to us how widespread the pollution was.

DINA CAPPIELLO:  The numbers here are pretty staggering.

You’re talking over 6,000 violations, violations over 300 state-issued permits, hundreds of streams, tributaries and rivers, 79 active coal mines, 25 coal processing plants, where they put the coal and wash it before it’s shipped, over five Appalachian states.  So it’s a pretty massive coverage area for the settlement.

ENVIRONMENT - New EPA Chief Gina McCarthy

"EPA chief Gina McCarthy on maintaining a 'diverse energy mix' for America" PBS Newshour 10/24/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In June, the Obama administration called for new pollution standards for power plants, and the new EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, has followed through with a proposal for new rules.  Ray Suarez reports on pushback from the coal industry, while Judy Woodruff talks to McCarthy about pollution and energy priorities.

EPA - Decision Delayed is Health Protection Denied

I consider this issue so important I am posting the article almost in its entirety.

"EPA Contaminated by Conflict of Interest" by David Heath and Ronnie Greene, PBS Newshour

Excerpt

In September 2010, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency came to a startling conclusion:  Even a small amount of a chemical compound commonly found in tap water may cause cancer.

The compound, hexavalent chromium, gained infamy in the Oscar-winning film Erin Brockovich, based on the David-vs.-Goliath legal duel between desert dwellers in Hinkley, Calif., and Pacific Gas & Electric Co.  The film ends in Hollywood fashion, with the corporate polluter paying $333 million to people suffering from illnesses.

But in real life, the drama continues.  More than 70 million Americans drink traces of chromium every day, according to the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization.

TOXIC INFLUENCE is an ongoing series of reports exploring the nexus between industry, science and policy.  This story is being produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.

And now, more than a decade after the film, EPA scientists cite “clear evidence” that the chemical compound, also known as chromium (VI), can cause cancer.  The federal agency was poised to announce its findings in 2011, a step almost certain to trigger stricter drinking-water standards to prevent new cancers and deaths.

The chemical industry’s trade association and chief lobbyist, the American Chemistry Council, urged the EPA to wait for more research, a common practice to delay action on toxic chemicals.  However, Vincent Cogliano, the soft-spoken head of EPA’s chemical-assessment program, rebuffed the powerful group, writing in an April 2011 letter that “strong” new research was already available.

Ten months later, the EPA reversed itself, quietly posting a notice on the Internet that it was pushing back the release of its findings for at least four more years.  Environmentalists were stunned at the reason:  The agency would wait for the results of new studies costing $4 million and paid for by the American Chemistry Council.

The EPA decided to wait at the urging of a panel of scientists chosen to give an unbiased review of the chromium findings.  But the EPA doesn’t vet these scientists directly, instead handing the task over to outside contractors.  An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that several of the panelists had worked on behalf of PG&E to defend the company in the Brockovich lawsuits.

President Obama pledged during his 2008 campaign to halt meddling and interference in government science.  The president put restoring integrity to science on his short list of priorities in his first inaugural address, right after fixing the economy and before health care reform.  “We'll restore science to its rightful place,” he said.

The story of chromium (VI), full of twists and turns, offers a case study in how the Obama administration has failed to shield science at the EPA from industry influence.

Companies with a stake in chromium have borrowed from the Big Tobacco playbook, using science to create doubt.  Ever since the brassy Brockovich knocked on doors in Hinkley to organize a class-action lawsuit, scientists paid by industry have tried to convince the courts and regulators that chromium (VI) poses no health risk.

Some of those scientists ended up on the panel chosen to review the EPA’s chromium findings, the Center for Public Integrity found:

• Three of the five panelists who urged delay had worked on industry's behalf in the Hinkley court cases.

• One of those scientists was retained by PG&E in the company’s ongoing chromium cleanup in Hinkley at the same time he was serving on the EPA panel.

• Another scientist who urged the EPA to wait for the American Chemistry Council studies served as a consultant on those studies.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that this is corrupt and unacceptable,” contends Rena Steinzor, a law professor at the University of Maryland and president of the Center for Progressive Reform, a think tank that recently published a report on the chemical industry’s influence.

Those members served on the EPA’s toxic-chemical-assessment program, the Integrated Risk Information System. IRIS, as it is known, is the pure science upon which clean air and water rules are based.  But IRIS has become a major bottleneck, delaying new federal and state air and water standards amid industry influence and other factors.  Critics say the EPA has only itself to blame.

Since October, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has declined interview requests to discuss IRIS or loopholes that open the door for potential conflicts of interest.  Yet Jackson is pushing reform before she leaves office this week that would address some of the conflicts unearthed in the Center’s review, and cited by environmental activists.

And recently the EPA decided to move up its timetable to complete its chromium assessment to later this year.

Case study of industry’s muscle

The issue of scientists with industry ties serving on special EPA peer review panels goes beyond chromium.  One out of every six scientists appointed to such panels since Obama took office had been a primary author of research articles funded by the American Chemistry Council over the past dozen years.

In all, 11 of the 68 members appointed to EPA panels assessing chemical health hazards were significant authors on studies funded by the ACC, a review of the council’s research database reveals.  That number does not capture all scientists backed by industry, just those with work funded by the ACC.  The authors of the hexavalent chromium studies, for example, are not included.

One scientist who has served on several EPA panels and co-written more than a dozen ACC-funded studies said that working with industry does not necessarily suggest a conflict.

“Scientists by and large want to get at the truth, so this really becomes more a matter of a perception of a problem than a real problem, in my opinion,” said Frederick J. Miller, an independent consultant who once worked at the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, a North Carolina research institute formed in the 1970s by leaders from 11 major chemical companies.

“The people that serve on these panels ... know if somebody is trying to make an argument that doesn’t hold water,” said Miller, who began his career in government.

However, studies have shown that when industry pays for research, it may influence the outcome.  A 1998 analysis of more than 100 articles published on secondhand smoke reported that 37 percent found no health risk.  At least 74 percent of the articles exonerating cigarette smoke were written by scientists with ties to the tobacco industry.

The American Chemistry Council has a stake in the outcome of research.  Lobby disclosure forms from 2011 reveal that the ACC lobbied the EPA on its assessments of three highly controversial chemicals:  dioxin, formaldehyde and chromium (VI).  The group boasts on its Web site that “in 2012, we helped defeat or amend 281 chemical regulation and product ban proposals.”

The ACC, whose members such as ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, Merck and Procter & Gamble are a who’s who of the Fortune 500, is one of the freest-spending lobby groups on Capitol Hill.  In 2011, it laid out $12.6 million on lobbying, four times the amount spent by the National Rifle Association.

David Fischer, a senior director at the ACC, defended the group’s research program.  “We feel we have an obligation to step up and fund studies to assist the agency — whether it’s EPA or others — to answer questions that might be posed about chemicals that we manufacture,” he said.

Asked if any of the ACC’s studies had ever shown that a chemical was more toxic than previously thought, Fischer replied, “I'm not aware of one right at this moment.”

The ACC said it was not involved in selecting the peer reviewers studying chromium (VI).  “EPA’s peer reviewers were selected by EPA.  They were vetted in the normal peer review process from EPA and we from the ACC do not have any direct links to these people,” said Ann Mason, the ACC scientist who commissioned the group’s new studies on chromium.

However, few scientists in the world specialize in chromium, a compound used to add color to paints, make stainless steel, add finish to chrome and inhibit rust.  During its lawsuits, PG&E hired several of these scientists as expert witnesses; some say the debate over the compound’s toxicity caused lasting splits in the tight-knit scientific world.

One of PG&E’s key experts was Steven Patierno, a former professor of pharmacology at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences who had conducted numerous studies on the metal.  Patierno, now the deputy director of the Duke Cancer Institute, has been an expert defense witness in seven chromium lawsuits.  He hasn’t wavered in his view that drinking low doses of chromium (VI) does not cause cancer.

By early 2011, Patierno was selected for the peer review panel critiquing the EPA’s chromium (VI) findings.  At a public meeting on May 12, 2011, he revealed a potential conflict of interest.  There’s no recording or transcript of the meeting.  Nothing in the EPA’s public record reveals the conflict.  Two EPA officials who were there say they cannot recall what Patierno said. Patierno himself declined requests for an interview.

Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, took notes at the meeting and said that Patierno revealed he was an investigator — though not a principal investigator — on the American Chemistry Council studies.

The ACC’s Mason disputes that Patierno was involved.  But Travis O’Brien, one of the principal investigators on the studies and a former colleague of Patierno’s at George Washington University, told the Center for Public Integrity that Patierno was a consultant on the research.

Max Costa, now a professor at New York University’s medical school, knows Patierno well.  When Costa taught at the University of Texas Medical School, Patierno worked in his laboratory.  The two published research together.  Costa said they became rivals when they took opposite sides in the PG&E lawsuit.

He argues that Patierno’s opinions are not credible because he works for the chrome industry.  “He’s been a paid a large amount of money by them, and he’s totally biased because of that.”

Patierno levels the same charge against Costa, attacking his conclusions in a lawsuit as “unsubstantiated” and “severely flawed.”  Patierno criticized the EPA for even citing Costa’s papers among hundreds of others in its report.  In his peer review comments, Patierno said two of Costa’s articles should not be taken seriously because “they were written and published at a time when the senior author was actively engaged as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in high-profile hexavalent chromium lawsuits.”

Patierno was an expert witness for PG&E in the same lawsuits.  When he was asked in a 2006 lawsuit if he discloses his expert-witness work for industry when submitting articles on chromium (VI), he answered no.  Patierno said his articles were based on laboratory studies that were not relevant to his legal work.

Costa was originally listed as a candidate for the EPA peer review panel, according to documents obtained by the Center through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.  Costa says he disclosed his work in the PG&E lawsuit but doesn’t know if that work disqualified him.  An EPA official said privately said that Costa’s work as an expert witness may have kept him off the panel.

Industry ties and EPA panel

Patierno was not the only defense litigation expert who served on the EPA's IRIS panel.  Two others were John P. Wise Sr., a toxicology professor at the University of Southern Maine, and Joshua Hamilton, a chief academic and scientific officer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., which is affiliated with Brown University.

Wise, who worked in Patiernos laboratory as a graduate student, said that in 1997 he worked for a consulting firm and was assigned to do research for an industry client in the Hinkley lawsuit but that he has not accepted industry money in the past 15 years.  Wise added that he was never told the identity of the client and that he does not believe that "such limited contact so long ago" influenced his opinion.

Hamilton was a defense expert in a PG&E chromium lawsuit that settled in 2006 and worked for the company as a consultant again starting in 2009, according to PG&E.  PG&E acknowledged that it hired Hamilton in May 2011 — the same month the EPA panel met — to consult on the ongoing chromium cleanup in Hinkley.  PG&E said it paid him $110,000.

Hamilton appeared before a California Regional Water Quality Control Board on June 8, 2011, to speak on behalf of PG&E about its cleanup of Hinkley.  The EPA peer review panel issued its final comments one month later, on July 6, 2011.

Hamilton’s consulting work included criticism of the California EPA’s own scientific assessment of chromium (VI), which was nearly identical to the EPA’s.

In an eight-page statement to the water board dated July 9, 2011, Hamilton wrote that the state agency’s findings did not represent “established science.”  He described California’s regulations as “overly protective.”

The PG&E director in charge of the Hinkley cleanup, Sheryl Bilbrey, said Hamilton’s work should not have affected his objectivity.  “PG&E expects all of our experts to give us unbiased advice,” she said.  “So we would never ask anyone to change their scientific opinion to fit something that we would want.”

Asked whether it was appropriate for an EPA peer reviewer to be working simultaneously for PG&E, the ACC’s Fischer said, “That sounds like a conflict of interest to me.  Generally, the way you get around it is you just — you don’t appoint that particular scientist to that particular panel.”

It was not the first time Hamilton had been paid a substantial sum by PG&E.  In 2001, Hamilton said he was surprised to get a $100,000 check in the mail before doing any work as an expert witness.  According to his deposition, Hamilton talked to PG&E’s lawyers about the check and learned that it was on top of his hourly fee.  PG&E ultimately paid Hamilton nearly $300,000 for his work on the lawsuit.

“That’s completely outrageous,” said Francesca Grifo, director of scientific integrity at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists.  “I don’t know how anybody could stand up logically and say I got $100,000 but it didn’t affect how I handled this.”

Hamilton declined interview requests.

EPA farms screening to consultants

Working for a chemical company appears to violate the EPA’s guidelines on conflicts of interest.  The EPA’s Peer Review Handbook says peer reviewers should appear to be impartial, defined as not having anything that “may cause a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts to question the expert’s ability to carry out official duties without bias or influence.”

The handbook offers, as an example of a conflict, a scientist paid to be an expert witness for a chemical company in a class-action lawsuit.

Yet, the EPA doesn’t ask scientists if they’ve worked as expert witnesses or have taken money from industry.  Instead, it turns that job over to private companies, which handle conflict-of-interest reviews in secret.  All of the information the vendors collect, including financial disclosure forms, is “considered private and non-disclosable to EPA or outside entities except as required by law,” the EPA policy says.

The contractor examines candidates’ published work, and prospective panelists fill out a questionnaire detailing potential conflicts.  Once the panel is picked, the contractor certifies to the EPA that “no unresolved actual or potential conflict of interest issues” remain.

What’s more, the ethics guidelines are not binding on contractors, and the EPA handbook says the agency should not override decisions on conflicts of interest.  “EPA should not attempt to make any changes in the contractor’s conclusions as this would compromise the independence of the peer review conducted by the contractor,” the handbook says.

The EPA said it set the system up this way to ensure impartiality.  But, the Center found, this structure helps shield the very conflicts the agency aims to avoid.

A year ago, the Center sought information on the screening of IRIS panelists through a FOIA request.  The EPA withheld most documents, including emails between the vendors and agency.

Officials at Eastern Research Group Inc., the Massachusetts firm that vetted the peer reviewers on the chromium (VI) panel, did not return emails and phone calls.  An official at another company handling peer reviews, Versar Inc., said he was prohibited by EPA from talking.

The EPA’s administrator, Jackson, and its chemical-assessment officials declined requests for on-the-record interviews.  But an EPA official acknowledged privately that the agency was not fully aware of the chromium (VI) peer reviewers’ ties to PG&E.  The official defended the use of private vendors, contending that if the EPA chose peer reviewers, it could pick scientists it knew would be friendly.

However, the EPA routinely selects scientists for other advisory panels.  Critics said it’s not clear how checking financial disclosure forms would taint the process.  The Peer Review Handbook does note that checking disclosure forms would activate the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a law meant to make panels more open.

“It’s bizarre,” Grifo said of the EPA’s secretive screening process.  “At its core it’s supposed to increase the public trust in the system.  If it looks like the whole system is rigged to begin with, then why should a citizen trust it?”

The EPA said it was working to reduce the potential for conflicts.  “We are exploring the best ways to provide for public review of contract-managed peer review panels and ensure that contractors are held accountable for their assessment of any conflicts of interest,” the agency said in a statement.

The ‘pure science’ bottleneck

Some 700 new chemicals hit the market each year, adding to the tens of thousands already in use.  Yet the EPA has assessed only 557 chemicals since the IRIS program began in 1985.  A typical review takes six to eight years, sometimes much longer.  It took 27 years for the agency to issue a partial assessment of dioxin, a byproduct of plastics manufacturing and burning.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded in 2008 that the IRIS program was so bogged down that it was in danger of becoming obsolete.

In 2009, EPA Administrator Jackson made bold promises within her first weeks in office to fix the program.  She pledged to finish many more assessments and to try to complete each one within two years.  Since May 2009, the EPA said it completed 24 IRIS assessments, “double the number” completed in the same time period prior to May 2009.

Yet its overall progress remains slow, and in the past two years, the program produced as few assessments as ever.  Last year, the EPA planned to complete 40 assessments.  It finished three.

The reasons for the logjam are complex.  But it has become common for industry and its allies inside the federal government to push for delay.  “Even a single delay can have far-reaching, time-consuming consequences, in some cases requiring that the assessment process essentially start over,” the GAO reported.

In the case of chromium (VI), evidence shows that industry worked closely with the EPA as the agency conducted its assessment.  On Oct. 8, 2009, a scientist at a law firm representing chemical companies complained in an email that the EPA was pushing ahead on its assessments without waiting for studies to address “gaps” in the science.

“EPA moved Chrom VI up by about two years after ‘we’ entered into a process of planning research with them to address gaps,” wrote Richard Canady, a former scientist at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who was then working at the private law firm of McKenna, Long & Aldridge.  “I’d like to make a case for EPA planning ahead in cooperation with industry.”

Canady’s email was sent to Nancy Beck, a toxicologist at OMB who reviewed the EPA’s findings.  Beck referred Canady to an American Chemistry Council official for help in gathering data.  A 2009 investigation by a subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee criticized Beck for improperly interfering with IRIS assessments during the George W. Bush administration.  Beck now works for the ACC.  She did not return a call last week seeking comment; an ACC spokesman said Tuesday he would seek her perspective.

In a recent interview, Canady said he could not recall the precise details from his email and declined to reveal clients for which he was working.  But Canady said he thought the process of planning research with the EPA “wasn’t that formal.”  Instead, industry scientists would call EPA scientists to find out what new data would help them in their chromium (VI) assessment, he said.

His 2009 email also said, “Peter made a point to me the other day about how boron and methylene chloride were good examples of working together on developing data ahead of assessments in ways that influenced the outcome.”

Canady said this was a reference to Peter Preuss, then the director of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment, which oversees IRIS.

The EPA originally planned to issue its chromium (VI) assessment last summer, giving the ACC time to finish its new studies.  However, under Jackson’s imperative to quicken assessments, the EPA moved up its timeline by six to nine months.

When the EPA’s Cogliano rebuffed the ACC’s request for a delay, the trade association turned its attention to the peer review panel.

Critics say the industry uses comments on chemicals that are under review to overwhelm the agency.

“There’s a very elaborate process that involves multiple opportunities for industry to pick away and blast away and confuse and overload the staff of IRIS, and the IRIS staff reacts by trying to address each and every one of industry’s concerns,” said law professor Steinzor.

“The chemical industry has made IRIS its leading target, one of its leading targets, for spoil in the current age of greed,” Steinzor said

Of the 49 public comments submitted to the EPA on chromium before the peer-review panel met, the American Chemistry Council and its research partners authored 29 of them, totaling 1,661 pages.  In addition, 10 other comments totaling 137 pages came from industry urging the EPA to wait for the ACC studies.

As the EPA stood poised to announce potential new safeguards for chromium (VI), the ACC had hired a scientific consulting firm, ToxStrategies, to manage the $4 million studies of mice and rats given the chemical for 90 days.

The panel met May 12, 2011, at a Hilton hotel near Reagan National Airport.  Patierno was highly critical of the EPA’s findings and suggested the agency “absolutely consider the extensive new data being provided.” Hamilton and Wise agreed.

In a recent interview, Wise said he wasn’t entirely familiar with ToxStrategies’ findings, which hadn’t yet been published. But he assumed the delay would be short, only a few months.  The EPA initially said the delay would take four years.  Later, the agency said the assessment would be done this year.

Anatoly Zhitkovich, a professor at Brown University who chaired the EPA peer review panel, was upset with the results and wrote his own review published in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology, according to Costa, a close colleague.  Zhitkovich declined an interview request, but his article supported the findings of the EPA.

In lobbying for delay, the American Chemistry Council quietly enlisted the help of a small office within the U.S. Small Business Administration.

SBA Chief Counsel for Advocacy Winslow Sargeant, an electrical engineer by training, submitted a comment to the EPA on Oct. 5, 2011, challenging its scientific conclusions and urging it to delay its chromium assessment pending completion of the ACC studies.  Winslow cited the peer review comments from Hamilton and Wise to support his argument.

But emails obtained through FOIA by the advocacy group Center for Effective Government revealed that the ACC helped shape the SBA letter.  An ACC lobbyist, Randy Schumacher, sent an email to Sargeant’s office on June 28, 2011, asking for its help.

“Administrator Jackson calling upon her to stop the Cr6 risk assessment process to do exactly as EPA’s peer reviewers deemed advisable,” Schumacher wrote.  “Since it appears EPA needs to hear from more constituents for it to listen to its own peer review team, would SBA be willing to send a letter to Ms. Jackson to weigh in on this matter?”

Later emails from Schumacher suggested editing changes to Sargeant’s letter.  The SBA official has not responded to interview requests.

Frustration prompts reform push

Now the EPA is in the process of revamping its IRIS program once more.  Cogliano has proposed releasing the names of prospective peer reviewers in advance, giving the public an opportunity to explore conflicts.  “This will improve transparency in the peer review process,” the EPA said in a statement.  The changes could be formally announced this week, as Jackson departs.

The ACC’s Fischer says he’s in favor of a conflict-of-interest policy that allows industry to participate on peer review panels.  “Bias in and of itself should not necessarily disqualify a particular scientist from serving on the panel,” he said.  “Industry perspective is a bias but so [is] every other perspective.”

The EPA is also weighing whether to set “stopping points” for new research, a deadline after which no additional studies would be considered.  Kenneth Olden, a senior EPA official who oversees IRIS, has proposed announcing assessments two years in advance, giving industry time to complete new studies.

Such proposals drew criticism at an EPA meeting in November, with an environmental group’s scientist stating bluntly that industry seeks delays because it wants IRIS to fail.  His comments drew faint gasps from a conference room filled almost entirely with industry consultants.

“The practice of waiting for one more study to be completed, as has happened repeatedly under IRIS — especially when that study is to be conducted by an entity with a vested financial interest in tilting the outcome — simply must stop,” said the scientist, Richard Denison, with the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.  “Simply put, a decision delayed is health protection denied.”

ENVIRONMENT - New EPA Rules, Finally, After 2 Decades

"New EPA Rules Target Power Plants' Toxic Mercury Emissions" PBS Newshour 12/21/2011

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (Newshour): The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled new rules today to curb mercury emissions from the nation's power plants. The standards apply to roughly 600 coal- or oil-fueled power facilities. They will have to either reduce their emissions or shut down.

The battle over the rules stretches back two decades. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said today the new regulations of multiple pollutants would save lives and clean the air.

LISA JACKSON, Environmental Protection Agency: And this is a suite of air toxic standards. It is mercury. It is arsenic. It is cadmium. It is chromium. It is cyanide. It is hydrochloric acid. It is hydrofluoric acid. And because the pollution control technology that will go on these plants will also get some soot out of the air, it means, by addressing some toxics, we're actually addressing a suite of toxics and getting a lot of health benefits.

GWEN IFILL: But there's a reason the rules have taken so long to take effect.

For more on that, we get two views.

Scott Segal is director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, an energy industry trade group, and John Walke is clean air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

COMMENT: Ah yes. Another example of corporate greed ahead of the health of people.

The power companies who fought these rules are just interested in the bottom-line in their books. Note, in this piece the inference that some power plants ARE already upgrading and complying. It just the power companies that have been fighting the necessary changes that will now be forced to comply or shut down. They would have better served if they had spent money on the necessary plant upgrades instead of spending it on lawyers, lobbyist, and consultants to fight the rules.

OIL - Why Risk the Environments of 6 States?

This is the type of idea that makes me wonder just how insane Big Oil is.

QUESTION: If the this oil source is so important why not build a refinery near the source? It could be funded by a joint U.S./Canada venture. Why risk the environments of 6 states?

The answer is, of course, GREED.

"Tar Sands Pipeline Plan Renews Energy vs. Environment Debate" PBS Newshour 8/29/2011

Excerpt

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Next: a friendly and safe new source of oil for the U.S. or an environmental disaster waiting to happen?

The tar sands of Alberta, in western Canada, are today considered one of the largest oil reserves in the world, a source of crude petroleum known as bitumen. But the extraction of oil there has come with concerns about the environmental impact. And now those concerns have exploded with a plan by the Calgary-based company TransCanada to build a massive pipeline to carry that crude oil deep into the U.S.

The proposed Keystone X.L. pipeline would run 1,700 miles through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma on its way to refineries in Texas. It's projected to cost $7 billion and carry an estimated 800,000 barrels of oil a day. The plan has galvanized a growing opposition from those who fear it would increase greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the prospects of leaks and spills in environmentally sensitive areas.

Activists are now in the midst of a two-week protest at the White House. Some 400 have been arrested so far. On Friday, they were dealt a blow by the U.S. State Department, which released a report finding the pipeline project will present no significant environmental problems.

A final decision to allow or reject the pipeline will come from Secretary of State Clinton and ultimately President Obama. It's expected by the end of the year.

And we have our own debate on the Keystone pipeline project now with Robert Bryce, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of "Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future," and Bill McKibben, an environmentalist, author and organizer of the ongoing protests in Washington this week.

By the way, who's going to actually fund the pipeline? You are, at the pump.

Another question that just occurred to me, "the U.S. State Department, which released a report finding the pipeline project will present no significant environmental problems," since when is the State Department the authority on environmental impact? I thought the EPA was.

ENVIRONMENT - Greenhouse Gasses, Courts or EPA?

"Should Courts or EPA Regulate Greenhouse Gases?"
PBS Newshour 4/19/2011

Excerpt from transcript

GWEN IFILL (Newshour): The lawsuit, originally filed in 2004, argues that carbon dioxide-driven global warming has eroded beachfronts, caused stronger storms and wildfires and increased health risks stemming from severe heat waves and smog.

But the case before the court is not a debate over climate change, per se. The companies acknowledge it exists and even their contributing role. They're arguing, instead, that a court-imposed solution that requires a 3 percent reduction in emissions over the next 10 years could hurt businesses that depend on fossil fuels.

ENVIRONMENT - Yet Another Fine Example of Bush Administration Protection

"Bush Administration to Close E.P.A Libraries in San Francisco and Nationwide" by Sara A. Fox, M.L.S.‚ BeyondChron

The 2007 Federal Budget proposed by the Bush Administration and currently before Congress includes a budget cut that would entirely eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s 27 libraries nationwide, including San Francisco’s own EPA Region 9 library. The Region 9 library provides the public, free of charge, with environmental data on CA, AZ, NV, HA and the lands of 140 tribal nations. The importance of this library cannot be understated. The importance of this library cannot be understated in providing citizens with scientific data about pollutants, wildlife, and energy resources in our city, state and beyond.

The San Francisco Region 9 library has already had its hours reduced and is limiting public access. This is especially bad news for the often low-income, immigrant and minority communities in San Francisco, and their advocates, who reside in some of the city’s most polluted neighborhoods, to whom environmental information is critical to their health and safety.

The bulk of the library's work is in serving the EPA's scientists, researchers and policy makers, providing them with the information that they need to make informed decisions, and under the Bush Administration's plan, both the documents and the information specialists who organize and provide it to the EPA's staff will be gone.

Surprisingly, far from fighting the proposed budget cuts, EPA management, over the objection of 10,000 of it’s own scientists who have signed a petition in protest, started implementing a shutdown of services over the last several months, when Congress was not in session – before the Presidents proposed budget was even debated, much less approved (which it still has not).

On their own initiative, the Bush appointee led EPA has closed the libraries in Dallas, Chicago and Kansas City, MO. The library in Washington, D.C., while nominally still open to EPA staff, has been closed to the public.

The EPA has responded that it plans to put documents online, but as the Special Library Association noted, they have not put forward a concrete proposal to do so, have been discarding document originals before copies can be made, and in fact, have been deleting born-digital files from its website, a move that does not save the EPA any funding.

POLITICS - Another Example of Our Bought-and-Paid-For Administration

"EPA May Drop Lead Air Pollution Limits" by John Heilprin, Washington Post

The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments.

Battery makers, lead smelters, refiners all have lobbied the administration to do away with the Clean Air Act limits.

A preliminary staff review released by the Environmental Protection Agency this week acknowledged the possibility of dropping the health standards for lead air pollution. The agency says revoking those standards might be justified "given the significantly changed circumstances since lead was listed in 1976" as an air pollutant.

The EPA says concentrations of lead in the air have dropped more than 90 percent in the past 2 1/2 decades.

But Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the incoming chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, called on the agency to "renounce this dangerous proposal immediately," because lead, a highly toxic element, can cause severe nerve damage, especially in children.

"This deregulatory effort cannot be defended," Waxman wrote EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.

However, on Wednesday night, Marcus Peacock, the Environmental Protection Agency's No. 2 official, approved new guidance to help the agency follow the law in a timelier fashion.

"Starting with lead, we're going to try to dovetail this in," Peacock said of the new guidance, which he said also would help the agency use the most up-to-date science and keep separate its scientific and policy considerations.

The health standards for air pollutants are intended to protect children, elderly and other "sensitive" populations, keep up visibility and limit damage to animals, crops, vegetation and buildings.

In July, a Washington-based trade group for all U.S. lead battery makers wrote a top EPA air quality official to urge that the agency remove lead from its list of air pollutants.

"That is not to say that air emissions of lead should be uncontrolled, or that no steps should be taken to address public health concerns arising from lead use," the Battery Council International said. "But many other regulatory vehicles exist for meeting these concerns."

BS! Another example of big busine$$ holding their profits as more important than our health, especially children, and the planet. And our fine "ethical" Administration is right there to help them.

And I'm not the only one of this opinion: "Bush was against our children breathing lead before he was for it"