My American Greatness summary of the recent New York Times jihad on EPA chief Scott Pruitt over his ban of secret science at EPA.
New York Times Melts Down Over EPA’s Secret Science Ban
By Steve Milloy
April 3, 2018 American Greatness (amgreatness.com)
The New York Times is spittin’ mad at Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt. In just the past week, the paper has attacked Pruitt four times – from the front-page to the editorial page — following his announcement that the agency would not longer be permitted to rely on so-called “secret science” as a basis for taking regulatory action. And at no point in this onslaught has the Times allowed the truth to intervene.
Since 1994, EPA and university researchers it funds have been hiding scientific data from Congress and the public data. EPA has used the data and studies in question since 1997 as the basis for issuing unnecessary and draconian (if not outright punitive) air quality regulations. During the Obama years, EPA relied on these studies to issue regulations that wiped out 94 percent of the market value of the U.S. coal industry. The largest companies were forced into bankruptcy. Thousands of miner jobs were killed, wreaking havoc on communities that depended on the jobs.
In 1994, an EPA external science advisory board known as the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee asked EPA for the data, but the request was ignored by the agency. In 1997, Congress requested the data and was refused. In 1998, Congress passed a law requiring that scientific data relied on by the agency must be made available to the public. But an appellate court held the law unenforceable in 1998.
In 2011, Congress again began politely asking EPA for the data. No luck. So in 2013, Congress issued its first subpoena in 30 years to force EPA to produce the data. Again, no luck. The House then began passing bills ¾ three of them in successive sessions of Congress¾ to bar EPA from relying on secret data to issue regulations. But all got stuck in the Senate, including the current bill known as the HONEST Act. (The secret science sags is told in full in my book “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” and summarized in my March 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed).
Since Congress can’t or won’t act, Pruitt has taken the reins and recently announced that the agency will no longer rely on studies with secret data.
Although the new policy has not been officially released, Pruitt announced his intent to issue it in an interview with the Daily Caller. This triggered the Times into a frency of dishonest reporting and editorializing.
A March 27 front-page screed labeled the ban on secret data as an “attack on science.” Although I have led the charge against EPA’s secret science for the past 20 years and spoke at length with two Times’ reporters for the article, none of my comments made the article. Nor did the Times include any comments from the key researchers who are hiding their data. Instead, the Times quoted people with little to no familiarity with the issue, the most appalling of which was the official from the American Association for the Advancement of Science who told the Times that banning secret science “is not about science” but rather just an an attack on regulation. (My line-by-line commentary on the NYTimes article is here.)
On the same day as the front-page article, the Times ran an op-ed from Gina McCarthy, the Obama EPA chief who in 2011 told Congress she would produce the data. She never did. Not only was McCarthy’s op-ed full of the usual false claims about the secret science controversy, but her op-ed failed to disclose her post-EPA affiliation with the Harvard TC Chan School of Public Health – one of the taxpayer-funded universities involved in hiding the controversial air quality data. (My line-by-line commentary on the op-ed is here.)
March 30 saw the publication of dutifully hysterical letters to the editor raving that “the discrediting of science is a shocking new piece of American life” and that Pruitt was “rolling back science-based safeguards.”
Finally, on March 31, the Times published a wild editorial accusing Pruitt of “muzzling scientific inquiry” and being “determined to destroy” EPA all in the hope of someday becoming president. (My line-by-line commentary on the editorial is here.)
All this raving aside, Pruitt is taking steps to end what I believe is the largest and most devastating case of scientific fraud ever. Moreover, EPA has spent about $600 million to prop up the claims made by the original (taxpayer-funded) secret science studies. If all this is on the up-and-up, as the New York Times and McCarthy claim. I’ll eat my words. But let’s see the data first.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com, served on the Trump EPA transition team and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” (Bench Press, 2016).