Here is my line-by-line of Evan Halper’s error-filled report in the Los Angeles Times.
The article is below. My in-line comments are in [bold brackets].
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EPA used disavowed research to justify putting dirtier trucks on the road
By EVAN HALPER
MAY 29, 2018, Los Angeles Times
At a time when acts of defiance against the Trump administration are routine in Sacramento, the rebuke that breezed through the California Assembly this month still came as a jolt. Even Trump loyalists in the chamber joined in.
The message to the administration was clear: Forget about your plan to unleash on freeways a class of rebuilt trucks that spew as much as 400 times the choking soot that conventional new big rigs do. [There is NO credible/reliable evidence to back up this 400x claim. As far as I can tell, it is just a Big Trucking-invented lie.] Getting caught behind the wheel of one of these mega-polluters in California would carry a punishing $25,000 minimum fine under the measure that lawmakers passed 73 to 0. It had the support of 25 Republicans. [Not the first Republicans, especially California Republicans, to cast ignorant votes.]
“This was a reaction,” said Chris Shimoda, vice president of government affairs for the California Trucking Assn., which sponsored the legislation. “A lot of people have made the investments to clean up their trucks. [California Trucking Association is part of the Big Trucking mafia that wants to put little trucking (i.e., glider truck makers and their customers) out of business. In all likelihood, CTA put the LATimes up to doing this hit piece.] They don’t want to see an obvious loophole that allows others to be gross polluters and undercut them.” [“Gross polluter” is a false talking point developed by Big Trucking. Gliders are not “gross polluters.” Big Trucking knows this but is lying anyway. Gliders have never failed an emissions test, even in California and Colorado.]
Equally strong reactions are rippling across the country in response to the Trump administration’s push to boost a cottage industry eager to sell trucks that run on rebuilt diesel engines. The trucks look new from the outside, but are equipped with repurposed motors that, according to the EPA’s own experts, threaten to produce enough soot each year to cause up to 1,600 premature deaths. [Total BS. No one dies from anything emitted by any vehicle on the road anywhere.]
Trump’s EPA has tried to justify the move by citing a privately funded study that claimed the trucks did not cause more pollution, but even the university that conducted the research has now cast doubt on the findings. [No. The study is robust. No one has challenged that. However, the professor charged with oversight of the study (but who provided no actual oversight) was pressured by Big Trucking forces to disown the study.]
Air regulators loathe the proposal to allow thousands more of the trucks on the roads. [The the junk science-fueled insanity — if not criminality — of the California Air Resources Board and other blue-state air regulators is well-known.] Most of the trucking industry feels the same. [Big Trucking (funded by engine manufacturers and new truck makers that want to sell more, and needlessly expensive trucks) doesn’t like gliders. Small trucking firms (that can get great performing rehab-ed trucks for 25% less than the cost of a new truck) love gliders.] Even the White House budget office and several conservative allies of the administration are balking. [OMB has been lied to by Big Trucking and so has become a tool of Big Trucking.]
“We urge you to consider the adverse impact on the economy,” said a letter that the Environmental Protection Agency recently disclosed from the Republican senators of Indiana, West Virginia and North Carolina. [Gliders amount to about 1% of the truck sales market. And what about the “adverse impact” on the part of the economy that relies on gliders?] They warned EPA chief Scott Pruitt that the plan is ill-advised and disruptive to industry. [Yes, gliders are disruptive to the Big Trucking racket of forcing trucking firms to purchase ever more needlessly expensive equipment.] Ten House Republicans concurred in their own letter, which warned the proposal is a potential job-killer. “We respectfully ask that you carefully consider the negative impacts,” the GOP lawmakers wrote. [JunkScience.com discovered that Chinese-owned Volvo Trucks is behind these letters — even drafting them for congressional signature.]
Yet the EPA is undeterred. Its crusade to lift an Obama-era ban on these heavily polluting vehicles known as “gliders” perseveres, largely at the behest of a small group of activists on the right and one generous political donor, Tennessee businessman Tommy Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, who has met privately with Pruitt and who held a campaign event in 2016 for Trump at one of his facilities, says restricting the sale of the trucks and the kits to build them threatens 22,000 jobs. [Imagine that. The Trump EPA championing a small US-based success story vs. Chinese-owned Volvo Trucks. Who’d a thunk it?]
Pruitt says the restrictions on the trucks were a misuse of Clean Air Act regulations. [They were. A gross abuse. An unbelievable gross abuse. You can read about that in my January Wall Street Journal op-ed.]
In announcing the rollback, Pruitt’s agency ignored its own findings about how much environmental damage the vehicles cause. [False. There are no such findings. Unbelievably, Big Trucking was able to get a rogue EPA lab to conduct some unauthorized and bogus testing on mysteriously sourced gliders, but this “study” is garbage.] Instead, it cited a new study from Tennessee Tech University that concluded, astonishingly, that the glider trucks were no more harmful to air quality than trucks with new engines. That study was bankrolled by Fitzgerald’s business. [No one has shown the TTU results are in error.]
The results of the study came as a shock to experts at the EPA, and also to the engineering faculty at Tennessee Tech.
“Tennessee Tech has skills in some areas, but air pollution is an area we have never worked in,” said David Huddleston, an engineering professor at the university. “I thought, who on campus knows enough to actually even offer an opinion on that? We have one guy who has some expertise in emissions, but he wasn’t even involved in this.” [The study is about engine emissions, not air pollution. The study results have not been found to be in error. Huddleston’s comment about lack of expertise is obvisouly not true and, in any event, Huddleston seems to have violated university investigation policy by speaking to the media.]
The faculty would soon learn the study was run by a university vice president who lacked any graduate level engineering training, and that it was conducted at a Fitzgerald-owned facility. Tennessee Tech’s president and Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) — who has accepted more than $200,000 in political donations from Fitzgerald, his companies and top employees — had lobbied Pruitt to embrace the research. [Unless there is something wrong with Fitzgerald’s equipment, I’m not sure what the problem is. Where was Evan Halpern’s concern about the totally bogus EPA lab test of gliders? Political contributions are not illegal or even inappropriate. Diane Black is defending her constituent. What is wrong with that?]
The Tennessee study quickly came under suspicion. Notes from discussions between EPA scientists and its authors revealed major flaws. [The suspicion was generated by Big Trucking and its allies. There are no known flaws in the study.] The EPA scientists then updated their own tests of glider vehicles, which confirmed the trucks are substantially dirtier than newly manufactured trucks. [This is false and misleading. Gliders are used all over the country and have never failed an emissions test — even in places like California and Colorado.]
The head of Tennessee Tech’s engineering department dismissed the study’s key conclusion as a “far-fetched, scientifically implausible claim” by a research team that included “no qualified, credentialed engineer.” The faculty senate passed a resolution demanding the university revoke its support for the study and launch an investigation. [TTU has succumbed to political pressure from Big Trucking. No errors have been found in the test.]
By late February, the university asked the EPA to stop using or referring to the study, pending its investigation. That investigation continues.
“The university takes the allegations of research misconduct seriously,” the school said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “Tennessee Tech is still in the process of following its internal procedures related to such matters.”
Despite Pruitt’s earlier acknowledgment that the study factored into his decision to revisit the glider vehicle restrictions, an EPA spokesperson said in an email last week that “it played no role” in the action the EPA is now taking. [That is true. As explained in my WSJ op-ed, the Trump EPA is reversing the bogus determination by the Obama EPA that gliders are new trucks.]
Two former EPA chiefs are skeptical. [Airhead] Christine Todd Whitman, who led the agency under George W. Bush, and [Comrade] Carol Browner, who led it under Bill Clinton, pointed out in a March letter to Pruitt that the industry’s petition that prompted the EPA to act on glider trucks relied heavily on the now disavowed study. [False. The decision to rollback the Obama rule is based on the bogosity of the Obama EPA’s determination that gliders are new trucks.] They urged him to withdraw the proposal.
Fitzgerald’s company is refusing to publicly release the full study, which it owns under its arrangement with the school. But it has cast itself as the victim. [The study is being held up pending the outcome of the TTU ‘investigation’. Fitzgerald would probably love to release the results.]
“We did not expect to receive work product that some have characterized as ‘flawed and shoddy’ or ‘far-fetched and scientifically implausible,’ and we certainly did not expect to be defamed by faculty members and administrators from the very institution that conducted the research,” a company lawyer wrote to university officials earlier this year.
The company later demanded that four faculty members who have spoken out against the research and the company’s involvement in it turn over any emails they wrote about the matter. [Yes. Let’s expose Big Trucking’s machinations.]
“It’s a mess,” said Huddleston. “All these professors are trying to do is the right thing. And now they have had to go out and hire lawyers to protect themselves. It’s sad.” [Maybe Big Trucking will pay the bills.]
Rep. Black recently told Nashville Public Radio that she had no regrets about using the study to try to help the glider business. She said glider manufacturers are in a noble “David and Goliath” battle with much larger trucking interests seeking to crush them. [True dat.]
But even some at the White House are chafing. Its budget office directed the EPA to undertake an extensive economic review that will hold things up for weeks and could reveal more legal vulnerabilities. The free market think tank FreedomWorks has, in turn, launched a campaign to pressure the White House to approve the EPA’s plan promptly, without requiring the economic analysis. [Gliders are not new trucks. The rulemaking could only be about new trucks. The inclusion of gliders in the Obama EPA rule was totally bogus.]
It remains to be seen whether Pruitt will prevail. But if he succeeds, glider truck drivers could find themselves entering California at their own risk. Backers of the $25,000 penalties that the Assembly approved said they would expect to see them enforced, regardless of how the EPA proceeds. The bill appears likely to pass the state Senate and be signed into law. [Ridiculous. Gliders are on the road in California and have never been flagged as a problem or failed an emissions test.]
Asked how it would confront that challenge, the agency demurred. “EPA has not yet taken a final action,” said the email from its press office, “and will not comment on hypothetical outcomes before the process is complete.” [See you in court.]