My oral testimony from today’s EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) meeting to finalize its letter trashing 25 years worth of EPA particulate matter junk science.
Good morning. I am Steve Milloy. I publish JunkScience.com.
I want to commend CASAC for condemning the EPA staff’s PM assessment.
The CASAC letter says the draft assessment:
does not provide a sufficiently comprehensive, systematic assessment of the available science due largely to lack of a comprehensive, systematic review of relevant scientific literature.
CASAC said there was:
inadequate evidence and rationale for altered causal determinations and a need for clearer discussion of causality and causal biological mechanisms and pathways.
That’s true and fantastic.
Let’s review why this obliteration of 25 years of EPA junk science is long overdue.
First, the epidemiology used by EPA is not science — it’s, at best, just statistics.
And statistical associations by themselves are not science.
Accordingly, EPA admitted in federal litigation that epidemiology alone is an inadequate for determining causality.
This should be no surprise.
Every Epi 101 student learns it. It’s basic. Epidemiology by itself is never appropriate for determining causality.
In addition to this fundamental shortcoming, the data used in the PM epidemiology are of terrible quality.
The exposure data, for example, are poorly guesstimated and often overwhelmed by other PM exposures, especially smoking.
It’s no wonder that EPA staff allow agency grantees to hide their data from public scrutiny.
It’s no wonder that EPA staff ignore all the PM epidemiology studies that report no association between PM and death.
Moving on from the wasteland that is PM epidemiology, let’s look at PM toxicology.
There is no lab animal experiment that has produced deaths in animals – despite intense PM exposures.
There is no human clinical experiment that has produced health effects let alone deaths despite exposing elderly and sick people to intense PM levels.
Again, this is no surprise, since there are no real-world examples where PM has killed anyone ever.
Smokers can inhale thousands of times more PM than nonsmokers and have the same life expectancy.
PM levels in Chinese and Indian cities can be a 100 times greater than US outdoor air – but there are no reports of actual deaths from inhaling Chinese or Indian air.
Historic incidents of deadly air pollution were caused by acidic gases concentrated in the air, not PM.
Coal miners and diesel workers have large exposures to PM – but they have greater life expectancy than workers not occupationally exposed to PM.
And guess what, when PM levels are reduced, deaths don’t go down.
Instead, EPA staff ignores this real-world data, doubles down on the fraud and raves that PM is more dangerous than ever.
EPA staff is so crazy, it has turned the innocuous carbon particle into what is essentially the most toxic substance known to man.
That is nuts.
All the foregoing is indisputable – especially since no one has dared dispute it with me or anyone else that is clued into the PM scam.
So how did we get to a place where EPA staff advises an administrator – namely Lisa Jackson in her 2011 testimony before Congress — that PM is responsible for 570,000 U.S, deaths every year or 1 in 5 deaths in America?
Since 1996 the last time CASAC told EPA that there is no evidence PM kills EPA staff has funneled at least $600 million to university researchers willing to commit scientific fraud in order to invent and maintain the lie that PM kills.
After the 1996 CASAC review, EPA staff saw to it that future CASAC review boards were staffed and controlled by the same researchers funded to commit the PM science fraud.
The current CASAC board is the first one in more than 20 years not to be run by the fraudsters.
And I would be remiss if I omitted mention of the Health Effects Institute.
HEI is funded by EPA and car, truck and engine manufacturers.
The industry guys want more stringent PM standards so they can sell ever more pointlessly expensive vehicles and engines.
HEI is hardly an objective forum.
Others and myself have asked HEI to sponsor a debate on PM.
But HEI has repeatedly dodged these requests, apparently since the last thing it wants is to have the PM fraud exposed.
So where does all this leave us?
For now CASAC has called a halt to PM nonsense. That’s great.
But the future will undoubtedly see more desperate PM science fraud come out of places like the Harvard TC Chan School of Public Health, which in case you didn’t know is funded by Communist China.
None of the PM fraudsters can reputationally afford to walk back their junk science.
Nor would their Chinese overlords want them to.
China is more than happy to fund research calling for insanely stringent PM rules to sabotage the American economy.
In short, the PM fraudsters gonna lie ‘til they die.
The ironic news for them is that PM won’t be responsible.
Finally, if you don’t believe what I’ve said, you just ask HEI’s Dan Greenbaum to sponsor a public forum where these issues are openly and honestly debated.
Just don’t hold your breath waiting for him to do it.
Thanks for listening.