Category: EPA

Junkman's fantasy: Budget impasse sends 90% of EPA apparatchiks home!

Greenwire reports,

About nine out of every 10 U.S. EPA employees will be furloughed if Congress and the president can’t reach an eleventh-hour budget deal, according to contingency plans released by the agency this morning.

But what about the children?

As I wrote in the Washington Times on February 9,

The EPA is coming for our jobs, electricity and economy. The Obama administration is preparing to make cap-and-trade look like a walk in the park compared to EPA regulation. Its regulatory apparatus is running amok.

Cut the EPA’s budget. Cut it in March. Close down the federal government if necessary. Save us now.

March may not have worked out, but cutting the EPA’s budget in April works, too.

64 Senators vote to delay/block EPA greenhouse gas regulation

Although today’s four efforts to rollback EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations failed, they nonetheless demonstrated that 64 Senators (17 Democrats and 47 Republicans) support some sort of delay/blockage of EPA greenhouse gas regulation.

Beyond bias: Trade press recasts Rockefeller as an 'EPA skeptic'

We’re all familiar with the so-called mainstream media’s so-called “liberal bias.” Putting aside that the MSM is not “mainstream” and their bias is way to the left of “liberal,” it’s no secret that this bias often-to-usually colors how the MSM reports news stories. But simple bias is not the entire extent of the MSM’s breech of journalistic ethics. Continue reading Beyond bias: Trade press recasts Rockefeller as an 'EPA skeptic'

Defund EPA's enablers: American Lung Association gets big paycheck for backing agency’s agenda

By Steve Milloy
April 1, 2011, Washington Times

NPR is not the only partisan political organization that ought to have its public funding cut. Congress should put the American Lung Association (ALA) on the chopping block, too. Continue reading Defund EPA's enablers: American Lung Association gets big paycheck for backing agency’s agenda

Sen. cRockefeller misleads public on McConnell amendment

While demagoguing the McConnell amendment to block EPA regulation of greenhouse gases this afternoon, Sen. Jay Rockefeller repeatedly lied to the public by claiming that the McConnell amendment would “permanently” block the EPA from acting on greenhouse gases — regardless of what happened in the future in terms of scientific knowledge about climate.

This, of course, is not true and Sen. Rockefeller knows better. That is, whatever law is passed today, can be amended or repealed in the future. The McConnell amendment simply blocks the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases until Congress gives the agency the legal authority.

Read more about Sen. cRockefeller’s game at Stop EPA Now!.

EPA pays American Lung Association to attack GOP?

“The American Lung Association has targeted House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton for his efforts to stop U.S. EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions by placing billboards within sight of his district offices linking climate change with increased childhood asthma,” reports E&E News PM.

But as we reported last week in “EPA owns the American Lung Association,” the EPA has paid the American Lung Association over $20 million in the last ten years, and has paid the ALA many more millions in a symbiotic relationship going back to at least 1990.

The EPA-ALA relationship works something like this: EPA pays the ALA and, in return, the ALA agitates for more stringent EPA air quality regulation, including by lawsuit. Now the ALA is attacking a politician who is aiming to rein in the out-of-control agency.

In addition to defunding National Public Radio, the House GOP should look at the EPA’s funding of American Lung Association. This abuse of taxpayer money is also a good subject for watchdog Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA).

EPA owns the American Lung Association

At today’s House Energy and Commerce Committee mark-up of the Upton-Inhofe bill to strip EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases, Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.) tried to defend the EPA by offering a recent American Lung Association poll that purports to show public opinion favoring the EPA.

What Congress needs to know, however, is that the American Lung Association is bought-and-paid-for by the EPA. In the last 10 years, the EPA has given the ALA $20,405,655, according to EPA records.

The master-servant relationship between the EPA and ALA extends back to at least the early 1990s. As John Merline reported in Investors Business Daily (Jan. 28, 1997), between 1990 and 1995, the EPA gave the American Lung Association $5 million — even though the ALA was suing the EPA at the time. Although not many grantors give grants to organizations that sue them, at least in the regular world, the EPA likes to be sued by its buddies because such lawsuits invariably expand the agency’s powers.

So it’s not really surprising (or meaningful) that the ALA issued a poll supporting the EPA.

EPA Goes Man-Hunting

By Steven Milloy
December 18, 2008, FoxNews.com

It’s little wonder why the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list doesn’t include anyone accused of breaking federal environmental laws. It’s hard to argue that a father-son team accused of illegally importing Alfa Romeo sports cars that don’t meet U.S. tailpipe emissions standards is the criminal equivalent of the likes of Usama bin Laden or the other hardened sociopaths for whom the FBI warns the public to remain on the lookout.

But the Environmental Protection Agency has now cured its apparent case of outlaw-envy with the launch of its own “Wanted” list last week. Hoping to “track down environmental fugitives,” the agency wants to “increase the number of ‘eyes’ looking for environmental fugitives.”

In addition to the Alfa Romeo Gang believed to be hiding out in Italy (so remain alert on your next visit to Tuscany), the EPA wants us to keep an eye out for Mauro Valenzuela, an airplane mechanic criminally charged for improperly loading oxygen canisters thought to have caused the tragic 1996 crash of ValuJet flight 592.

But converting the crash into an environmental crime seems a stretch. The EPA apparently views the canister loading as “illegal transportation of hazardous material.” In any event, Valenzuela’s boss and co-worker were eventually acquitted of the same criminal counts. The only reason Valenzuela also wasn’t acquitted was because he panicked and fled to parts unknown before trial. He is, in effect, a fugitive from his own innocence — but he is wanted by the EPA nonetheless.

The rest of the EPA’s fugitives appear to be mostly hapless immigrants now believed to be “hiding” oversees in places like Syria, Mexico, India, Greece, Poland and China. They’re wanted for a variety of alleged infractions, including smuggling banned refrigerants, discharging waste into sewers, lying to the Coast Guard about a ship’s waste oil management system, transporting hazardous waste without a manifest, and creating false official documents.

While the EPA’s fugitives certainly appear to be a motley lot who may have broken a variety of environmental regulations, often unwittingly, one can’t help but wonder whether the EPA’s Wanted list is not only over-the-top, but where the agency is headed.

We, of course, don’t want people breaking environmental laws, however technical or trivial, but there’s hardly a moral equivalence between a food delivery man who, in a panic, drained 32 gallons of gasoline into a storm sewer and Islamic terrorists who have declared war on America.

The list’s creation seems a furtherance of the Greens’ larger campaign to plant the idea within the public’s mind that all environmental “transgressions” fall along a criminal continuum.

Unlike the FBI’s Wanted list, which spotlights a number of truly dangerous characters accused of causing actual harm to real people — murder, kidnapping, rape, child molestation, armed robbery and the like — the EPA’s fugitives are wanted for violations that seem to have caused little, if any, harm to anyone or the environment.

It’s too bad, however, that you can’t say the same thing about the EPA’s Enforcement Division.

In September 1988, the EPA had John Pozsgai indicted for removing more than 5,000 old tires from his property and spreading dirt where the tires had been. Although Pozsgai’s land was bordered by two major highways, a tire dealership and an automobile salvage yard, the EPA considered his land a federally protected “wetland” because of a drainage ditch running along the edge of his property. Though the ditch was mostly dry, it flooded during heavy rain, and the EPA considered it a stream. When Pozsgai filled the ditch without a permit, EPA undercover agents secretly filmed the dump trucks that delivered the topsoil. Though his actions didn’t create any pollution, endanger any species or water quality, Pozsgai was sentenced to three years in prison and fined more than $200,000.

In 1997, nearly two dozen federal agents, armed with semiautomatic pistols, showed up at James Knott’s wire-mesh manufacturing plant in Massachusetts. Knott was indicted on two counts of violating the Clean Water Act for allegedly pumping acidic water into the town sewer system. The EPA publicly condemned Knott and warned that his conviction could result in up to six years in prison and a $1.5 million fine. The case was subsequently dropped when it was discovered that the EPA had omitted vital information from the search warrant information indicating that Knott wasn’t violating the law.

What is the future of eco-crime? A man in the U.K. was fined $215 for leaving the lid of his trash can ajar by more than three inches. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proposed last July to deputize garbage men to fine people as much as $1,000 for mixing trash with recyclables. Garbage cops, however, pale in comparison to the call earlier this year by NASA’s global warming alarmist, James Hansen, to put the CEOs of oil and coal companies on trial for “high crimes against humanity and nature” — a sentiment first broached in 2006 by a blogger for Grist magazine who called for a “climate Nuremburg” for those who have questioned the need for global warming regulation. Is this really the direction in which we want to go?

It could just be that the real threat to society comes not from a couple of guys selling a few European sports cars that don’t meet stringent U.S. tailpipe standards, but those who use the environment as an excuse to commit crime like, say, the elusive Earth Liberation Front (ELF) terrorists whose arson and vandalism targets have included homes, university buildings, a ski lodge, SUVs, SUV dealerships and more. What’s the EPA doing about ELF?

If the EPA needs a Wanted list, how about making it a “Help Wanted” list in search of Enforcement Division employees with some perspective?

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and manages the Free Enterprise Action Fund. He is a junk science expert and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The EPA's Secret Science

By Steven Milloy
February 2, 2001, FoxNews.com

“Independent Institute Finds Key Pollution Studies Are Sound Science,” blared a recent press release from the American Lung Association.

Yet one of the most controversial “junk science” issues of recent years — whether air pollution causes premature death — will remain controversial for the foreseeable future despite activist claims and media headlines.

The ALA goes on to say studies show “once again that air pollution shortens lives, and strong [Environmental Protection Agency] standards are needed to protect public health.”

But the reality is somewhat different — at least according to Health Effects Institute, the organization whose research the ALA cited.

The saga started in November 1996 when the EPA proposed more stringent regulation of airborne particulate matter, otherwise known as soot. The EPA initially claimed further regulation would prevent 20,000 “premature deaths” every year at an annual cost of $8 billion. By valuing each life saved at about $5 million, the EPA estimated the monetary benefits of saving these lives at $100 billion per year.

But the validity of the EPA’s estimates is in question. In particular, the estimate of premature deaths was based on the “Pope study,” so called for its lead researcher, C. Arden Pope of Brigham Young University. The Pope study reported that airborne particulates were associated with a 17 percent increase in premature deaths. But this result constituted only a weak statistical correlation — not scientific proof of a cause-and-effect relationship between air particulate pollution and premature death.

Although the study included more than 550,000 people, the researchers did not measure the level of exposure to air pollution for even one study subject. Instead, they guessed how much pollution these individuals might have encountered. The researchers also failed to look at the subjects’ diets, income, health histories, genetic predispositions to illness, exercise habits and social habits — all well-established risk factors for premature death.

The study did adjust for some factors — including smoking habits, education level and occupational exposures — but additional adjustments could easily negate the purported 17 percent increase in risk.

A further problem was that no one has ever demonstrated how typical levels of airborne particulates could cause premature death.

In this context, the reported correlation could easily have been a statistical artifact. According to the National Cancer Institute, “In epidemiologic research, [risks of less than 100 percent] are considered small and usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident.”

But the EPA did not back down — even when an elementary statistical error in the EPA’s calculations was discovered that knocked down the lives-saved estimated to 15,000 or when some economists estimated the proposal’s cost to exceed $100 billion annually.

The controversy prompted Congress to ask the EPA to produce the Pope study’s raw data so independent scientists could check the results.

The EPA initially balked, saying there was no purpose in any re-analysis of the EPA-funded study. Finally, after issuing the regulations, the EPA did provide access to the data — to the Health Effects Institute, a Massachusetts-based research organization funded by the EPA and the auto industry.

HEI issued its report last week, three years after the regulations were finalized. The results are not quite as the ALA press release touts.

Using essentially the identical methodology as the Pope study researchers, HEI produced virtually the same results — hardly a surprise. A naive media reported this “replication” in headlines such as “Research on Air Particles Passes Muster” and “Studies Back Particulates’ Link to Death.”

But the re-analysis has essentially the same shortcomings as the original study. The researchers did not factor into their analysis the effect of diet or genetics on death rates. Data on exercise habits were factored in, and ended up reducing risk estimates by almost 30 percent. But the quality of the data on exercise is debatable; incredibly, it indicates no difference in death rates between non-exercising study subjects and heavy-exercising study subjects. Better quality exercise data could have an even more dramatic effect on the numbers.

There is a similar data-quality problem with health history. The re-analysis paradoxically indicates that healthy study subjects had twice the risk of premature death of diseased study subjects.

Neither of these data problems is surprising given how the study data were collected. The American Cancer Society amassed the data by having 70,000 volunteers — not trained data-collection specialists — go to their friends, family and neighbors and ask personal, health-related questions. No effort was made to verify or validate the study subjects’ responses.

It’s no wonder the HEI concluded its report: “It is important to bear in mind that the results of our re-analysis alone are insufficient to identify a causal relation with mortality.”

So why did the ALA jump to its conclusion? That question perplexed HEI’s president Daniel Greenbaum, who noted the ALA issued a press release last April titled “New Health Research ‘Vindicates’ EPA; Soot Particles Are Deadly, Lung Association Notes” — three months before the HEI report was made available to the public.

The explanation, though, lies with the finances and politics of the ALA. As first reported by Investors Business Daily in January 1997, “The ALA has had a long — and lucrative — relationship with the EPA.” In the years before the EPA air-pollution proposal, the agency gave the ALA almost $5 million — despite the ALA suing the EPA almost every year claiming the agency wasn’t complying with the nation’s air-pollution laws.

“If you think the EPA is upset with the ALA suing them, think again,” said Scott Segal, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney. “Truth be known, the EPA wants to be sued, because every time they are sued it expands the reach of the Clean Air Act.”

Unfortunately for the ALA and the EPA, another lawsuit has pre-empted the claimed “vindication” of the Pope study. A federal appellate court overturned the EPA regulations in May 1999 on a number of grounds. The case is pending before the Supreme Court.

No doubt more research will continue into the potential health effects of air pollution. But another byproduct of the Pope study controversy may change the shape of the next scientific debate. Because of difficulty in obtaining the Pope study data, a federal law was enacted in October 1998 requiring that federally funded scientific data used to support federal policy must be publicly available through the Freedom of Information Act.

With any luck, the next debate over the potential health effects of air pollution won’t be hampered by EPA’s “secret science.”

Steven Milloy is a biostatistician, lawyer, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and publisher of Junkscience.com.