The Environmental Protection Agency's new rule will protect polluters, not the environment

Here's a neat political trick: if you want to introduce a new law, but you know people will hate it, give it a misleading, nice-sounding name. It's surprising how well this works. Let me explain.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded in 1970 under Republican President Richard Nixon, and since that time it has helped the country clean up our air, water, and soil at thousands of locations. For many years, the agency was a bipartisan success.

Now, though, the EPA is run by a former coal industry lobbyist, Andrew Wheeler, and it seems more concerned with protecting polluters than with the environment. The latest example is a newly proposed rule that will allow the EPA to ignore a vast swath of scientific research that demonstrates the harmful effects of pollution on people's health. This includes research on the damage caused by burning coal and other fossil fuels.

(I should note that this new proposal was first introduced by the previous EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, another friend of the fossil fuel industry who sued the EPA 14 times while serving as attorney general for Oklahoma.)

If the EPA were being honest, it would call this new proposal something like "Ignoring the Science on the Harmful Effects of Pollution." Of course, Congress would never go near a proposal like that, so instead the EPA calls it "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science."

Huh? How can they do that?

Well, there's nothing to prevent the EPA from calling this proposal "Motherhood and Apple Pie," but they like to pretend the title has something to do with the content of the new regulation. And it does.

Here's what the new regulations do: they will allow the EPA to ignore any science where the public doesn't have access to all of the underlying data–including private, individually identifiable health data. The EPA is pretending that this rule all about openness and transparency (who could object to that?), but actually it's not that at all. It's really about protecting the fossil fuel industry.

As The New York Times reported two years ago, 

"the proposed new policy has its roots in the fossil fuel industry’s opposition to a groundbreaking 1993 Harvard University study that definitively linked polluted air to premature deaths.... In that study, which began in the mid-1970s, scientists signed confidentiality agreements so they could track the private medical and occupational histories of more than 22,000 individuals in six cities around the country."

So apparently the fossil fuel industry thought: hmm, how do we prevent the EPA from regulating us when this high-quality study shows that pollution kills? They couldn't successfully attack the study, so they concocted the strategy of demanding all the confidential data on the participants. When they were told that the data would have to remain secret, they saw their opening: "transparency" would be their mode of attack, aided by their lobbyists Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler.

The Harvard study and hundreds of others like it, which have shown time and time again that air pollution kills people, will be ignored if the proposed new EPA regulation goes into effect.

Not surprisingly, public health scientists and medical experts have spoken out strongly against the EPA's proposed new rules. The American Association for the Advancement of Science said, in a statement last month, that the rules would allow the EPA "to exclude the best available science from informing EPA regulations, making it difficult for the agency to fulfill its mission to protect environmental and human health." Writing in The Hill, biostatisticians Roger Peng (a colleague of mine) and Steve Pierson wrote that the new rule 

"weakens EPA’s scientific process and undermines its mission to protect the environment and the health of the U.S. population." 

And an environmental policy watchdog, EDGI, called it 

"a comprehensive assault on science in agency decision-making."

So that's how it's done. The EPA wants to enable more pollution for its friends in the fossil fuel industry, but they can't say that out loud. The only beneficiaries of this newly proposed rule will be industries that don't want to pay for the cost of cleaning up their pollution. Meanwhile, everyone who breathes air–which, the last time I checked, included every human being on the planet–will suffer from dirtier air, water, and soil.

But don't tell that to the EPA. They are still claiming that this is just about "transparency."

How not to respond to the EPA's science denialism

You would think that the editors of the top science journals in the world would know how to write clearly. But if you read their joint statement in the journal Science last week, you might be forgiven for wondering what the heck they are talking about. It's not that complicated, really. Let me explain.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, when he's not busy taking expensive trips, renting rooms at a deep discount from coal lobbyists, or building $48,000 soundproof booths for his office, is doing his best to make the U.S. a friendly place for fossil fuel industries. As part of his pollution-friendly mission, Pruitt denies the scientific consensus that climate change is real and is caused in part by human activities, especially by carbon dioxide emissions.

Pruitt has devised a clever new strategy to make science denialism part of official EPA policy, while pretending otherwise: he's issued a new proposed rule that requires the EPA to use only "transparent" science. (The official Federal Register entry is here.) In his press release, Pruitt stated

"The era of secret science at EPA is coming to an end. The ability to test, authenticate, and reproduce scientific findings is vital for the integrity of rulemaking process."

The press release, which is titled "EPA Administrator Pruitt Proposes Rule To Strengthen Science Used In EPA Regulations", seems to be all about science and openness. One thing I've got to give them credit for: the PR people at the EPA know how to obfuscate.

It turns out this is just a ruse. As Pruitt certainly knows, many of the EPA's rules are based on studies of human subjects, which are governed by strict privacy rules–which are necessary not only to get people to participate in the studies, but also because violating people's privacy can be highly unethical. This means that many studies showing the harms of pollution–for example, this massive study, which found that fine-scale particulate matter from coal plants increases the risk of lung and heart disease–are not "transparent" enough for the EPA, because the identities of the participants as well as all their health records are confidential.

In other words, the new EPA policy isn't about scientific transparency. It's a transparent (!) attempt to ignore the negative health effects of pollution, so that Pruitt can put in place new rules allowing polluters to dump more pollutants into our air and water. See how that works?

In response, the Editors-in-Chief of Science, Nature, the Public Library of Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences issued a joint statement. Alas, their statement is anything but clear. They spend about three-fourths of it explaining about how they support data sharing, and finally, in their last sentence, they write this:

"Excluding relevant studies simply because they do not meet rigid transparency standards will adversely affect decision-making processes."

That's it. Even the most sophisticated reader could be forgiven for not understanding what the issue is, not from this statement alone.

Here's what they should have said: the EPA wants to ignore the health consequences of pollution when creating policy. The EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has announced a new policy that pretends to be about scientific transparency, but is nothing of the sort. Instead, this policy is designed to undermine the EPA's mission, which is (and you can read this right on the EPA's website "to protect human health and the environment."

Since the EPA's creation in 1970, the U.S. has made tremendous strides in cleaning up our air and water. Let's not start backsliding just to enhance the profits of a few polluters.

[Note: I have written the EPA and asked for comment. I will update this article if they respond.]

The new EPA Chief is a climate denier: why are you surprised?

On Thursday, newly appointed EPA chief Scott Pruitt said he doesn't think human-driven carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming. The internet exploded with outrage.

Why so surprised? We already knew that Scott Pruitt was a climate change denialist.

Donald Trump is also a climate change denialist. Why is anyone surprised that Trump is appointing other denialists to top posts in his administration?

During his campaign, Trump claimed that climate change was a "hoax" perpetrated by the Chinese. Mr. Trump just made that up: it's complete nonsense, and he would be laughed out of the room in a serious discussion of climate science. Unfortunately, he now has too much power for us to ignore him.

The Secretary of Energy, former Texas governor Rick Perry, has also been a climate change denier, although he "softened" his position during his confirmation hearings. At those hearings, Perry said

"I believe the climate is changing. I believe some of it is naturally occurring, but some of it is also caused by man-made activity." [Secr. of Energy Rick Perry]

How refreshing! What really matters, though, is whether Perry's newfound awareness will be reflected in actual policy or it will turn out to be just a pose he adopted for the hearings.

Scott Pruitt, though, is unreprentant. Pruitt has spent much of his recent career suing the EPA on behalf of oil companies (despite the fact that he worked for the state of Oklahoma, not for those companies). Oil companies, coal companies, and others who make their money from fossil fuels–notably the Koch brothers and their fake-science-pushing Heartland Institute–have devoted millions of dollars and years of effort to climate change denialism. We already knew Scott Pruitt was one of them.

On CNN, Hawaii's Senator Brian Schatz commented:

"If there was ever any doubt that Scott Pruitt is a climate denier, this settles it."

Sen. Schatz is correct, of course–but there wasn't any doubt in the first place.

The New York Times couldn't have been surprised. Just two days before Pruitt's on-air denial, they ran a story headlined "E.P.A. Head Stacks Agency With Climate Change Skeptics." The Times pointed out that Pruitt's chief of staff and top deputies are former staffers of Senator James Inhofe, one of the Senate's leading climate change deniers.

I do have a major disagreement with The Times, though: stop calling these people "skeptics." They are not skeptics. A skeptic is someone who insists on solid evidence before accepting claims about science, medicine, or other fact-based issues. Once evidence is produced, a good skeptic acknowledges the evidence and changes his/her views, if necessary.

Denialists, in contrast, stick to the same rigid narrative regardless of the facts. When evidence contradicts their views, they have no choice but to deny, deny, deny. When pushed, they obfuscate and delay, often arguing that the evidence is not yet clear and more studies are needed. This is precisely what EPA head Scott Pruitt and his boss, Donald Trump, have been doing with climate change. Pruitt argued on Thursday that "we need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis." No, we don't. The evidence is overwhelming that the planet is warming, that rising CO2 emissions are a major contributor to that warming, and that human activities are causing much of it.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), summarizing the work of thousands of scientists from around the globe, has concluded with very high confidence that human activities are the primary driver of climate change. They've also explained (hello, Scott Pruitt?) that carbon dioxide is the most important human-driven cause of global warming, and that it has increased 80% since 1970.

Because Scott Pruitt is a denialist–not a skeptic–he will simply deny these facts.

The New York Times and other media need to stop calling Pruitt a skeptic. Skepticism can be healthy; all good scientists are skeptics. Denialism, on the other hand, can lead to great harm. Cigarette companies were not being skeptical when they denied, for decades, that cigarette smoking causes cancer. They too called for more research. They were protecting their profits, and millions of people died while the companies denied and delayed.

Oil and coal companies are now playing exactly the same game, sowing doubt in order to preserve their profits. Scott Pruitt demonstrated this when he claimed, on CNN, that "there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact [of human CO2 emissions]." No, there isn't. Quite the opposite is true: there's remarkable agreement among climate scientists that humans are causing global warming. The only source of disagreement is the profit-driven fossil fuel industry, which cares far more about its short-term profits than about the world that future generations will inherit.

So let's not be surprised when Trump and his minions deny climate change, or deny that human activities are causing it. Perhaps it would be better to consider what the harms will be, and whether we can prevent them. Just don't expect any help from the government.