Smoked Out
How EPA Cooked the Books for Its
Air and Climate Power Grab
By Steve Milloy
Preface
This book proves, in no uncertain terms, that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has committed large-scale,costly and shockingscientific and regulatory fraud.EPA’s conduct runs the gamut from subtle statistical shenanigans to hiding key scientific data for over 20 years to illegally spraying diesel exhaust up the noses of 10-year old children and more. This is not a polemic based on opinion or argument. The necessary and myriad facts and details are presented here in the pretty much the same sequence in which they occurred or were discovered. Quotes are used extensively and whenever possible as, for the most part, EPA’s staffand henchmen convict the agency with their own words. Effort has been made to simplify and minimize complex scientific or statistical concepts and language. The goal of this book is to present the case against EPA in a comprehensive and comprehendible manner.
We all want a clean and safeenvironment. Despite 150 years of industrial development, our environment has always been remarkably safe. This is not a message one often hears from environmental activists, the media, or government officials. But it nevertheless less is the reality. Though we were safe, our environment was not always so clean, as was most vividly evidenced by the urban smog and river fires of the 20th century. So beginning with the 1970 amendments to the Clean Air Act, American embarked on an aggressive campaign to clean its environment a mission that was largely accomplished within about 20 years.
In a December 1970 Executive orderand as a sop to anti-Vietnam War activists President Richard Nixon cynically consolidated virtually all federal agency environmental activities into a new organization called the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Although never officially organized by Congress, subsequent laws were written to be implemented by Nixon’s invention.
Through a combination of factors including these new laws, public pressure, industrial innovation and technology, national wealth, and a decline in domestic heavy industryour environment had by 1990 become remarkably cleaner. The environmental debate at this point could have turned to debate the point at which an even cleaner environment was simply not worth the cost. Instead, the debate was hijacked by politics and the “industrialization” of the environmental movement.
The precipitous end of the Cold War resulted in the disbanding of the peace movement. Left-wing political activists were suddenly left without a cause. They wound up flocking to the environmental movement. Activist groups that started out as rag-tag bands or niche groups soon became financial powerhouses. Greenpeace, for example, had revenues of $100 million annually by 1986.So environmental protection became a politicized ideology powered by a highly profitable business model.
The EPA was transformed in a similar way. From its $1 billion annual budget and 4,000 employees in 1970, EPA grew into a $6 billion annual budget with 16,000 employees by 1991. President Ronald Reagan’s first EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch tried to rein in the EPA’s already evident excesses. But she was hounded from office by a Democrat-controlled Congress. President Reagan replaced Gorsuch with the nominal Republican William Ruckelshaus, who had been EPA’s first administrator. But unknown to Reagan, Ruckelshaus was also a fundraising member of the radical activist group, the Environmental Defense Fund and was not about to constrain EPA activities. It would be more than a decade before anyone seriously discussed reining in EPA again.
My experiences with EPA began in 1990. As a young lawyer-statistician working for a regulatory agency lobbyist 1990, I immediately began work on a number of EPA issues, each one sillier than the next. Should a pesticide be banned because it seemed to make dog stool too soft? Should the phosphoric acid in soft drinks be considered a toxic substance? What is the economic value of blue sky? Should homes in an Idaho town be demolished because their foundations were made of mining slag that emitted some radon? Should nuclear power plant waste be secured one mile underground in the Nevada desert for one million years, or only 10,000? The only thing seemingly more absurd than these EPA controversies each of which was causing or could cause genuine but unjustified economic harm to someone was the agency behind them.
In the more than 25 years since, things have not improved. Every EPA issue I’ve ever worked and I’ve worked them all, including air pollution, water pollution, toxic waste sites, pesticides, chemical safety, hazardous waste, non-hazardous waste, and radiation has been a ridiculous exercise akin to arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But one issue has stuck in my craw much more than the others.
Fittingly, this issue has been central to EPA’s regulatory agenda for the past 20 years. EPA’s biggest, most prominent and most burdensome and expensive regulations all depend on it. It’s an issue that EPA has used to exercise complete control over fossil fuels, transportation, electricity generation, and industrial activity in short, a large and vital part of our economy. People are being frightened without cause. Wealth-creating and poverty-ending economic activity is being restrained and destroyed. Government employees are committing felonious crimes and getting away scot-free.
What follows is how, despite the best efforts of EPA and its henchmen to prevent discovery of its scientific fraud, I have been able over the past 20 years to uncover, debunk and present in one unified storythis crime against science and our society. But this David-vs-Goliath story necessarily goes beyond just EPA. Aiders and abettors of EPA have included other federal and state regulatory agencies, universities and their researchers, federal courts, state medical boards, scientific journals, environmental activist groups, bioethicists, Congress and even the directly-harmed victims of EPA’s regulations industries themselves.
The skullduggery, lying and flat-out illegal activity in this story is of mind-blowing scale. If you respect science, you will read about how EPA has abused and dishonored it. If you value government integrity, you will read about how EPA has mocked it. If you prize a clean environment, you will read how EPA wastes significant societal resources accomplishing nothing for it. Indeed, if you respect human life itself, you will be appalled at what EPA has tried to do to people in the name of more regulation.
This story can also serve as a roadmap for those wishing to challenge seemingly impregnable authority. Throughout this story, I try every way imaginable to tackle EPA, from uncovering and publishing embarrassing revelations to agitating for legislation to legal action to original scientific research. No stone has been left unturned. No avenue untried. Yes, EPA is still acting badly. But no one who has followed this story and that does include many Members of Congress as it has unfolded on my web site JunkScience.com will ever look at EPA the same.
Over the years that this story has developed, I have enjoyed a great deal of moral and intellectual support from a number of special people. The ones that stand out the most include my wife Julia, Francis Collins, Dr. John Dale Dunn, Dr. S. Stanley Young, Vera Sharav, and Dr. David Schnare. This story would not have been possible without them. While I am eternally grateful for their help and proud of my work, I wish that this effort had not been necessary. It is appalling that ourgovernment operates this way.
Introduction
I was doing my usual round of research for my web site JunkScience.comon September 15, 2011, when I came across a new study with a mouthful of a title:
Case report: Supraventricular Arrhythmia Following Exposure to Concentrated Ambient Air Pollution Particles.
Translation: Someone’s heart started fluttering after they had inhaled a jacked-up level of outdoor air pollution.
Intrigued, I turned the page to read that scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were involved. Now my own heart began to race a little as I wondered whether this report would make me eat my very public words.A couple months earlier, I had written an op-ed for the Washington Times that I brazenly titled, “Show us the bodies, EPA.”
Myop-ed was occasioned by an EPA proposal to saddle Midwest coal-fired power plants with yet more expensive smokestack emissions requirements. The Republican-controlled Congress was trying to stop the rule by cutting the agency’s budget. Environmental activists came to EPA’s aid by running ads claiming that EPA’s opponents were pushing a “dirty air” bill that would kill 17,000 people per year.
I had long viewed the EPA’s claim that typical outdoor air pollution killed tens of thousands of people every year as sheer nonsense. And in July 2011, in the Washington Times, I had challenged that nonsense with “Show us the bodies, EPA.” The op-ed read in part:
The EPA says air pollution kills tens of thousands of people annually. This is on a par with traffic accident fatalities. While we can identify traffic accident victims, air pollution victims are unknown, unidentified and as far as anyone can tell, figments of EPA’s statistical imagination.
It ought not to be too much to ask the EPA to produce some tangible evidence that air pollution is causing actual harm to real people. The EPA should have to demonstrate that its ever-tightening air quality and emissions standards are producing actual benefits.
Consider that the EPA and its enviro-buddies are essentially accusing coal-fired utilities of killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of people annually. Have you ever wondered why there are no class-action lawsuits against utilities for billions of dollars in damages?
So while the case report headline didn’t involve a death per se, it did involve a heart abnormality that could lead to death. But after scanning a few pages of the report my anxiety vanished.
The person who experienced the heartbeat irregularity turned out to be a 58-year old woman. Not only was sheobese, and suffering from hypertensionand other maladies, her father had died from heart disease at age 57. I knew instantly there was no way that whatever happened to her could be blamed on air pollution, concentrated or not. Plain and simple, this woman was an ambulance trip waiting to happen.
So “Show me the bodies, EPA” remained as sound a challenge as ever. But this left me thinking how did this poor, sick woman come to be exposed to “concentrated ambient air particles” in the first place? Where and how does that happen?
Reading on, I learned that EPA scientists had intentionally experimented with concentrated air particles on this poor woman. They induced her to inhale air containing three times the maximum level of particles that EPA allows outdoor air to contain. Though she was supposed to inhale this air for two hours, after about 20 minutes, her heart began to beat erratically. At this point the EPA researchers stopped the experiment and called an ambulance to take her to the hospital. Though her heart beat quickly returned to normal, she remained in the hospital overnight.
Needless to say, this was all quite astounding. To explain just how astounding it was, I have to fast-forward the story about week to September 22, 2011. That was the day EPA chief Lisa Jackson testified before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. During that testimony, Jackson stated:
Particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.
The “particulate matter” she referred to was, I knew, the same sort of air particles to which the 58-year old woman had been exposed except, of course, that the particles the woman inhaled were “concentrated” and so one would suppose, even more dangerous.
So EPA scientists had made a sick woman inhale something that the EPA chief Jackson had just described to Congress as something that would kill you. Go straight to death. Do not pass sick.
Something was obviously rotten at EPA. What exactly that iswill be the story related here.
Chapter 1 EPA’s Secondhand Smoke-and Mirrors
“Show us the bodies.” Where did that come from, other than a hilariously funny Cuba Gooding, Jr.-Tom Cruise scene in Jerry Maguire?
The story goes back to the early 1990s when I worked as a consultant at an odd place called Multinational Business Services for an even odder, but exceedingly brilliant and colorful guy named Jim Tozzi.
A career bureaucrat until he had to pay for his kids’ college, Tozzi rose to power as a key government overseer of the budgets and rulemaking efforts of regulatory agencies like the EPA. He was the driving force behinda major Reagan administration policy requiring the benefits of regulations to exceed their costs. And he enforced that principle like no one has since.
I was hired by Tozzi because I was both a lawyer and had a background in science and statistics, the perfect combination for Tozzi’s plan to expand hislobbying practice to includeenvironment and health risk assessment issues. One of the first issues I worked on was EPA’s risk assessment for secondhand smoke. As a nonsmoker, I wasn’t especially thrilled about working for a tobacco company. But EPA soon fixed that.
EPA issued earlier in 1990 a draft risk assessment document in which EPA presented its evidence for concluding that secondhand smoke caused lung cancer in humans and that secondhand smoke caused 3,000 deaths from lung cancer every year. These claims were largely based on about 30 studies of lung cancer in various human populations exposed to secondhand smoke. Such studies of disease in human populations are called “epidemiology.”
Epidemiologic studies can be very useful in the practice of public health. The classic example is food poisoning where epidemiologic evidence can be used to trace the origin of the outbreak. Epidemiology has also been used to link heavy smoking with lung cancer and aspirin with Reyes syndrome in children, to provide a just a couple notable and creditable examples.
The key to the value of epidemiology as an investigative tool, however, is that a researcher must be looking for a relatively high risk of a relatively rare event. The reason for this is that epidemiology is just statistics applied to the incidence of disease in human population. Epidemiologic results are essentially correlations and, as we all learn in Statistics 101, correlations do not equate to causation.
If a researcher can find a high rate of a rare disease in a population with a specific exposure of interest, however, she may very well be on to drawing a connection between the exposure and disease. In contrast, trying to use epidemiology to connect a low rate of a common disease with a specific exposure is not very persuasive at least it was until EPA turned the epidemiology world upside down with its secondhand smoke risk assessment.
The EPA had a big problem with its secondhand smoke studies. Of the 30 or so epidemiologic studies cited in the risk assessment, the results for about 80 percent of the studies either failed to show a correlation between exposure to secondhand smoke and lung cancer incidence or the reported correlation was not statistically significant meaning that the results were too likely to have been caused by chance to be used as evidence against secondhand smoke.
The other 20 percent of the studies all reported very low or weak correlations between exposure to secondhand smoke and lung cancer. As such they ran afoul of the cardinal rule against relying onstudies reporting low rates of disease. But EPA had a plan or should I say recipe for cooking its secondhand smoke risk assessment.
To eliminate the problem posed by the 80 percent of the studies that couldn’t even pretend to correlate secondhand smoke with lung cancer, EPA took the results of all 30 studies and pooled them into one big study, a statistical technique called “meta-analysis.” Though this effort produced a single, unified positive correlation between secondhand smoke and lung cancer, the EPA still had a problem because that correlation was not statistically significant and under EPA’s own risk assessment guidelines, epidemiologic results had to be statistically significant to be considered reliable. But the ever-resourceful EPA had yet another card up its sleeve.
When epidemiologists (and most other scientists) test their results for statistical significance, they are looking for significance at a 95 percent level. That is, they want to be 95 percent sure that their results did not occur by chance. Much to EPA’s dismay, its results were not significant at the 95% level.