In Tuesday's New York Times story, “In a Feast of Data on BPA Plastic, No Final Answer,” Denise Grady characterizes the continued development of new studies about the endocrine disrupting chemical as yet another dispute between environmentalists and chemical manufacturers over a ubiquitous chemical with uncertain health effects. While her assessment of the state of the science is accurate, she expends thousands of words parsing the uncertainty and profiling the scientists who’ve made it their work to reduce the uncertainty without fully exploring the bigger picture context that would explain why this isn’t a petty dispute.
The question Grady left unanswered was, Why is there so much uncertainty about the health effects of a chemical that is produced in quantities of nearly a million tons per year? Two reasons immediately come to mind.
First, chemical manufacturers operate under a system of antiquated laws. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), allows a company to put a new chemical into commerce without having to make any explicit determination about its safety. Instead, the company simply informs EPA that it is going to manufacture the chemical, turns over whatever health and safety data it might happen to have on hand (they’re not required by law or regulation to actually do any testing), and then just waits 90 days. In the meantime, EPA may only put limits on production or use of the chemical if it is able to make a determination (in that time) that the chemical presents an unreasonable risk. Of course, without any test data that would be relevant to that determination, EPA is not likely to regulate.
Full textThe American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade association that represents chemical industry interests and is heavily connected to the plastics industry, filed a Request for Correction Monday on the EPA's Chemical Action Plan for Bisphenol A (BPA). The request, filed under a provision of the Data Quality Act (also referred to as the Information Quality Act), is truly astonishing and bears noting. In addition to standard requests that EPA statements be toned down or removed due to conflicting studies, ACC makes several requests that EPA remove statements that are included not as “ knowledge such as facts or data,” but policy statements that reflect EPA’s intent to manage exposure to BPA.
ACC requests in several places that references to a Canadian risk assessment of BPA be deleted because the Canadian assessment was informed by the precautionary principle:
Any reliance in the Canadian assessment to support EPA’s conclusion that … action is warranted is not appropriate under the Guidelines; EPA cannot blindly rely on Canada’s screening risk assessment (particularly as Canada’s assessment incorporates the precautionary principle), but must perform its own weight-of-the-evidence assessment. (p. 9)
And ACC later objects to the use of a “conservative” model:
Full textEPA cannot rely on the highly conservative E-FAST2 modeling of BPA releases in the 2007 TRI to estimate the amount of BPA in drinking water or surface water when there exists [sic] peer-reviewed assessments of BPA in groundwater and drinking water… (p. 18, citations omitted)
Over on Slate this weekend, William Saletan posted an Elena Kagan piece in which he describes a 1996 incident in which the future presumptive Supreme Court Justice, then working at the White House, commented on a draft statement on “partial birth abortion” by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).
Congress was then on the verge of banning certain abortion procedures lumped together under the umbrella of “partial birth,” a name made up by the right wing and not otherwise used by doctors. ACOG had drafted a statement saying that its select panel on the subject had concluded that while it could identify no circumstances under which the “intact D&X” procedure, which seemed to be the procedure the right wingers in Congress were after, “would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman…[t]he potential exists that legislation prohibiting specific medical practices, such as intact D&X, may outlaw techniques that are critical to the lives and health of women.”
ACOG submitted the draft to the White House for comment, and Kagan, in her role as associate White House counsel, proposed revisions, which ACOG subsequently incorporated, revising the relevant portion of the statement, by adding the sentence, “An intact D&X, however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman, and only the doctor, in consultation with the patient, based upon the woman's particular circumstances, can make this decision.”
Full textWith the strong support of their new Administrator, last year the EPA staff who administer TSCA came up with a novel idea for jump-starting a moribund regulatory program. They started publishing Chemical Action Plans (CAPs) for a selection of chemicals “that pose a concern to the public.” Having selected chemicals that are found in consumer products, produced in large volumes, have particular concerns for children’s health, or meet other criteria, EPA staff published action plans for the chemicals that provide a clear and concise profile of each chemicals’ hazards, exposures, and risks and lay out regulatory actions EPA might take in the near future. The documents are truly excellent pieces of work in that they provide a summary of complex and controversial science within the context of the agency’s duties and powers under existing law, and they do so without getting bogged down in scientific or legal minutae.
But now activists with the American Chemistry Council (ACC) have resurrected the wasteful practice of filing Requests for Correction under the Data Quality Act, this time (pdf) in response to EPA’s action plan for phthalates (pdf), proving once again that ACC will harass EPA for taking even the smallest steps.
The RfC alleges that the action plan contains “numerous factual errors” and that it therefore “fails to meet the requisite standard for objectivity.” A majority of their complaints focus on elements of EPA’s summary of potential hazards and routes of exposure, generally faulting EPA for not including references to studies that may provide evidence that would lessen the agency’s concerns. The general perspective underscores the real point of debate that ACC has manufactured with its RfC: What degree of precision is appropriate for EPA’s action plans?
Full textIs the Gulf of Mexico disaster a reason to pass climate legislation – or is that legislation largely irrelevant to curbing our oil use? A Greenwire article Tuesday quoted a number of economists arguing that the leading proposals in Congress wouldn’t do much to change our dependence on petroleum.
The only reasonable response is “yes, of course.” Climate proposals such as Kerry-Lieberman, Cantwell-Collins, or Waxman-Markey will have limited effects on oil consumption for two reasons: first, they are market mechanisms; second, they are weak market mechanisms.
To start with the good news, reducing carbon emissions from electric utilities is cheaper than reducing oil use. Any market mechanism is supposed to prompt us to do the cheapest things first; that’s the whole point. There are many ways to make electricity with lower carbon emissions than a coal plant; putting a price on carbon makes those alternatives cheaper relative to coal. There are also many ways to promote energy efficiency, incrementally reducing electricity use.
For most Americans, on the other hand, there is only one way to make transportation, and it runs on oil. In the short run, with all of us driving the cars we now own, there is very little chance to change our gasoline use. In the closing words of one of the best satirical videos about the oil spill, “BP: you’re not mad enough to not drive your car.”
Full textIn the year since EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced a new process (pdf) for updating chemical risk assessments in EPA's IRIS database, agency scientists have succeeded in getting some stalled assessments moving through the system. Since the May 21, 2009 announcement, EPA staff have competed nine new and updated assessments. Two others are in the final stages of review and 20 more are at the external peer review stage.
But just as EPA staff are getting geared up, industry, potentially regulated federal agencies, and the White House are trying to throw a monkey wrench into the works.
First, Inside EPA reports (subs. required, "Industry, Agencies Struggle To Revise EPA's Risk Assessment Process") that anti-regulatory advocate Jim Tozzi's Center for Regulatory Effectiveness is making the claim that external peer review must be "Data Quality Act compliant." That's a great way to strike fear in the minds of an embattled office like the IRIS office, but it lacks any real basis. The purpose of a Science Advisory Board SAB (SAB) review is to get outside scientists' opinion on specific science-policy decisions made by EPA staff in the process of developing the IRIS assessment. By definition, opinions are not "information" covered by EPA’s DQA guidelines (pdf, p.16), so the DQA doesn't apply. And even if it did apply, there's no checklist to make sure a document is DQA compliant. The DQA simply creates a (not-judicially-reviewable) administrative mechanism for outside parties to request that an agency correct information that they disseminate that does not meet the agency's DQA guidelines. At its core, the DQA respects the fact that agencies are staffed by dedicated and highly competent individuals who do high quality work. The burden is on an outside party to prove that disseminated information does not conform to an agency's DQA guidelines. There is no burden for EPA to perform any sort of DQA-specific analysis of a piece of information before disseminating it.
Full textVirginia AG Ken Cuccinelli II has taken his climate change vendetta to a new low, announcing that he will use Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act to force officials at UVA to spend months digging through a decade of university records in search of evidence that Dr. Michael Mann "defrauded" the Commonwealth by seeking funds to explore the boundaries of climate science.
Tuesday's article in the Washington Post gave the attention-seeking politician all that he needed from the civil investigative demand issued to Dr. Mann's former employer. Now Cuccinelli will move on to his next headline-grabbing venture without a care for the disruptions he's left in his wake.
As others have pointed out, threatening academics with legal penalties sets a terrible precedent that will stifle the innovation and progress that are the hallmarks of the United States' great research universities. It was bad enough when Rep. Joe Barton first started harassing Dr. Mann over his work, signaling to all climate scientists that they'd better be careful what they researched or the full force of a congressional investigation might be in their future. Now that Cuccinelli has set the precedent of making onerous demands on the universities that employ researchers who work on the cutting edge, there will be another dimension to the pressures that will constrain American academics.
Full textThis is the April installment of CPRBlog’s series of posts highlighting legal developments in other countries and in international environmental law.
Last month the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted a hearing to the residents of Mossville, Louisiana, based on their petition asserting that the U.S. government has violated their rights to privacy and racial equity by failing to address toxic pollution in their community. Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, the legal advocacy organization that filed the petition on behalf of the Mossville residents, says this hearing represents the first time IACHR has granted a hearing on complaints of environmental racism by the United States.
Located in southwest Louisiana, Mossville is a small community of roughly 375 residents, the majority of whom are African American. Fourteen industrial facilities—ranging from an oil refinery and a vinyl manufacturer to petrochemical facilities—are sited within and around Mossville. Using data taken from EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, the petition declares that these fourteen facilities release annually more than four million pounds of toxic chemicals into the surrounding land, air, and water. Residents have complained for years about poor health from inflammatory diseases and early deaths from cancer (see CNN's report). In 1998, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that the blood from 28 Mossville residents had dioxin levels that were three times the national average.
Full textToday CPR releases a new report, Failing the Bay: Clean Water Act Enforcement in Maryland Falling Short. The report, which CPR Member Scholar Robert Glicksman and I co-authored, details the results of an investigation of the Clean Water Act (CWA) enforcement program at the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE). CPR provided a copy of this report to MDE, and its response (and CPR’s follow-up) is included as an appendix to the report.
Overall, we found that state of Maryland is failing to enforce existing water pollution laws, allowing illegal pollution that damages Maryland waters and the Chesapeake Bay. The report focuses on three specific areas:
This item, by Liz Borkowski, is cross-posted from The Pump Handle.
Exactly one year ago, President Obama issued a memorandum on scientific integrity that gave the Office of Science and Technology Policy 120 days to “develop recommendations for Presidential action designed to guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch” based on six principles that Obama specified. OSTP solicited public input to inform its drafting of the recommendations.
It’s now been 365 days, and OSTP hasn’t released its recommendations. Why the delay? Since President Obama issued the scientific integrity memo during his first hundred days in office, this is evidently an important issue for him.
Although advocates for scientific integrity have welcomed many of Obama’s decisions and appointments, threats to the integrity of government science haven’t disappeared. As I noted last week, my colleagues and I have just released a report on scientists in government, and we found that many policies and practices need to be strengthened in order to ensure that federal-agency scientists can do their best work. The Union of Concerned Scientists has been tracking the Obama administration’s progress on several aspects of scientific integrity, and they find that while the administration has made progress, it still has a long way to go.
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Guest Blogger: Liz Borkowski