4/19/12, "The EPA's Faulty Science Can Be Stopped," John Dale Dunn and Steve Milloy
"The science misconduct is the result of the politicization of public health science, something Eisenhower warned about in his farewell speech in 1961. There are political, judicial, and administrative solutions to this perfidy....
Some EPA research scientists fail in their professional ethics because they have become propagandists and have succumbed to many of these biases and fallacies.
Well-paid researchers for the EPA junk science project
Some examples of individuals who corrupt the EPA human health effects science research:...
It won't matter until industry, business, citizens, and the Congress and the courts start holding the EPA to account. Presently business, industry, and the Congress are intimidated by the well-paid, slick, and arrogant army of EPA scientists who have the media as their shills and don't have to answer hard questions on the reliability of their research. No one asks them even the basic question:
- how can you be reliable
- when you rely on the EPA for a living and career advancement?
Conflicts of professional interest created by millions of dollars in research funded by the EPA and EPA-allied entities are a serious problem that compromises public policy-making.
Legal and Political Strategies to Stop EPA Junk Science
The Administrative Procedure Act provides the means to challenge EPA conduct, actions, and policy-making. The burden of the challenge to an action or ruling or fine or penalty is to prove that the agency was arbitrary and capricious. A commonsense understanding of those words entails actions taken without good justification or rationale. The courts have been inclined to be lazy and deferential and allow Agency hegemony....
Judges and lawyers have been intimidated by the idea of challenging a powerful agency. Lawyers and judges are too often ill-equipped to frame the challenges to junk EPA science well; they are badly advised, and they end up going back to what makes them comfortable -- arguments on the law and economics.
But -- a big but -- judges are, and always have been, the ones to decide what's admissible as evidence....
The evidence must be admissible for purposes of proving that the Agency is or is not being arbitrary or capricious, which makes the decision on evidentiary admissibility and reliability separate from whatever tortured idea the court might have about agency authority and discretion. Unreliable scientific evidence is inadmissible and therefore cannot be used to justify inappropriate actions. The admissibility rulings on evidence trump some arcane idea about agency discretion that is all tied up in the jurisprudence on Congressional Delegation. There is no law that the Congress has passed that permits agencies to pursue junk science.
In the political sphere, the Congress can modify the standards of administrative and judicial review to demand good science and a better standard for agency conduct, with more reasonable rules on challenges to EPA actions, similar to the rules for challenges to actions by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that are civil court evidentiary preponderance of evidence burdens.
However, even without congressional help, responsible, competent, and serious lawyers can force judges and frame evidentiary challenges so that the judges will be required to make clear rulings on admissibility of scientific evidence and even require that the court provide a rationale for the ruling. A bad ruling is a reversible error; a good ruling will nurture good science in the courtroom, the job of conscientious judges, and the responsibility of lawyers. No lawyer but a pettifogger would admit to arguing for bad science that violates the public trust....
Changing the EPA agenda means challenging inadequate and unreliable EPA science and demanding reliable and skeptical science in the public interest. It can be done politically and legally by proper use of modifications of law and statutes -- even modification of the Administrative Procedure Act, properly conducted administrative hearings, evidentiary challenges in any number of different forums, and political and legal and political action to modify statutory requirements for agency conduct and to clarify proper process for challenges of agency actions. It can be done if parties in disputes do it right, if lawyers do their jobs, and if politicians work hard to force better rules for sensible agency conduct and fairer rules for citizen challenges of agency decisions and actions."...
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4/18/12, "EPA human experiments debunk notion of ‘killer’ air pollution: Agency hides exculpatory results," Steve Milloy, Junk Science
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