How The Left Views Administrative Law: A Highlight From The Federalist Society Convention

November 12, 2022/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

You may have seen that the Federalist Society has been holding its annual convention in Washington. I was there on Thursday and Friday. They have recorded all the presentations. If you want to watch some, go to this link and see what interests you.

There was not a lot of moaning about the election results. Rather, the focus was on high-minded issues, mostly of constitutional and administrative law.

I have selected a highlight that you may find interesting. One of the lunchtime panels on Thursday was titled “Render Law Unto Congress and Execution Unto the Executive: The Supreme Court Rebalances Constitutional Power.” Here is the description of the subject of the panel:

The Roberts Court is recasting the administrative state according to its view of the separation of powers. It is giving the President more authority to fire his subordinates and creating a hierarchical executive where the President and his principal officers have more authority over appointments and decision making. It is forcing the legislature to speak clearly when it wants to vest agencies with major powers and expressing interest in reinvigorating limits on some delegations of legislative power. It is strengthening the judiciary’s interpretative role, declining to give as much deference to regulatory interpretations by agencies. Is its view coherent and sound? Should the Court square its vision with a modern government that was formed on different principles? If so, how?

The full video of the panel, 1:23:30 in length, can be found at this link. The panel featured four speakers (Nicholas Parrillo of the Yale Law School, Aditya Bamzai of the Virginia Law School, Thomas Griffith, formerly Judge of the DC Circuit, and Sally Katzen of NYU Law School) describing and debating the merits of recent Supreme Court cases that have articulated something called the Major Questions Doctrine as a limit on administrative agency power to promulgate regulations of sweeping import without clear statutory basis. The most important of the cases under discussion was West Virginia v. EPA, the June 30 Supreme Court decision that held that EPA’s Clean Power Plan — a mechanism to shut down all generation of electricity using fossil fuels — exceeded the agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act.

As is typical on Federalist Society panels, the majority were conservative scholars or judges, who thus were generally supportive of the Court’s approach, although offering a variety of perspectives. However, the fourth panelist, in this case Ms. Katzen of NYU, was a die-hard left-winger. It fell to Ms. Katzen to defend the position that EPA was well within its powers under the CAA to promulgate a regulation that would force the closure of all coal power plants in a short period of time, followed in short order by all natural gas power plants over the next decade or so.

In her opening remarks (beginning about the 31 minute mark of the video at the link) Ms. Katzen described Congress as having become a completely dysfunctional institution that has been paralyzed by partisanship and can barely pass a spending bill to keep the government operating, let alone address any serious policy issue with major legislation. Meanwhile, she noted that since adoption of the Constitution the country had become huge, wealthy, and enormously complex. Thus Congress has seen fit to delegate the problems of dealing with the great complexities to specialists and experts in various fields. But now, said Ms. Katzen, her voice dripping with scorn, the Supreme Court has decreed that only the dysfunctional Congress can address the most critical issues facing us. She was particularly critical of the Court having struck down the Clean Power Plan, which in her view was well within the authority granted to EPA under the CAA, as well as being a subject that could only properly be dealt with by people with the necessary expertise, such as the bureaucrats at EPA.

Before reading on, you might consider whether those arguments appear persuasive to you.

After the panelists’ remarks, there was a period for questions from the audience. I managed to maneuver myself into a position to get to the microphone and ask the first question. I’m going to transcribe my question and Ms. Katzen’s response. This begins at 1:04:24 of the video:

Question: Thank you. My name is Francis Menton. My affiliation is Manhattan Contrarian. That’s my blog; many people here may read it. So out there we have the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Air Act basically gives the EPA the authority to regulate “pollutants.” And then a decade or so ago the EPA decided that carbon dioxide was a pollutant. And I guess this question is mainly for Professor Katzen. So carbon dioxide has been declared a pollutant by the EPA. They’re an “expert.” 

Does that mean, could the EPA then, on its own authority, say, well, airplanes all generate carbon dioxide, we hereby say they must be all grounded? Oh, and industry must be ended, that generates carbon dioxide. And 80% of our electricity generation is fossil fuel, generates carbon dioxide. And of course all automobiles, so you can’t drive them any more. Can the EPA do that? Or does that go beyond what they’ve been authorized to do? And if it goes beyond, what is the limiting principle? Do you have one, or are you completely fine with that if EPA does that?

Professor Katzen: I’m not sure I completely followed because there’s a lot of distracting noise out there. But the Congress clearly gave the EPA authority to specify those pollutants that are dangerous and should be regulated, and to set limits for them based on that which is necessary to protect the public health, with an adequate margin of safety and all that. There are standards to be applied. They can’t just say “no cars.” I don’t think that would survive any kind of judicial review.

Me: What’s the standard?

Professor Katzen: (Several seconds delay) The standard as set forth in the Clean Air Act is the scientific basis for levels to be set. That’s not — I’m not an environmental lawyer, and maybe there are others here who could provide the exact terminology. But the EPA is not able to and does not do whatever it has a whim to do when it wakes up in the morning. It bases it normally through rule-making through notice and comment, cost/benefit analysis, scientific determinations, that are subject to the critique and then response by the agency. 

You may not be happy with the answer any more than I was not happy when they stayed the Clean Power Plan in the first place, even though it had not yet gone through the courts. It was an extreme action taken to shut down rule-making in this area. And I thought that was unfortunate that we were never able to develop the kind of record that would enable sensible people to see if the agency was acting within its authority as granted by Congress. 

I am not saying that the organic statute or the authorizing statute is meaningless. It survives. But if it is granted authority, then the agency should be able to use it, even if the pollutant is something that they didn’t think of when they passed the statute, or weren’t aware of when they passed the statute. Any more than under the FCC Act, it was radio, that was in 1933, it was radio, but it was interpreted to mean television. It wasn’t a big step.

It’s too bad this wasn’t a cross examination, because Professor Katzen was trapped, and it would have been fun to keep pressing. The next obvious question would have been:  

“My question was, what’s the limiting principle? You haven’t answered. Please state the limiting principle. Do you have one or not?”

So Professor Katzen was completely outraged that the Supreme Court had struck down the Clean Power Plan (“it was an extreme action taken to shut down rule-making in this area”). Yet she couldn’t come up with any reason why, if EPA could force the shut down of all fossil fuel burning power plants, it could not also ban all burning of fossil fuels for airplanes, cars, industry, agriculture, home heat, etc. She flatly asserted “there are standards” without being able to specify any of them. (There are no meaningful standards in the statute that would constrain EPA in these circumstances, if the courts approved the Clean Power Plan.). 

The best she came up with was “notice and comment rule-making,” which is not a standard, but rather a procedure. It can be a time-consuming and burdensome procedure, and may generate thousands or even millions of comments, but at the end of that the EPA can just go ahead and implement the rule it started with and planned to implement all along. When Professor Katzen says that “EPA is not able to and does not do whatever it has a whim to do when it wakes up in the morning,” she is just plain wrong.

If you are wondering what the Clean Air Act may actually have to say on this subject, I would point out that the Act is lengthy and nearly incomprehensible. However, in the West Virginia litigation EPA had to come up with something in the CAA to point to as its authority for promulgating the Clean Power Plan, and the best it could do was Section 111(d) of the Act. Here is the text of that section:

(d) Standards of performance for existing sources; remaining useful life of source

(1) The Administrator shall prescribe regulations which shall establish a procedure similar to that provided by section 7410 of this title under which each State shall submit to the Administrator a plan which (A) establishes standards of performance for any existing source for any air pollutant (i) for which air quality criteria have not been issued or which is not included on a list published under section 7408(a) of this title or emitted from a source category which is regulated under section 7412 of this title but (ii) to which a standard of performance under this section would apply if such existing source were a new source, and (B) provides for the implementation and enforcement of such standards of performance. Regulations of the Administrator under this paragraph shall permit the State in applying a standard of performance to any particular source under a plan submitted under this paragraph to take into consideration, among other factors, the remaining useful life of the existing source to which such standard applies.

(2)The Administrator shall have the same authority—

(A) to prescribe a plan for a State in cases where the State fails to submit a satisfactory plan as he would have under section 7410(c) of this title in the case of failure to submit an implementation plan, and

(B) to enforce the provisions of such plan in cases where the State fails to enforce them as he would have under sections 7413 and 7414 of this title with respect to an implementation plan.

In promulgating a standard of performance under a plan prescribed under this paragraph, the Administrator shall take into consideration, among other factors, remaining useful lives of the sources in the category of sources to which such standard applies.

Make of all that mumbo jumbo what you will. What is certainly not there is any limiting principle or standard that constrains what EPA may do to effectively ban use of fossil fuel energy in all sectors, once it is accepted that EPA can regulate CO2 as a “pollutant.” Instead what is found in that section is blanket authority to EPA to set “standards of performance.” And in the Clean Power Plan EPA has set those “standards” in a way to make all use of fossil fuels in electricity generation non-compliant over time. If the courts allowed EPA to do that under this section, there would be nothing to stop it, if it wanted, from setting “standards” to make fossil fuels non-compliant in other sectors.

Here’s the bottom line: Under a statute that gives EPA general authority to set “standards of performance” with respect to “pollutants,” the progressives (including the liberal wing of the Supreme Court) are totally OK with allowing EPA to declare CO2 a “pollutant” 40 years after the statute was enacted, and then set “standards of performance” to ban CO2 and shut down the entire economy one sector at a time. Fortunately, with our current Supreme Court, we’ll get to see how this plays out in places like Germany and the UK before our federal government can impose it on all of us by executive fiat.

 

 

The Ghost of Anne Gorsuch Burford

Editorial of The New York Sun | January 10, 2022 

With the Supreme Court now set to hear in February a major case over the regulatory powers of the Environmental Protection Agency, some are already suggesting Justice Gorsuch might lack objectivity. The justice’s “tangled history with the EPA” is, Bloomberg reports, a “concern.” It’s a reference to the justice’s mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, whom, as Esquire retails it, President Ronald Reagan tasked with “running the EPA into the ground.”

“Revenge is a dish best served from a lifetime gig,” write’s Esquire’s Charles Pierce. He refers to the defeat, some 40 years ago, of Burford’s heroic attempt to reform the EPA. Yet there’s no reason to doubt Justice Gorsuch’s capacity to decide objectively the dispute that is at the heart of the case before the court, West Virginia v. EPA. It asks the Nine to roll back the agency’s power to regulate smokestack emissions..........To Read More....

My Take -  In years gone by I considered myself an environmentalist, meaning having rational concern about the environment and wanted just laws governing how industry and communities conducted themselves.  After so many years reading and writing about the corruption of the EPA I realize those were dark days intellectually.  I, as was most of America, and mostly still is, were misinformed, uninformed, and thinking the EPA was a really good thing. 

One of my personal friends is Dr. Jay Lehr, one of the founders of EPA and helped write their first five foundational pieces of legislation, and has said after 1980 they didn't do anything worthwhile and needed to be dismantled, and developed a five year plan on how to do it.

 I read Anne Gorsuch Burford's book, "Are You Tough Enough?", and the fact is she got caught up in backstabbing cabal of Deep Staters, environmental activists, RINO's, Democrats and a corrupt media.  

I remember those days and the media had everyone, including me, thinking she was corrupt, out of control, and had to go, and her supporters disappeared, and mostly because they weren't really supporters, any more than many of those who served in Trump's administration, taking the paycheck he provided and stabbing him in the back the whole time. 

When Harry Truman said "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog"!  Truer words were never spoken. 

EPA Transparency and the Deep State

By Duggan Flanakin

Ballot harvesting, behind-the-curtains ballot counting and other hijinks have made transparency a critical issue this election year.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency celebrates its fiftieth birthday, political battles continue to rage over the extent of public, executive and congressional oversight, and access to research files, original data and other information used by the agency in taking legal actions against individuals, institutions and businesses. The latest salvos involve the first-ever “transparency” requirements for EPA guidance documents – requirements likely to be tossed out by a Biden Administration.

In October 2019, President Trump signed an executive order to curb what he called abuses of authority by unaccountable bureaucrats who were “imposing their private agendas” on Americans. “A permanent federal bureaucracy,” he observed, “cannot become a fourth branch of government unanswerable to American voters.” Nor should federal agencies be able to impose multi-billion-dollar regulations, while claiming studies used to justify them are proprietary, confidential or otherwise inaccessible.

This February, the EPA launched a new searchable portal to provide public access to agency guidance documents. When it was finalized in July, the EPA brought over 9,000 guidance documents out of the darkness and made the entire active guidance library available to the public for the first time.

In September, the EPA finalized a rule that significantly increases the transparency of guidance practices and amends the agency’s process for managing guidance documents. The rule establishes the first formal public petition process for asking the EPA to modify, withdraw or reinstate a guidance document.

You would think “transparency” would be universally practiced and praised. However, the Deep State, science establishment, activist and pressure groups, and Democratic Party politicians have been horrified. Some claimed the rule reveals and distorts EPA’s decision-making processes. Others said it risks exposing private medical data and other confidential information. Still others carped that the rule is a bad-faith ploy to hamstring the agency’s ability to regulate industries and individuals.

Indeed, last October, an unsigned article in Wired magazine (we can’t even have author transparency) claimed the regulation was a Zombie-like attempt to resurrect the Secret Science Reform Act. Horrors!

The proposed legislation merely attempted to end the EPA’s widespread practice of basing regulations and guidance on research whose details remain hidden behind confidentiality agreements and are not publicly accessible, and whose research data cannot be replicated or independently verified.

During Congressional hearings on the proposal, critics claimed transparency would force the EPA to exclude important studies to protect confidentiality agreements. FactCheck.org found that private data sometimes cannot be redacted. But it also acknowledged that the rule allows the EPA administrator to exempt regulations if releasing study data publicly (rarely) does conflict with protecting privacy. It also allows for alternatives to complete public release if the data actually include confidential information.

One of the most scandalous cases of regulatory secrecy (and presidential secrecy) involved the acid rain provisions of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. President Bush and the EPA suppressed the findings of the 10-year, $537 million National Acid Rain Assessment Program (NAPAP), which had been authorized by President Carter.

To gain public support for the legislation, EPA scientists conjured up scary scenarios, claiming that sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants combined with water in the air to form acid rain that polluted streams, lakes and rivers and damaged trees, wildlife and buildings. The NAPAP found that the acidity of a lake is determined as much (or more) by the acidity of local soil and vegetation as it is by acidic rain. The frightening scenarios were wildly exaggerated, to justify closing power plants.

Moreover, many of these lakes were historically acidic and fishless until around 1900, when logging removed the acid vegetation and made the soil slightly alkaline. After logging slowed to a halt (around 1915), the naturally acidic decaying vegetation built up again, and the lakes became acidic again. In many cases forests were also debilitated due to insects or drought – not acid rain.

Curiously, a 1991 paper by environmental law scholar Richard Lazarus argued that Congress should let EPA be more independent, while admitting that legislators and regulators alike “have rarely known the best way to respond to an environmental pollution problem at the time a statute was passed.” Lazarus further claimed, “Statutory prescription therefore is an especially risky endeavor [that] can lead to wasteful expenditures for pollution control and … to more, rather than less, environmental degradation.”

These realities, Lazarus argued, make congressional oversight problematical, especially because the scientific options proposed by regulators for solving pollution often conflict with the political interests of lawmakers. True. But what if the legislators’ science is corrupted by “dark money” and the perpetual quest for more agency funding? Or if the regulators’ science is corrupted or weaponized by White House or Deep State biases, agendas, censoring of certain views, or manipulation or fabrication of data?

(In a republic, at least theoretically, the political leadership is informed by a citizenry that has all the needed facts, and ultimately has the authority to decide whether or not to follow the particular scientific pathways favored by regulators. In a pure democracy, minority views can be deemed or made irrelevant.)

A 2018 CFACT report assessed the extent of the public information problem, noting that EPA regulations have the force of law and constitute 25% of all federal regulations. Congress often grants regulatory bodies immense power over how people and businesses may operate, without giving targeted entities even the same level of due process that the law affords to criminal defendants. We should expect that EPA expands these overly broad mandates even further.

Indeed, the CFACT report contends, federal bureaucrats, and EPA administrators in particular, determine “who gets a permit to operate, and who does not; what technologies a business must use; what lightbulbs are available for your homes; what gas we can buy; what chemicals can be used; where companies can mine; what local land use decisions will survive; and even where a pond can be built on private property.”

It concluded: “While the President has massive powers over war and peace, and sets the operating philosophy of federal agencies, the EPA Administrator has direct power over the business operations … and thus the economy … of the entire nation.”

In creating the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau in 2010, the Democrat-controlled Congress gave its director broad powers and virtual immunity from political scrutiny – with more power than the President. The Supreme Court only narrowly recognized this as an unconstitutional grant of power to an unelected official. The EPA Administrator’s powers should be equally restrained.

In a second October 2019 executive order, President Trump required that agencies inform individuals of regulatory cases against them, acknowledge their responses, and educate businesses about new regulatory impacts. This order too should be non-controversial, but could well be axed by a President Biden.

Under current law, those whose livelihoods are assaulted by regulatory bodies can challenge an agency in court only after the agency has sullied their reputations and prosecuted their alleged noncompliance. Even then, the environmental defendant typically loses, because courts have mostly upheld the agencies if their decisions are “rational,” even if (absent long-sought transparency) the agency has concealed any or all of its “public” (but secret) data and records that do not support its “reasoning.”

Ultimately, the future of EPA transparency (and openness in all government) rides on the final outcome of the 2020 Presidential election. It’s fascinating how entities that set arbitrary and ever-changing standards for “acceptable” speech, favor crude protests over peaceful assemblies, and seek to curtail entire industries – also see no reason to inform the public of the rationale behind their politicized “scientific” decisions on issues from climate change to COVID to all manner of environmental regulation.

Via email

 

EPA Can’t Deny Farmers Their Day in Court

Here is a prime opportunity for the White House to show farmers that it stands with them and with sensible, science-based environmental regulation, and against bureaucracy gone wild.

By Gerald Baron • September 1, 2020
 
With so much bad news circulating these days, how about some good news from an unlikely source? The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has been a bastion of judicial activism for decades. But maybe that’s changing.

Late last month, a three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency is not allowed to cover up evidence that they screwed up and then dodge a lawsuit by claiming the statute of limitations had expired.

The judges denied a motion by the agency to dismiss a lawsuit being brought by Washington state dairy farmers. What the farmers allege, with plenty of evidence courtesy of Freedom of Information Act requests, is a long list of actions by the EPA that are unethical, and possibly even criminal.

The Washington State Dairy Federation argues that the local branch of the EPA put together a shaky study of nitrate contamination in Yakima Valley groundwater. The farmers argue, again with plenty of documentary evidence, that EPA bureaucrats then rewrote that study over the objection of outside scientific experts to put the blame on farmers. They further state that the EPA strong-armed local farmers into signing consent decrees that cost them millions of dollars by misrepresenting the study..........To Read More.....

Chlorpyrifos: A Hostage of the Secret Science Rule?

By Michael Dourson — March 27, 2020 @ The American Council on Science and Health

In short, the public is often worried about chemical exposure, as they should be when such exposure exceeds a safe dose. The public’s interest is best served by trusting experts dedicated to public health protection and not by withholding scientific data from independent analysis.

By Michael Dourson,Bernard K. Gadagbui, and Patrician M. McGinnis

Many groups have weighed-in on EPA’s recent secret science rule. Generally missing from nearly all these opinions is the perspective(s) of risk scientists charged with protecting public health.

As scientists know well, results of any one study, especially one with significant societal impact, should be replicated because positive findings occur, on average, in one out of every 20 studies due to chance.  If a study cannot be replicated, then it (at least) needs to be consistent with the pattern of available data. Studies that are not replicated or that do not “make sense” in an overall pattern are still considered by EPA (and other authoritative agencies). Scientists within these agencies will often contact the authors(s) to obtain additional information in order to conduct their own analysis.

A case in point is the publication of a series of studies on a single human group from exposure to chlorpyrifos that shows an unexpected effect at extremely low exposures. This finding has not been replicated in other human studies and is in contrast to extensive animal and limited human studies that all point to changes in a blood enzyme (cholinesterase) as sentinel, at higher exposures. In this case, EPA scientists asked authors of studies from this single human group for the underlying data in order to confirm this lower effect. The authors demurred citing confidentiality concerns despite the fact that EPA has rigorous procedures in place to handle confidential information. Thus, EPA was not able to conduct its own analysis, and since EPA had neither confirmatory studies, nor information consistent with other studies, it chose not to use the information from this single human group.

A recent publication confirms the EPA decision. In brief, Rauh et al. (2011) reported evidence of neurological deficits in children at 7 years old as a function of prenatal chlorpyrifos exposures that were much lower than levels causing cholinesterase inhibition. Since the raw data had not been made available, Dourson et al. (2020) extracted data from published figures of Rauh et al. (2011), and plotted these extracted data as response versus log dose, a common risk assessment approach.

Surprisingly, a significant portion of the data was not found in these published figures. Moreover, the reported associations of chlorpyrifos levels were also not replicated in our analysis. Like EPA, Dourson et al. (2020) sent multiple requests to Rauh et al. (2011) for access to the data so that confirmation could be attempted. No response was forthcoming. This general lack of data, inconsistency with cholinergic responses in other research studies, and refusal by the authors to share data and to write an editor-invited letter to the editor, raises concerns about the lack of data transparency.

From our perspective as toxicologists and risk scientists, EPA’s decision not to use such studies where information is not provided, suitably redacted to protect confidential information, is correct. The public’s interest is best served when science is replicable and consistent. When studies cannot be replicated or are not consistent with other information, using such studies then depends on having access to the underlying data for independent analysis. If the underlying data are not provided, it is difficult to use such studies to make a credible scientific risk judgment, much less national rulemaking.

In short, the public is often worried about chemical exposure, as they should be when such exposure exceeds a safe dose. The public’s interest is best served by trusting experts dedicated to public health protection and not by withholding scientific data from independent analysis. Others have also had thoughts on this topic.

Authors: Michael L. Dourson, PhD., DABT, FATS, FSRA; Bernard K. Gadagbui, MS, PhD, DABT, ERT; and Patrician M. McGinnis, PhD, DABT of the Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA)

Authors: Michael L. Dourson, PhD., DABT, FATS, FSRA; Bernard K. Gadagbui, MS, PhD, DABT, ERT; and Patrician M. McGinnis, PhD, DABT of the Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA)

EPA Appears To Be Backing Off From The Discredited Linear No Threshold Theory

August 5, 2019 By Michael D. Shaw @ Health News Digest

This is good news, but requires a bit of explanation. The Linear No Threshold Theory, aka the Linear Non-Threshold Theory, aka the Linear No Threshold Model (abbreviated LNT), was originally developed regarding exposure to ionizing radiation. LNT holds that additional cancer risk is linear with respect to the absorbed dose, and becomes zero only at zero dose. Thus, there is no threshold below which there is no effect. This model is used as the basis of most nuclear-related legislation around the world, and in some chemical risk assessment.

LNT was controversial from its introduction, and became even more so once it was applied to chemical exposures. After all, if the dose makes the poison, and the dose is diluted down to one molecule, how harmful could it be? Intuitively, there must be a threshold. If not, then no pharmaceutical drug could ever be safe. Or as my toxicologist friend Dr. Robert Golden once put it, “If there is no safe level, then why bother doing risk assessments at all?”

There is much literature extant disputing LNT, including this extensive review article from 2018, which concludes:

Objectively evaluating and incorporating the latest scientific evidence on LDDR (low dose, low-dose rate) dose-response relationships for application to the regulatory and policy-making process for risk assessment purposes will (1) ensure science remains the foundation for its decision making, (2) reduce the unnecessary burden of costly cleanups, (3) provide a much needed platform to educate the public on the risks or benefits from LDDR radiation exposures, and (4) harmonize the agency’s policies with those recognized by the rest of the radiation scientific community. A continued resistance to conducting a comprehensive review of the latest science regarding LNT-based policies will only diminish the agency’s [EPA’s] credibility and influence to protect human health and the environment.

The notion of LNT is based on the work of Nobel Laureate Hermann Muller, who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery that X-rays induce genetic mutations. In his Nobel Lecture (December 12, 1946), Muller declared that there is “no escape from the conclusion that there is no threshold dose.”

However, according to the extensive work of toxicologist Edward Calabrese, it is highly probable that at the very time Muller gave this lecture, he already knew that his contention was untrue. More than that, Muller actively conspired to suppress contrary findings for years.

Which brings us to recent activity of EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB). On July 15th, the Board posted a report entitled “Consultation on Updating EPA Guidelines for Carcinogen and Non-Cancer Risk Assessment.” The report first states the charge questions, which cover aspects of EPA’s risk assessment guidelines, with frequent reference to dose-response issues. The next two sections of the report include individual comments from members of the SAB on these questions.

The comments were conveyed as such because EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler specifically requested individual advice from the board members, rather than seeking consensus recommendations.

Member Kimberly White, with the American Chemistry Council, noted that, “There is considerable empirical evidence of non-linearity in dose-response modeling and the Agency should evaluate its reliance and application of default models that limit the consideration of alternative approaches. Decades of peer reviewed published literature provide multiple examples of observed chemical specific thresholds for both non-cancer and cancer endpoints.”

Member Dennis Paustenbach, an independent consultant, agrees: “It is clear to me, although not everyone would agree, that the linearized multi-stage model is unable to account for the dozens of compensatory mechanism that clearly exist at low doses which render virtually all chemicals to be harmless at those levels. Dozens of papers of the past 15-20 years that have attempted to study such doses in whole animal studies seem to clearly show this to be true.”

Member Brant Ulsh, Principal Health Physicist with M.H. Chew & Associates cites numerous references criticizing LNT, which have heretofore been ignored by the EPA…

“In spite of these cautions and caveats, the Agency continues to claim that there is consensus for their application of LNT to estimate risks from low radiation doses and set cleanup standards. In fact, there is wide disagreement on application of the LNT model among expert advisory bodies, professional societies, and individual scientists.”

“The Agency’s assertion that assuming linearity is protective of public health is presented without evidence and is in fact contradicted by the experiences of the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents. In those situations, public health responses based on the LNT model of radiation risks were retrospectively found to have done more harm than good.”

There is little doubt that EPA should abandon Linear No Threshold.

Bill To Reinstate Obama Pesticide Ban Ignores Science

Paul Driessen Jul 20, 2019

The battle over neonicotinoid pesticides rages on. In response to one of many collusive sue-and-settle lawsuits between environmentalist groups and Obama environmental officials, in 2014 the Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service banned neonic use in wildlife refuges.
Following a careful review of extensive scientific studies, the Trump Interior Department concluded that neonics are safe for humans, bees, other wildlife and the environment. In August 2018 it reversed the ban.

Last month, Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY) introduced HB2854, to reinstate the ban via legislation. She and 21 cosponsors (all Democrats) say neonics threaten biodiversity, bees and other wildlife in the nation’s refuges. Anti-pesticide groups have rallied behind the bill.

Their efforts are misguided and based on bad, outdated or even dishonest information.
Neonicotinoids are the world’s most widely used insecticide class. As I have noted in previous articles (here, here and here, for example), these systemic, advanced-technology insecticides are sprayed on many fruits and vegetables. But some 90 percent of them are used as seed coatings for corn, wheat, canola, soybeans, cotton and similar crops. Either way, they are absorbed into plant tissues as crops grow.

 

Neonics protect plants against insect damage by effectively targeting only pests that actually feed on the crops, particularly during early growth stages. Since they don’t wash off, they reduce the need for multiple sprays with insecticides that truly can harm bees, birds, other animals and non-pest insects.
Moreover, because neonics from coated seeds have largely dissipated from plant tissues by the time mature plants flower, they are barely detectable in pollen and nectar. That explains why extensive studies have found that neonic residues are well below levels that actually can adversely affect bee development or reproduction under real-world (non-laboratory) conditions.

It also helps explain why annual surveys and studies continue to show steady beehive and honeybee population increases since the infamous “colony collapse disorder” and “bee-pocalypse crisis” of a few years ago.

While over-winter and summer losses are still troublesome in places, they now occur overwhelmingly in hobbyist hives. Professional beekeepers, who handle the vast majority of US bees and hives, have learned how to control what was really, or primarily, behind the worrisome honeybee losses:Varroa destructormites that arrived in the USA in 1987.

Bee larvae hatch with Varroa mites already attached to them, and these tiny parasites suck the hemolymph blood-equivalent out of bees, attack bee fat body organs, compromise their immune systems, and provide pathways for other viruses, diseases and fungal pathogens into bees and colonies.

The destructive mites infected hive after hive. What were once nuisance infections became devastating epidemics, and sometimes efforts to control the mites and diseases further damaged hives. Maintaining healthy hives became much more complicated and difficult, especially when multiple pathogens invaded.

As disease control efforts improved, hive counts and honeybee populations climbed. They are now at or near 20-year highs in North America and every other continent.

As to claims that neonics should be banned from wildlife refuges, a 2015 international study of wild bees published in Entomology Today found that most wild bees never even come into contact with crops or the neonics that supposedly threaten them.

The same study also determined that only 2 percent of wild bees are much involved in crop pollination, and thus become exposed to these pesticides. Yet they are among the healthiest bee species.

Many US Wildlife Refuges were established along migratory bird flyways to provide food for waterfowl. But some can provide sufficient food only through cooperative agreements that let local farmers plant corn, wheat and certain other crops on refuge lands in exchange for leaving some of their crops unharvested, to supplement natural animal food on the refuge.

 

Some of those farmers do use neonic-coated seeds, preferring that to more traditional insecticides which must be sprayed several times during the growing season, potentially harming bees and other non-target insects or even birds and other wildlife.

Even organic farmers employ crop protecting insecticides that are highly toxic to bees, including rotenone, copper sulfate, spinosad, hydrogen peroxide, azidirachtin and citronella oil, Risk Monger Dr. David Zaruk points out.

Other organic farm chemicals are very toxic to humans. Boron fertilizer and copper sulfate fungicide can affect human brains, livers and hearts. Pyrethrins are powerful neurotoxins that can cause leukemia.

Lime sulfur mildew and insect killer causes irreversible eye damage, and can be fatal if inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the skin. Rotenone is a highly toxic and can enhance the onset of Parkinson’s disease. Nicotine sulfate is an organic neurotoxin that interferes with nerve-muscle transmissions, causes abnormalities in lab animal offspring, and can lead to increased blood pressure levels, irregular heart-rates and even death in organic gardeners.

They may be “natural” or “organic,” but they’re still powerful and potentially harmful. And in sharp contrast to neonics and other synthetic pesticides, most Big Organic chemicals have not been tested for residue levels or toxicity, Zaruk notes.

Members of Congress should applaud neonic use – instead of condemning it or trying to ban it from refuges – or from all modern agriculture, as some seek to do.

They should focus greater attention on Varroa mites (and Nosema ceranaeparasites), and on programs and technologies that really do pose a threat to endangered whooping cranes, other threatened birds, and bats: the proliferation of wind turbines along migratory flyways and close to many wildlife refuges.

They should investigate (and defund) the latest fad among allied radical environmentalist groups – and even some government agencies, like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Agro-ecology has become a hardcore political movement that rejects and seeks to ban biotech (GMO) and patented hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers, neonics and other pesticides, and even tractors and other mechanized equipment.

Agro-ecology thus perpetuates primitive backbreaking agriculture, poverty, malnutrition and needless death in poor countries – while hypocritically claiming to safeguard ecological values and “social justice.”

Before they introduce legislation, legislators should read reputable scientific studies, rely less on pressure group press releases, and avoid associating with organizations that stridently oppose all manner of modern technologies in the name of protecting bees and other wildlife, indigenous people and human rights.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of many articles on the environment. He has degrees in geology, ecology and environmental law.

Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death Hardcover – March 15, 2006 by Paul Driessen

Why Should We Accept Corrupt Government?

June 17, 2019 by George McClellan, Historian, Political Observer

In light of the unraveling of the corruption inherent in the “Administrative Deep State,” it’s past time for a serious rethinking of the need of a giant federal administrative state and reexamine the common sense methods of governing the framers gave us to rule ourselves.

 

Article1, of the Constitution has already laid out the basic outline for such a republican government as the founders created. While taking apart the monstrosity that politicians have engineered over the decades that changed that original form of government might be painful, it’s far less painful then the future that awaits us if we don’t. Who governs, the people or Socialists?

 

The Administrative state and its regulators, a creation of previous congress’s, have grown into a bureaucracy so entrenched that worker’s can’t even be fired. They lurk in the darkness of their own regulations and use their powers to punish those who fail to comply. Regulators are great for making and executing rules and regulations, and taxing, but not so good at designing those regulations to advance unproven political theories, that most often come undone..............The EPA and IRS comes to mind as fascist agency’s. The EPA has been tweaked but the IRS only suffers changes of top leadership. No one gets fired, no one goes to jail.........

 

Trump has thrown a wrench into the gears of socialisms advancement. Socialists are reeling in confusion but don’t count on them staying there. A revolution is coming. The question is, who’s going to lead it, them or us?.....................To Read More....

How NPR, Washington Post, Bloomberg and other media botched reporting on EPA’s ‘ban’ of 12 ‘bee-killing’ neonicotinoid insecticides

Cameron English, Jon Entine | June 5, 2019 @ Genetic Literacy Project

Image: Larissa Walker/Center for Food Safety

If recent headlines are the measure, advocacy groups making a case that bees are endangered because of the misuse of pesticides just scored a significant victory. On May 20, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that after a 6-year-long legal battle with anti-pesticide activists, it endorsed a voluntary withdrawal of 12 insecticides by a group of agri-chemical companies that a coalition of environmental groups had blamed for health problems in bees.

George Kimbrell, Center for Food Safety legal director and lead counsel in the case against the EPA, immediately claimed that that the settlement represented a massive victory in support of his claims that neonics from ‘harmful’ and ‘toxic’ chemicals. According to a post on the CFS site:

[The] cancellation of these …. pesticides is a hard-won battle and landmark step in the right direction,’ said …. Kimbrell …. ‘But the war on toxics continues: We will continue to fight vigilantly to protect our planet, bees, and the environment from these and similar dangerous toxins.

Facts aside—we will address that—Kimbrell’s casting of the court agreement as a victory for anti-pesticide campaigners was the narrative angle adopted by much of the media. According to reports that flooded the Internet, from the Washington Post to fringe activist sites, the EPA ‘banned’ 12 ‘dangerous’ neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides that environmental activists blame for bee health issues.

Unsurprisingly, CFS acolytes like Care2 crowed in its headline and blog about the success in bringing American regulators to heel. VICTORY! EPA Cancels 12 Bee-Killing Pesticides, Care2 wrote on its activist social community site:

The environmentalists, food safety organizations and beekeepers spent the last 6 years holding the EPA accountable for its lack of diligence in preventing or addressing bee Colony Collapse Disorder and to demand that the EPA protect livelihoods, rural economies and the environment.

Most mainstream media outlets parroted the CFS line. Business Insider’s Aria Bendix told readers, The US just banned 12 pesticides that are like nicotine for bees. Bloomberg reported, EPA Curbs Use of 12 Bee-Harming Pesticides. According to Washington Post energy reporter Dino Grandoni,”EPA now blocks a dozen products containing pesticides thought harmful to bees. The respected publication The Scientist headlined its article, EPA Cancels Registrations for 12 Neonicotinoid Pesticides, noting in the first line:

Out of concern for bees, the Environmental Protection Agency announced on May 20 that the registrations for 12 neonicotinoid-based products used as pesticides in agriculture would be canceled…

But not one of those articles, or dozens of others in news sites across the world, accurately represented what the EPA actually said or the actions that it took.

What did the EPA say and do............To Read More, Much More!!!!!

“Clean” energy isn’t so clean

By Ronald Stein, Mark Mathis March 31st, 2019 |Energy |7 Comments

Energy consumers everywhere, we need to clean up our act! Anti-fossil fuel activists are no doubt nodding their heads in agreement. Except, we’re thinking about something a little different than what they’re thinking. Let’s talk.

 

What we’re referring to is the commonly over-used phrase, “clean energy.” All of us, even those who understand that oil, natural gas, and coal run the world, often refer to wind and solar as “clean” without even questioning it. It’s time to do some questioning.

 

What is it that makes wind and solar so clean and fossil fuels so dirty? Perception and hype. With wind and solar you don’t see anything getting burned (perception) like you do with oil, natural gas, and coal. And it’s the burning that creates pollution (hype). But let’s take a closer look at that.

 

Air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels in the United States has been in steep decline since 1970. And that dramatic drop across all six pollutants the EPA classifies as dangerous took place at the same time Americans increased their fossil fuel use by 40 percent. From 1988 to 2015 our vehicle miles traveled have more than doubled! So, as America has grown, we’ve used more fossil energy, traveled a lot more and yet the air we breathe has continued to get cleaner. That’s amazing. Check “pollutants” off the list.

 

And, for those who are worried about energy-related CO2 emissions, they’ve also been in decline for more than a decade.............To Read More....

 

EPA’s Chemical Risk Assessments Rely on Flawed Science, Study Finds

March 26, 2019 By Linnea Lueken

A new study concludes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a program assessing the toxicity of chemicals and any risk from exposure to them, often produces assessments based on flawed research.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a program assessing the toxicity of chemicals and any risk from exposure to them, often produces assessments based on sloppy or flawed research, a new study concludes...........“EPA risk assessments, by and large, focus on preventing worst-case scenarios—even absurd ones—and ignore more plausible scenarios, while ignoring more serious risks created by the EPA’s own regulations,”

 

EPA identifies four steps necessary for an accurate risk assessment.............

Proponents tout IRIS as the most comprehensive, accurate chemical risk assessment, but it is not, says Logomasini.

 

“IRIS’s supporters say it sets the ‘gold standard’ for risk assessment, when the opposite is true,” Logomasini told Environment & Climate News. “The program has failed to develop rational, useful risk assessments, opting to select absurd risk values that create unwarranted public health scares, harming the public.”.............EPA uses toxicology poorly to make people believe substances they may be exposed to are more dangerous than they really are, says Dr. John Dale Dunn, an emergency physician, researcher, and policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, which publishes Environment & Climate News..................To Read More....

Clearing the air on the EPA

EPA grants to its advisers triggers conflict-of-interest query.

By Steve Milloy

This appeared in the Washington Times on March 8, 2012

Rep. Joe Barton last week took the first official baby step in exposing the Environmental Protection Agency’s corrupt scientific advisory process.

In his opening statement at last week’s House Energy and Commerce hearing about the EPA’s 2013 budget, Mr. Barton of Texas came as close as any Republican ever has to reading EPA Director Lisa P. Jackson the riot act about the agency’s ever-increasing contempt for science, economics, Congress and even the Constitution.

While much of the aforesaid is widely known but typically left unsaid by timid congressional Republicans, Mr. Barton also raised an issue that should shock the conscience of anyone concerned about ethics in government: financial conflict-of-interest among EPA science advisers.

“I want to discuss the EPA’s science and research funding and support activities such as the quality assurance supervisory budget and the committees that monitor the EPA’s internal activities,” Mr. Barton told Ms. Jackson.

“You fund research with grants to people who also serve on your review committees. Is this a conflict of interest? Almost every single member of your Clean Air Science Advisory Committee has been directly or indirectly funded for research. This hand-and-glove policymaking by those appointed to also do your research and being funded by you at the same time is not appropriate. They are often asked to review other research they themselves were a party to on the original research team.How could one possibly expect them to be objective in any way?”

JunkScience.com undertook to put some meat on the bones of what Mr. Barton alleged and discovered that of the seven members of CASAC, six have received or still are receiving substantial sums in the form of research grants from the agency.

According to EPA records, CASAC Chairman Jonathan M. Samet is listed as a principal investigator on grants from the agency totaling $9,526,921. The other CASAC board members have received grants from the EPA: George Allen ($3,907,111); Ana Diez-Roux ($31,343,081); H. Christopher Frey ($2,956,432); G. Armistead Russell ($20,130,736); and Helen Suh ($10,962,364).

Although EPA records do not list seventh board member Kathleen Weathers as a principal investigator receiving any grants from the agency, her employer, the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, is listed as the lead institution in EPA grants totaling $3,570,926.

Other than for Ms. Weathers, these sums don’t include any grants awarded to the CASAC members’ institutions in which the CASAC member is not listed as the principal investigator. So these sums could just be the tip of the iceberg.

While the above-mentioned information is available to the public, not only do you have to look for it, you’ve got to first imagine that such immense and obvious conflicts are possible in the first place.

The EPA, after all, dissuades the public from even considering the possibility of this issue, as the first statement on the agency’s website is, “The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) provides independent advice to the EPA Administrator on the technical bases for EPA’s national ambient air quality standards.” I suppose it depends on what the meaning of “independent” is.

So exactly what is the “independent” aspect of a process in which researchers are paid millions of dollars to conduct research and then get to review and rubber-stamp that research so it invariably advances the EPA’s own political, regulatory and bureaucratic interests?

Mr. Samet, the CASAC chairman, recently opined in the New England Journal of Medicine that air-quality rules should be tightened “for ozone and particulate-matter pollution, because no thresholds have been identified below which there is no risk at all.”

Given that the Clean Air Act technically prohibits the consideration of cost in setting ozone and particulate-matter standards, the view of the handsomely compensated Mr. Samet effectively provides cover for the Obama EPA to regulate industry, agriculture and the public as it chooses, regardless of scientific reality or economic practicality. It has done so already with rules such as the recently promulgated Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, which will cost our economy tens of billions of dollars for no benefits in public health.

Coming down the pike are the recently delayed, more stringent standards for ground-level ozone and the tightening of fine particulate-matter regulations – rules that could cost more than a trillion dollars and millions of jobs by 2020.

America’s air is clean and safe. But Americans will not be learning this from CASAC’s advice to the EPA. Whether this is because CASAC’s members are incompetent or corrupt is anyone’s guess.

But thanks to Mr. Barton, the subject has been broached. Let the debate and investigation begin.


Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery, 2009). I would like to thank Steve for allowing me to republish his works. Tomorrow I will be posting another article dealing with how to fix the EPA by Steve Milloy and Dr. John Dunn.

Holding the EPA to Account

John Dunn and Steve Milloy Originally published 3/29/12 and the problem with EPA remains.  RK

Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton asked for EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's attention in his opening statement at a Feb. 28 House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, berated her and held her to account.

Congressman Barton's opening statement ticked off the following list of problems he had with the EPA, including agency:

1. Failure to comply with Obama Executive Order 13563 requiring regulations that promote economic growth, innovation, competitiveness and jobs with the least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends, taking "into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative" (quoting from the Executive order);
2. Promulgation of power plant regulations that have driven energy costs higher without reasonable justification;
3. Failure to Congressional criticism of regulatory actions, including requests for public health and economic research data and justifications of policy decisions;
4. Disregard of blatant conflicts of interest among its science advisers who receive tens of millions of dollars in research grants from the agency wile also posturing as independent reviewers of agency science;
5. Failure to require that its sponsored researchers follow established rules of public health research with respect to toxicology and epidemiology;
6. Inappropriate reliance on the precautionary principle;
7. Circumvention of Congressional oversight; and
8. Grant-giving to advocacy groups that then enter into collusive lawsuits and aggressive regulatory requests that promote the agency's agenda and expand its regulatory and political power.  (bold highlight is mine)

As Congressman Barton pointed out, "I believe that the American public and taxpayers should not be paying for an agency that manipulates data and funds researchers in the form of exterior grants, who in turn serve on the internal committees within the EPA to create policy and work in an oversight capacity. This is an incredible conflict of interest to the American public."

What are some solutions to the EPA's faults and shortcomings?

1. Shrink EPA. Most environmental protection is done at the state-level. Most environmental regulatory work is done by the states. The Federal agency has too much time and money and that results in overreach and aggressive policy making. (Editor's Note: This also one of the recommendations made by my friend Dr. Jay Lehr, who was one of the original scientists who helped create the EPA. RK)

2. End inherent conflict of interest. Research and regulation need to be separated into independent agencies. At a minimum, EPA science reviewers should not be grantee researchers or affiliated with grantee institutions.

3. Risk assessment (RA) and cost benefit analysis (CBA). All rules must be subject to the two. RA and CBA should be judicially reviewable. This could be done through a super mandate that modifies review criteria for all agency activities.

4. Judicial review. Aggrieved parties should have easier opportunities to challenge the agency in court. The "arbitrary and capricious" standard in the Administrative Procedures Act needs to be replaced with a standard that allows proper challenges, such as the standard of review for workplace rules administered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This could be done with a "super mandate" that overrides all existing statutory law.

5. Impose stricter scientific standards. Obligate the Agency to research that is subject to objective, non conflicted peer review and appropriate evaluation of data and methods. Require that taxpayer funded research be reviewable for data and methods and that research comply with the scientific standards from authoritative resources such as the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence,written by truly independent experts to provide federal judges with guidance on what constitutes reliable scientific evidence in federal courts. If the Reference Manual is good enough for courts, it ought to be good enough for the EPA.

Congressman Barton's dressing down of EPA and its administrator was a first step in the right direction. But now Congressman Barton and his colleagues need to follow through by implementing real solutions that will stop the EPA's regulatory excesses.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery, 2009). I would like to thank Steve for allowing me to republish his works.

The Unending Quest

By Rich Kozlovich

Over these many years I have noticed a pattern of activity that I find sort of fascinating. Scares will ebb and flow, but never really go away. Even after an issue has been raised and dealt with it's clear activists keep these issues on the back burner for future reference, as if everyone will forget what the facts actually were. And to some extent they're right, because there will always be a new crop of young misinformed and uninformed potential acolytes they can gull into the green movement.  Young people in search of some sense of worth.  Searching for something in which they can believe.  Clearly a failure of religion in America today.

As a result, environmentalism has become today’s secular religion, thus, they are susceptible to the Kyrie Eleison of environmentalism. Drinking the Kool Aid they soon become sickened breathing in the fumes from the fever swamps of that movement.  It fills them with arrogance and a sense of self-righteous indignation at the rest of the world that no amount of valid scientific information or rational observation can cure.

I keep hearing all sorts of claims by activists and government grant chasing “scientists” that chemicals (especially pesticides) cause cancer, autism, low sperm count and a host of other unproven scares. This has been particularly true of DDT. More outrageous claims have been made against DDT than almost any product that has ever been developed, with the possible exception of bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates. Do chemicals really cause a drop in sperm count? Finally we can answer with a resounding NO!

In 2007 the American Council on Science and Health cited a study  that clearly demonstrated that:

 “the 1992 study by a group of Danish researchers that claimed sperm counts declined by 50 percent worldwide from 1938 to 1991”, was wrong! They point out that the study was “heavily criticized for its many flaws, methodological problems, and biases” at the time. “We know that the so-called decline in sperm count is just another myth promulgated by the ‘our stolen future’ crowd who say that environmental chemicals lead to infertility in men,” says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. “But now we have proof that’s simply not true.”

* In Update on Sperm, Data Show No Decline By Gina Kolata June 6, 2011

This leads us to DDT, which was banned by the first administrator of the EPA, Bill Ruckelshaus in 1972. And yes….it was a ban. It is true that there were exceptions written into the ban, and yes, it is true that this ban in the U.S. was not incumbent on other nations, and yes it is true that it was not a worldwide ban…..on paper. However, so much economic pressure was placed on countries that didn’t ban it outright that it became a de facto ban in all but a few nations.

Lower sperm count was one of the claims, and yet the generation of parents who were most heavily exposed to DDT were the parents of the baby boomers. Even if there was a valid study that could show this today (which there isn’t), that study wasn’t available when the ban was imposed.

Most studies are filled with weasel word and phrases. Then there are the “conclusions in search of data” studies, much like the Hungarian studies of Trajan and Kemeny published in 1969. Using only 3 ppm in the food per day this dose was fed to five generations of inbred Balb/c mice. They claimed a higher incidence of leukemia in the test subjects over the control animals. They also claimed they started with a leukemia free strain, yet there were incidents of leukemia in the controls.

So what was disturbing about this study? Other researchers working with comparable dosages with animals of any species or strain showed no incidences of cancer of any type. The skepticism warranted an investigation into this puzzle.

Although everyone agreed something went wrong in their study they couldn’t definitely point out what went wrong.  However it was shown that there were design problems in the study and there was a possibility of aflatoxin (an absolutely known carcinogen) contaminated food.

Modern studies seem to have much the same problem. Conclusions in search of data! The question I keep asking is this. If DDT was banned for scientific reasons that were obvious, factual and could be replicated; then why have they been studying it since 1972 to prove that it does________(fill in the blank).

Millions have been spent on studies that have been conclusions in search of data. The mere fact that so much has been spent after the ban to prove that the ban was proper is a good indicator that everyone….and I mean everyone, on both sides of this issue, know that the science was weak or invalid, and the decision to ban DDT was a political one.

The real problem with the ban on DDT isn't the fact that we lost DDT. Why? Technically it didn’t matter (at least in the developed world) because we had a large arsenal of products to defend society’s health, food and property.

Philosophically it was devastating because it became the basis for all that has come into being since then. All those tools have come under attack, and as a result we have lost important chemistry. First it was the chlorinated hydrocarbons, then it was the organophosphates and carbamates and now the pyrethroids and rodenticides are under attack. All of this goes back to the ban on DDT. That ban laid the foundation for the financial and legislative power of the environmental movement. The ban on DDT needs to be overturned for that reason alone.

Environmentalist fraud and manslaughter

In the name of banning DDT, GEF bureaucrats are consigning millions to death from malaria

Paul Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs. Paul Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power, Black death.

Editor's Note:  This was origianlly published on 3/2/11

 

By Paul Driessen

Many chemotherapy drugs for treating cancer have highly unpleasant side effects—hair loss, vomiting, intense joint pain, liver damage and fetal defects, to name just a few. But anyone trying to ban the drugs would be tarred, feathered and run out of town. And rightly so.

The drugs’ benefits vastly outweigh their risks. They save lives. We need to use chemo drugs carefully, but we need to use them.

The same commonsense reasoning

The same commonsense reasoning should apply to the Third World equivalent of chemotherapy drugs: DDT and other insecticides to combat malaria. Up to half a billion people are infected annually by this vicious disease, nearly a million die, countless survivors are left with permanent brain damage, and 90% of this carnage is in sub-Saharan Africa, the most impoverished region on Earth.

These chemicals don’t cure malaria—they prevent it. Used properly, they are effective, and safe. DDT is particularly important. Sprayed once or twice a year on the inside walls of homes, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do enter, so they leave without biting, and kills any that land. No other chemical, at any price, can do this.

Even better, DDT has few adverse side effects—except minor, speculative and imaginary “risks” that are trumpeted on anti-pesticide websites. In the interest of saving lives, one would think eco activists would tone down their “ban DDT” disinformation. However, that is unlikely.

Anti-DDT fanaticism built the environmental movement, and gave it funding, power and stature it never had before. No matter how many people get sick and die because health agencies are pressured not to use DDT, or it is totally banned, Environmental Defense, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Pesticide Action Network, and allied activist groups will never reform or recant.

Government agencies—including the US Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, and Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry—will likewise continue pouring hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into anti-DDT research, in futile attempts to prove DDT causes some sort of meaningful harm. And the malaria death toll will continue to mount.

Worse, they have now been joined by the United Nations Environment Program, Global Environment Facility and even World Health Organization Environmental Division—all of whom share the avowed goal of ending all DDT production by 2017, and banning all use of DDT in disease control by 2020.

A recent GEF “study” demonstrates how far they are willing to go, to achieve this goal, no matter how deadly it might be. The study purported to prove DDT is no longer needed and can be replaced by “integrated and environment-friendly” alternatives: for example, mosquito-repelling trees, and non-chemical control of breeding sites and areas around homes that shelter insects.

The $14-million study claimed that these interventions resulted in an unprecedented “63% reduction in the number of people with [malaria], without using DDT or any other type of pesticide.” However, as analyses by malaria and insecticide experts Richard Tren and Dr. Donald Roberts clearly demonstrate  (see Research and Reports  in Tropical Medicine and AEI Outlooks), the study, conclusions and policy recommendations are not merely wrong. They are deliberately misleading and fraudulent.

GEF did its 2003-2008 study in Mexico and seven Central American countries—all of which had largely ceased using DDT and other pesticides years before the GEF project. Instead of chemical sprays, these countries now employ huge numbers of chloroquine and primaquine (CQ and PQ) pills to prevent and treat malaria: 2,566 pills per diagnosed case in Mexico; 22,802 pills (!) in El Salvador; 50 to 1,319 pills per case in the other countries, according to 2004 health records.

It was these powerful drugs, not the “environment-friendly” GEF interventions, that slashed malaria rates. Indeed, they had begun to do so before GEF even arrived. This terribly inconvenient reality was further underscored by the fact that malaria rates were the same in “study” areas and “control” areas, where GEF did nothing—and that the number of malaria cases increased when the number of pills per case decreased. In other words, GEF could have gotten its same results using one bed net or one larvae-eating fish.

GEF’s fraudulent claims were then compounded by its insistence that the results and conclusions are relevant to other malaria-endemic regions. They are not. Malaria parasites in Latin American countries are Plasmodium vivax; in Africa and Southeast Asia, they are the far more virulent P. falciparum.

CQ and PQ are effective in preventing and treating vivax; they rarely prevent or cure falciparum malaria. Moreover, the eight Latin American countries have 140 million people. Sub-Saharan Africa has 800 million and a woeful medical and transportation infrastructure; Southeast Asia has 600 million people. Both have infinitely more malaria. Getting adequate medicines that work (far more expensive Artemisia-based ACT drugs) to 1.4 billion people would be a budgetary, logistical and medical impossibility.

But apparently none of these facts occurred to the bureaucrats who did this study. That’s hardly surprising, since the project was designed and directed, not by disease control experts, but by the UNEP and radical environmental groups—which also spent millions distributing and promoting the study and other anti-DDT propaganda all over the world, ensuring that they received substantial media attention.

Anti-pesticide fanatics know this “study” is fraudulent. They just have a very high tolerance for how many malaria cases, brain-damaged people and dead babies are “acceptable” or “sustainable.” They just don’t care enough to bother learning basic facts about malaria, CQ versus ACT, vivax versus falciparum. They need to get out of the malaria control policy business and let medical professionals do their jobs.

(To learn more about stopping malaria, see Tren and Roberts’ book The Excellent Powder, Dr. Rutledge Taylor’s documentary film “3 Billion and Counting,” and the website for Africa Fighting Malaria.)

The final report claims its authors submitted manuscripts to prominent peer-reviewed medical journals. However, nothing was ever published. That suggests that they lied, and never submitted any manuscripts; or they did submit papers, but the manuscripts were rejected as being shoddy, unprofessional, unscientific, or even on par with Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent vaccine-and-autism work.

To cap it all off, the bogus GEF project appears to have been conducted using funds diverted from already insufficient malaria control budgets. The GEF, UNEP, Stockholm Convention Secretariat and radical environmental groups are using money intended for malaria control to launch anti-pesticide programs in countries plagued by malaria, and gain control over public health policies, insecticides and programs.

Overall, the GEF has spent over $800 million on efforts to eliminate DDT and other “persistent organic pollutants” (POPs). It budgeted nearly $150 million in 2007 alone on its campaign to ban DDT production and use—but spent a lousy $22 million researching alternatives to DDT for vector control.

Until an equally effective and long-lasting substitute for DDT is developed—one that repels, irritates and kills mosquitoes—this vital weapon needs to remain in the disease control arsenal.

The GEF, UNEP, POPs Secretariat and WHO need to withdraw the study; discipline the people who perpetrated this fraud; retract World Health Assembly Resolution 50.13, calling for malaria-infested countries to slash their use of public health insecticides; and issue a statement making it absolutely clear that this “study” was erroneous and deceptive, and should not be considered in setting malaria policies.

Donors to the GEF and radical groups must be exposed. For activists and agencies to continue promoting this study or demand that malaria-endemic countries stop using DDT and insecticides, and adopt bogus “eco-friendly” GEF “solutions,” is gross medical malpractice—and deliberate manslaughter.

Malaria can be controlled, and even eradicated in many areas. We simply need to use every available weapon—including DDT, pesticides, nets, window screens, drugs and other interventions—in an orderly, coordinated and systematic manner; and ensure that mosquito infestations, disease outbreaks, malaria control successes and problems are monitored and evaluated accurately and honestly.

If we do that—and end the anti-pesticide hysteria—we can get the job done.


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We don't need no stinkin' evidence

Why can’t you be more polite, and stop questioning our integrity and science?

by Paul Driessen

Who can forget the classic confrontation between Humphrey Bogart and Alfonso Bedoya in “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” It’s now being reprised in living color, featuring banditos from East Anglia, Penn State, Washington and the UN.

“We’re Federales,” they tell us. “You know, climate police. Evidence? We ain’t got no evidence. We don’t need no evidence. We don’t have to show you any stinkin’ evidence.

“Hold your tongue, hombre. We ain’t trying to do you any harm. Why don’t you try to be a little more polite? Why don’t you just throw us a little more money, and stop questioning our integrity and science?”

The United States alone has spent over $30 billion on alarmist “climate science” over the past 20 years – plus another $35 billion on renewable energy – based on the banditos’ tales of global warming catastrophe, if we don’t slash fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions.

However, instead of solid, reproducible scientific evidence, the bandito scientists offered hypotheses, speculation, assumptions, assertions, “hockey stick” graphs, computer models and worst-case scenarios – purporting to demonstrate that CO2 causes planetary warming … and the warming will be cataclysmic.

Their reports were “peer-reviewed” by networks of fellow alarmists who tied every temperature, weather and wildlife anomaly to global warming and carbon dioxide. When challenged, they claimed the “science is settled” and stonewalled requests from experts who did not accept dire predictions of planetary mayhem – and wanted to examine the raw temperature data, computer codes and analyses.

Suddenly, however, the world got a glimpse into the mindset and machinations of these tax-funded catastrophists. Thousands of emails revealed systematic, concerted collusion to conceal and delete data, manipulate temperature trends that contradicted predictions of dangerous warming, stifle debate, and pressure scientific journals to publish only alarmist studies … and exclude dissenting analyses.

This fraudulent science is the basis for congressional cap-tax-and-trade legislation, EPA’s pronouncement that CO2 “endangers” human health and welfare, and the new global governance treaty being debated in Copenhagen. The actions will result in huge taxes on energy use, reduced liberties and living standards, millions of lost jobs, and a massive transfer of wealth from energy-consuming families and businesses to governments and their allies.

The proposed Copenhagen treaty authorizes the “transfer of technical and financial resources” from developed countries to developing countries, to help them address climate change impacts allegedly caused by hydrocarbon use in industrialized nations. Free or low-cost technology transfers would include electrical generation and pollution control equipment and patents. “Financial resources” would tally $50-200 billion per year, most of it apparently from the United States.

The money would come from fines for noncompliance with CO2 emission rules, a global “carbon tax” on energy use, a new levy on air travel, and “mandatory contributions” as high as 1% of GDP, paid by (formerly) rich developed countries, as new foreign aid for corrupt officials in poor nations.

One would think such actions would be based on rock-solid science. One would be wrong. It’s time to ask the critical question – which the White House, UN, EPA, “mainstream” media (especially the Associated Press, New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN) have refused to consider:

What evidence backs up the terrifying disaster claims, the calls for drastic “solutions” that won’t work, to a crisis that extensive evidence strongly suggests is speculative or even illusory?

Reliable satellite temperature measurements span most of the planet. However, they only cover the last 30 years – and for the past 15 years show stable and then declining temperatures, despite steadily rising CO2 levels. So climate crisis scientists have focused their “research” on ground temperatures.

However, nearly half of the world’s remaining ground-based gauges are in the United States, and cover just 1.8% of the Earth’s surface. Moreover, as meteorologist Anthony Watts has demonstrated, most of those gauges are close to air conditioning exhausts, tarmac, blacktop and other urban heat sources. So they read high, and then are further “adjusted” upward, corrupting climate records, models and analyses.

Most of Siberia’s stations were shut down years ago, leaving that vast frigid region devoid of reliable data, and further tilting average global temperatures upward. Britain’s combined marine and land-based temperatures were “value-added” (aggregated, averaged and manipulated) by its East Anglia University Climate Research Unit (CRU) – which then tossed or lost all the original raw data, so no one could check its methodology, accuracy and honesty. (Try that tactic with your friendly IRS.)

The incomplete, averaged and manipulated ground temperature data were then fed into computer models that reflect our still limited understanding of climate causes and dynamics; assume CO2 is the primary driver in climate change; and poorly analyze the vast, complex, chaotic planetary climate system. The models have never been able to forecast climate accurately, even one year in advance, much less 50 or 100. They can’t reproduce prior years’ climates. They failed to predict the stable and declining temperatures of the past 15 years.

But even that didn’t conjure up the desired “manmade climate crisis.” As a CRU programmer put it, the only way the models can produce “the proper result” is when programmers apply a “very artificial correction,” use “low pass filtering at century and longer time scales,” and “include a load of garbage.”

Back in 1999, CRU director Phil Jones reported that he’d “just used [Penn State climatologist Michael Mann’s] trick … to hide the decline” in average global temperatures. In October 2009, US climate scientist Kevin Trenberth moaned that alarmists still “can’t account for the lack of warming and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

Nevertheless, “peer reviewed” scientific journals somehow produce “consensus” among “mainstream” scientists, offer “unequivocal” evidence of disastrous manmade global warming – and give the IPCC, White House, EPA and Congress the “proof” they need to justify treaties, laws and regulations that will send energy costs skyrocketing. Compliant media outlets whitewash the email and science scandal, and trumpet the latest alarmist claims. And voila, like Freddy Krueger in “Nightmare on Elm Street,” the predicted warming crisis is back, just in time for Copenhagen.

Evidence tampering like this would get legal cases thrown out of court – and land the manipulators in jail. To use it in advancing economy-wrecking energy policies is criminal.

Just one week ago, President Obama promised jobs summit attendees, “We will do everything we can to bring down the unemployment rate.”

I would like to thank Paul for giving me blanket permission to reprint his work.  RK