Sunday, May 20, 2012

The EPA’s Faulty Science Can Be Stopped

By John Dale Dunn and Steve Milloy

A Strategy to Stop EPA Science Abuse

There is a way to stop the EPA's abuse of science and prevent their continued aggressive regulatory activity that destroys the economy and causes harm to Americans. Primarily, we have to hold the EPA to good scientific principles and stop the EPA's overreaching and panic-mongering.

The method that will work is a well-established judicial and legal demand for good scientific evidence as described in the Daubert supreme court opinion, explained in the book by the Federal Judicial Center -- the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.

The Supreme Court opinion in Daubert v. Merrell Dow, 509 U.S. 579 (1993) set out rules on assessing the reliability of scientific evidence. To educate judges on how to conduct judicial affairs consistent with the Daubert rules, the Federal Judicial Center published the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (RMSE) in 1994.......

All the EPA studies (including those done by Samet and his associates) used to claim that the EPA is saving lives or to justify air pollution regulations have weak associations that prove nothing and are unreliable -- i.e., they are within the "noise" (normal variability) range for the premature death endpoint that they report. Samet and his EPA researcher colleagues are harvesting "deaths" from the normal variability of day-to-day events and calling them deaths from air pollution. It's nonsense, and they must know it.

Now the EPA and Dr. Samet assert the theory of "no threshold" to air pollution toxicology. Chemical toxicology still is based on thresholds. "No threshold" chemical air pollutant toxicology turns the Clean Air Act on its head and nullifies and abandons the Clean Air Act strategy intended by the Congress.

The EPA human health effects on science cannot be defended, and the aggressive air pollution regulatory regime is based on a scientific house of cards that can be brought down by an effective legal and political/legislative challenge.

Editor's Note: Please follow the link to see the whole article.  The EPA has been a lava flow of scientifically dubious regulations since it was founded.  Why would we expect it to be any better as time went by.  EPA was not created to be a scientific agency.  It was created to be a psuedo-scientific political agency with a dark political agenda driving it.  In that it has been horribly successful.  RK

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