Chevron Doctrine is Activist Insanity

By Rich Kozlovich

The Chevron Deference became doctrine as a result of a SCOTUS decision in the 1984 Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. case, "that the courts should defer to the agencies interpretations of ambiguous or unclear statute that Congress delegated to the agency to administer". After all, these agencies decisions are based on the views "experts"! 

Well,  that's now being challenged, and rightly so, and for good reason.

I'm a retired 40 year veteran of the structural pest control industry.  An exterminator!  And for many years I had the privilege of being heavily involved in my industry's affairs defending the use of pesticides, and fertilizers.   

One of the biggest scams ever pushed by the EPA to justify banning pesticides was the claims regarding pesticides and Endocrine Disruption (ED), which are more correctly termed hormonally active agents, (HAA), "substances that possess hormone-like activity."

In  May 20, 2016  Julianna LeMieux posted this article entitled,  How Do You Regulate Something That You Don’t Understand?, saying:

The debate about endocrine disruption is intense, in large part because the research is inconclusive. In turn, there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding how to regulate  the use of supposedly endocrine disrupting chemicals.  Endocrine disruptor chemicals (EDCs) are defined as having the potential to alter one or more functions of the endocrine system and cause negative effects in an organism, and/or its babies.  A new publication entitled “Scientific Issues Relevant to Setting Regulatory Criteria to Identify Endocrine Disrupting Substances in the European Union” is the latest in a long line of reports, studies and recommendations opining on the best way to identify what defines an EDC and how to deal with them.

The real problem with these "studies" are the world is full of naturally occurring endocrine disruptors, especially in the food we eat.  In his book The Really Inconvenient Truths Iain Murray states:

"Laboratory experiments have shown that there are so-called "endocrine disruptors" present in forty-three different foods common in the human diet, including corn, garlic, pineapple, potatoes, and wheat. Most amusingly, soybean, that product so beloved by liberal environmentalists, is a particularly potent source of phytoestrogens".....

"it appears that on average human beings consume just over 100 micrograms of estrogen equivalents a day from natural sources. Compare that to the amount of industrial chemical amount of 2.5 micrograms.".........

"As it turns out phytoestrogens are actually much more potent than the chemicals that act like estrogens. Our friend DDT, for instance, has a relative potency to natural estrogen of 0.000001, meaning it takes one million molecules to have the same impact of one molecule of real estrogen."

If that's the case, and it is, how can you determine if manufactured chemicals have any impact at all?  It's simple, you create mythological science.

The fact is all this got started by a piece of falsified science from Steven F. Arnold of the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research who along with his gang published a study in June of 1996:

"claiming that combinations of pesticides and PCBs were up to 1,000 times more potent as endocrine disruptors than the individual chemicals alone." 

As a result the EPA managed to include into the Food Quality Protection Act an ED requirement, resulting in the loss of pesticides used effectively and safely for decades.  Then came the consequences of time.  Which is the great leveler of truth, and it turned out this study that  Carol Browner - head of EPA at the time - declared: 

"The new study is the strongest evidence to date that combinations of estrogenic chemicals may be potent enough to significantly increase the risk of breast cancer, prostate cancer, birth defects and other major health concerns." She went on to say: "I was astounded by the findings. Dr. Lynn Goldman, EPA pesticide chief, claimed "I just can't remember a time where I've seen data so persuasive … The results are very clean looking".  

The results were astounding?  Really?  The data persuasive and clean looking?  Really?  If that was so, then why was it no one was capable of duplicating those results, anywhere in the world.  Because according the journal Science, Arnold was found to have:

"committed scientific misconduct by intentionally falsifying the research results published in the journal Science and by providing falsified and fabricated materials to investigating officials" ...[and]......"there is no original data or other corroborating evidence to support the research results and conclusions reported in the Science paper as a whole."

So, why is this important now?  Because the FQPA is still on the books, and the ED requirement remains as part of FQPA, and even after it was known to be junk science, there was a short term push at EPA to once again make ED claims against pesticides.  

This is more evidence these bureaucratic "experts" are not experts at all, and in point of fact, they're activists, and particularly environmental activists, who have no idea what they're talking about more times than not, and they don't care, and really don't care about the negative consequences of their insane decisions. 

The same was true of Colony Collapse Disorder.  I shared this article, Presidential Pollinator Protection: Myths, Facts and Hyperbole, with a prominent EPA official who shared it with his colleagues, and that was the last time we heard much from the EPA about saving the honey bees from extinction as a result of the use of pesticides. Did my article have anything to do with that?  I have no idea, but they could never say they weren't told!  

But the question that really needs answered is why is it an autodidact bugman knew all this and these bureaucrat experts didn't?  And if they don't know the facts, and don't truthfully understand what they're regulating, how can the courts justify continuing to defer to these agencies under the Chevron Doctrine?   These agency regulations are in effect laws Congress never saw and never voted on!

Chevron needs to be sent onto the ash heap of history, and the Congress needs to start doing the job they were hired to do.  While we're at it, they need to dump the EPA, and my now passed friend Dr. Jay Lehr, who was one of the founders of EPA put together a five year plan to do just that, because according to Jay, the EPA hasn't done anything worthwhile since 1980.  

To tell the truth, I'm betting that's true of the rest of the almost 450 agencies of the federal government.