By H. Sterling Burnett

September 16, 2018 - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is fundamentally transforming itself under President Donald Trump’s direction, from a department producing and funding politicized science to one instilling sound scientific standards for research that should produce results improving the environment and protecting peoples’ health.

Because the economic and social implications of regulations are profound, the science they are built upon must be impeccable.

Over the past few decades—under Republican and Democratic administrations alike—EPA formed a cozy relationship with radical environmental activists and liberal academic researchers. With the support of environmental lobbyists who despise market capitalism (expressed by consumers’ free choices in the marketplace), EPA bureaucrats, in pursuit of more power and expanded budgets for the agency, funded researchers who, because they were largely dependent on government grants for the majority of their funding, were only too happy to produce results claiming industry is destroying the Earth and the only way to prevent an environmental collapse is more government control of the economy.

These reports, however, ignored the fact poverty and hunger have steadily declined and people are living longer and more productively than ever before.

Recognizing this, Trump set about changing the way EPA pursues science: paying greater fealty to the scientific method and removing temptations for scientific corruption.

Not surprisingly, researchers, environmentalists, and bureaucrats who are seeing their power curtailed and their gravy train ending are crying foul.

EPA’s scientific advisory panels are tasked with ensuring research the agency uses to develop and justify regulations is rigorous, has integrity, and is based on the best available science. To better ensure this, EPA changed how it staffs its scientific advisory panels, ceasing to automatically renew existing board members’ terms and instead filling its scientific panels on a competitive basis as each panelist’s term expires.

EPA hopes this will improve the science the agency uses to inform its decisions, by expanding diversity—diversity of interests, diversity of scientific disciplines, and diversity of backgrounds—to bring in a wider array of viewpoints to EPA decision-making.

In addition, to improve accountability, reduce opportunities for corruption, and prevent conflicts of interest, EPA also prohibited members of its federal advisory committees from receiving EPA grants for their research. It was always a foolish practice to allow those recommending, often determining, who gets EPA grants to be in the running for those grants, yet this was business as usual at EPA, with grant makers awarding themselves, research teams they were members of, or their friends, billions of taxpayer dollars over the years.

EPA has attempted to end the use of “secret science,” by proposing a new rule requiring the data underlying scientific studies used by the agency to craft regulations be available for public inspection, criticism, and independent verification.

For years, EPA bureaucrats have used the results of studies by researchers who would not disclose their research methods, assumptions, or underlying data to be examined and tested for confirmation or falsification, to justify regulations costing billions of dollars to businesses and individuals. EPA is finally ending this unjustifiable practice.

Another long-overdue EPA regulatory reform was the decision to end exclusive use of the Linearity No Threshold (LNT) model when assessing the dangers of radiation, carcinogens, and other toxic substances in the environment. Going forward, EPA will incorporate uncertainty into its risk assessments using a variety of more realistic models.

Using LNT as a basis for regulation of environmental clean-ups, setting safety standards for nuclear plants, and limiting low-dose radiation treatments for medical patients has cost lives and millions of dollars.

The LNT model implies there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation or exposure to various other chemicals or toxins. The truth, by contrast, is adverse effects from low-dose exposures to radiation and most other chemicals and potential toxins are often nonexistent. Substances that may be harmful in large quantities can actually be beneficial in small amounts, a fact known as hormesis.

In the commonly paraphrased words of 15th century Swiss physician and astronomer Paracelsus, “the dose makes the poison.” Vitamins, which are valuable in small quantities, and even water, which is literally necessary for life, can become deadly if too much of either is taken over a short period of time. Or consider sun exposure. Although exposure to too much sunlight can contribute to skin cancer, sunlight is required to catalyze the final synthesis of Vitamin D, which strengthens the bones, helping prevent osteoporosis and rickets. There is also ample evidence sunlight can help fight depression, among other ailments.

Replacing reliance on the untenable LNT model with other models of exposure and response will result in better safety and health protocols, potentially saving billions of dollars and thousands of lives each year.

EPA’s faulty science protocols were built over decades, not a day, meaning undoubtedly there are many other policies and standards that should be reviewed and altered by the Trump administration to better serve the American people. One policy that leaps to mind, since I’ve written about it repeatedly, is the need for EPA to rescind its endangerment finding for carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is toxic at any foreseeable levels, and human carbon dioxide emissions do not endanger human health or the environment. EPA should never have claimed they do. As I explained in a previous Climate Change Weekly, because the endangerment finding is still in place, the Trump administration having been forced to replace the rule with one of its own, the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, instead of simply repealing and the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have dramatically restricted carbon dioxide emissions from coal power plants and thus forced their closure. Although ACE is less costly and prescriptive than CPP, it will still add billions of dollars to peoples’ power bills, cost jobs, prematurely close some (fewer, but still some) coal power plants, and strain household budgets. This could have been avoided if the administration had simply followed the science and withdrew the endangerment finding. It is not too late. ACE has not come into force yet, so the administration has time to get the science and policy right. Let’s hope it does.

In addition, let’s hope the administration enacts reforms at other executive agencies similar to those already adopted by EPA so the regulations they produce are grounded in the best available science, free of political corruption and bureaucratic incentives for agency mission creep and growth.