Citing the risk of conflicts of interest, the EPA administrator instituted a sweeping change to the agency’s core system of advisory panels on Tuesday, restricting membership to scientists who don’t receive EPA grants.
In practice, the move represents “a major purge of independent scientists,” Terry F. Yosie, chair of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board during the Reagan administration, told the Washington Post. Their removal paves the way for a fresh influx of industry experts and state government officials pushing for lax regulations.
The advisory boards are meant to ensure that health regulations are based on sound science, but that role may be changing. As of Tuesday, the new chair of the Clean Air Safety Advisory Committee is Tony Cox, an independent consultant, who has argued that reductions in ozone pollution have “no causal relation” to public health.
The new head of the Science Advisory Board is Michael Honeycutt, the head toxicologist at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, who has said that air pollution doesn’t matter because “most people spend more than 90 percent of their time indoors.”
The figureheads of science denial were on hand to celebrate Pruitt’s announcement. Representative Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, called the move a “special occasion.”
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we’re all so much safer under Pruitt’s EPA, don’t you think? two weeks ago, they ruled that radiation from a dirty bomb or a nuclear meltdown posed “no harmful health effect”, then yesterday they said that water drawn from wells at a hazardous waste site in Puerto Rico was fit for consumption, and today we know longer have to be concerned about air pollution…with all these threats eliminated, our quality of life is just getting better all the time…
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Any word on changes to the EEAC? I guess there’s an upside to the lack of economics grant funding.
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