[Source: Orange County Register] See if you can spot the flaw in this logic: Disease-causing bacteria can be spread by hand contact. Boiling water kills bacteria. Plunge your hands into boiling water several times a day to prevent disease.
If you can see the flaw in the logic, you have better eyesight than a lot of people who write government regulations.
What you noticed is that there was no mention of the negative consequences, also known as the cost, of the boiling-water policy. Similarly, the cost of government regulations is often omitted, overshadowed by an analysis demonstrating that the benefit is greater than the cost.
In analyzing the costs and benefits of air-quality regulations, regulators frequently cite the financial benefit of preventing thousands of premature deaths from fine particulate matter in the air, known as PM2.5.
For example, in 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency projected that the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan would prevent 3,600 premature deaths and save as much as $34 billion. That made the regulations appear cost-effective — the annual cost of compliance was estimated to range from $1.4 billion in 2020 to as much as $8.4 billion by 2030.
About five years ago, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, expressed concern that the EPA’s new limits on ozone would cost $90 billion per year by the agency’s own estimate. He was not pleased that the EPA had cited hidden, undisclosed data more than 1,000 times in its assessment supporting the new ozone rule.
Smith proposed a bill called the Secret Science Reform Act. “Nearly every major air-quality regulation from [the Obama] administration has been justified by studies that even the EPA hasn’t seen,” he said, and his bill would require the EPA “to base its decisions on information to which all scientists have access.”
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, sponsored the bill in the Senate. “EPA has a long history of relying on science that was not created by the agency itself,” he said. “This often means that the science is not available to the public, and therefore cannot be reproduced and verified.”
What exactly is this secret science?
In particular, two studies published in the 1990s on the health effects of air pollution, the Harvard Six Cities Study and a larger study in 1995 by the American Cancer Society. In the Harvard study, researchers chose 8,111 people in six U.S. cities to participate. The cities were selected for their varying levels of pollutants.
The study was limited to white people between the ages of 25 and 74. Participants were tested for lung function and asked about their age, sex, weight, height, education level, complete smoking history, occupational exposures and medical history.
Once a year, researchers checked to see who was still alive.
The study was published in 1993 and the researchers said they observed “significant effects of air pollution on mortality.” They did not release their underlying data.
The Harvard Six Cities Study and the American Cancer Society study are still being cited by the EPA as the basis for new and ever-more-stringent regulations. But the relevance of the 1970s-era participants to today’s regulations has been questioned. In 2004, the National Research Council warned that the data from the 1993 and 1995 studies would be of “little use for decision-making.”
Still, the EPA continued to impose phenomenally costly regulations justified by these 1990s studies. Again and again, regulators claimed that tighter regulations would prevent thousands of premature deaths, saving billions of dollars.
But consider that California Air Resources Board staffer Hien Tran, author of the 2010 report “Methodology for Estimating Premature Deaths Associated with Long-term Exposure to Fine Airborne Particulate Matter in California,” bought his Ph.D. in statistics from a diploma mill for $1,000. Some board members knew that, but they kept it hidden from the other board members until after a vote to impose costly new regulations on heavy-duty diesel trucks and buses.
All of this is the context for EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s recent decision to end the use of “secret science.” Pruitt said, “the methodology and data need to be a part of the official record.” The EPA will now demand “transparent and reproducible” science to justify regulations, something that would have been required by another of Rep. Smith’s bills, HR 1430, which passed the House last March, but stalled in the Senate.
Science doesn’t have to be controversial. We should all be able to agree on the temperature of boiling water.
Susan Shelley is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Reach her at Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter: @Susan_Shelley
Source: Orange County Register
March 27, 2018
