August 1, 2009

Politics Trump Scientific Integrity

By Dr. Robert Peltier, PE

In their recent endangerment finding draft technical support document (TSD), scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conclude that carbon dioxide emissions are a public health hazard and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Federal law requires that regulations be based on scientific information that is "accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased"; the most recent available; and collected by the "best available methods." The EPA’s TSD on carbon emissions violates all of these requirements.

Rush to Judgment

Lisa Jackson, the new EPA administrator, gave her staff only a few weeks to prepare a TSD for carbon emissions. It should have taken a year or two. The TSD is the technical documentation that must be finalized before the EPA can promulgate carbon regulations, hence the haste. The short schedule to prepare the TSD forced staff scientists to pick between two poor choices: maintain the required scientific checks and balances but miss the TSD deadline of April 2 (the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the agency to regulate CO₂) or compromise their internal scientific review processes and meet the schedule. They chose option two.

The EPA working group that authored the TSD circulated its draft in mid-March for an internal review. Staff researcher Dr. Alan Carlin, a 38-year EPA veteran, was given less than five days to prepare his comments. Carlin prepared a blistering 98-page report that was extremely critical of the TSD’s scientific rigor because EPA "decisions [were] based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."