Effectively, the new definition requires the agency to check the math of every study to make sure it gets the same answer. And the rule requires an overly broad set of sensitivity studies on all parameters. That is enormously time-consuming and impractical. And such delays are not ethical for public health studies, where the impacts on individuals can be severe. It upends the value placed on studies. There are good ways to evaluate a scientific research project: How well is it designed?
Are the assumptions reasonable? Are the sample sizes big enough? Is the evidence strong enough to point to a conclusion, and how does that conclusion compare with other studies in the field?
The new proposal invents an arbitrary new bureaucratic standard by which a study is judged, unrelated to robustness or merit. The actual weight the evidence would receive is, according to this new proposal, based on the public availability of raw data. For an agency to implement a new regulation—and for it to survive a legal challenge—there must be a clear authority for the action given to the agency by law.
EPA political leaders are insisting this new rule is based on a need for transparency and good science. But every step of the process has made a mockery of those claims. This rule was designed by political staff, based on proposals long pushed by lobbyists for the tobacco industry and fossil-fuel extractors. But as the supplemental draft shows, those comments were largely ignored.
Intrepid bathers in Long Island Sound were routinely surrounded by bits of used toilet paper. Stinky algal blooms were common, as were fish kills. The Clean Water Act led to tens of billions of federal dollars being invested in municipal sewage treatment plants. But people do swim in Boston Harbor and the Hudson River. And the toxic cesspools that literally catch on fire have largely become a thing of the past.
In her seminal book Silent Spring , Rachel Carson popularized emerging research that showed DDT was wreaking havoc on birds by making their eggs thin to the point of disintegration. Beloved birds like the bald eagle and peregrine falcon teetered toward extinction.
A colorless, nearly odorless insecticide, DDT had been a valuable weapon against disease-carrying mosquitoes and also a boon to farmers. People had so little notion of its dangers they let their children play happily in the spray. That same year Congress passed the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act , giving EPA more clear authority to regulate pesticides in general based on their impact on health and the environment.
Until the s, hazardous chemical waste was general disposed of like ordinary trash—at best in an unlined municipal landfill from which toxic chemicals could seep into groundwater, at worst in open dumps, where runoff from corroded barrels might contaminate streams. The country was dotted with thousands of such dumps.
EPA now tracks chemical waste from hundreds of thousands of facilities; it requires landfills to be lined and water leaching through them to be collected before it can contaminate drinking water. RCRA also regulates municipal waste and has given a big push to recycling. If RCRA is about handling waste right in the present, the Superfund law is about cleaning up the dumps of the past. In , hundreds of residents of Love Canal, New York, near Niagara Falls, were sickened; their planned community had been built on an old toxic waste dump operated previously by the Hooker Chemical Company.
The neighborhood was eventually demolished and cleaned, and the incident helped jump-start the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of , commonly known as Superfund. Under that law EPA is slowly trying to clean up a nationwide legacy of Love Canals, recovering costs where it can from the original polluters. As National Geographic reported in , nearly half of the more than 1, Superfund sites have been fully addressed—but even many of them have to be monitored indefinitely.
Some 49 million or nearly one in six Americans live close to a Superfund site. Like government agencies in nearly every other country in the world, EPA is now trying to extend that principle to carbon dioxide, the waste gas produced by burning fossil fuels, which is warming the planet.
In August the agency finalized its Clean Power Plan, which for the first time sets a national limit on carbon pollution from power plants. The goal is to reduce their emissions by 32 percent by , relative to levels. The plan is a central part of the U. Court of Appeals in Washington by Scott Pruitt, the attorneys general of 23 other states, and a raft of utilities and fossil fuel companies. After retiring from that mission decades ago, William Ruckelshaus went on to serve as an executive at Weyerhaeuser, the lumber company, and Browning Ferris, a waste management company.
He has also served on the board of Monsanto. At EPA, you work for a cause that is beyond self-interest and larger than the goals people normally pursue. You're not there for the money, you're there for something beyond yourself. All rights reserved. Editor's note: An earlier version of this story understated the extent to which the benefits of EPA air pollution rules exceed the costs. This story was originally published on December 9, Almost all Republicans of his generation did.
Clean air, clean water, open spaces—these should once again be the birthright of every American. But he viewed those costs as justifiable, even obligatory. He continued:. We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high.
Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called. The public overwhelmingly agreed with these mandates. Some 20 million Americans demonstrated across the country. Congress canceled business, as its members felt a responsibility to stand with their constituents and vowed to clean up the mess they had made.
The EPA, and the laws it implemented, changed everything. Although we now drive four times as many miles as we did in , smog no longer chokes our cities as it used to, thanks to a more than 90 percent decrease in emissions per mile. The average American kid is growing up with blood lead levels one-tenth of what her grandparents had as children. Municipal solid waste recycling has grown fivefold.
More than 18 million acres of land contaminated by hazardous waste have been cleaned up. The rate of wetlands loss has decreased by 96 percent. Nostalgia is a dangerous instinct. The EPA saved us. But things are looking up for you again—just when we need you the most. Now families are demanding answers. And every extra day it lasts, the deleterious effects on our national parks, food inspections, and toxic waste cleanups grow bigger and more difficult to stop.
The incoming head of the EPA believes states should be in charge of their own environmental regulations. Been there, done that, got the oil-soaked T-shirt. This Southeast Side community has helped give a voice to the environmental justice movement.
President Trump and the Republican-led Congress are poised to wipe out crucial environmental safeguards. Shown to be toxic to kids, chlorpyrifos is nevertheless still being sprayed on crops across the country—and making its way into our bodies. So why has the EPA refused to ban it?
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