Crimes Against Nature (11 page)

A subsequent newspaper story described “screaming telephone calls” between EPA associate administrator Tina Kreisher and Sam Thernstrom, communications director for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Kreisher, who now works as a speechwriter for Gale Norton, later acknowledged that she “felt extreme pressure” from Thernstrom.
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Thernstrom’s boss was Council on Environmental Quality director James Connaughton, a former asbestos-industry lawyer who had left industry for “public service” three weeks before. According to the inspector general’s report, Connaughton did not want data on health hazards given to the public.

The government’s reassurances may have endangered the health of firefighters, police, construction workers, and residents, including schoolchildren. Testing by outside sources has since revealed that contaminant concentrations at Ground Zero were among the highest ever recorded. For example, scientists from the University of California at Davis, who had conducted over 7,000 similar tests at contaminated sites worldwide, found particulates at levels they had never before seen.
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One study done by Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York found that 78 percent of rescue workers suffered lung ailments and 88 percent had ear, nose, and throat problems in the months following the attack; half of those still had persistent lung and respiratory symptoms 10 months later.
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Dan Tishman, whose company, Tishman Construction, was involved in the reconstruction at 140 West Street, required his crews to wear respirators, but he recalls seeing many rescue and construction workers laboring unprotected — no doubt relying on the government’s assurances. “The frustrating thing,” Tishman lamented to me, “is that everyone just counts on the EPA to be the watchdog of public health. When that role is compromised, people can get hurt.”
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“In the World Trade Center, the White House and the EPA were basically lying to the people of New York,” Kaufman said. “It’s public be damned at the EPA.”
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Alas, this was not merely a desperate measure taken at a desperate time; this White House routinely goes to great lengths to withhold vital health information from the public. In May 2003, it blocked the EPA staff from publicly discussing contamination by the chemical perchlorate — an ingredient in solid rocket fuel. In an apparent effort to please defense contractors, the administration also froze federal regulations on perchlorate, even as new research revealed that alarmingly high levels of the chemical — which can compromise fetal development — had been detected in water in more than 20 states.
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For nine months the White House Office of Science and Technology sat on a report exposing the frightening impact of mercury on our children’s health, finally releasing it in February 2003.
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Among the report’s findings was the disturbing fact that the bloodstreams of 1 in 12 American women are coursing with enough mercury to cause neurological damage, permanent IQ damage, and a grim inventory of other diseases in their unborn children.
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(A more recent EPA study has found that 1 in 6 women carry dangerous levels of mercury and that some 630,000 children born each year are at risk.
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Then, in March 2004, the administration compounded that cover-up by helping the tuna industry conceal from consumers the true extent of mercury contamination in fish. Under pressure from tuna-industry lobbyists, the EPA and the FDA issued, instead, a mild warning about fish consumption by young children and women of childbearing age, after rejecting the recommendation of an FDA advisory committee. The advisory gently observes that albacore tuna “has more mercury than canned light tuna” but does not discuss frightening results of recent tests by the FDA that found canned albacore tuna to have about three times the mercury of canned light tuna, which itself is too contaminated for children or fertile women to eat frequently.
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One member of the advisory committee, University of Arizona toxicologist Vas Aposhian, quit in protest, pointing out that the panel of experts had advised warning children and childbearing women not to eat albacore tuna at all and to eat less light tuna than allowed by the advisory.
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“What is more important to the U.S.,” Aposhian asks, “the future mental health of young American children or the albacore tuna industry?”
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But of all the debates in the scientific arena, however, there is none in which the White House has cooked the books more than that of global warming. In the past three years the White House has altered, suppressed, or attempted to discredit close to a dozen major reports on the subject. These include a 10-year peer-reviewed study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, commissioned by the former president Bush in 1993 in his own effort to dodge what was already a virtual scientific consensus blaming industrial emissions for global warming. The list also includes major long-term studies by the federal government’s National Academy of Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as well as a 2002 collaborative report by scientists at all three of those agencies.

In September 2002, administration censors released the annual EPA report on air pollution without the agency’s usual update on global warming, that section having been deleted by Bush appointees at the White House.
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On June 19, 2003, a State of the Environment report commissioned by the EPA in 2001 was released after language about global warming was excised by flat-earthers in the Bush administration. The deleted passages had included a 2001 report by the National Research Council, commissioned by the White House. In its place was a reference to a propaganda tract financed by the American Petroleum Institute.
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In July 2003, EPA scientists leaked an analysis that the agency’s leadership had withheld for months showing that a Senate plan to reduce the pollution that causes global warming could achieve its goal at very small cost.
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Bush reacted by launching a 10-year, $100 million effort to prove that global temperature changes have, in fact, occurred naturally, another delay tactic for the fossil fuel barons at taxpayer expense.
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“This administration likes to emphasize what we don’t know while ignoring or minimizing what we do know, which is a prescription for paralysis on policy,” says Princeton’s Oppenheimer. “With a president who does not believe in evolution, it’s hard to imagine what kind of scientific evidence would suffice to convince him to take firm action on global warming.”
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When the administration can’t actually suppress scientific information, it simply issues a new set of facts. The White House has taken special pains, for example, to shield Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, from sound science. The company is the leading practitioner of hydraulic fracturing, a new process used to extract oil and gas by injecting benzene into underground formations. EPA scientists studying hydraulic fracturing in 2002 found that it could contaminate groundwater supplies. A week after reporting their findings to congressional staff members, however, the EPA revised the data to indicate that benzene levels would not exceed government standards.
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In a letter to Congressman Henry Waxman (D-California), EPA officials said the change was based on “industry feedback.”
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Waxman requested a clarification on the nature of that feedback. He’s still waiting for an answer.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton seems particularly inclined to manipulate science. In autumn 2001, she testified that Arctic oil drilling would not harm hundreds of thousands of caribou. Not long afterward, Fish and Wildlife Service biologists contacted Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which defends scientists and other professionals working in state and federal environmental agencies. “The scientists provided us the science that they had submitted to Norton and the altered version that she had given to Congress a week later,” says Jeff Ruch, the group’s executive director.
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There were 17 major substantive changes, all of them downplaying the reported impacts to the caribou. When Norton was asked about the alterations in October 2001, she dismissed them as typographical errors.

During the late winter and spring of 2002, Norton and White House political adviser Karl Rove pressured National Marine Fisheries scientists to alter findings in a report on salmon in Oregon’s Klamath River.
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The final report underestimated the amount of water needed to keep the salmon population alive in order to divert a bigger share of the river water to large corporate farms. Agribusiness got its water and more than 33,000 chinook and coho salmon died — the largest recorded fish kill in the history of the American West.
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Mike Kelly, the biologist who worked on the original draft — and who has since resigned in despair — told me that the coho salmon is probably headed for extinction. “Morale is low among scientists here,” Kelly says. “We are under pressure to get the right results. This administration is putting the species at risk for political gain — and not just on the Klamath.”
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Norton has also ordered the rewriting of an exhaustive 12-year study by federal biologists detailing the injuries that Arctic drilling would impose on populations of musk oxen and snow geese. She reissued the biologists’ report as a two-page paper showing no negative impact to wildlife.
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She ordered suppression of two studies by the Fish and Wildlife Service, concluding that the drilling would threaten polar bear populations and violate an international treaty protecting the bears.
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She suppressed findings that mountaintop mining would cause “tremendous destruction of aquatic and terrestrial habitat.” She forced Park Service scientists to alter a $2.5 million environmental impact statement that found that snowmobiles were damaging Yellowstone’s air quality, its wildlife, and the health of its visitors and employees. A federal judge has reprimanded her office for interfering with scientists in the case.
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Roger G. Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, views Norton’s machinations with horror. “This administration routinely mismanages scientific information through distortion and omission whenever scientific truth is inconvenient to its industrial allies,” he says. “It’s hard to decide what is more demoralizing about the administration’s politicization of the scientific process — its disdain for professional scientists working for our government or its willingness to deceive the American public.”
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Manipulating data leads to one pesky problem: scientists who stick to their guns. And when scientists resist the White House agenda, the Bush camp threatens, intimidates, or purges them. Nearly every week I come across courageous public servants like Mike Kelly, or David Lewis, an EPA scientist for 30 years who endured reprisals for divulging that his agency knowingly relied on faulty data to approve the use of dioxin-tainted sewer sludge as farm fertilizer.

In April 2002, James Zahn, a nationally respected microbiologist with the Department of Agriculture’s research service in Ames, Iowa, accepted my invitation to speak at a conference of over 1,000 family farm advocates, environmentalists, and civic leaders in Clear Lake, Iowa. In a rigorous, taxpayer-funded study, Dr. Zahn had identified bacteria that can make people sick — and that are resistant to antibiotics — in the air surrounding industrial hog farms. His studies proved that billions of these “superbugs” were traveling across property lines daily, endangering the health of neighbors and their livestock.
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I was shocked when Dr. Zahn canceled his appearance on the day of the conference under orders from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington. I later uncovered a fax trail proving that the order was prompted by lobbyists for the National Pork Producers Council. Dr. Zahn told me that his supervisor at the USDA, under pressure from the hog industry, had ordered him not to publish his study, and that he had been forced to cancel over a dozen public appearances before local planning boards and county health commissions seeking information about the health impacts of meat factories. Soon after my conference, Zahn resigned from the Department of Agriculture in disgust.
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On April 19, 2001, at the request of ExxonMobil, the Bush administration orchestrated the removal of Dr. Robert Watson, the NASA atmospheric chemist who headed the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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Watson, one of the world’s top climate experts and a key player in the global response to climate change, was despised by many in the oil and coal industries. He was replaced by a little-known scientist from New Delhi, India, who would be generally unavailable for congressional hearings.

When a team of government biologists indicated that the Army Corps of Engineers was violating the Endangered Species Act in managing the flow of the Missouri River, it was replaced by an industry-friendly panel. The original team had recommended that the Corps-controlled dam flows should be changed to mimic the natural pattern of rising in the spring and ebbing in the summer, a plan also endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences. Allyn Sapa, a former Fish and Wildlife Service supervisor in North Dakota and a member of the original team of scientists, says that there was “intense political pressure” brought to bear to maintain the status quo to please downriver agribusiness and barge operations. Sapa worries that the status quo may mean extinction for Missouri River species, including the pallid sturgeon. “We might be in the last decade for these fish,” he says. “They can maybe make one or two more spawning runs.”
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