Crimes Against Nature (12 page)

In April 2003, the EPA suddenly dismantled an advisory panel composed of utility industry representatives, state air-quality officials, scientists, and environmentalists who had spent nearly 21 months developing rules for stringent regulation of industrial emissions of mercury. John A. Paul, supervisor of Ohio’s Regional Air Pollution Control Agency and the panel’s cochair, says, “You have an EPA that assumes that because the law has an adverse impact on industry profits, the agency must find a way to usurp the law.”
⁴⁷

The replacement of accomplished scientists and public health leaders with industry-friendly representatives has ignited grave concern among public health professionals. When, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently replaced an environmental health advisory panel with industry representatives (including a vice president of the Heritage Foundation), ten leading scientists denounced the move in the journal
Science.
“Scientific advisory committees do not exist to tell the secretary what he wants to hear but to help the secretary, and the nation, address complex issues,” they asserted. “Regulatory paralysis appears to be the goal here, rather than the application of honest, balanced science.”
⁴⁸

Needless to say, such appointments pose a direct threat to our children’s health. In the summer of 2000, officials at the Centers for Disease Control asked Bruce Lanphear, along with four other esteemed health professionals, if he was willing to be nominated to serve on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention. Lanphear, a physician, is director of the Environmental Health Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and a professor at the University of Cincinnati. Approval of such nominations by the secretary of Health and Human Services is traditionally a formality. But before this could happen, George W. Bush took office.

A month later, the CDC turned down Lanphear’s nomination, along with the others, selecting instead five people with ties to the lead industry. Among the new appointees are Dr. Kimberly Thompson, an associate of John Graham’s Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. At the time of her appointment, the HCRA had 22 corporate backers with a financial interest in looser lead standards. Another choice was Bill Banner, who works part-time as an expert industry witness for lead poisoning cases, where he testifies that there is no harm to children from lead blood levels below 70 micrograms per deciliter.
⁴⁹
This is dangerous nonsense. “We know kids often die if their blood levels get much above 80,” Lanphear says. “At levels of about 10, which is about 3 percent of kids, we’re pretty convinced they’re harmful. Now there are several studies coming out saying there should be no threshold, that there are adverse effects below 10.”
⁵⁰

“The current Bush administration has taken intolerance of science dissent to a new orbit,” says Tom Devine, a self-described Goldwater Republican who monitors the treatment of federal whistle-blowers for the nonpartisan Government Accountability Project. “The repression against internationally renowned professionals and experts in their fields just for exercising the scientific method objectively is unprecedented.”
⁵¹

In 2003 PEER conducted a survey of staffers in the EPA’s Region 8, which includes most of the states among the administration’s leading targets for energy development — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas. The survey found widespread demoralization caused by the political pressure to please industry. Fully one-third of the respondents said they feared retaliation for performing their job, a feeling that was most pronounced among managers. Wes Wilson, an environmental engineer with the EPA’s Region 8 and the legislative representative for Local 3607 of the American Federation of Government Employees, agrees. “We’re seeing a pattern here — competent people who are doing objective work being moved because they haven’t acquiesced to the Bush administration’s radical ideology.”
⁵²

The desire to surround itself with compliant scientists has led the administration to engage in “outsourcing,” a practice that effectively transfers science from dispassionate professionals to the corporate boardroom. As part of an initiative by the Office of Management and Budget to outsource 425,000 federal jobs, thousands of environmental science positions are being contracted out to industry consultants already in the habit of massaging data to support corporate profit taking. This program would place the care and oversight of a vast range of public policy and public resources in the hands of people without civil-service or whistle-blower protection — and with little or no duty to the public good.
⁵³
If we continue to squander decades of valuable technical expertise and rely on industry data and risk assessments, Wilson says, “the nation runs the risk of not having a government capable of analyzing its health risks and environmental risks.”
⁵⁴
That means legislators making decisions that will profoundly affect our lives and our children’s lives with no better guide than the profit motive.

A case in point: In November 2003 the administration was forced to respond to a lawsuit by the NRDC, the United Farmworkers of America, and other environmental groups against the EPA over its failure to regulate certain pesticides, notably atrazine. Atrazine was first approved in 1958, and by the 1980s it had been implicated by epidemiological studies in a host of illnesses, including prostate cancer and infertility. The data was so compelling, in fact, that the pesticide was banned in the European Union. Despite this, it is still the most heavily used weed killer in the United States. Testing by the U.S. Geological Survey regularly finds alarming concentrations of atrazine in drinking water across the corn belt. In 2002 scientists at the University of California Berkeley found that atrazine at one-thirtieth the government’s supposedly “safe” level causes grotesque deformities in frogs, including multiple sets of organs.
⁵⁵
Last year epidemiologists from the University of Missouri found that atrazine may lead to reproductive abnormalities in humans, including sperm counts that are 50 percent below normal.
⁵⁶

In September 2001, as a result of NRDC’s lawsuit, the courts agreed that the administration must review the health effects of atrazine. But instead of handing the job to the EPA, the administration asked Syngenta, a Swiss company with U.S. headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina, to monitor the environmental effects of the pesticide. And just what does Syngenta manufacture? Atrazine! It’s almost funny. In an interview with the
Los Angeles Times,
Sherry Ford, a Syngenta spokesperson, said without apparent irony, “This is one way we can ensure that it’s not presenting any risk to the environment.”
⁵⁷

A similar bargain in Florida illustrates the kind of fantastic results we might expect when government relies on data from industry biostitutes. In July 2003, the EPA’s regional office overseeing the Everglades approved an absurd study performed by a developer-financed consultant concluding that wetlands discharge more pollutants than they absorb. Bush administration regulators are now using that study to justify giving developers credit for improving water quality by replacing natural wetlands with golf courses and other developments.
⁵⁸
The findings, of course, contradict everything known about wetlands, including a comprehensive study by the Tampa Bay National Estuary Program, in which more than 25 scientists determined that south Florida wetlands remove far more nitrogen pollutants than they generate.
⁵⁹
Bruce Boler, a biologist and water quality specialist working for the office, resigned in protest. “It was like the politics trumped the science,” he says. “I felt like I was bushwhacked.”
⁶⁰

During the first few years of Bush’s presidency, the assault on science was still somewhat ad hoc. But by midterm, his advisers were moving to institutionalize the corruption. And no one was more zealous in this regard than John Graham.

In September 2003, Graham attempted a massive structural change in how science is generated and how the public gets to hear about it. In what amounted to a brazen coup d’état, Graham has proposed that the Office of Management and Budget take over the peer-review process for all major government rules, plans, proposed regulations, and pronouncements. Under the current system, individual federal agencies typically invite outside experts to review the accuracy of their science, whether it is about the health effects of diesel exhaust, industry injury rates, or the dangers of eating beef that has been mechanically scraped from the spinal cords of mad cows. Graham’s proposal would block all new federal regulations until the underlying science passes muster in a peer-review process centralized in his office.
⁶¹

In other words, all government research would be under the control of the guru of junk science. Karl Kelsey of the Harvard School of Public Health recalls reviewing Graham’s résumé during his tenure process: “He had this separate tiny paragraph or two about peer-reviewed reports. He’s a man who doesn’t know what peer review is. It’s a horrible thing.”
⁶²

Certainly, placing peer review under OIRA is the ultimate delay tactic. No scientific study is airtight. Science is all about divining conclusions from the data. No matter what the study, no matter who’s designed it, Graham’s peer-review panels could always find a hole in the data. Remember how the tobacco industry hid behind “scientific uncertainty” to shield cigarettes from regulation for 60 years? Using the same methods, the coal industry, with even greater profits at stake, could shield itself from regulations for acid rain, mercury contamination, and global warming — maybe forever.

Lined up in support of Graham’s proposal are all his old friends from the Harvard center, the same industrial polluters who funded the Bush campaign. Opposing Graham are some of the nation’s most respected scientific bodies: the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Association of American Medical Colleges, along with environmental and consumer-interest groups. Additional criticism has come from a group of 20 former federal officials, including prominent regulators from the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

Graham’s proposal is now working its way through the regulatory process, and a version of it will almost certainly become law of the land if Bush is reelected in November.

Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths about a changing world. The best scientists are moral individuals whose business is to seek the truth. Corruption of this process undermines not just democracy but civilization itself. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group devoted to the use of sound science in environmental policy, issued a report in February 2004 entitled “Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation of the Bush Administration’s Misuse of Science.”
⁶³
The report, signed by some 60 renowned scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, made news for about 20 minutes in the mainstream media. But its charges were scalding and astonishingly direct. “There is strong documentation of a wide-ranging effort to manipulate the government’s scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration’s political agenda,” the authors wrote. “There is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented.” That’s not just some protester talking. Those are the conclusions of our country’s top researchers — America’s brain trust.

In February 2004, Michael Oppenheimer stated the situation plainly. “If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge, and in a search for the truth,” he said, “this White House is an absolute disaster.”
⁶⁴

T
here is no better example of the corporate cronyism now hijacking American democracy than the White House’s cozy relationship with the energy industry. In the 2000 election, it contributed more than $48.3 million to George W. Bush and the Republican Party, and it has donated another $58 million since the president’s inauguration.
¹
The investment matured almost immediately: It may be hard to find anyone on Bush’s staff who doesn’t have extensive corporate connections, but fossil fuel executives rule the roost. Both Bush and Cheney came out of the oil patch. Thirty-one of the Bush transition team’s 48 members had energy-industry ties. Bush’s cabinet and White House staff is an energy-industry dream team — 4 cabinet secretaries, the 6 most powerful White House officials, and more than 20 high-level appointees are alumni of the industry and its allies. It’s a tight-knit group: Chevron named an oil tanker after National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who served for a decade on the company’s board.
²

Few of these appointees seem to be troubled about conflicts of interest. In early 2001, while the administration was formulating its national energy policy, Karl Rove still owned $250,000 in Enron stock and tens of thousands more in BP Amoco and Royal Dutch Shell. When asked if Rove ever recused himself from policy discussions involving these companies, the White House stated, “He’s involved in virtually every decision that is made here.” Clay Johnson, as director of presidential personnel, held $100,000 to $250,000 in stock in El Paso Energy Partners, a Houston oil and gas company. As part of his White House duties, he was involved in selecting people to fill vacancies at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the natural-gas market. Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, is a lawyer who in early 2001 sold tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stocks in Enron, ExxonMobil, Texaco, and Chesapeake Energy. Deputy Commerce Secretary Samuel Bodman was the CEO of Cabot, a Texas chemical company cited as the fourth-largest source of toxic emissions in the state. Kathleen Cooper, undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs, was chief economist at ExxonMobil.
³