... and there's a lovely picture of a smokestack. \u00a0The article begins with an update on the many scandals engulfing Pruitt at the EPA and then says:<\/p>\n
\"On April 24th he unveiled a new policy which would prohibit the agency from using studies backed by confidential data, like medical records, when drafting environmental regulations. He has removed scientists affiliated with universities from the department\u2019s scientific advisory committees. Staff morale has plunged. \u00a0This is the culmination of a decades-long campaign against the \u201csecret science\u201d underpinning environmental regulation. In 1993 researchers at Harvard published the \u201cSix Cities study\u201d, which definitively linked air quality to premature death using confidential medical records from 8,000 people. The study prompted the first regulations on fine particulate matter issued under the Clean Air Act in 1997. Manufacturers spent millions in an effort to dispute the science and called for release of the raw data, which the researchers, bound by a confidentiality agreement, refused. Today the findings are established science\u2014and the rules they inspired will prevent more than 230,000 early deaths by 2020. Nevertheless, Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman who chairs the science committee, has subpoenaed the EPA for the underlying Six Cities data. He has also unsuccessfully sponsored a bill, dubbed the Honest Act, which would bar the EPA from issuing any new rules based on such studies. Mr Pruitt\u2019s recently announced proposal would sidestep Congress and impose such a policy anyway.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There's more. \u00a0Pruitt has barred university academic with EPA grants from sitting on advisory boards (think conflict of interest) but has no problems with those working in industries regulated by the EPA from doing so. The Economist says that \"the result is that the number of university scientists on the boards has fallen by half, while the number from regulated industries or consulting companies has increased threefold.\"<\/p>\n
Many officials have left the EPA; others are sticking it out till better times arrive as they surely will \u2013 but when ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was wondering the other day how that human wrecking ball \u2013 Scott Pruitt \u2013 was getting on as Director of the US Environmental Protection Agency; specifically, I was interested in how his plan to undo environmental protection in the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}