Frank O'Donnell is president of Clean Air Watch, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization aimed at educating the public about clean air and the need for an effective Clean Air Act.
When President Bush named Stephen Johnson to head the Environmental Protection Agency, the President pledged that as the “first professional scientist to lead the EPA,” Johnson would “place sound scientific analysis at the heart of all major decisions.”
Within a few weeks, we will find out if Johnson makes his president a liar.
That’s because on Sept. 27, Johnson will announce the most important decision of his career—indeed, the most important decision EPA will make this year. It’s a decision that could consign thousands of Americans to premature death.
The decision concerns new national public health standards for particle soot, the nation’s most lethal air pollutant.
These tiny particles, often too small to be seen by the naked eye, spew from coal-burning power plants, diesel trucks, trains, traffic and other smokestack industries. They can invade the body—causing asthma attacks, heart attacks and cancer.
The scientific evidence is overwhelming that EPA should make the current standards, set in 1997, significantly stricter. EPA itself has noted that thousands of Americans are dying prematurely each year at levels of pollution that are considered legal today. Tougher standards have been endorsed by groups as diverse as the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, Northeastern state governments and EPA’s own science advisers and staff scientists. But industry lobbyists have been blitzing EPA, Republican senators and various governors in an effort to fend off changes.
It’s become a classic showdown: medical science versus political science. I am betting—I regret to say—that Johnson will indeed make his president seem a dissembler.
Here’s why, and what makes this issue is so important.
National clean air standards are what my friends at the American Lung Association call the “heart and lungs” of the federal Clean Air Act. They simultaneously are supposed to represent the federal government’s scientific definition of “clean air” (all the various “code orange” and code red” advisories are derived from these standards) and become the driving force for the clean up of specific sources of pollution such as electric power plants, cars and trucks.
By law, EPA is supposed to base these standards on science—so the public really can know if the air is fit to breathe—and then figure in costs when it comes to devising cleanup strategies.
But polluter industry lobbyists have been working hard to block significant improvements to current standards.
The electric power industry has been the leader in this coordinated industry campaign, mobilizing at least eight governors to parrot power industry arguments.
On July 12, a cadre of industry lobbyists—including those from the oil, coal, electric power, chemical, steel, auto, diesel engine and other industries—made their case directly to Johnson .
Their message: Don’t “move the goalposts,” or make current standards much tougher. Quicker than George Allen could say “macaca,” this precise phrase was used by no fewer than four Republican senators the very next day in a hearing organized to pressure Johnson, who was rumored to be considering tougher standards.
“Hopefully, this [hearing] will help the administrator make the right decision,” declared Senator George Voinovich, R-Ohio, who, as governor of Ohio and close crony of its coal-burning power industry, had led efforts to block tougher EPA standards the LAST time the agency was going through this process in 1997.
Another of the senators who leaned on EPA was James Inhofe, R-Okla., whose scientific credentials include claiming that global warming is a “hoax.”
A former Inhofe aide, Michael Catanzaro, appears to be playing an inside role for industry at EPA. Catanzaro, deputy policy director for environment for the Bush-Cheney re-election team, now appears to be something of a White House errand boy within EPA—sent there to make sure EPA doesn’t make too much trouble for the White House’s industry supporters.
Catanzaro has also become a conduit for mining industry efforts to evade any requirements, according to various e-mails in EPA’s official regulatory docket.
- “Mike, I have attached a legal brief,” noted a mining association lobbyist. “would appreciate your passing this along.”
- “Mike – This is in response to your question concerning the impacts of EPA’s proposal,” the lobbyist wrote at another time.
- “Mike – This is a follow-up to yesterday’s conversation,” he wrote yet again.
So EPA’s Johnson is surrounded and beset by trouble from within. If he were a true “professional scientist,” he would resign rather than put his signature on a standard heavily laced with political considerations.
Keep watching this space, but I wouldn't bet on Johnson.
