Eric Schaeffer, Environmental Integrity Project, 919 18th Street, NW, Suite 975, Washington, DC 20006, 202-296-8800, eschaeffer@environmentalintegrity.org

One of the Environmental Protection Agency’s most important tasks is assessing the health risks associated with exposure to pollution, and explaining these risks to the public. Inevitably, risk assessment involves the exercise of value judgments, such as determining how much a human life is worth, and how much uncertainty to tolerate. But the Bush Administration has gone further than its predecessors in letting its political objectives shape the scientific information it shares with the public. Historically, the EPA has most of the time been relatively straightforward when explaining how air pollutants like fine particles and mercury affect human health. This presentation will demonstrate several examples related to clean air policy where the EPA has manipulated or ignored the data. For example, EPA favors market-trading approaches to pollution control, but its public statements frequently overstate the level of emission reductions that these trading programs obtain. The Agency has proposed market trading in mercury emissions, a deadly neurotoxin, without considering the impact this would have on mercury hotspots. EPA has advertised the health benefits of its “Clear Skies” proposal to establish another market trading system for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, without providing the public with baseline data needed to evaluate other alternatives. The Agency’s insistence that its new regulations to relax Clean Air Act permitting requirements will not increase emissions is contradicted by virtually all the available data. The Agency’s political manipulation of emissions data and health risks deserves more scrutiny from the scientific community.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize how the current Administration’s political objectives have shaped the scientific information it shares with the public, and uses to make regulatory decisions on clean air.
• Understand the impact of bias and politics in the development of public health policies.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.