https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... le/558878/
Apparently, Pruitt can't read. And hopes no one else can either:
Quote: In one sweeping move, the Trump administration may soon not only destabilize the last three decades of clean air and water rules, but also completely overhaul how the Environmental Protection Agency uses science in its work. If EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s recently-proposed rule gets enacted, it will spark a revolution in environmental regulation. But the question is—will it stand up in court?
It looks like part of what Pruitt and his cronies want to do is deny air pollution standards, in favor of the coal industry and other polluters:
Quote: An agency statement bragged that the rule “is consistent with” two bipartisan reports in particular: one from the Administrative Conference of the United States, and one from the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Wendy Wagner, a law professor at the University of Texas, knows both of those reports well. In fact, she wrote them. ...She said the proposed rule had nothing to do with her and her colleagues’ work. “I really don’t know what the problem is that they think they’re fixing,” she said, adding that many of her co-authors “would laugh and hoot” at some of the scientific ideas expressed in the rule.
“They don’t adopt any of our recommendations, and they go in a direction that’s completely opposite, completely different,” she told me after reading the rule. “They don’t adopt any of the recommendations of any of the sources they cite. I’m not sure why they cited them.”
Quote: Just about everyone involved in the rule-making process agrees that the rule targets a specific and foundational piece of environmental science: the “Six Cities” study, from the Harvard School of Public Health. First published in 1993, the study found that Americans living in more air-polluted cities died earlier than Americans living in cleaner ones.The killer was a specific type of air pollution: fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns, which scientists call PM₂.₅. Subsequent studies of human anatomy and biochemistry have backed up this findings.
...While conducting the research in the 1970s and 1980s, Harvard scientists drew on hundreds of confidential medical records.
These scientists say they cannot now release the underlying data to the public because doing so—even on an anonymized basis—would reveal the identity of individual patients. But Harvard has turned over its data to third-parties and industry groups multiple times in the past. Each time, those scientists have reanalyzed the data and largely validated the results of the Six Cities study.
This isn’t enough for Steven Milloy, a policy adviser at the Heartland Institute and a former coal executive.... He argues that the EPA must release the data from the Six Cities study, even though that data is controlled by Harvard University. ...He contests that PM₂.₅ is not toxic at all.
And a related article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... is/559013/
Quote: Experts Are for Facts, Amateurs Are for Analysis
President Trump and his aides are willing to let specialists gather data, but trust only their own conclusions.
And our regularly scheduled "news we hope to bury by releasing it on Friday afternoon":
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-enviro ... ing-safety
Link to the federal register, if you want to comment, starting sometime next week:
Quote: The Trump administration is proposing to roll back parts of a landmark offshore drilling safety regulation that was written in response to the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The rule, dubbed the Well Control Rule, was put into place in 2016. Its standards focus on blowout preventer systems, the emergency systems that offshore oil and natural gas drillers have on hand for when something goes wrong with drilling and operators lose control of the well. That happened in the BP spill, causing an explosion that killed 11 workers and an 87-day uncontrolled oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The announcement came Friday, a week after the eighth anniversary of the explosion.
...BSEE plans to send the proposal next week for publication in the Federal Register, which would kick off a 60-day public comment period, after which the agency could make it final.
https://www.federalregister.gov/
What might possibly be a purge of writers insufficiently loyal to Trump at a conservative media publication. I'm not sure it matters much. Still, it's interesting timing after Trump's ranting in the Fox interview yesterday.
http://thehill.com/homenews/media/38520 ... e-redstate
Quote: Conservative outlet RedState fired most of its staff Friday while its owner, Salem Media, froze the site, citing an inability to "no longer support the entire roster of writers and editors." "The site name will linger, but RedState is all but dead now. I have invited the fired writers here," Erick Erickson, a RedState founder who left the site in 2015, wrote in a blog post.
Fired staffers said the cuts focused on writers who have been critical of President Trump.