The Environmental Protection Agency’s Particulate Matter Rules: One Physician’s Crusade against Cargo Cult Science

摘要

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has an annual budget of almost $10 billion, and influence and power far beyond that, with U.S. industry and society always subject to EPA orders, regulations, guidelines, fines, and edicts on environmental compliance.My effort to expose EPA’s bad science and policy making began in the early 1990s, and has culminated in the past 2 years in EPA’s admissions, in declarations under penalty of perjury, that inadequate and unreliable science underlies EPA regulatory regimes under the Clean Air Act (CAA).In the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, innocent black Americans suffered the depredations of advanced syphilis as federal public health agents denied them treatment. Now EPA-sponsored studies deliberately expose human subjects to pollutants that the EPA claims to be toxic, lethal, and carcinogenic. The Tuskegee experiment was unnecessary—the effects of advanced syphilis had been known for centuries. The EPA claims it already knows how dangerous fine-particulate air pollution is, but the agency is funding human exposure experiments with what EPA-published air quality standards say are toxic levels of fine-particulate air pollution.