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The EPA's Anti-Science 'Transparency' Rule Has a Long History
Sometimes a bad piece of legislation doesn't die, it just returns in another form—call it a zombie bill. In this case, the zombie is a bill that morphed into a proposed rule that would upend how the federal government uses science in its decisionmaking. It would allow the US Environmental Protection Agency to pick and choose what science it uses to write legislation on air, water, and toxic pollution that affects human health and the environment.
Republicans tried to pass this type of legislation from 2014 to 2017, with titles such as the Secret Science Reform Act, followed the next year by the Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act. The idea, which on the surface seems like a good one, was to force the EPA to use only research that is publicly accessible, reproducible, and independently verified.
Critics, including much of the US scientific community, complained it would throw out nearly all epidemiological studies in which patients give consent to use their medical information but not their names, to protect their privacy. That would mean limiting studies on the effects of air pollution on lung disease or toxic chemicals' effects on Parkinson's disease and cancer, for example. Scientists also argued that some data, by its nature, can never be reproduced. That would include, for example, the collected particles spewed out by erupting volcanoes, or oil-stained creatures from the Deepwater Horizon spill, or tissue samples taken from soldiers exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
[...] "This is not being driven by scientists at the agency, it's being driven by political staff who have spent their careers trying to reduce the authority that the EPA has," says Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Center for Science and Democracy. Halpern noted the proposal has been championed by chemical and tobacco industry groups that have for years sought to reduce the EPA's regulatory powers.
The Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science rule would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could consider an academic study's conclusions, according to a draft copy obtained this week by The New York Times.
At a hearing of the House Science Committee on Wednesday entitled Strengthening Science or Strengthening Silence?, EPA science adviser Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta was put in the difficult position of defending a regulation she either wasn't able to discuss or didn't seem to know about. Although Orme-Zavaleta has spent 38 years at the agency and is its top scientist, she isn't reviewing the new rule and couldn't answer many questions from the congressional panel.
[...] Sean Casten (D-Illinois) pleaded with Orme-Zavalata to join the ranks of the anonymous Ukraine whistle-blower and go against the Trump administration by publicly refuting the EPA science rule. "Look, this is painful," Casten said. "We are sitting here in a moment where none of this assault on science happens if people in your shoes stand up. If and when you stand up, we have got your back. But please stand up."
Orme-Zavalata did not respond to Casten's statement.
A panel of experts including a toxicologist, a pulmonary epidemiologist, a neurologist, and a psychologist all testified about the importance of transparency and reproducibility in science. None of the experts—including the one expert invited by the Republican side—said they supported the new EPA rule. The proposal was recently submitted to the Office of Management and Budget and will be made public sometime next year for a final round of comments before going into effect.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by exaeta on Saturday November 23 2019, @02:13AM (14 children)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Saturday November 23 2019, @03:38AM (9 children)
By that definition, landing on the moon wasn't science.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:08AM (3 children)
It was not. It was exploration and engineering with maybe a little science to fill knowledge gaps.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:23AM (2 children)
A little science we would be required to disregard when drafting policy....
But you're making a semantics argument.
Answer this: should the US government be allowed to consider their experience landing on the moon when drafting space policy?
Because this law would require them to ignore it.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday November 23 2019, @05:22AM (1 child)
I thought this was an EPA rule. Space is handled by NASA.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Saturday November 23 2019, @05:31AM
Space launches produce a shit-ton of emissions, so, yes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jb on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:28AM (4 children)
Of course it wasn't science.
It was however, for its day, a tremendous achievement in multiple fields of engineering, plus of course exploration. "Science" is not just another word for anything that advances any human knowledge. "Science" implies conducting properly designed experiments, following recognised scientific methods and subjecting one's work to peer review.
That doesn't mean that other, non-scientific, fields which advance human knowledge in other ways (e.g. philosophy, engineering, etc. etc.) are "worth" any less than science. Just that it is inaccurate to describe them as "science".
Note that some experiments were conducted on the moon while they were there -- those can be described accurately as science, but landing on the moon was not, in itself, science.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:43AM
According to this law those are not science either, and results would be ignored.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:49AM (2 children)
I challenge the semantics argument, too, by the way!
Proving the hypothesis that it is possible to return a man from the moon given current technology IS science.
(Score: 2) by jb on Saturday November 23 2019, @05:25AM (1 child)
So when Roger Bannister first ran the 4 minute mile (something which some doctors of the day were quoted as saying would "make a man's heart explode" if attempted) and survived, was that science too?
I think not (even though it was an incredibly impressive feat and did indeed advance mankind's knowledge of the limits of the human body).
The presence of experiments in a process is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to classify it as science.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Saturday November 23 2019, @05:33AM
Yes, it disproved the hypothesis that involved a heart exploding.
(Score: 4, Informative) by darkfeline on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:09AM (3 children)
That doesn't mean what you think it means. The results of science should be reproducible. The data doesn't have to be, and in fact that's impossible; you cannot collect the exact same data points at an arbitrary moment in time; that completely violates entropy and conservation of energy.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:31AM
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 3, Insightful) by qzm on Saturday November 23 2019, @07:57AM (1 child)
The publication of conclusions without the publication of the base data sets is NOT SCIENCE.
Why? because it cannot be checked, it cannot be challenged, it cannot be re-interpreted.
Why is publishing the data important to science? So others can use it! Possibly in even more valuable ways than originally.
Publishing results without base data used to be VERY rare, these days it has rapidly become the norm. This is a problem the 'scientists' have created for themselves.
Why?
Most likely because it is one hell of a lot SAFER to not publish the data - in case you made a mistake (and in a few cases because you knowingly misinterpreted it, however that is hopefully NOT the norm).
This does not block ANY research, it just means that you must make the raw data available - and it can quite easily (AND THIS IS VERY VERY STANDARD) be anonymized where needed. It already commonly is for other medical areas.
The BIG question is, why is it being fought tooth and nail, when it is pretty much standard in other areas?
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we should be wondering about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2019, @01:27PM
AFAICT There aren't any of those here, and I take umbrage at your erroneous characterization.