In a parting gift, EPA finalizes rules to limit its use of science:
With the days counting down to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, the Trump administration has been undertaking a series of actions that will make it more difficult for its replacements to reverse any of its policies or pursue new ones. This is especially true in the area of environmental regulations, where both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Interior have recently issued decisions.
[...] The EPA's new rule [PDF link], which will be formally published [on January 6, 2021], is an attempt to set additional standards for the evidence it considers when establishing new regulations for pollutants. In principle, the rule sounds great: it wants the data behind the scientific papers it uses to be made publicly available before it can be used to support regulatory decisions. In reality, the rule is problematic, because many of these studies rely on patient records that need to be kept confidential. In other cases, the organizations with the best information on some environmental hazards are the companies that produce or work with them, and they may not be interested in sharing proprietary data.
The practical result of this sort of change is that the EPA would be precluded from relying on scientific papers that contained the clearest indications of public harm. This would almost certainly lead to weaker rules or a decision not to regulate at all.
The EPA defends the rule in a Wall Street Journal editorial:
[T]he work of the Environmental Protection Agency—to protect human health and the environment—shouldn’t be exempt from public scrutiny. This is why we are promulgating a rule to make the agency’s scientific processes more transparent.
Too often Congress shirks its responsibility and defers important decisions to regulatory agencies. These regulators then invoke science to justify their actions, often without letting the public study the underlying data. Part of transparency is making sure the public knows what the agency bases its decisions on. When agencies defer to experts in private without review from citizens, distinctions get flattened and the testing and deliberation of science is precluded.
Our rule will prioritize transparency and increase opportunities for the public to access the “dose-response” data that underlie significant regulations and influential scientific information.
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printed from SoylentNews, In a Parting Gift, EPA Finalizes Rules to Limit its Use of Science on 2024-05-02 07:53:50