Bush v. Science

Here's one more instance of the Bush government allowing ideology to overrule science. Not only do they ignore the scientists' recommendation, but they then say the scientists proposed them. From the LA Times:

In an unprecedented action, the Environmental Protection Agency's own scientific panel on Friday challenged the agency's proposed public health standards governing soot and dust.

The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, mandated by Congress to review such proposals, asserted Friday that the standards put forward by EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson ignored most of the committee's earlier recommendations and could lead to additional heart attacks, lung cancer and respiratory ailments...

Some panel members called the administrator's actions "egregious" and said his proposals "twisted" or "misrepresented" their recommendations...

After a teleconference Friday lasting nearly four hours, the committee members decided to write a letter to Johnson laying out the scientific evidence for their conclusions and urging him to reconsider his proposals.

It was the first time since the committee was established under the Clean Air Act nearly 30 years ago that the committee had asked the EPA to change course, according to EPA staffers and committee members.

"We're in uncharted waters here," acknowledged committee Chairwoman Rogene Henderson, an inhalation toxicologist. She said their action was necessary because "the response of the administrator is unprecedented in that he did not take our advice. It's most unusual for him not to take the advice of his own science advisory body."

Several members said Johnson's proposals incorrectly said the committee had called for eliminating the regulation of coarse particulates for mining and agriculture...

Panel member Richard Poirot, an environmental analyst with Vermont's Air Pollution Control Division, said the proposed exemptions were being wrongly attributed to committee recommendations...

... acting EPA air chief William Wehrum said..."The science behind particulate matter is extremely complex, and there's a lot of it out there. We know there's a diversity of opinion"...

... Cal/EPA's air pollution epidemiology chief, Bart Ostro, charged during the teleconference that the EPA had incorporated "last-minute opinions and edits" by the White House Office of Management and Budget that "circumvented the entire peer review process."

He said research that he and others had conducted also had been misrepresented in the EPA's lengthy justification for the proposed new standards.

In an interview later, Ostro said he was referring to marked-up drafts of Johnson's proposals that showed changes by the White House budget office and language that was "very close to some of the letters written by some of the trade associations."

He said the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee's seven-year review of data on health risks of particulate matter had been replaced with inaccurate conclusions about the science that could lead to "thousands more deaths," especially from fine particulates that lodge deep in the lungs.

Alex Conant, a spokesman for the White House budget office, would say only that the agency "reviews rules as part of a routine regulatory process" and that the ultimate decision on rulemaking rests with the EPA.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) ... "The revelation that the OMB has intervened to gut the scientific recommendations is an outrage, but not surprising."

The American Mining Assn. has supported the EPA's proposed new rules and says very little dust is generated by industry operations in remote areas.

And, what was it that Bush said in his SOTU last Tuesday about science being the solution to our problems?