National Academy of Sciences warns EPA to get its science straight or risk irrelevance
Irrelevance in scientific terms, of course. In bureaucratic combat, the EPA is nearly peerless. The article is behind a subscription firewall, but here’s the gist:
A key EPA science adviser is warning that the agency must succeed in making its scientific research programs more transparent and sound in order to to bring credibility back to agency science, or EPA will risk increased scrutiny from House Republicans and industry that could prompt a “crisis.”
“You can’t fail this time,” Thomas Burke, associate dean of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who also chaired a recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel on ways to improve EPA risk assessments, told EPA officials and other scientific advisers during a discussion on the agency’s new chemical safety research program June 30.
“The sleeping giant is that EPA science is on the rocks . . . if you fail, you become irrelevant, and that is kind of a crisis,” Burke told a joint meeting of EPA’s Science Advisory Board and EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC) charged with looking at the reorganization of the agency’s research programs.
Burke, who chaired a recent NAS panel that recommended a host of steps for EPA to improve its risk assessment process, pointed in particular to the agency’s risk assessment process, calling it EPA’s “Achilles heel.”
That’s a big warning, and it comes from an authoritative source that the EPA’s fans cannot easily dismiss. The National Academy of Sciences has essentially told the EPA that its science stinks.
And they didn’t even get into how the EPA slammed Texas despite the agency’s own contrary scientific findings.
EPA’s pretty messed-up, and wastes a colossal amount of taxpayer and licensee money while producing an exceptionally low benefit/impediment ratio to the taxpayers and businesses who fund it.
That said, the four-sentence quote offered above must be the worst string of bad writing I’ve seen today. What a mess the NAS author has made of language, however valid his points.
fud, I was thinking the same thing. How good a scientist can this guy be if he has no command of the language at all. I suppose he could be a foreigner, although Thomas Burke sounds pretty anglo to me. I wonder what kind of crisis it would be if the EPA lost relevance? Certainly not one for America.
I appreciate that there are folks out there willing to criticize English usage. The criticism falls flat, however, when made by someone who fails to comprehend simple and obvious facts presented by the text. The article was written about, not by, Thomas Burke, who recently chaired an NAS panel. Why on earth would anyone write about himself in the third person?
If there are any criticisms about the quoted portions of Thomas Burke’s speech, then that criticism should be leveled at the writer of the article. It was the writer, after all, who determined which words to excerpt from the speech and how to arrange them, not Thomas Burke. Moreover, there are different considerations between written and oral style. Those who have not actually seen the oral presentation would have too little criteria to validly assess the presenter’s command of English.
Here’s a Thomas Burke story that’s not behind a paywall …
… showing an extremely strong correlation between public exposure to soot (from vehicles and power plants) and the incidence of diabetes.
But is there a causal relation? That’s where the science gets tough.
Public health costs associated to diabetes are so enormous that it’s worth investigating further. No-one doubts that the EPA needs to do the best possible job on questions like this.
RTP conference chases environmental triggers of disease
URL: http://scienceinthetriangle.org/2010/10/rtp-conference-chases-environmental-triggers-of-disease/
The EPA is one of the few federal agencies that is a victim of it’s own success. Most of the rest, The Department of Education, HUD, Dept. of Energy have never been successful. But the rivers don’t catch on fire anymore, the air is clean…the EPA’s mission has been fulfilled and now they are looking for another mission.
Like the aforementioned federal agencies the EPA should be eliminated. No good can come from it now.
When you state the DoE is a success you make yourself look really stupid.
The entire alphabet soup of Gravy Train Riding Losers needs to be eliminated.
Reread his post.
Perhaps they could “borrow” NASA’s new “mission” assigned by The Community Organizer in Chief …
“In bureaucratic combat, the EPA is nearly peerless.”
Well, yes, this is the thing exactly. The EPA has never been about the science. It has always been a political organization. Science has nothing to do with it. If the science is convenient to them, they use it. If inconvenient they toss it, or lie about it.
Science itself has become a religion with folks. They embrace it without reservation (faith) without really understanding the underlying principles that make it work. This is true even for those who are trained in science. If something is put forward as “science”, they embrace it without regard for the source, especially if it is something they want to hear. They miss the most important point, that of skepticism being the foundation of science.
A good example is AGW. The use of the terms “denier” and “consensus” violate this very principle of skepticism, and discredits the “believer’s” own position. Even someone saying they believe in AGW is a statement of faith. The fact is, AGW has never even been put forward as a theory according to scientific methods. It is greatly remote from being the “Law of AGW”, which would be required for “consensus”.
Rightwingers are accused of being “anti-science”, because we are skeptical, as we should be. WE are the ones being scientific. We question the “science”, especially when the sources are… questionable.
EPA “scientists” are all hacks. I never met one of them who could hold a real job in industry.
GS-15, lots of vacation, no accountability, special-sounding stuff to pontificate about, but probably lot of petty office politics
Not the life of anyone who would get ahead in industry…
Seniority and tenure are confused with marketable skill by union members, civil servants and professors of law. Reality returns soon, with a thud.
A bit of saving and the matching money in the thrift savings plan, and there is a comfortable retirement too. Where is the thud of reality for those in government lala land?
There hasn’t been any “thud of reality” for them as yet. However, if government employees were smart — apparently they’re not — they’d be the ones hollering loudest for the federal government to get its fiscal act together. If we continue out-of-control deficit spending until we encounter a debt shock and the government really does run out of Other Peoples’ Money their jobs and pensions are.. somewhat less than secure.
The California equivalent, The Air Resources Board (CARB) was headed by a guy with a mail order PhD. When caught, all they did was remove his fake degree from the web site. Anothe.r UCLA scientist with a real PhD was fired for disagreeing with the party line.
Only in California
The EPA had better read the writing on the wall. The incoming Republican administration is going to demolish that waste of tax dollars in 2013.
How bad does the economic situation have to get before industry,
or at least the associated state governments, simply ignores the
EPA, and the rest of the federal bureaucracies ?
I am well aware that the Feds are too strong to challenge today;
What happens ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ when they are running scared
from the collapsing economy ?
They won’t be running scared. They’re the governmemnt. They’ll come into your place of business and threaten to shut you down because of EPA violations. You’ll be expected to bribe them.
If you want to assess the scientific quality of EPA proclamations, you can ignore all the discussion pro and con. The measure of EPA’s scientific soundness can be easily assessed by counting the number of EPA scientists relative to EPA lawyers and administrators. You’d be surprised how many lawyers they employ and how relatively few scientists.
“The National Academy of Sciences has essentially told the EPA that its science stinks.”
That’s not what the story says. It says that this individual scientist told the EPA that its science stinks.
If the NAS would stand up as a body and take a stand on something like this, that would be very exciting.
But it sounds like Burke was speaking for himself, not for the Academy.
actually that “individual” scientist chaired a recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel on ways to improve EPA risk assessments …
So he was the chair of the NAS panel that just assed the EPA … Hardly as an individual scientist …
nice try though … go back to your DNC talking points and find some better stuff …
Here is a non-pay-wall description of that panel.
It appears that PJM/Tatler has done some pretty aggressive cherry-picking.
Sarah Rolph’s post appears to be correct on-the-facts.
EPA must overhaul risk assessments to protect public health, panel says
URL: http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/panel-advises-epa-to-overhaul-risk-assessments
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