EPA Administer Scott Pruitt. Credit:
Justin Merriman Getty Images
Scientific American
By John McQuaid
May 16, 2017
New changes to EPA, Interior
Department advisory groups could restrict or paralyze them, critics say
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency surprised
many people in 2015 when it announced its scientists had found hydraulic
fracturing for natural gas had no “widespread, systemic impacts” on the nation’s
drinking water. Some independent studies had shown the opposite.
The EPA’s 47-member Science Advisory Board—a panel of
outside experts, mostly academics—studied the report’s evidence and found it
did not justify that rosy conclusion. As complaints mounted, the EPA changed
the words, saying the language was not “quantitatively supported” and “did not
clearly communicate the findings of the report.” It turned out the phrases
about little water impact had been added after a meeting with officials at the Obama
White House, which strongly backed the natural gas industry.
Keeping agency science in line with the evidence is
the principal job of this advisory group and hundreds of similar boards across
the federal government. But this month, under Pres. Donald Trump, that is
changing. Administration officials began acting to reconfigure several boards
to make them friendlier to industry, driven by the belief that current board
scientists are too beholden to regulatory agencies. The EPA dismissed half of
the 18 members of its Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC). Members typically
serve two three-year terms but these people had only served one. EPA
Administrator Scott Pruitt “believes we should have people on this board who
understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” spokesman J.
P. Freire told The New York Times. For the larger SAB, Trump’s proposed budget
cuts its operating funds by 84 percent. In addition, the Interior Department
announced last week it was reviewing the scope of 200 of its own advisory
committees.
More members from “the regulated community”—chemical
and energy companies and manufacturers—could prevent the committees from
spotting problems such as the fracking report, says Robert Richardson, an
ecological economist at Michigan State University who was one of the BOSC
members let go. Or industry members could paralyze the boards, observers say,
preventing them from making any decisions….
To access the COMPLETE
news,
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario