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December 2007 archives
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows. . . .
— A. E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young
With all the Environmental Protection Agency has been doing in the last few weeks it’s hard to believe its employees had time to enjoy Christmas or make plans for the New Year - there was so much to do in the old.
Last week this column pointed out that during the holiday season in 2006 the EPA. made it easier for companies to secretly release toxins into the air thus permitting communities to avoid the concerns and fears that would otherwise almost certainly follow news of the release. The change in the rules governing disclosure of the release of such substances only gained notoriety during the 2007 Christmas season. That was not the only December 2006 policy change whose fruits were plucked in December of 2007.
On December 7, 2006, Marcus Peacock, the Deputy Administrator of the EPA announced a new approach to making decisions that was known as “policy-relevant science.” According to the Union for Concerned Scientists here is how “policy-relevant science" works in practice. “[H]igh-level political appointees are involved (in setting National Ambient Air Quality Standards) right from the start, working with staff scientists to create a document containing ‘policy-relevant science' that 'reflect the agency’s views’ instead of the independent scientific paper that staff scientists have put together in the past.” In December 2007 we saw the results of the new process when California, a consistently rogue state when it comes to environmental matters, asked the EPA for permission to impose tougher emissions standards on the cars traveling its highways.
In 1970 Congress passed the Clean Air Act. As explained in the official summary of the act it is the “comprehensive federal law that regulates air emissions from area, stationary, and mobile sources . . . . The goal of the Act was to set and achieve National Ambient Air Quality Standards in every state by 1975.” One of the mobile sources the act regulates is the automobile. In the past some states, including California, have taken it upon themselves to come up with even stiffer regulations than those established by the EPA with respect to, among other things, the tailpipe emissions of automobiles. According to the Act that is permissible if the state applies for a waiver from the agency and the standards it seeks to impose are “at least as protective of health and welfare” as the federal standards. The act provides, however, that the waiver will be denied if the administrator finds that the determination of the state is arbitrary and capricious or the state has no need for the standards to “meet compelling and extraordinary conditions” or the proposed standards are not consistent with the purposes of the act.
Since the passage of the act, California has been given permission to regulate smog-forming pollutants 50 times. With respect to man’s best friend, the automobile, statistics show that 30 percent of the total U.S. creation of heat-trapping gases is attributable to motor vehicles. Under the energy bill signed by Mr. Bush in December 2007, the federal goal was to reduce those emissions by 40 percent by 2020. California applied for a waiver so that it could require automakers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2016. That’s where “policy-relevant science” entered the picture.
According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, an anonymous EPA staffer said the staff at the EPA believed the waiver should be granted. The staffer said: “California met every criteria. . . on the merits. The same criteria we have used for the last 40 years on all the other waivers. We told him [Stephen L. Johnson, E.P.A.adminstrator] that. All the briefings we have given him laid out the facts.” Unpersuaded by science, Mr. Johnson introduced policy into the equation and said California’s request did not “meet compelling and extraordinary conditions.” It was the first time that California had requested a waiver and been turned down and it is likely that the state will take the EPA to court. Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board said his decision showed “that this administration ignores the science and ignores the law to reach the politically convenient conclusion.” She was right. This was not Mr. Johnson’s first experience with ignoring good science in favor of making good policy.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, in 2005 Mr. Johnson overruled a “nearly-unanimous recommendation from scientific advisors that the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAASQS) for fine particulate matter be strengthened. Commenting on the ruling. The Union said: “This case is yet another example of where political appointees have seemingly misused science for political reasons.”
George Bush will be remembered for many bad things. Substituting political agenda for science is one of them.
It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice-there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.
— Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book
The Bush Administration has done something that on the surface appears to be anti-environmental when in reality all it is doing is implementing the Paperwork Reduction Act. George Bush takes great pleasure in finding any Congressional act with which he can cheerfully comply and his administration’s compliance with this law has earned it unjustified criticism. The criticism pertains to lessening the paperwork burden imposed on certain companies by weakening requirements pertaining to the release of toxic chemicals.
The Paperwork Reduction Act that is referenced in many forms the citizen encounters says one of its purposes is to “minimize the paperwork burden for individuals, small businesses . . . Federal contractors . . . and other persons resulting from the collection of information by or for the Federal Government.” Any attempt to describe in fewer than dozens of thousands of words any legislation enacted by Congress falls far short and this excerpt from the first section is no exception since the act itself has 20 sections.
The 1986 Emergency Planning & Community Right to Know Act was passed following the 1984 Union Carbide chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. Signed by President Reagan, the act imposed reporting requirements on companies that dealt with toxic materials. Affected companies are required to produce a Toxic Release Inventory Report (TRI) disclosing, among other things, the release into the air, ground and water of toxic chemicals. Under the act the Environmental Protection Agency is required to publish a list of extremely hazardous substances and publish a final regulation “establishing a threshold planning quantity for each substance on the list.” Facilities dealing with those substances were subject to the requirements of the regulation “if one of the substances on the list is present at the facility in excess of the threshold planning quantity established for such substance.”
Until the end of 2006, the threshold planning quantity was 500 pounds. Facilities with more than 500 pounds were required to make annual reports using a detailed form prepared by the EPA. The requirements became known as the “community right to know rules” since they gave communities detailed information about toxic releases into their environments that would otherwise have gone unreported. Although the rules were good, they had one consequence that the Bush administration disliked. They created a lot of paper work for the affected facilities since they were required to complete a form known as Form R instead of a simpler form known as Form A. Aware of the burden the rule placed on industry, the EPA has issued a new rule that is going to make life easier for facilities by reducing their paperwork and will reduce concern in communities around the country about the release of toxic materials into the environment since they will not learn of them and, thus, have no cause for alarm.
Under the new rules that this writer has tried in vain to put into comprehensible English, the use of form A has been expanded “by raising the eligibility limit on total waste management of non-persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemicals . . . from 500 pounds to 5,000 pounds, with a cap on releases and other disposal of 2,000 pounds.” The number of communities that will sleep better at night as a result of being in the dark is, according to the General Accounting Office that understands the new rule, staggering.
According to the GAO summary, under the new rules the “EPA would allow more than 3,500 facilities to no longer report detailed information about their toxic chemical releases and waste management practices. As a result, more than 22,000 of the nearly 90,000 TRI reports could no longer be available to hundreds of communities in states throughout the country.” The summary goes on to state that 12 state attorneys general and the EPA’s own Science Advisory Board stated the changes “will significantly reduce the amount of useful TRI information.” That wasn’t all the GAO concluded.
It found that the EPA did not “follow key steps in agency guidelines designed to ensure that it conducts appropriate scientific, economic, and policy analysis” and went on to say that was because the Office of Management & Budget pressured the EPA to provide burden reduction by the end of 2006.
The GAO recommends that Congress overturn the rule by legislation and has supporters in Congress, according to the Associated Press. Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg who authored the 1986 legislation said: “Unfortunately, this report makes clear the Bush Administration is putting politics ahead of science and letting facilities hide critical data about toxic chemicals.” Sen. Barbara Boxer said: “The public has a right to know about toxic pollution in local communities.”
They may be right. However, reducing paperwork, as all who have ever dealt with paperwork would agree, is far more important than alarming communities by telling them about releases of toxic materials when there is not much they can do about a release that’s already happened.
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.
— Langdon Smith, Evolution
Pesky. There’s no other description for evolution. It just keeps evolving. The most recent flap comes from Texas, the state that demonstrated that evolution is not as far along as we’d like to think by sending us George W. Bush. Not that that is the only indication of the state’s hostility to the notion of evolution. Others have manifested themselves as well.
It may be recalled that “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea”, a movie the National Science Foundation and Rutgers University had a role in producing, was described as “blasphemous” by an audience that was given a preview in the Fort Worth Museum of Science and Industry. The film suggested that life might have begun in the undersea vents in an undersea volcano. One viewer said: “I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact.” That viewer was not alone as Christine Castillo Comer will be the first to tell you. Christine has first hand experience with the perils posed by the debate over evolution.
Christine has worked in the Texas education system for 36 years. She spent 27 years in the classroom and nine years as the Texas Education Agency’s director of science. While working as the director of science she discovered that evolution doesn’t affect everyone equally.
According to the New York Times, Christine received an e-mail message from the National Center for Science Education announcing that Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University would be giving a talk in Austin. National Center for Science Education is known as a pro-evolution group that thinks evolution happened in the past and is continuing. Christine sent the notice she received to a group described as an “online community." That got her fired by Lizzette Reynolds.
Lizzette is a former deputy legislative director for then Governor George W. Bush. Following her boss to Washington, Lizette joined the U.S. Department of Education. Tiring of the life in Washington she moved back to Texas and joined the Texas Education Agency where Christine worked. When Lizzette learned of Christine’s e-mail she was upset. She said that notifying people about a speech pertaining to evolution “assumes this is a subject that the agency supports.”
When Lizzette and others in the Texas agency learned of the e-mail sent by Christine they instructed her to retract the e-mail even though retracting the e-mail did not make the lecture disappear. The lecture went on as scheduled. Lizzette wanted the retraction because, said she, notifying people of a lecture was taking a position on “a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.” Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the agency elaborated saying that by sending the e-mail announcing the lecture Christine was injecting her personal opinions and beliefs into the evolution vs. intelligent design debate.
Lizzette and Christine knew that Barbara Forrest, the co-author of "Creationism's Trojan Horse," testified in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005 on behalf of the plaintiffs in a case that debated the merits of intelligent design. In the Pennsylvania case the court found that intelligent design was not to be included in curricula as part of scientific education. For circulating word of Barbara's speech, Christine was seen as endorsing Barbara's opposition to the teaching of intelligent design.
Texas is in the vanguard of those now debating how to deal with teaching the theory of evolution in schools. According to Christine when asked about the agency’s attitude towards teaching evolution in years gone by she had responded that the agency supported the teaching of evolution in the public schools, a statement even the least evolved could understand. Early in 2007, with new unevolved supervisors in place, she was instructed to respond to such inquiries by quoting the high school biology standards formulated for the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills test. As a result, today inquirers about evolution are sent the language of Section 112.43(7) of that document. That section says in two simple sentences that the student knows the theory of evolution and is expected to: “(A) identify evidence of change in species using fossils, DNA sequences, anatomical similarities, physiological similarities, and embryology; and (B) illustrate the results of natural selection in speciation, diversity, phylogeny, adaptation, behavior, and extinction.” That is, of course, hugely helpful to the inquirer.
Notwithstanding Christine’s e-mailed retraction, an act that in the time of heretics frequently would save the heretic’s life, the retraction did not save Christine’s job. The offense, said Lizzette, is an offense “that calls for termination.”
Describing her firing, Christine was quoted by The Times as saying: “I’m for good science.” When it comes to teaching evolution: “I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination where I stand.” Time will tell where future Texas textbooks will stand following upcoming reviews of evolution that the Texas Board of Education will conduct in its February meeting.
A Ship of Fools - a 1965 Movie
If craziness loves company, U.S. citizens should take comfort from some other world leaders. Evidence was recently offered by a Sudanese teddy bear and a South American leader.
The Teddy bear was in Sudan. That country has been in the news for the last 5 years because of the slaughter taking place in Darfur. Since 2003 more than 200,000 people have died and more than 2.5 million have been displaced. To end the crisis the United Nations wants to deploy a joint African Union-United Nations force to bring peace and stability to the area. Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir, says he wants to see such a force deployed while simultaneously doing everything he can to delay its deployment. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, Jean-Marie Guénno, the United Nations’ top peacekeeping official, has said that the Sudan government has imposed limits for the joint force that would make it “impossible to operate.”
The people of Sudan are almost certainly concerned about the sad plight of their fellow citizens but something more important than human suffering has attracted their attention - a teddy bear.
Gillian Gibbons is a British subject who until recently taught at Unity High School, a private school in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. As part of a class project for her 7-year old charges, Ms. Gibbons asked them to name the teddy bear she brought to school. In a vote to name the bear, 20 children voted for Muhammad, a common name among Islamic families but not among teddy bears. Following the bear’s baptism by ballot each child was permitted to take the bear home over a weekend and then write a story about what the bear did when visiting the child’s home. The stories were then collected in a book with a bear on the cover with the title: “My name is Muhammad.”
One of the things the bear did when visiting the children’s homes was to make some of the parents so angry that they demanded that Ms. Gibbons be severely punished. The Sudanese Assembly of the Ulemas, described as an influential and semi-official association of clerics and Islamic scholars, said the teddy bear was a Western plot against Islam and demanded that Ms. Gibbons be punished to the full extent of the law. They said the bear’s baptism was “a calculated action and another ring in the circles of plotting against Islam.”
Following trial, Ms. Gibbons was sentenced to 14 days in jail following which time she was to be deported. On November 30, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets demanding that Ms. Gibbons be killed for insulting Islam. Nevertheless, President Bashir showed himself to be truly compassionate in the teddy bear case, a quality he has successfully hidden when addressing the slaughter in Darfur. He pardoned Ms. Gibbons and permitted her to return to England before her jail sentence had ended. Now that he is not distracted by the teddy bear Mr. Bashir may direct his presidential gaze towards Darfur. If the past is prologue to the future, he won’t.
Meanwhile, half way around the world, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez was continuing to prove that among loony world leaders he takes a back seat to no one.
Addressing the General Assembly at the U.N. in 2006 he likened Mr. Bush to the devil, a comparison that even Mr. Bush’s detractors found excessive if not offensive. Mr. Bush is not the only target of Mr. Chávez’s invective.
Attending a summit in Chile of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal, Mr. Chávez repeatedly referred to former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar as a “fascist.” “Fascists, ” said he, “are not human. A snake is more human.” Exasperated by the rhetoric, Juan Carlos, the king of Spain, finally blurted out “Why don’t you just shut up.” Mr. Chávez who gives better than he takes, was offended at the remark and has now demanded an apology.
Referring to the event in a recent speech he said: “Are we going to turn the page, are we going to forget? No! The only way this is going to be fixed is for the king of Spain to offer an apology for having attacked the Venezuelan head of state.” Putting force behind his words he went on to say that if no apology were forthcoming he would nationalize the Venezuelan subsidiaries of Spanish banks, Banco Santander SA and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA. Infatuated with the sound of his own words he said that if the U.S. interfered in the election held December 2, he would cut off its oil sales on Monday, December 3. Since sales were not cut off presumably there was no interference.
Comparing Mr. Bush to those two men leads to the conclusion that there are worse presidents than he. Small comfort that.
