Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has begun to repair the damage his agency did to science before he arrived. Late last month he said current recipients of EPA grants won't be allowed to serve as scientific advisors.
Protests erupted predictably. "This could mean that there's no independent voice ensuring that EPA follows the science on everything from drinking-water pollution to atmospheric chemical exposure," complained an official at the Union of Concerned Scientists. A Natural Resources Defense Council blogger wrote: "This purge of credible, independent scientists from its scientific advisory bodies damages EPA's credibility. Worse, the transparent packing of these same advisory bodies with representatives of polluting industries that are more concerned with their bottom lines than with public health will damage the environment and hurt people."
Conflict of interest
EPA followed these dispositions several years ago when it resisted suggestions from the oil and gas industry that a panel reviewing hydraulic fracturing include someone professionally experienced with the operation. To the EPA of that era, industry affiliation meant disqualifying conflict of interest. An oil-company scientist with a salary was deemed less "independent" than a professor needing grants.
Independence of this type helps EPA activism more than science. In response to a congressional request made in 2009, the agency conducted an exhaustive study of hydraulic fracturing's effects on drinking water. Environmentalists at the time were demonizing the completion method, supposedly because it threatened subsurface water but really because it contributed to new abundance of oil and natural gas. Many of them worked at EPA under former President Barack Obama.
In June 2015, the agency essentially said it had spent several years looking for a general threat to drinking water from hydraulic fracturing and found none. The encapsulating sentence in its 998-page public review draft was this: "We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States." The statement validated industry arguments and disappointed extremists hoping to stymie development of oil and gas.
Yet the EPA's Scientific Advisory Board somehow considered that statement to be deficient. "The SAB finds that the EPA did not support quantitatively its conclusion about lack of evidence for widespread, systemic impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources and did not clearly describe the system(s) of interest (e.g., groundwater, surface water), the scale of impacts (i.e., local or regional), nor the definitions of 'systemic' and 'widespread.'" The SAB thus faulted the EPA for not measuring what it didn't find. If EPA wanted to retain its conclusion, the SAB said, it "should provide quantitative analysis that supports its conclusion that hydraulic fracturing has not led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources."
Asked to do the impossible, EPA dutifully omitted the conclusive sentence from its final report. There, it reverted to the unwarranted alarmism from which the whole, futile exercise had begun. Its conclusions listed hypothetical conditions under which hydraulic fracturing might damage drinking-water resources, including the "injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids directly into groundwater resources." Congress should demand to know how much public money the EPA spent on that remarkable illumination of the obvious.
This exercise had nothing to do with science and everything to do with prejudice against the production of oil and gas. Unable to justify opposition to hydraulic fracturing with its own findings, EPA readily yielded to illogical criticism of its procedures from a like-minded advisory board to perpetuate a contrived menace.
Distorted conclusions
The possibility exists, of course, that SAB members critical of EPA's initial findings did act with genuine independence. But distorted conclusions make their report look like a nitpicking excuse for the EPA to do what it wanted to do all along. Financial links between board members and EPA amplify the suspicion.
Scientists are human, whatever their affiliation. Some are better than others at keeping self-interest out of professional judgments. They all should welcome Pruitt's efforts to restore confidence in their work.
