California Construction Trucking Association (CCTA)

Jean Chemnick, E&E reporter - Published: Friday, February 3, 2012

A House subcommittee put U.S. EPA's science under a microscope again today, asking whether the scientific underpinnings for controversial rules from climate change to smog are the products of a transparent review process.

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee's Energy and Environment panel has held two prior hearings on EPA science.

Today, witnesses for industry and for EPA watchdog groups said the agency did not do enough to make its findings available to the general public. A wider airing of research, they said, might let other scientists scrutinize the work.

Stanley Young, assistant director for bioinformatics at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, a private organization, said peer review only ensures that research meets the standards of an area of discipline and "on the face of it, the claims are plausible." It does not ensure that the findings are correct, he said. In fact, the vast majority of peer-reviewed medical observational studies fail to replicate.

"Ninety percent of the time, the claims do not hold up," he told the subcommittee. "And you guys are trusting that the claims are good."

By making data available to the general public, EPA can make false findings easier to identify before they spur the writing of regulations, Young said.

Michael Walls, vice president of regulatory and technical affairs at the American Chemistry Council, said scientists routinely show too much deference to EPA's research, which may be reducing the rigor of the review process. He advocated new reforms to EPA's Integrated Risk Information System, which assesses the toxicity of chemicals in commerce and the environment.

Richard Belzer, president of the watchdog group Regulatory Checkbook, said that in some cases scientists are even in a position of peer reviewing their own work -- a clear conflict of interest. EPA's role as a grant-writing agency that supports science may also be prejudicing the process.

Congress, Belzer said, should revamp the way EPA's scientific operations are conducted, creating new barriers between the agency's researchers and reviewers.

Such a move would help prevent "science from being politicized" and "policy from being scientized," he said.

Deborah Swackhamer, who serves on EPA's Science Advisory Board, said EPA routinely turns out excellent science.

She agreed that EPA could do more in some cases to give the public access to the data it relies on in its reports, but she said there are controls to prevent conflicts of interest. For example, she said, peer reviewers must disclose their positions on various issues and their sources of funding before they are assigned to assess a report.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), a member of the subpanel, said the so-called Climategate scandal, which involved the theft of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), shows the need for scientists to make all their data available to the public.

Some of the emails were interpreted by climate skeptics as showing that scientists were attempting to cover up data that showed warming was not occurring on a scale that would be consistent with man-made climate change.

Rohrabacher called the event "an atrocity" and accused the scientists of "limiting the availability of knowledge to other people."

Independent review of the CRU incident showed no evidence of any intent on the part of the scientists to falsify findings, although one review said they could be clearer in presenting their findings to the public.

Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.) said that industry, also, should be concerned with boosting its transparency, including the way it influences regulators and lawmakers.

"If we made sure that industry was transparent in their influence on policy, I think we'd be a lot better off," he said.