California Construction Trucking Association (CCTA)

You may not know that there is a growing body of scientists who are questioning California-specific health effects associated with diesel emissions.

Both the activist scientific community and CARB continue to ignore contrary scientific evidence and refuse to reexamine their numerous disputed scientific reports. We believe many independent scientists are now disputing the validity of CARB’s original diesel emissions effects reports based on the following reasons:

• Substantial epidemiologic evidence from six different sources indicates that there is no current relationship between PM2.5 (specifically diesel PM) and premature deaths in California.
• The key epidemiologists relied upon by CARB in the October 24, 2008 CARB Staff Report (Drs. Arden Pope, Michael Jerrett, Daniel Krewski, and Michael Thun) have clear conflicts of interest (CARB and EPA funding, involvement in review of report, etc.). Furthermore, they have repeatedly refused to allow reanalysis of the key American Cancer Society CPS II database, which is in violation of Federal Data Access Act.
  
  
• CARB has not considered several factors relevant to the justification of their draconian diesel emission regulations: First, California has the fourth lowest total age-adjusted death rate of all 50 states; second, California is currently experiencing 13% unemployment and 25% underemployment, the highest level since the Great Depression; and third, none of the epidemiologic evidence used by CARB satisfies the Federal Judiciary Center standards for establishing a causal relationship between PM2.5 and premature deaths.
  
  
• On May 22, 2008 a Draft CARB Report on PM2.5 & Premature Deaths by Hien T. Tran, Ph.D. was published. On July 11, 2008 Tran had a detailed teleconference with Enstrom and other key epidemiologists who explained their data, which was extremely relevant to the rule. On July 11, 2008, 148 pages of mostly critical scientific comments were submitted to CARB in response to the May 22, 2008 Draft CARB Report. The October 24, 2008 Final CARB Report does not properly include or address the critical comments by Professors Enstrom, Moolgavkar, and North, Drs. Dunn and Lipfert, and others.
  
  
• Peer Reviewers, Review Their Own Research? James Goldstene, CARB’s Executive Officer, has stated numerous times that the Tran report “went through three levels of formal, independent, external peer review before the report was finalized, and did not rely on the health research or original work of ARB staff.” Goldstene said the findings were then reviewed again when the CARB asked its 10 expert advisers to examine the report; nine stood by their earlier findings, and one did not respond. CARB staff provided copies of the comments of CARB Chief Legal Counsel Peter and Goldstene. The Board and staff also noted that the study ultimately was peer-reviewed by a number of experts, “with all reviewers finding out it was methodology scientifically sound and reasonable.” But because the report “provides important input into the regulation, which in turn results in increased regulations to the trucking industry (whose effects are far reaching), the credibility of the lead author and project coordinator is paramount,” CARB noted this in its own adverse action report against Tran. However, Mr. Goldstene fails to acknowledge that the October 24, 2008 Final CARB Report does not properly include or address the critical comments by Professors Enstrom, Moolgavkar, and North, Drs. Dunn and Lipfert, and others, as stated above.
  
  In his October 27, 2009 memo to the CARB members, Goldstene wrote, “Second, we received comments throughout the process, including review of the final report, from three advisors: Prof. Jonathan Levy of Harvard University, Prof. Arden Pope of BYU and Dr. Bart Ostro of Cal/EPA’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.” All three advisors have a clear conflict of interest because they reviewed their own research in the Draft Staff Report and the Final Staff Report. Levy authored two papers that are cited: Levy 2000. Pope authored nine papers that are cited; Dockery one, and Jerrett one. Ostro authored two papers that are cited as well. Incredibly, Levy and Ostro authored their 2006 paper,“The health benefits of reduced tropospheric ozone in California” (J Air Waste Manag Assoc. 2006 Jul.) with Hien Tran.
  
  Then Goldstene wrote, “Third, our draft report was reviewed following the Cal/EPA external scientific peer review guidelines for independent review. In this process, the UC Berkeley Institute of the Environment selects the peer reviewers without input from staff. Candidates were accepted as reviewers only if their disclosure information showed they had no conflict of interest related to the report.” The six reviewers identified by the UC Berkeley and selected by the Cal/EPA Project Director to review the proposed methodology in the PM2.5 Mortality staff report were: Jeff Brook from Environment Canada, Prof. Mark Eisner of the UC San Francisco, Professor Richard Flagan of the CA Institute of Technology, Prof. Alan Hubbard of UC Berkeley, Prof. Joel Kaufman of the Univ. of Washington, and Prof. Joel Schwartz of Harvard University. Contrary to Goldstene’s statements, three of these peer reviewers have a clear conflict of interest. Based on a PubMed.gov search, Eisner has published 65 papers during 1998-2009 with CARB Scientific Review Panel member Paul Blanc, who has been a SRP member since the SRP identified diesel exhaust as a Toxic Air Contaminant in 1998. Eisner has published 17 papers during 2003-2009 with CARB member Balmes and 16 of these papers include Blanc as a co-author. Kaufman authored three papers that are cited in the Final Staff Report: Goss 2004, Miller 2004, and Miller 2007. Schwartz authored five papers that are cited: Schwartz 1996, 2002, and 2008; Laden 2006; and Franklin 2007. Additional investigation may reveal further conflicts of interest among these reviewers.
  
  

CARB has only now reconsidered opening Tran’s disputed scientific report for review because of the fraud relating to his credentials, the cover-up of this by Chair Mary Nichols and staff, plus the failure to disclose this to the entire CARB Board prior to a vote on a regulation that will easily cost California small businesses and the construction industry over $35 billion. It is the job-killer of all job-killer regulations.

In light of these astonishing conflicts noted above, we have not only formally requested CARB to reopen Tran’s disputed scientific report with a fresh panel of truly independent peer reviewers (CARB Forum in Sacramento February 26), but we are also asking for the data behind key reports utilized by CARB, from which we believe there is no California-specific data showing any negative health effects of diesel emissions here.

We have sent formal written requests to the President of the UC School system, Mark Yudof to compel Prof. Michael Jerrett, an associate professor at UC Berkley who was educated in Canada, to release data associated with two important studies mentioned above that were used by CARB. We have repeatedly asked, and they have repeatedly refused to allow any reanalysis of the key American Cancer Society CPS II database, which is in violation of Federal Data Access Act.

UC President Yudof did respond to our January 6 letter on January 26, Prof. Jerrett has responded to a follow-up email I sent him associated with this request on February 5. (Read letter on left)

He sent a lengthy seven-paragraph email to me a month later, blaming the California Budget crisis for suspending his research funding, delaying his most recent “important,” no-doubt “Jonesed-up,” research. He also suggests that he couldn’t share the specific study data because, “the data contain sensitive health information on hundreds of thousands of people, and there are means within the data to identify some individuals. On entering the American Cancer Society Cancer Prevention II study, all individuals signed informed consent forms and were guaranteed that their identities would remain confidential.”

Anticipating that Yudof would defer the letter to Jerrett and Jerrett would provide a bunch of obfuscation, we decide to also send a separate request to the Health Effects Institute for the data. That request was sent on January 27. On February 10, I received an email response from The Health Effects Institute (HEI) President, Dan Greenbaum.