by Steve Fiscor
Coal Age Editor-in-Chief

Last month, the E&E Legal sued the EPA for illegally forming a key science advisory committee — the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee Particulate Matter Review Panel for 2015-2018 (CASAC PM Panel). “The EPA has stacked the panel, which is required by law to be independent and unbiased, with researchers who have received more than $190 million in discretionary grants from the EPA,” said Steve Milloy, an attorney and senior fellow with E&E Legal. “This clearly violates the law and makes a mockery of the notion of ‘independent’ scientific review.” Coal Age readers should know Milloy. A lawyer, he ran the website junkscience.com, which was dedicated to exposing faulty scientific data and analysis. Today’s EPA is a hotbed of faulty scientific data and analysis…

The EPA’s PM2.5 regulations have been a scientifically controversial policy since the agency began the process of regulating it in the early 1990s. E&E Legal has said that, not only has the EPA hidden from public scrutiny the “scientific data” that its PM2.5 regulation relies on, the agency stacks the legally required CASAC panel with EPA-paid researchers.

Why is this important to the coal business? The agency’s claims about the dangers related to PM2.5 have been a primary basis for its justification of air quality standards and the regulations related to the Obama administration’s “war on coal,” specifically the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, Mercury Air Transport Standard and Clean Power Plan…

Fortunately, watchdog groups like E&E Legal are exposing and documenting the underhanded methods this administration used to subvert America’s energy policy.

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