by Carolynn Kormann
The New Yorker

[Ed. Note: Obviously the New Yorker and Kormann are far left and don’t understand that transparency and sound science are the cornerstones of developing sound regulations.  The ‘public health’ argument is a straw man with no basis in fact.]

“Today is a red-letter day, a banner day,” Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Tuesday afternoon. A few moments later, he signed a controversial rule proposal titled “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science.” The document stipulates that when E.P.A. employees develop new policies on, say, toxic chemicals or fine-particle pollution (also known as soot) they must rely only on research whose underlying data has been made available to the general public. “The science that we use is going to be transparent, it’s going to be reproducible, it’s going to be analyzed by those in the marketplace, and those that watch what we do can make informed decisions about whether we’ve drawn the proper conclusions or not,” Pruitt said…

Perhaps the happiest guest at Pruitt’s event on Tuesday was Steve Milloy, a lawyer who served on President Trump’s E.P.A. transition team and who has proclaimed himself the intellectual architect of the secret-science rule. “I’ve been working on this for twenty years,” he told me. “Steve Milloy wins! Yay!” During our conversation, Milloy repeatedly mentioned those early air-pollution studies—Dockery’s and others. “Where is the data?” he asked, as if the question remained unresolved. He said that he still finds the link between air pollution and shorter life expectancy “extremely dubious,” and called scientists who have published papers on the subject “liars,” “frauds,” and “pure evil.”

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