Crimes Against Nature Read online

  25

  One member of the advisory committee, University of Arizona toxicologist Vas Aposhian, quit in protest, pointing out that the panel of experts had advised warning children and childbearing women not to eat albacore tuna at all and to eat less light tuna than allowed by the advisory.

  26 “What is more important to the U.S.,” Aposhian asks, “the future mental health of young American children or the albacore tuna industry?”

  27

  But of all the debates in the scientific arena, however, there is none in which the White House has cooked the books more than that of global warming. In the past three years the White House has altered, suppressed, or attempted to discredit close to a dozen major reports on the subject. These include a 10-year peer-reviewed study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, commissioned by the former president Bush in 1993 in his own effort to dodge what was already a virtual scientific consensus blaming industrial emissions for global warming. The list also includes major long-term studies by the federal government’s National Academy of Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as well as a 2002 collaborative report by scientists at all three of those agencies.

  In September 2002, administration censors released the annual EPA report on air pollution without the agency’s usual update on global warming, that section having been deleted by Bush appointees at the White House.

  28 On June 19, 2003, a State of the Environment report commissioned by the EPA in 2001 was released after language about global warming was excised by flat-earthers in the Bush administration. The deleted passages had included a 2001 report by the National Research Council, commissioned by the White House. In its place was a reference to a propaganda tract financed by the American Petroleum Institute.

  29

  In July 2003, EPA scientists leaked an analysis that the agency’s leadership had withheld for months showing that a Senate plan to reduce the pollution that causes global warming could achieve its goal at very small cost.

  30 Bush reacted by launching a 10-year, $100 million effort to prove that global temperature changes have, in fact, occurred naturally, another delay tactic for the fossil fuel barons at taxpayer expense.

  31

  “This administration likes to emphasize what we don’t know while ignoring or minimizing what we do know, which is a prescription for paralysis on policy,” says Princeton’s Oppenheimer. “With a president who does not believe in evolution, it’s hard to imagine what kind of scientific evidence would suffice to convince him to take firm action on global warming.”

  32

  When the administration can’t actually suppress scientific information, it simply issues a new set of facts. The White House has taken special pains, for example, to shield Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, from sound science. The company is the leading practitioner of hydraulic fracturing, a new process used to extract oil and gas by injecting benzene into underground formations. EPA scientists studying hydraulic fracturing in 2002 found that it could contaminate groundwater supplies. A week after reporting their findings to congressional staff members, however, the EPA revised the data to indicate that benzene levels would not exceed government standards.

  33 In a letter to Congressman Henry Waxman (D-California), EPA officials said the change was based on “industry feedback.”

  34 Waxman requested a clarification on the nature of that feedback. He’s still waiting for an answer.

  Interior Secretary Gale Norton seems particularly inclined to manipulate science. In autumn 2001, she testified that Arctic oil drilling would not harm hundreds of thousands of caribou. Not long afterward, Fish and Wildlife Service biologists contacted Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which defends scientists and other professionals working in state and federal environmental agencies. “The scientists provided us the science that they had submitted to Norton and the altered version that she had given to Congress a week later,” says Jeff Ruch, the group’s executive director.

  35 There were 17 major substantive changes, all of them downplaying the reported impacts to the caribou. When Norton was asked about the alterations in October 2001, she dismissed them as typographical errors.

  During the late winter and spring of 2002, Norton and White House political adviser Karl Rove pressured National Marine Fisheries scientists to alter findings in a report on salmon in Oregon’s Klamath River.

  36 The final report underestimated the amount of water needed to keep the salmon population alive in order to divert a bigger share of the river water to large corporate farms. Agribusiness got its water and more than 33,000 chinook and coho salmon died — the largest recorded fish kill in the history of the American West.

  37 Mike Kelly, the biologist who worked on the original draft — and who has since resigned in despair — told me that the coho salmon is probably headed for extinction. “Morale is low among scientists here,” Kelly says. “We are under pressure to get the right results. This administration is putting the species at risk for political gain — and not just on the Klamath.”

  38

  Norton has also ordered the rewriting of an exhaustive 12-year study by federal biologists detailing the injuries that Arctic drilling would impose on populations of musk oxen and snow geese. She reissued the biologists’ report as a two-page paper showing no negative impact to wildlife.

  39 She ordered suppression of two studies by the Fish and Wildlife Service, concluding that the drilling would threaten polar bear populations and violate an international treaty protecting the bears.

  40 She suppressed findings that mountaintop mining would cause “tremendous destruction of aquatic and terrestrial habitat.” She forced Park Service scientists to alter a $2.5 million environmental impact statement that found that snowmobiles were damaging Yellowstone’s air quality, its wildlife, and the health of its visitors and employees. A federal judge has reprimanded her office for interfering with scientists in the case.

  41

  Roger G. Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, views Norton’s machinations with horror. “This administration routinely mismanages scientific information through distortion and omission whenever scientific truth is inconvenient to its industrial allies,” he says. “It’s hard to decide what is more demoralizing about the administration’s politicization of the scientific process — its disdain for professional scientists working for our government or its willingness to deceive the American public.”

  42

  Manipulating data leads to one pesky problem: scientists who stick to their guns. And when scientists resist the White House agenda, the Bush camp threatens, intimidates, or purges them. Nearly every week I come across courageous public servants like Mike Kelly, or David Lewis, an EPA scientist for 30 years who endured reprisals for divulging that his agency knowingly relied on faulty data to approve the use of dioxin-tainted sewer sludge as farm fertilizer.

  In April 2002, James Zahn, a nationally respected microbiologist with the Department of Agriculture’s research service in Ames, Iowa, accepted my invitation to speak at a conference of over 1,000 family farm advocates, environmentalists, and civic leaders in Clear Lake, Iowa. In a rigorous, taxpayer-funded study, Dr. Zahn had identified bacteria that can make people sick — and that are resistant to antibiotics — in the air surrounding industrial hog farms. His studies proved that billions of these “superbugs” were traveling across property lines daily, endangering the health of neighbors and their livestock.

  43 I was shocked when Dr. Zahn canceled his appearance on the day of the conference under orders from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington. I later uncovered a fax trail proving that the order was prompted by lobbyists for the National Pork Producers Council. Dr. Zahn told me that his supervisor at the USDA, under pressure from the hog industry, had ordered him not to publish his study, and that he had been forced to cancel ove
r a dozen public appearances before local planning boards and county health commissions seeking information about the health impacts of meat factories. Soon after my conference, Zahn resigned from the Department of Agriculture in disgust.

  44

  On April 19, 2001, at the request of ExxonMobil, the Bush administration orchestrated the removal of Dr. Robert Watson, the NASA atmospheric chemist who headed the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

  45 Watson, one of the world’s top climate experts and a key player in the global response to climate change, was despised by many in the oil and coal industries. He was replaced by a little-known scientist from New Delhi, India, who would be generally unavailable for congressional hearings.

  When a team of government biologists indicated that the Army Corps of Engineers was violating the Endangered Species Act in managing the flow of the Missouri River, it was replaced by an industry-friendly panel. The original team had recommended that the Corps-controlled dam flows should be changed to mimic the natural pattern of rising in the spring and ebbing in the summer, a plan also endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences. Allyn Sapa, a former Fish and Wildlife Service supervisor in North Dakota and a member of the original team of scientists, says that there was “intense political pressure” brought to bear to maintain the status quo to please downriver agribusiness and barge operations. Sapa worries that the status quo may mean extinction for Missouri River species, including the pallid sturgeon. “We might be in the last decade for these fish,” he says. “They can maybe make one or two more spawning runs.”

  46

  In April 2003, the EPA suddenly dismantled an advisory panel composed of utility industry representatives, state air-quality officials, scientists, and environmentalists who had spent nearly 21 months developing rules for stringent regulation of industrial emissions of mercury. John A. Paul, supervisor of Ohio’s Regional Air Pollution Control Agency and the panel’s cochair, says, “You have an EPA that assumes that because the law has an adverse impact on industry profits, the agency must find a way to usurp the law.”

  47

  The replacement of accomplished scientists and public health leaders with industry-friendly representatives has ignited grave concern among public health professionals. When, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently replaced an environmental health advisory panel with industry representatives (including a vice president of the Heritage Foundation), ten leading scientists denounced the move in the journal Science. “Scientific advisory committees do not exist to tell the secretary what he wants to hear but to help the secretary, and the nation, address complex issues,” they asserted. “Regulatory paralysis appears to be the goal here, rather than the application of honest, balanced science.”

  48

  Needless to say, such appointments pose a direct threat to our children’s health. In the summer of 2000, officials at the Centers for Disease Control asked Bruce Lanphear, along with four other esteemed health professionals, if he was willing to be nominated to serve on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention. Lanphear, a physician, is director of the Environmental Health Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and a professor at the University of Cincinnati. Approval of such nominations by the secretary of Health and Human Services is traditionally a formality. But before this could happen, George W. Bush took office.

  A month later, the CDC turned down Lanphear’s nomination, along with the others, selecting instead five people with ties to the lead industry. Among the new appointees are Dr. Kimberly Thompson, an associate of John Graham’s Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. At the time of her appointment, the HCRA had 22 corporate backers with a financial interest in looser lead standards. Another choice was Bill Banner, who works part-time as an expert industry witness for lead poisoning cases, where he testifies that there is no harm to children from lead blood levels below 70 micrograms per deciliter.

  49 This is dangerous nonsense. “We know kids often die if their blood levels get much above 80,” Lanphear says. “At levels of about 10, which is about 3 percent of kids, we’re pretty convinced they’re harmful. Now there are several studies coming out saying there should be no threshold, that there are adverse effects below 10.”

  50

  “The current Bush administration has taken intolerance of science dissent to a new orbit,” says Tom Devine, a self-described Goldwater Republican who monitors the treatment of federal whistle-blowers for the nonpartisan Government Accountability Project. “The repression against internationally renowned professionals and experts in their fields just for exercising the scientific method objectively is unprecedented.”

  51

  In 2003 PEER conducted a survey of staffers in the EPA’s Region 8, which includes most of the states among the administration’s leading targets for energy development — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas. The survey found widespread demoralization caused by the political pressure to please industry. Fully one-third of the respondents said they feared retaliation for performing their job, a feeling that was most pronounced among managers. Wes Wilson, an environmental engineer with the EPA’s Region 8 and the legislative representative for Local 3607 of the American Federation of Government Employees, agrees. “We’re seeing a pattern here — competent people who are doing objective work being moved because they haven’t acquiesced to the Bush administration’s radical ideology.”

  52

  The desire to surround itself with compliant scientists has led the administration to engage in “outsourcing,” a practice that effectively transfers science from dispassionate professionals to the corporate boardroom. As part of an initiative by the Office of Management and Budget to outsource 425,000 federal jobs, thousands of environmental science positions are being contracted out to industry consultants already in the habit of massaging data to support corporate profit taking. This program would place the care and oversight of a vast range of public policy and public resources in the hands of people without civil-service or whistle-blower protection — and with little or no duty to the public good.

  53 If we continue to squander decades of valuable technical expertise and rely on industry data and risk assessments, Wilson says, “the nation runs the risk of not having a government capable of analyzing its health risks and environmental risks.”

  54 That means legislators making decisions that will profoundly affect our lives and our children’s lives with no better guide than the profit motive.

  A case in point: In November 2003 the administration was forced to respond to a lawsuit by the NRDC, the United Farmworkers of America, and other environmental groups against the EPA over its failure to regulate certain pesticides, notably atrazine. Atrazine was first approved in 1958, and by the 1980s it had been implicated by epidemiological studies in a host of illnesses, including prostate cancer and infertility. The data was so compelling, in fact, that the pesticide was banned in the European Union. Despite this, it is still the most heavily used weed killer in the United States. Testing by the U.S. Geological Survey regularly finds alarming concentrations of atrazine in drinking water across the corn belt. In 2002 scientists at the University of California Berkeley found that atrazine at one-thirtieth the government’s supposedly “safe” level causes grotesque deformities in frogs, including multiple sets of organs.

  55 Last year epidemiologists from the University of Missouri found that atrazine may lead to reproductive abnormalities in humans, including sperm counts that are 50 percent below normal.

  56

  In September 2001, as a result of NRDC’s lawsuit, the courts agreed that the administration must review the health effects of atrazine. But instead of handing the job to the EPA, the administration asked Syngenta, a Swiss company with U.S. headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina, to monitor the environmental effects of the pesticide. And just what does Syngenta manufacture? Atrazine! It’s almost funny. In an interview with th
e Los Angeles Times, Sherry Ford, a Syngenta spokesperson, said without apparent irony, “This is one way we can ensure that it’s not presenting any risk to the environment.”

  57

  A similar bargain in Florida illustrates the kind of fantastic results we might expect when government relies on data from industry biostitutes. In July 2003, the EPA’s regional office overseeing the Everglades approved an absurd study performed by a developer-financed consultant concluding that wetlands discharge more pollutants than they absorb. Bush administration regulators are now using that study to justify giving developers credit for improving water quality by replacing natural wetlands with golf courses and other developments.