In two apparently related decisions, the Trump "Environmental Protection Agency" is terminating outside panels of experts formed to advise the EPA on soot and on ground-level ozone pollution. The ozone panel hadn't even been formed yet; the EPA simply informed all the candidates that they would no longer be needed.
According to the Washington Post, this is part of an intentional shift by the agency to "change the way the agency conducts and assesses science." Specifically, it's an effort to have less of it.
Now, under acting administrator Andrew Wheeler, the EPA has instead decided to let a seven-member group called the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) alone perform those assessments and make recommendations to the agency’s political leaders.
Rather than convening scientific experts who specialize in the targeted questions being asked about the health effects of soot, ozone, and other pollutants, the more generic Clean Air committee, five members of which were recently installed by Team Trump, will simply weigh in on those issues themselves and be done with it.
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Experts are (rightly) alarmed with the move, contending it's part and parcel of the Trump administration's purge of science and embrace of whatever Trump-allied industries want to do. Trump's EPA has already issued severe restrictions on what research can be used by the agency (only research with fully public data, which is illegal and/or unethical when using medical records to survey health effects of environmental pollution) and which scientists can serve as advisers at all (none who receive EPA grants for their research–but the EPA has long been a prime funder of environmental research; industry-funded researchers, however, are still fine.)
“By removing science and scientists, they are making it easier for the administration to set a weaker standard” said Gretchen Goldman, research director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy.
Yes. Yes they are, and they're not being subtle about it. The Trump administration has been moving to curtail consideration of the health effects of soot, ozone, and other near-ground pollution as a transparent gift to the fossil fuel industry and as part of an extremely doomed effort to prop up the nation's near-dead coal industry; one of Trump's most favored lies revolves around somehow putting "coal miners back to work" even as market forces continue to close those mines.
It's astonishingly shortsighted, meant to fluff Republican-leaning donors for just a few more years and damn the climate effects in the meantime, but that's Team Trump. Your health problems are not their concern; whether entire American cities will have to be moved to higher ground, in your children's lifetimes, is less important than propping certain stocks up.