Since at least the George W. Bush administration, the environmental Left and the Democratic Party have continually screamed that conservatives and Republicans are anti-science.
According to this group, conservatives ignore scientific evidence of risks to the environment and human health so as to avoid imposing costly pollution reduction requirements on business. This is nonsense. Quite to the contrary, both the Bush and Trump administrations tried to ensure that the process by which Environmental Protection Agency regulations are reviewed conforms to how science actually works. For instance, on Clean Air Act science review panels, both the Bush and Trump administrations included scientists from private labs and companies, not just EPA-funded scientists at academic centers created by EPA. And the Trump administration promulgated a rule that would have required that the data about health risks said to support EPA regulations was publicly available so that other researchers could ensure that results about risk could actually be replicated.
In its assault on fossil fuels, the Biden administration’s EPA has moved rapidly to make sure that the scientific basis for EPA regulations is no longer subject to independent review and outside verification.
The first such move allows EPA to rely upon secret science: evidence that nobody other than EPA’s chosen experts will ever get to see. The second such move is to return to a practice, adopted during the Obama administration and then ended by the Trump administration, of appointing mostly EPA-funded scientists to serve on the science advisory panels (such as the Clean Air Act Scientific Advisory Committee) that review the evidence said to support EPA regulations. With these two changes, the “science” supporting EPA regulations requiring further reductions in the emissions of air pollutants such as ozone and fine particulates (dust particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter) will come from a production process whereby EPA funds research that uses secret data to generate conclusions. Conclusions, that is, of which the validity will be reviewed by boards composed almost entirely of the very same EPA-funded researchers who generated the conclusions.
This process is completely at odds with how the scientific process is supposed to work. The validity of scientific results is established only after other researchers obtain the data generating published results and then do their own independent analysis to confirm that those results can be reproduced. This process relies upon data sharing. EPA’s regulations can now be based on data that is never subjected to testing by outside scientists.
By allowing its scientific review committees to be composed mostly or entirely of researchers it itself funds, EPA will subvert the scientific process in yet another way. As dramatically illustrated by repeated failures to replicate results in fields ranging from social psychology to biomedicine, the validity of scientific results is not established by their publication after peer review. The peer review process is limited. In particular, peer reviewers don’t look at the actual data underlying published results. As is now increasingly understood, peer review does not establish scientific validity. But peer review does at least expose scientific results reported in papers to examination by researchers other than those who author the paper. In this, it is far superior to the scientific review process that Biden’s EPA is now restoring. For under EPA’s proposed return to Obama administration practices, EPA’s review committees will consist of EPA-funded researchers who are reviewing mostly work by themselves and other EPA-funded researchers. This is like a scientific journal whose editors and reviewers decide whether to publish their own work, work that was funded entirely by the entity that publishes the journal.
“Peer review” means review by other, competing researchers, not review by the authors of the papers under review. Such self-interested review bodies are also likely illegal. Congress expressly required that the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee be an “independent review committee.” It is unfathomable how anyone could find “independent” a review committee consisting primarily or entirely of EPA-funded researchers who sit in review of work by themselves and other EPA-funded researchers. It is almost unknown for an EPA-funded study to find that there is not a significant risk of premature mortality that would be reduced by tougher air pollution standards. It is correspondingly difficult to imagine how a member of EPA’s Clean Air Act Scientific Advisory Committee can be “independent” when that person’s entire research institute depends on discretionary EPA funding for its existence.
The Biden administration has already made clear its intent to toughen standards for air pollutants such as ozone as means of putting the final nail in the coffin of the fossil fuels industry. With EPA’s wholehearted endorsement of what amounts to a scientific star chamber, there is no doubt that there will be plenty of “evidence” supporting the execution order.
Jason Johnston is the director of the Olin Program in Law and Economics at the University of Virginia.
