UPDATE: A new website chronicles the issue here http://epahumantesting.com/
Exclusive to WUWT by David W. Schnare
Statement of ATI’s Lead Counsel
on
American Tradition Institute v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(US District Court, Easter District of Virginia No. 1:12-cv-1066)
There are few occasions in life that emerge directly from the core of an individual and almost never are those memorialized in a law suit. On Friday, September 21, 2012, I took five copies of a complaint to the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, filing one of them with the court and having each of the rest stamped and then sent to four senior government officials, Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney Neil H. MacBride, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson and EPA General Counsel Scott Fulton. I sent them summons to appear and defend themselves in part because of my first name.
I was named after David Steiner, a man who died of starvation in Buchenwald concentration camp on May 3, 1945. Tattooed on his body was the number 59059. He was witness to horrors that, today, we have a hard time even contemplating, something that I thought would never exist on this planet again – the abhorrent practice of giving human subjects poisons in order to determine what subsequently happens to them.
I have always been deeply affected by the circumstances of my great-uncle’s death. It is a heavy burden to carry the name of such a victim. As I matured, I committed my life to giving to our civilization that which David Steiner was never able to give himself. I have given 37 years of service to the United States, most of that in an effort to protect human health and the environment as a professional at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
I was able to secure a position of responsibility and trust at EPA in large part because the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offered me the opportunity to obtain graduate degrees and prepare myself for a career in public service. Until a few weeks ago, I had been a strong supporter of each. Then Steven Milloy asked me to represent him and other members of the American Tradition Institute who have stories much like mine, or otherwise cannot countenance such human experimentation.
Steve’s story is worse than death. His uncle, Zoran Galkanovic, was incarcerated at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Upon threat of death, Mr. Galkanovic was forced to rise each morning and identify those individuals at the concentration camp too ill to work, knowing they would subsequently be executed that very day. Because of the inhumanity forced on Mr. Galkanovic, Mr. Milloy has accepted as a family responsibility the fight against any government who subjects its citizens to inhumane treatment. Who knew it would be our government? Who knew it would be the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency? Who knew that human experimentation would be done on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? Who knew it would be an official body of that University that approved this research?
On first blush, I simply could not believe Mr. Milloy. Then I looked carefully at the facts and at the law. This case involves the intentional exposure of human subjects to “fine particulate” matter, also known as PM2.5. EPA obtained their PM2.5 from a diesel truck. It is difficult to overstate the atrocity of this research. EPA parked a truck’s exhaust pipe directly beneath an intake pipe on the side of a building. The exhaust was sucked into the pipe, mixed with some additional air and then piped directly into the lungs of the human subjects. EPA actually has pictures of this gas chamber, a clear plastic pipe stuck into the mouth of a subject, his lips sealing it to his face, diesel fumes inhaled straight into his lungs.
Unbelievable as that may seem, consider the additional fact that EPA has officially concluded that this gas is a genotoxic carcinogen and that there is no exposure level below which it can be considered safe. In fact, EPA Administrator Jackson testified to Congress that of all deaths occurring in the United States, 1 in 4 “is attributable to PM2.5.” She told them “Particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.”
Under the law, under EPA regulations and under EPA policy, this human experimentation is strictly prohibited. To conduct human experimentation, the human subjects must be properly informed of the risks they face and these risks must be less than the potential benefit of the experiment. My family knows how that works too.
Few today know the ravages of Polio, but some of us are old enough to remember it too well. Susan Paidar was a childhood neighbor, the same age as one of my brothers. She died in an iron lung. And, she was one of the last victims of this terrible disease, in small part because of the courage of one of my brothers. In 1952, at age 6, my brother Rick was selected to be in the first human test group for the Salk vaccine. He was offered the possibility of never having to worry about polio again. He was a human subject and there was a real benefit from that human experimentation.
In the section describing the mandatory benefit that must be offered to the human subjects, EPA’s PM2.5 “informed consent” baldly states “there is no benefit.” Worse, the form never informs the subjects that they will be inhaling diesel fumes, never tells them the gas is a carcinogen, never tells them about all the other toxic substances in diesel exhaust pouring into their lungs, never tells them that because PM2.5 is genotoxic, it might cause disease in children they might wish to have.
Medical ethicist, Professor John D. Dunn, MD, JD, called EPA’s human experimentation “scandalously unethical and immoral” and said “There can be no further tolerance of this misconduct.” This is not the EPA I knew. This is not the University of North Carolina I knew. This is not the American Tradition of our nation. But, this is why I traveled to the U.S. Courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia – to put a stop to it.
David W. Schnare, Esq., MSPH, PhD.
Director
Environmental Law Center
American Tradition Institute.
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Steve Milloy will have a related major announcement tomorrow at junkscience.com
Taphonomic: Not sure from where the “1 in 4 is attributable to PM2.5″ comes. Milloy’s own site indicates that it was alledgedly 1 in 20:
http://junksciencecom.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/dunn-nc-med-board.pdf
Thanks for the link. It appears to me that the quote attributing 1 in 4 to Ms. Lubchenko is in error. That number appears to be an inference by John Dunn (see the bottom of p. 10 of the above linked statement) based on Lubchenko’s comparison of particulate mortality with cancer.
Warmist politicians say enough outrageous things on their own initiatives, we really don’t need to be putting words in their mouths.
Mr. Schnare,
A search for the case number on United States District Court Eastern District of Virginia’s website doesn’t return a result. Can you post a link to American Tradition Institute v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency so we can read the filing?
http://dockets.justia.com/docket/virginia/vaedce/1:2012cv01066/286173/
Note: Justia does report the case but PACER is required to view the filing.
I think Skiphil nails this issue best. At its most useful, it’s forcing EPA to declare its hand – YES or NO – because either way, it looks as if EPA has to show itself guilty. That would be good.
I’d like to add to that:
(1) Steve Milloy has done sterling work at least in the past, in bringing the “junk science” of CAGW to the notice of the world. He was certainly one of my important info sources in early days. Therefore Milloy has at least earned the respect implied in putting this on view for folks to look at here.
(2) I see people like Brookes jumping to conclusions mighty fast, in a way I do not like or trust. We can still practice (a) the sniff test so long as (b) we go check carefully.
(3) there is OTT emotional hyperbole, I agree. But I put myself in Steve Milloy’s shoes and think about his perspective on life, given his family links to the gas chambers of horror. And we grieved with Anthony when Bob Phelan passed away so suddenly. But while emotions can and probably need to be our drivers, yet for the sake of science, we need to transcend them in our public statements, and mostly keep quiet about them.
A couple of random thoughts from the skeptical “fooled me before” point of view:
1. What if this is a suit that the current EPA wants to lose? What harm can befall the current administrators. What additional power and authority might they be granted after a finding of PM2.5 caused harm to people in the experiment?
2. Is regulating the current diesel engine out of existence the next environmental cause?
3. Is the clean-diesel then next mandated technology? Think of all the money to be made (by some!) by forcing a technology change by mandate and not by economics.
4. A very interesting point made by previous posters: reducing PM2.5 concentrations only to increase PM1.0, PM0.5, and PM0.25 concentrations might harm public health in the long run while making the regulators look good in the short run.
I don’t have answers. I don’t have conclusions, yet. I’m just trying to identify the degrees of freedom. (Hmmm. “degrees of freedom” could be an ironic term here.)
Re: Diesels on Submarines
Simple answer. Diesel engines are more efficient than Otto-cycle (gasoline) engines, and therefore the submarine would obtain more cruising range from a given load of fuel. (Mostly, the crew is still below decks when the submarine is cruising on the surface.) This has all been superseded by nuclear power, thanks to Admiral Rickover.
Juan Slayton, I believe the correct quote was that reducing PM10 Emissions would save more people than curing cancer. This was in testimony to Congress, and the representative heading the comittee asked her to repeat the claim, which she did. As cancer kills a quarter of Americans, that’s a pretty darn bold claim to make.
I agree with others that the hype in the beginning of the article is offputting. However, it appears there may be something to this scandal.
From Steve Milloy’s website at http://epahumantesting.com/summary/:
“Was anyone actually harmed by these experiments?
In October 2010, a 58-year obese woman with personal and family histories of heart problems (e.g., her father died from heart disease when he was age 57), had her experiment terminated early and was taken by EMTs to the hospital when she experienced cardiac arrthymias in the test chamber. In a September 2011 report of the incident published in the U.S. Government journal Environmental Health Perspectives, the EPA concluded that the subject’s arrhythmia was caused by her exposure to PM2.5.
Although this incident and the reporting of it are another separate controversy (involving the scientific misconduct of “falsification”), its instant relevance is that, even accepting EPA’s conclusion, the agency failed to amend the consent forms so as to disclose this risk of harm to future study subjects — and there have been at least 17 study subjects since that so-called “adverse event.”
End quote
Adverse events are very important and must be reported even if the connection of the adverse event to the exposure is tenuous. If this information is accurate, this is a major ethical and scientific lapse. I can almost understand the hype at the beginning of the article now.
I have believed the EPA should have its wings clipped since they forced catalytic converters upon us in our automobiles in the 1970s. I do not believe any unelected bureaucrats should have the power to mandate “laws.” The original mission of the EPA was to be an advisory body, but as Barry Goldwater noted, they quickly morphed into the “agency from hell” staffed with dogooders trying to save the world. Unless they intentionally lose this lawsuit, as noted by others above, the end result could be a little daylight shined upon them, forcing them to admit some of their hypocrisies. Under a different administration, come November, perhaps some “clipping” can thus be accomplished. Hey, I can wish, can’t I?
Several people have suspected that this is a hoax. Everyone, wild as this seems, CRAZY AS IT SOUNDS. We have witnessed this since the beginning, with that one report on the one person who had a heart fribulation after being exposed to PM10. Back then, we lambasted the sophomore nature of the write-up. They did not say how they had generated the PM10 or what it contained. There was no mention of other patients or their reactions. Nor was their information about either her consent or her prior information. Furthermore, the desired outcome of the experiment was unclear with possible violation of Nuremburg code. I personally stated that I would not accept such an experiment at an elementary school science fair.
How those gaps have been filled.
1: There were other patients, dozens of them, with no negative reactions whatsoever. None of this was reported.
2: There was documentation of how they generated the PM10. They hooked diesel exhaust to an inhaler, a SUICIDE method which would have had very bad results should their air blower have failed.
3: There was “informed” consent. However, the method of generation was not specified, nor was there any statement of the risks, and in it, the researches admit that there was no expected benefit, in clear violation of ethics guidelines.
To coin a phrase, “It was worse than we thought”. In fact, worse than I dared imagine.
This is a question rather than an acusation.
Didn’t Jackson make that testimony regarding coal plant emissions? And wasn’t it around the time that the CO2 regulation was still in the courts?
It IS worse than we thought.
The EPA’s paper can be found on the Swiss Medical Weekly site. Controlled human exposures to diesel exhaust .
From the summary:
Table 1 of the paper notes the strengths and weakness of human exposure studies.
Strengths include: Inclusion of potentially susceptible populations (e.g., elderly, diabetics, and individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and cardiovascular disease).
Weakness include: Small subject numbers and Generally short term effects only.
Apparently they are happy to poison sick people, but regret that they can’t poison more or observe long term effects.
September 24, 2012 at 9:57 am | Lucy Skywalker says:
[ … ] (2) I see people like Brookes jumping to conclusions mighty fast, in a way I do not like or trust. We can still practice (a) the sniff test so long as (b) we go check carefully.
[ … ]
———————-
Never mind Brooks, Lucy, he’s just another luvvie from UWA’s raa-raa crowd.
The complaint as filed may be viewed here:
http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/2012-09-21-Complaint-as-Filed.pdf
The main driver for using diesel rather than gasoline engines on submarines is safety. Diesel is much less flammable than gasoline. Although the US, UK, and France operate only nuclear powered subs, most other navies have mixed fleets (e.g., China and the Russian Federation) or only operate conventionally powered subs. Diesel electric is still the most common submarine propulsion method. Also, most (possibly all?) nuclear subs also have emergency diesel generators for backup power. Neither propulsion or emergency generator diesels exhaust to the “people tank” so this is really not relevant for the PM2.5 discussion.
It is worth noting that diesel (and gasoline) engines are rarely used in indoor applications except where there is a dedicated system to remove exhaust. I don’t know much about mines, but fork lifts and handling equipment in warehouse operations are normally powered by propane or compressed natural gas. If the EPA and other regulators will just leave well enough alone, the fracking boom and falling natural gas prices will probably drive a shift from diesel to gas power for heavy trucks and buses and reduce urban particulates due to market action.
I don’t usually get seasick, but sometimes, with a following sea, the smell of diesel fumes just makes me want to hurl…
At the end of the tape she states
“If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels it would have the same impact as finding the cure for cancer in our country,” explained Jackson. “The difference is we know how to do that.”
@Steve R
Unless it’s bio diesel and then the fumes smell like french fries. 🙂
My gut feeling is that this will go nowhere.
” I’ll take the word of an attorney who has to prove such things over the word of an activist. – Anthony”
Or, you could actually go look at the paper (linked to conveniently from the lawsuit as reference number 1: http://www.smw.ch/content/smw-2012-13597/) which states, “DE is introduced into the exposure chamber (1.83 m x 1.83 m x 2.44 m) after a 1:30 dilution with clean and humidified air to yield a feedback-regulated concentration of 100 to 300 μg/m3 (fig. 1B).” Figure 1B is not the Figure shown in this post with a man sucking a plastic pipe – it is unclear where that figure came from as the provenance is not listed in this post, nor is it obvious from the main junkscience post or the lawsuit itself. That is a pity, since it seems to be the key evidence for the statement “EPA actually has pictures of this gas chamber, a clear plastic pipe stuck into the mouth of a subject, his lips sealing it to his face, diesel fumes inhaled straight into his lungs.” If this image is not in fact associated with the actual experiment, then it (and the associated paragraph) should be retracted (and the credibility of the attorney maybe should be brought into question). It seems more likely to me that, as previously suggested, this pipe is hooked up to a lung-capacity testing instrument.
-alkylation
ps. I’ll also note that 2 hours at 100-300 micrograms is less than 24 hours at 35 micrograms, which is the legal 24 hour standard for PM2.5.
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=epa+human+testing
Alkylation says:
September 24, 2012 at 5:32 pm
” I’ll take the word of an attorney who has to prove such things over the word of an activist. – Anthony”
Or, you could actually go look at the paper (linked to conveniently from the lawsuit as reference number 1: http://www.smw.ch/content/smw-2012-13597/) which states, “DE is introduced into the exposure chamber (1.83 m x 1.83 m x 2.44 m) after a 1:30 dilution with clean and humidified air to yield a feedback-regulated concentration of 100 to 300 μg/m3 (fig. 1B).” Figure 1B is not the Figure shown in this post with a man sucking a plastic pipe – it is unclear where that figure came from as the provenance is not listed in this post, nor is it obvious from the main junkscience post or the lawsuit itself. That is a pity, since it seems to be the key evidence for the statement “EPA actually has pictures of this gas chamber, a clear plastic pipe stuck into the mouth of a subject, his lips sealing it to his face, diesel fumes inhaled straight into his lungs.” If this image is not in fact associated with the actual experiment, then it (and the associated paragraph) should be retracted (and the credibility of the attorney maybe should be brought into question). It seems more likely to me that, as previously suggested, this pipe is hooked up to a lung-capacity testing instrument.
===========================================================
I see. So, since it appears the alleged EPA human experiments involved the use of a lung-capacity machine and everyone knows that if it was really a human experiment the EPA would have gone down to Wal-Mart and bought an actual ACME Human-Exposure-To-Particulate-Matter-Machine then the thought that the EPA would have performed human experiments must be false. So the whole thing should just be just be ignored or dismissed out of hand. I see.
It would be interesting to know how they got people to volunteer for this.
Honestly though, it is hard to believe that this is what actually happened. Surely someone somewhere realised that not only was this unethical, but is unlikely to be conclusive given the vast range of pollutants present in Diesel many of which are knwon to be or are suspected of being carcinogenic.
Even from a lung function perspective, particulate matter is not the only pollutant present in diesel, known to affect pulmonary activity: Think Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Dioxide, sulphur dioxide and a range of aldehydes (acrolein, acetaldehyde, formaldehyde etc). Even the Victorians knew that particulate matter and sulphur dioxide acted synergistically, but very little is known about the synergistic effects of all of these pollutants together.
So why would the EPA conduct such an uncontrolled experiment in such an unethical way….it can’t be for real.
Goldie says:
September 24, 2012 at 7:49 pm
It would be interesting to know how they got people to volunteer for this.
…. So why would the EPA conduct such an uncontrolled experiment in such an unethical way….it can’t be for real.
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A couple of thoughts. How did they get them to volunteer? They didn’t tell them the risk? They knew the claimed risk weren’t real? They were hoping to get data to support their regulations after the fact?
They hoped no one in the media (which now includes blogs) would notice?
Since when does a totalitarian-type bureaucracy need to be ethical? After all, “There’s no controlling legal authority.”
(For those outside the US. The job of the Executive Branch is to enforce the laws passed by Congress. The EPA is part of the Executive Branch. Who’s going to arrest them if the President supports them?)
First off, I detest the EPA on almost very level, especially with regard to CO2 issues.
However, most of the particulates issues are a load of BS. I grew up on a livestock farm and had every imaginable respiratory insult, including the dust and fumes from pigs, cattle, chickens, moldy hay, corn and other feedstocks, ammonia and silo gas, exhausts from diesel and gas engines where even the muffler was an afterthought, crop pollen, ground corn cob dust, dried manure dust, and a whole laundry list of pesticides and herbicides that were marketed first and tested later. My 61 year old lungs are just fine and most of my contemporaries are doing fine as well. I believe much of the demand for lower emissions and particulates on diesel engines is based on junk science and has both raised the complexity and lowered the efficiency of these engines, which have literally lifted us all from the depths of poverty.