Guest essay by Steve Goreham
Unnoticed by most citizens, last week the United States Senate introduced the “Secret Science Reform Act of 2015.” The act is aimed at the Environmental Protection Agency’s practice of refusing to disclose data from scientific studies that support new pollution regulations. The act indirectly questions the EPA assertion that Americans are dying today from small particle air pollution.
Past EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson testified before Congress in 2011, stating, “Particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.” Particulate matter refers to PM2.5, classified by the EPA as particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter, much smaller than the eye can see. Particle pollution is a mixture of dust, nitrates and sulfates, metals, pollen, and organic chemicals.
The EPA claims that any level of small particles can cause premature death. The agency warns that death may be short-term, occurring within a few hours of inhalation, or may be caused by long-term inhalation of PM2.5 over several years. EPA policy advisor Amanda Brown asserted that between 130,000 and 320,000 Americans died prematurely in 2005 due to small particle pollution, an incredible 6 to 15 percent of total US deaths.
EPA claims that particle pollution triggers heart failure, respiratory failure, or other causes of death. For example, suppose a senior citizen dies a few days before his 67th birth day and a coroner determines heart failure to be the cause of death. According to the EPA, the death may have been “premature” and caused by small particle air pollution.
The EPA uses “prevention” of premature deaths from small particles to justify tighter pollution regulations. The EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which will force closure of coal-fired power plants across the nation, is an example. The EPA claims that implementation of the CPP will prevent up to 6,600 premature deaths and $93 billion in climate and public health benefits. But the monetized climate benefits are essentially zero. Almost all of the $93 billion comes from an EPA calculation on savings from avoidance of premature death from small particles.
Today, our nation’s air is remarkably clean, especially when compared to 50 years ago. Incidents of serious air pollution are rare. According to the EPA, the concentration of six major air pollutants, lead, nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide, ozone, and particulates, are down more than a combined 70 percent since 1980. PM2.5 particle pollution is typically below the EPA national standard of 15 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
Fifteen micrograms per cubic meter is not very much. Dr. James Enstrom, retired researcher from the UCLA School of Public Health, points out that a person breathing in 15 micrograms of small particles per cubic meter would inhale only about one teaspoon of these microscopic particles over an 80-year lifespan. The EPA’s assertion that this small amount of particles causes premature death is not credible.
How does the EPA conclude that thousands of Americans die each year from particle pollution? No coroner ever attributes a cause of death to particle pollution. Instead, the EPA relies on epidemiological observational studies that associate particle pollution with death.
Epidemiological studies analyze statistical associations between exposure to an agent and appearance of disease in a population. An example is the Doll and Hill study in the 1950s that found that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer in a population of 41,000 British medical doctors. EPA has concluded that associations found in epidemiological studies show that inhalation of small particles cause premature death.
But the association between death and particle pollution found by studies that EPA relies on is shaky at best. Relative risk (RR) is the ratio of incidence of disease in an exposed population to a control population. The size of the relative risk is a measure of the chance that an association is causal.
The Harvard Six Cities study of 1993 and the American Cancer Society study of 1995, two studies that form the basis of EPA small particle science, found an increase in relative risk of less than 20 percent (RR=1.2). An increase in death rates of less than 20 percent (RR=1.2) is almost statistically indistinguishable from zero. In contrast, the Doll and Hill study on cigarettes and lung cancer found smokers had 10 times the rate of lung cancer and non-smokers, a relative risk of RR=10. The weak association (small relative risk) between death and particle pollution that the EPA judges to be causal could be due to other factors in the measured populations or even random chance.
But what stinks to high heaven is that data from the Harvard Six Cities and American Cancer Society studies have never been released. Other scientists are not able to replicate and verify the results of these studies. In effect, the EPA is asking all to “trust us” on the science of death from particle pollution. The Secret Science Reform Act proposes to force the EPA to disclose data from studies that support the need for EPA regulations.
Further, EPA is often the funding agency for epidemiological studies that are then used to justify new air pollution regulations. EPA supports such studies either directly or indirectly through grants to organizations such as the American Lung Association and the American Cancer Society. For example, over the last decade the EPA has provided more than $20 million in grants to the American Lung Association, a group that supports EPA efforts for more stringent air pollution regulations.
The result is a massive, costly, and growing burden on American citizens in the name of clean air. NERA Economic Consulting estimates that the Clean Power Plan will cost US citizens some $400 billion in compliance costs over the next 15 years. But the savings from “prevention of premature deaths” from particle pollution are likely imaginary.
Originally published in Communities Digital News.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
Don’t let us forget the never ending raining on the planet of meteors and all the particulate matter they bring with them … they can’t be stopped and they’re a crisis without end … a bureaucrat’s perfect power fantasy.
And, as usual, not a single line about the trillions of Bq of particulate uranium, plutonium, cesium, polonium, strontium and a thousand other radioactive cancer-causing particles generating Fukushima-Daiichi cancers across the planet.
Do you have some details on that?
These claims always make me grin, shudder and turn away. Many years ago I was engaged in locating and identifying asbestos in an industrial plant, and then monitoring fibre levels during its removal. The regulations for amphibole asbestos were, from memory:
Fibre at least 3 microns long but less than 100 microns.
Fibre a maximum of 2 microns in diameter
Fibre has a length to diameter ration of greater than 3
Maximum exposure (8 hour working day) 0.1 fibre per millilitre of inhaled air.
Serpentine asbestos regs. were similar except for exposure which was 1 fibre per millilitre.
These numbers, which may have changed in the past 20 years, give the lie to the hazards of ultrafine particulates. Asbestos fibres have been known as a health hazard since ancient Greek times, but the official reglations permitted higher exposures than these particulate regulations. Also if the asbestos particulates were smaller than 3 microns by 1 then they did not count as asbestos fibres.
How does that work for peoples in Asbest, a city that used to make the stuff, even filled poyholes in roads with it?
considering how SS system will be bankrupt soon shouldn’t we be encouraging shaving a few years off lifespans?
Likely the ACA will take care of that problem.
Of course there is the other effect of removing particulates from air … it makes it warmer. So this would be EPA Warming. Particulates are known to cause cooling, so why remove them from the air if it is going to exacerbate the “problem” ?
Air pollution is not uniform across the nation, pollution lowering your life expectancy is a no brainer to anyone working in the hospital field above janitor level. As long as their lowering where it’s at the worst I’m fine with it.
..and your definition of air pollution is?
Sunshine + H20 + CO2 + Minerals = O2 +Sugars(food)
EPA definition of pollution:
Sunshine + H20 +POLLUTION +Minerals = O2 +Sugars(food)
In the mulga area of Australia we have a very fine dust (engineer from a leading US machinery manufacturer collecting the dust from an air filter with the comment “We can’t grind it this fine”).
So ought to be an area with an abnormally high casualty rate – of which I have not yet heard. Nor become one after breathing it for a bit beyond three score and ten.
So…. if we live in a vacuum with zero particulates, we’ll live forever?
” if we live in a vacuum with zero particulates, we’ll live forever?”
No, you’d suffer a quick and horrific death. I’m pretty sure their assumptions fall apart quickly once you move away from the center.
Only if you do all of the other “life lengthening” measure.
Use only olive oil – adds 10yrs!
Eat 3oz of chocolate per day – Adds 10yrs!!
Do yoga – Adds 10yrs!!
Meditate – Adds 10yrs!
I’m not sure what value to assign to “live in a vacuum”…
Oh…wait…
For EPA to make these claims about PM2.5 would require studies involving people exposed to the particles and a control group that isn’t exposed. And both groups would have to be comparable for all other factors that could affect life span and health.
Since PM2.5 is everywhere, the best that could be done is comparing groups at different levels of PM2.5. But people tend to move and their enviroments tend to change, so determining the PM2.5 exposure over a few years much less a lifetime is virtually impossible. And without LARGE comparable groups with detailed exposure histories any conclusion is more of a guess than science.
“…any conclusion is more of a guess than science.”
Could be why they want to keep it secret. Or it’s just my tin foil hat?
What does an agency do once it has lived past its time of usefulness? It makes things up! Rapantly! This is the EPA in todays world.
I would suggest that the EPA is suffering from its own success in reducing real pollution. Like any temporary tax, it continues long after its mandate has in essence completed, so it has to invent new ways to justify its continued existence beyond maintenance…
>>The agency warns that death may be short-term.
Interesting. What is a short term death?
R
The EPA says one or two days is short-term death. Not credible, but they spew this nonsense before Congress and have gotten away with it up until this point.
Apparently in the Middle East (Syria, Iraq, Libya etc.) there is a lot of PM2.5 – so many premature deaths there… /SARC
What a lot of bollocks.
It is well established that exposing yourself to small amount of dirt and pollution lets your body develop defences against it (the same goes to radiation). That is why it is very good for parents to let their children play in the dirt, crawl on the ground and put stuff in their mouths.
Children who were over-protected tend to get sick from minor infections while kids who were exposed to dirt are much healthier.
What the EPA suggests is to create an over sensitive and weak society. This is a disaster!
Some tribes in Africa actually allow their children to cover themselves and play in animal carp! It has “experts” questioning the western practice of smothering their babies and children in anti-bacterial “products”.
Look at the global maps of PM2.5. Why is there anyone alive in the areas that are 5, 10, 20 times the levels allowed in the regulations?
http://junkscience.com/2012/03/04/epa-science-advisors-not-so-independent/
Why is it that when you add up all of the deaths that will be or are presumed to be caused by these various “toxins” that the entire population is killed off every year? (speaking of just the USA only)
Unfortunately it’s the way of nuscience. All that matters is that a paper gets published in a pal-review journal, the quality of work and scientific evidence is no longer important. I’m dealing with this same nuscience with the listing of the Lesser Prairie Chicken as threatened. Specific research that fits the dogma is obviously cherry picked for regulatory purposes and they get away with it. We must pay tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in regulatory fees per well because some pseudo scientist named Christan Hagen with art degrees published that prairie chickens show a “mean avoidance” to well pads of 300 meters. The paper would fail a statistics 101 class, but that’s the paper that the FWS chooses to use.
Plants emit high levels of pollen, which causes hay fever, and asthma attacks in some, which can be deadly. Therefore, plants need to be banned immediately. For the sake of humanity.
That reminds me, isn’t pollen approximately the same size as the PM2.5? How much of that do people breathe? How can we possibly live with all of that toxic pollen in the air?
Premature death? Working to death to pay for non existent heat in the dead of winter. Wonder why they say ‘dead of winter’?
Well, this legislation is promising. I’d like very much to find out how the EPA decided that Radon inhalation is the second greatest cause of lung cancer after cigarette smoke, and especially how they decided on a mitigation threshold of 4 Picocuries per Liter, while the WHO picked 2.7 and Canada (belatedly) switched from 20 to 5…
Anyone who’s ever tried to make a meaningful measurement of Radon levels in his or her own home must wonder how the EPA, WHO, and Health Canada obtained reliable data on the Radon in private homes. It’s a difficult, slow, and finicky process requiring expensive and fragile equipment that provides dubious results even with the best of intentions.
And in the real world, most homeowners have little incentive to shoot themselves in the pocket book by measuring radon in their home, and certainly none for revealing it’s presence to potential buyers. In states where such measurements are mandatory, I understand the realtors rely on boxes locked in place in the home. But various means of cheating aside, anyone who’s ever taken the trouble to test the same room over three days, three months, three years using a variety of meters can only laugh at the usefulness of the three day test.
@ur momisugly otropogo July 4, 2015 at 9:00 pm
I am absolutely sure that there are two (2) highly questionable “peas in that pod” …. and the primary one is, to wit:
Given the fact that very, very few autopsies are performed each year in the United States, relative to the total number of deaths, …. me thinks the above claimed statistics are little more than “wild exaggerations” being touted by the funded-interest “fear mongers”.
It is obvious to me that the “fear mongers” have probably been calculating their “fuzzy” statistics via a ”single query” that is included on every Patient Record Form of their healthcare provider(s) …. which asks the patient “Do you smoke cigarettes or have you ever smoked cigarettes?
Thus, … # of deaths …. verses … # of “YES” answers ….. equals …. tobacco related deaths.
If you smoke cigarettes ….. and get run-over by a big truck, ….. then your death is “tobacco related”.
Your death can be “tobacco related” even if you never smoked tobacco. For instance, if the truck that ran over you was delivering cigarettes to a store, then your death would obviously be “tobacco related”
Right, …. never considered that.
The next time you see a healthcare provider and he/she asks you, …. “Do you smoke cigarettes?”, …. just look them straight in their eyes and say, …… “You tell me, ….you are the expert on the dangers of cigarette smoking“.