Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: The Junk Science of George W. Bush

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

I am far from sure that this behavior is limited to the Bush years. It 
seems to me that this is a trend that has accelerated over the past years 
and the blame gets shared with many administrations not just GWBs djf

Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2004 22:53:17 -0800
From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ibd com>
Subject: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: The Junk Science of George
 W. Bush
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>, Dave Farber <dave () farber net>

  The Junk Science of George W. Bush
  By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
  The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040308&s=kennedy
  March 8, 2004 Issue

  As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history we learned that Copernicus and
Galileo self-censored for many decades their proofs that the earth revolved
around the sun and that a less restrained heliocentrist, Giordano Bruno, was
burned alive in 1600 for the crime of sound science. With the encouragement
of our professor, Father Joyce, we marveled at the capacity of human leaders
to corrupt noble institutions. Lust for power had caused the Catholic
hierarchy to subvert the church's most central purpose--the search for
existential truths.

   Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration--aided by right-wing
allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to
further their goals--are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is
arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes,
rather than suppress good science, they simply order up their own.
Meanwhile, the Bush White House is purging, censoring and blacklisting
scientists and engineers whose work threatens the profits of the
Administration's corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological
underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda. Indeed, so extreme
is this campaign that more than sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates
and medical experts, released a statement on February 18 that accuses the
Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific fact "for partisan
political ends."

   I've had my own experiences with Torquemada's modern successors, both
personal and related to my work as an environmental lawyer and advocate
working for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Waterkeeper
Alliance.

   At the time of the World Trade Center catastrophe on September 11, 2001,
I had just opened an office at 115 Broadway, cater-corner from the World
Trade Center and within the official security zone to which access was,
afterward, restricted for several months. Upon returning to the office in
October my partner, Kevin Madonna, suffered a burning throat, nausea and a
headache that was still pounding twenty-four hours after he left the
building. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency's claims that air
quality was safe, Kevin refused to return and we closed the office. Many
workers did not have that option; their employers relied on the EPA's nine
press releases between September and December of 2001 reassuring the public
about the wholesome air quality downtown. We have since learned that the
government was lying to us. An Inspector General's report released last
August revealed that the EPA's data did not support those assurances and
that its press releases were being drafted or doctored by White House
officials intent on reopening Wall Street.

   On September 13, just two days after the terror attack, the EPA announced
that asbestos dust in the area was "very low" or entirely absent. On
September 18 the agency said the air was "safe to breathe." In fact, more
than 25 percent of the samples collected by the EPA before September 18
showed presence of asbestos above the 1 percent safety benchmark. Among
outside studies, one performed by scientists at the University of
California, Davis, found particulates at levels never before seen in more
than 7,000 similar tests worldwide. A study being performed by Mt. Sinai
School of Medicine has found that 78 percent of rescue workers suffered lung
ailments and 88 percent had ear, nose and throat problems in the months
following the attack and that about half still had persistent lung and
respiratory illnesses nine months to a year later.

   Dan Tishman, whose company was involved in the reconstruction at 140 West
Street, required his crews to wear respirators but recalls seeing many
rescue and construction workers laboring unprotected--no doubt relying on
the government's assurances. "The frustrating thing is that everyone just
counts on the EPA to be the watchdog of public health," he says. "When that
role is compromised, people can get hurt."

   I also recall the case of Dr. James Zahn, a nationally respected
microbiologist with the Agriculture Department's research service, who
accepted my invitation to speak to an April 2002 conference of more than
1,000 family farm advocates and environmental and civic leaders in Clear
Lake, Iowa. In a rigorous taxpayer-funded study, Zahn had identified
bacteria that can make people sick--and that are resistant to
antibiotics--in the air surrounding industrial-style hog farms. His studies
proved that billions of these "superbugs" were traveling across property
lines daily, endangering the health of neighbors and their herds. I was
shocked when Zahn canceled his appearance on the day of the conference under
orders from the Agriculture Department in Washington. I later uncovered a
fax trail proving the order was prompted by lobbyists from the National Pork
Producers Council. 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 more than a dozen public appearances at
local planning boards and county health commissions seeking information
about health impacts of industry mega-farms. Soon after my conference, Zahn
resigned from the government in disgust.

   Ignoring Bad News

  The Bush Administration's first instinct when it comes to science has been
to suppress, discredit or alter facts it doesn't like. Probably the
best-known case is global warming. Over the past two years the
Administration has done this to a dozen major government studies on global
warming, as well as to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, in its own efforts to stall action to control industrial emissions.
The list also includes major long-term studies by the federal government's
National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences, and by
scientific teams at the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration and NASA, and a 2002 collaborative report by scientists at
all three of those agencies.

   The Administration has taken special pains to shield Vice President Dick
Cheney's old company, Halliburton, which is part of an industry that has
contributed $58 million to Republicans since 2000. Halliburton is the
leading practitioner of a process used in extracting oil and gas known as
hydraulic fracturing, in which benzene is injected into underground
formations. EPA scientists studying the process in 2002 found that it could
contaminate ground-water supplies in excess of federal drinking water
standards. A week after reporting their findings to Congressional staff
members, however, they revised the data to indicate that benzene levels
would not exceed government standards. In a letter to Representative Henry
Waxman, EPA officials said the change was made based on "industry feedback."

   As a favor to utility and coal industries, America's largest mercury
dischargers, the EPA sat for nine months on a report exposing the
catastrophic impact on children's health of mercury, finally releasing it in
February 2003. Among the findings of the report: The bloodstream of one in
twelve US women is saturated with enough mercury to cause neurological
damage, permanent IQ loss and a grim inventory of other diseases in their
unborn children.

   The list goes on. In October 2001 Interior Secretary Gale Norton,
responding to a Senate committee inquiry on the effects of oil drilling on
caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, falsely claimed that the
caribou would not be affected, because they calve outside the area targeted
for drilling. She later explained that she somehow substituted "outside" for
"inside." She also substituted findings from a study financed by an oil
company for some of the ones that the Fish and Wildlife Service had prepared
for her. In another case, according to the Wall Street Journal, Norton and
White House political adviser Karl Rove pressed for changes that would allow
diversion of substantial amounts of water from the Klamath River to benefit
local supporters and agribusiness contributors. Some 34,000 endangered
salmon were killed after National Marine Fisheries scientists altered their
findings on the amount of water the salmon required. Environmentalists
describe it as the largest fish kill in the history of the West. Mike Kelly,
the fisheries biologist on the Klamath who drafted the biological opinion,
told me that under the current plan coho salmon are probably headed for
extinction. According to Kelly, "The morale is very low among scientists
here. We are under pressure to get the right results. This Administration is
putting the species at risk for political gain. And not just in the
Klamath."

   Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, told me that
the alteration and deletion of scientific information is now standard
procedure at Interior. "It's hard to decide what is more demoralizing about
the Administration's politicization of the scientific process," he said,
"its disdain for professional scientists working for our government or its
willingness to deceive the American public."

   Getting the Right Answer

  But suppressing or altering science can be a tricky business; the Bush
Administration has found it easier at times simply to arrange to get the
results it wants. A case in point is the decision in July by the EPA's
regional office overseeing the western Everglades to accept a study financed
predominantly by developers, which concludes that wetlands discharge more
pollutants than they absorb. There was no peer review or public comment.
With its approval, the EPA is giving developers credit for improving water
quality by replacing natural wetlands with golf courses and other
developments.

   The study was financed by the Water Enhancement and Restoration
Committee, which was formed primarily by local developers and chaired by
Rick Barber, the consultant for a golf course development for which the EPA
had denied a permit because it would pollute surrounding waters and destroy
wetlands. The study contradicts everything known about wetlands functioning,
including a determination by more than twenty-five scientists and managers
at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program that, on balance, wetlands do not generate
nitrogen pollution. Bruce Boler, a biologist and water-quality specialist
working for the EPA office, resigned in protest. Boler says the developers
massaged the data to support their theory by evaluating samples collected
near roads and bridges, where developments discharge pollutants. "It was
like the politics trumped the science," he told us.

   In a similar case, last November the EPA cut a private deal with a
pesticide manufacturer to take over federal studies of a pesticide it
manufactures. Atrazine is the most heavily utilized weedkiller in America.
First approved in 1958, by the 1980s it had been identified as a potential
carcinogen associated with high incidences of prostate cancer among workers
at manufacturing facilities. Testing by the US Geological Survey regularly
finds alarming concentrations of Atrazine in drinking water across the corn
belt. Even worse, last year scientists at the University of California,
Berkeley, found that Atrazine at one-thirtieth the government's "safe" 3
parts per billion level causes grotesque deformities in frogs, including
multiple sets of organs. And this year epidemiologists from the University
of Missouri found reproductive consequences in humans associated with
Atrazine, including male semen counts in farm communities that are 50
percent below normal. Iowa scientists are finding similar results in a
current study.

   The Bush Administration reacted to the frightening findings not by
banning this dangerous chemical, as the European Union has, but by taking
the studies away from EPA scientists and, in an unprecedented move, giving
the chemical's manufacturer, Switzerland-based Syngenta, control over
federal research. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sherry Ford, a
spokesperson for Syngenta, praised without irony the advantages of having
the company monitor its own product. "This is one way we can ensure it's not
presenting any risk to the environment."

   In a dramatic expansion of this disturbing strategy, the Bush
Administration now plans to systematically turn government science over to
private industry by contracting out thousands of science jobs to compliant
consultants already in the habit of massaging data to support corporate
profits. The National Park Service is preparing a first phase of contracting
reviews, involving about 1,800 positions, including biologists,
archeologists and environmental specialists. Later phases may entail
replacement of 11,000 employees, more than two-thirds of the service's
permanent work force.

   At least federal employees enjoy civil service and whistleblower
protection intended to allow them to operate professionally and
independently. Private contractors don't enjoy the same level of protection.
"You can shop for the right contractor to give you the kind of result you
want," says Frank Buono, a retired Park Service veteran who now serves on
the board of a nonprofit whistleblower protection organization.

   As a Last Resort, Fire the Messenger

  Most federal employees have gone along with the Bush Administration's
wishes, but a few have tried to stand up for sound science. The results are
predictable. 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, the group was quickly replaced by an
industry-friendly panel. (In an unexpected--and fortunate--development, the
new panel ultimately declined to adopt the White House's pro-barge-industry
position and upheld the decision to manage the river to protect imperiled
species.) Similarly, last April the EPA suddenly dismantled an advisory
panel that had spent nearly twenty-one months developing rules for stringent
regulation of industrial emissions of mercury [see Alterman and Green, page
14].

   Or consider the case of Tony Oppegard and Jack Spadaro, members of a team
of federal geodesic engineers selected to investigate the collapse of
barriers that held back a coal slurry pond in Kentucky containing toxic
wastes from mountaintop strip-mining. The 300-million-gallon spill was the
largest in American history and, according to the EPA, the greatest
environmental catastrophe in the history of the Eastern United States. Black
lava-like toxic sludge containing sixty poisonous chemicals choked and
sterilized up to 100 miles of rivers and creeks and poisoned the drinking
water in seventeen communities. Unlike in other slurry disasters, no one
died, but hundreds of residents were sickened by contact with contaminated
water.

   The investigation had broad implications for the viability of mountaintop
mining, which involves literally lopping off mountaintops to get access to
the underlying coal. It is a process beloved by coal barons because it
practically dispenses with the need for human labor and thus increases
industry profits. Spadaro, the nation's leading expert on slurry spills,
recalls, "We were geotechnical engineers determined to find the truth. We
simply wanted to get to the heart of the matter--find out what happened and
why, and to prevent it from happening again. But all that was thwarted at
the top of the agency by Bush appointees who obstructed professionals trying
to do their jobs."

   The Bush Administration appointees all had coal industry pedigrees. Labor
Secretary Elaine Chao (the wife of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the
Senate's biggest recipient of industry largesse) appointed Dave Lauriski, a
former executive with Energy West Mining, as the new director of the Mine
Safety and Health Administration, which oversaw the investigation. His
deputy assistant secretary was John Caylor, an Anamax Mining alumnus. His
other deputy assistant, John Correll, had worked for both Amax and Peabody
Coal.

   Oppegard, the leader of the federal team, was fired on the day Bush was
inaugurated in 2001. All eight members of the team except Spadaro signed off
on a whitewashed investigation report. Spadaro, like the others, was
harassed but flat-out refused to sign. In April of 2001 Spadaro resigned
from the team and filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Labor
Department. Last June 4 he was placed on administrative leave--a prelude to
getting fired.

   Bush Administration officials accuse Spadaro of "abusing his authority"
for allowing a handicapped instructor to have free room and board at a
training academy he oversees, an arrangement approved by his superiors. An
internal report vindicated Spadaro's criticisms of the investigation, but
the Administration is still going after his job. "I've been regulating
mining since 1966," Spadaro told me. "This is the most lawless
administration I've encountered. They have no regard for protecting miners
or the people in mining communities. They are without scruples."

   Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths about a changing
world. At their best, scientists are moral individuals whose business is to
seek the truth. Over the past two decades industry and conservative think
tanks have invested millions of dollars to corrupt science. They distort the
truth about tobacco, pesticides, ozone depletion, dioxin, acid rain and
global warming. In their attempt to undermine the credible basis for public
action (by positing that all opinions are politically driven and therefore
any one is as true as any other), they also undermine belief in the
integrity of the scientific process.

   Now Congress and this White House have used federal power for the same
purpose. Led by the President, the Republicans have gutted scientific
research budgets and politicized science within the federal agencies. The
very leaders who so often condemn the trend toward moral relativism are
fostering and encouraging the trend toward scientific relativism. The very
ideologues who derided Bill Clinton as a liar have now institutionalized
dishonesty and made it the reigning culture of America's federal agencies.

   The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional
culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it
could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is
defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer,
"If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and
in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster."

   -------

  Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense
Council and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, is working on a book
about President Bush's environmental policies, Crimes Against Nature, to be
published this spring by HarperCollins.

  -------
--
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
Voice: 408-882-4755 eFax: +1-408-490-2868
http://www.ibd.com

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