HOUSE APPROVES BILL TO FORCE PUBLIC RELEASE OF EPA SCIENCE

Not necessarily defending the EPA, but has anyone in this thread bothered to find out why the science in question has not been publicly released? I see a lot of partisan fantasy in this thread, and a dearth of actual information.

 

Because they are leftover Obamites, who try to hide their malfeasance...

 

About time the American public gets to see what these Stalinist idiots are doing...and why.

 

Case in point.

 

What would be an acceptable reason for the EPA to refuse to release the science that they use to justify the standards they promulgate?

The studies used to support the 1997 PM2.5 standard have never been independently reproduced or validated, and EPA has successfully resisted all attempts – including a 2000 Freedom of Information Act request from the U.S. Chamber – to obtain the data underlying the studies upon which EPA based its standards.

https://www.uschamber.com/blog/epa-s-flawed-playbook

McCarthy reaffirmed her agency's refusal to make the data available to public scrutiny.

 

Stalinist nonsense. The EPA has NOTHING TO DO with the environment...just like AGW.

 

What if Napoleon had B-52D Bombers at the Battle of Waterloo?

If they are right, then there should be no problem releasing the data, right?

As a taxpayer, I want to see what my money is buying, instead of 10,001 reasons why they cannot comply with FOIA requests.

 

As I figured earlier, there is no sane person defending the EPA's refusal to publish their findings and "science" er cough cough regarding their positions and regulations. Only an efftard would support such a position. Oh well, there are plenty of those, but with any luck, with Obama out we might see some improvement.

 

Bad science is never right.

 

I'd love to hear a possible valid reason.

 

What is it with partisans? You guys read a slanted article and feel qualified to pontificate and speculate about the topic. You don't bother to actually try to learn anything more about the issue before doing so. In particular, you make no effort to see if there are two sides to the story, or something important your slanted source isn't telling you.

Is blindly spouting speculation based on ignorance really the way to go?

Here's what I have found, looking into this. A quick summary of some of the issues is here:
https://www.marketplace.org/2017/04...t-seen-critics-undercutting-epa-s-use-science

The bill requires the following:

1. That regulations can only be based on studies wherein the raw data is freely available online
2. That ANYONE who signs a confidentiality agreement can view redacted personal and trade information

Both are problematic.

The EPA usually doesn't own the data it wants to use. So it would need to persuade the scientists involved to make the raw data public.

It is common for scientists to NOT make raw data public, for three major reasons:

1. Raw data is easy to misuse and misunderstand unless you know what you're doing. In the past (for example, tobacco studies), corporate and ideological interests have deliberately twisted and misused raw data in an effort to undermine the science.
2. Gathering the data often involves significant effort. As such, the data is a valuable asset to the scientist who gathered it. The curator of a dataset may charge a fee for access, for instance, to help cover the cost of gathering and maintaining the data. Requiring the data be made public destroys that business model, including the incentive (and sometimes the ABILITY) to gather the data in the first place.
3. Particularly in environmental studies, the data sets typically contain a huge amount of confidential personal and medical information, as well as trade secrets from the companies being studied. Quite often, the scientists are only able to obtain this information by promising to keep it confidential. If people have reason to think their data might one day be posted online, they have an incentive not to participate.

So by requiring the raw data be made public, you greatly reduce the amount of data being gathered in the first place. And of that diminished amount, the EPA can still only use a subset. The result is that science will play a far smaller role in EPA regulations.

This does not mean the data is taken on trust. What scientists typically do is share the data with qualified scientists who want to try to replicate the work. The scientific method and peer review still applies. But privacy and property rights are protected.

The requirement that ANYONE who signs a confidentiality agreement can view confidential personal and trade information is a problem for obvious reasons, and is probably illegal (running afoul of medical privacy laws, for one thing). And it would obviously be a huge disincentive for companies and people to let their data be used in studies. Once again, reducing the amount of data available to science, and not just to the EPA.

That is all bad enough. But then straight-up politics adds the kicker:

1. The EPA estimated that complying with the law would have significant cost -- up to $30,000 PER STUDY -- as the EPA would have to spend significant effort to gather the raw data for thousands of studies, prepare the data for release, redact all the confidential information in it, etc. And that's IF the data owners agree to release it publicly in the first place.
2. However, EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who hates the agency he heads, blocked that estimate from reaching the CBO.
3. Instead, Pruitt said the EPA would devote "minimal funding" to implement the law.

So the law/politics combination does this:

1. Law requires EPA only use science where the raw data is publicly available;
2. This will reduce the amount of data available overall, regardless of what the EPA does;
3. Gathering and publishing the data in a way that lets the EPA use it involves significant cost;
4. The EPA plans to spend almost nothing on #3;
5. Thus, this essentially guts the agency's access to scientific data.

Still think it's a good idea? Because it certainly looks like a hyperpartisan attack on science in general and the EPA in particular.

What makes more sense is requiring that the EPA base it's regulation on published, peer-reviewed studies. That still excludes certain private data sets, but it guarantees that the data and related studies have passed certain hurdles for rigor and validity, even if the raw data itself is not publicly available.

 

I used to work for a large computer company that had four levels of confidentiality to assign to information. The highest level was "down right embarrassin' "

 

Nice wall of text.

So basically they get to be the Medieval priests who are the only ones who could possibly interpret their Bible.

Must be nice to be your own oversight.

Here's some of the problems you have:

The Federal government via the EPA paid for all of the research and the studies to be conducted, in one way or another. This, at a minimum, opens that data to the owner since they paid for it. Since that's tax payer money, guess who it belongs to? I'm pretty sure the government still works for the people of the US, or at least it's supposed to.

Since the vast amount of scientific funding comes from the US taxpayers, I don't think they have much of a leg to stand on by "refusing to do research" because they'll lose money.

Next, there's no reason personal information can't be excluded from the dataset. Additionally, we already have laws in place that allow for such information to be released "for the common good" in cases of serious environmental risk, communicable diseases, and other large scale life-threatening environmental issues.

Moreover, this excuse you're presenting is the antithesis of science. Science is meant to be reproducible and examined by as many people as possible. That's kinda how you get to good science, it's sorta built into the process ya know.

On top of that, the EPA has a laundry list of failures. If the stated goal of the EPA is to protect the people by protecting the environment, maybe they wouldn't fail as often as they do if they were open to oversight.

So that brings us to the #1 reason why the EPA needs to release it's data: we paid for it, and it affects our lives.

We deserve to know what they find, how they came to those conclusions, and what they're going to do about it.

The government doesn't have the right to hide these things from us.

 

Sorry. In the real world, the full story can't always be told in 140 characters.

Well, except for the fact that anyone in the world can join the priesthood, and that there is no ideological or religious test for doing so. The only requirement is knowledge of the topic. And one way they make names for themselves is by disproving the claims of other scientists.

The idea that scientists are some sort of monolithic bloc is pretty silly.

That's simply not true. Again, scientists are not a united "them".

Wrong again. The federal government now funds less than half of basic research in the United States:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...t-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50

And basic research accounts for just 1/6 of overall R&D spending. The other 5/6 is applied research and product development, both of which are overwhelmingly done by private corporations.

The share of research done by corporations is almost always proprietary and kept secret, so it is not shared and thus does not contribute much to overall knowledge.

The idea that all personally identifying information can be removed is a myth:
https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/anonymize-data-limits

Basically, given all the public information out there, it's nearly impossible to truly anonymize a dataset without destroying the usefulness of that dataset.

Precisely because there are now so many different public datasets to cross-reference, any set of records with a non-trivial amount of information on someone’s actions has a good chance of matching identifiable public records. Arvind first demonstrated this when he and his fellow researcher took the “anonymous” dataset released as part of the first Netflix prize, and demonstrated how he could correlate the movie rentals listed with public IMDB reviews. That let them identify some named individuals, and then gave access to their complete rental histories. More recently, he and his collaborators used the same approach to win a Kaggle contest by matching the topography of the anonymized and a publicly crawled version of the social connections on Flickr. They were able to take two partial social graphs, and like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, figure out fragments that matched and represented the same users in both.

So we have to wait for an enviornmental disaster before the EPA can do anything?

Exposing raw data filled with personal information to people with ideological axes to grind and no subject-matter expertise is not "science." It's anti-science noise. As long as qualified researchers can access the data without undue hassle, science is served.

Nice assertion -- with no facts provided to back it up. The EPA is a big place, and the environment is a big topic. EPA regulators are human like everybody else. I'm sure mistakes have been made. But there have been a lot of successes, too. What evidence do you have to support the idea that, on balance, the EPA is a failure?

Here are a couple of reviews of the agency's first 40 years.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/the-triumphs-and-failures-of-the-epa/67372/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-epa-first-40-years/

Among the successes:
-- banning the widespread use of the pesticide DDT
-- achieving significant reductions in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions that were polluting water sources via acid rain;
-- changing public perceptions of waste, leading to innovations that make use of waste for energy creation and making new products;
-- getting lead out of gasoline;
-- classifying secondhand smoke as a known cause of cancer, leading to smoking bans in indoor public places;
-- establishing stringent emission standards for pollutants emitted by cars and trucks;
-- regulating toxic chemicals and encouraging the development of more benign chemicals;
-- establishing a national commitment to restore and maintain the safety of fresh water, via the Clean Water Act;
-- promoting equitable environmental protection for minority and low-income citizens;
-- increasing public information and communities’ “right to know” what chemicals and/or pollutants they may be exposed to in their daily lives.

Among the failures:
-- In the 1990s, was considering a way to regulate all power-plant emissions at once, rather than individual emissions in a more haphazard way. Not only would that have been more consistent, it would have let us start regulating carbon dioxide much earlier.
-- Not always caring about the cost-benefit analysis of a particular regulation. This actually wasn't part of the EPA's mission at the beginning -- as the first EPA administrator said, Commerce has its own Department, and any conflicts should be worked out at that level. That has changed over the years, and the EPA Is now required to take cost-benefit analysis into account.
-- Not always being an effective promoter of environmental justice -- the idea that poor and minority communities deserve clean water as much as everybody else.

And just to point out that the EPA has done what it has done despite persistent efforts by the business lobby to hamstring it, and persistent anti-regulation efforts by conservatives. Many of its failures can be traced to ideological opposition and lack of funding, not poor decisionmaking. For instance, much of its slow and not-always-effective responses to community complaints can be traced to a lack of staff to process and investigate the complaints.

 

Blah blah blah.

If the EPA funded the research then it's 100% funded by the government.

If it's paid for research, it's still tax dollars.

We have a right to know what the EPA bases decisions on. They are not God. They work for us.

The rest of your post has nothing to do with anything. The EPA's failures are easily sourced, I'm not wasting my time since it's not the point.

 

Concession noted.

Not actually true (government grants may be just a part of a particular researcher's budget). And irrelevant anyway, since as I showed the government funds a very small slice of research.

I agree. And as a rule, NSF grants (for instance) give weight to how the results of the research will be shared. The expectation is that it WILL be shared, through publication in peer-reviewed journals if nothing else. Failure to do so will lead to grants not being renewed and future grants not being given.

But government support for research doesn't mean government ownership of the results. Just like government helping you buy your house (by making your interest payments tax deductible) doesn't give them an ownership interest in your house.

I agree. However, there are compelling reasons why requiring the RAW DATA to be published online will have a stifling effect not just on the EPA, but on science in general. You wish to pretend those reasons don't exist. Unfortunately, they do.

LOL!

YOU are the one who brought up the EPA's record. Then you claim my response "has nothing to do with anything." Classic.

You asserted "The EPA has a laundry list of failures", and provide not a single example. When called on it, you refuse to provide anything. Second concession noted.

 

Raytri denies any ideological tests.

Then defends nessecity of ideological tests.

 

Um, no.

"People with ideological axes to grind" is not an "ideological test" -- it is a descriptor of someone who is interested in something other than free and open inquiry. And I paired it with "no subject-matter expertise", which is the main issue.

Bias combined with ignorance is bad. Do you disagree?

 

According to your own test and judgement. According to the church Martin Luther had an ideological ax to grind.

 

Sure, everything in that regard is opinion. Does that make it untrue?

Remember, it's bias AND ignorance. I never suggested that "unfriendly" scientists should not have access to data.

 

Uh yes you just did. You defended an ideological test.

 

Strictly speaking, the can't be right.

A large portion of CO2 regulation involves a wholly politicized calculation known as 'the social cost of carbon' as part of cost/benefit analysis. This 'cost' involves at minimum weighting factors using assumed discount rates and potential technological advances. It's mush. And it's Obama mush, the most toxic political effluvium imaginable.

Every regulatory decision is to by law to include this cost/bene analysis. And it's crap.

 

Lot's of imaginary concessions flying around in here.

You're trying to obfuscate the issue when it's really quite simple. When the government contracts for research to be conducted, that data belongs to the government.

The raw data out there simply means more research can be conducted, with less time gathering raw data.

I mentioned the EPA's failures because I simply wanted to point out that they have made some grand mistakes in their time, and those mistakes might not have happened with more people looking at not just the data, but the reasoning behind the choices they made.

The individual mistakes don't matter, because I'm not pointing to any particular mistake.

 

No well-bred person can deny the clear and persuasive power of your well-made points!

The bullshit never stops with these folks:

Michael Mann, Who'd Previously Said the Climatary "Tipping Point" Would Be 2016/2017, Now Puts that Tipping Point at 2020
Let's just save time and say every presidential election will be a global warming tipping point

Despite Obama winning in 2008/2012, the climate tipping point didn't get tipped back to the "safe" position.

 

This is the first requirement of a Democrat.