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Following The Pump Handle’s July 8 post “Secret Rule on OSHA Risk Assessment” (and July 10 here), a front-page Washington Post article provides more details on the Bush Administration’s plan to ”reform” the system used by OSHA and MSHA to assess workers’ risk from toxic materials. In U.S. Rushes to Change Workplace Toxin Rules, Post reporter Carol Leonnig obtained a draft copy of the proposed rule, which would direct the risk assessment assumptions and procedures used by MSHA and OSHA when developing regulations to protect workers health hazards. Leonnig reports that Bush appointee, lawyer and “ethics advisor” Deborah Misir in DOL’s Office of Policy worked with a contractor to develop the new risk asssessment plan, intentionally leaving career scientists out of the process.
Well, well, it’s the same old playbook for the Bush Administration: Leave out the career staff who know most about the topic, assign a political appointee with no expertise to manage the process, and pay a hand-selected contractor to do the work. That would be bad enough, but it gets worse.
Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Congressman George Miller (D-CA) are demanding answers from Labor Secretary Elaine Chao on her mysterious proposed rule on risk assessment. I reported earlier this week that the Secretary’s office sent a proposed rule to OMB on July 7 entitled “Requirements for DOL Agencies’ Assessment of Occupational Health Risks.” Although this proposal might sound innocuous, past experience at so-called “regulatory reform” of risk assessment tells us to be very wary of plans to “improve” the risk assessment process. In layman’s terms, it means workers’ health gets screwed.
Kennedy and Miller’s letter to Secretary Chao asks for a briefing within a week about the proposed regulation, and asks for:
- a copy of the proposed rule
- the legal authority under which the Department expects to promulgate this regulation
- the reason that this proposed rule was not listed in the Department’s Regulatory Agenda (which was published in May 2008 )
A screenshot of OMB’s webpage on which this proposed rule appears is here.
Thanks to the Senator and Congresman for taking their oversight responsibilities seriously.
I found the most curious item on OMB OIRA’s webpage today, and my paranoia about end-of-the-term mischief by the Bush Administration kicked into high gear. The item is listed as a proposed rule submitted to OIRA for review on July 7 titled:
“Requirements for DOL Agencies’ Assessment of Occupational Health Risks” (RIN: 1290-AA23) (Link here, select DOL) or (screenshot)
Whenever the term risk assessment is uttered by the Bush Admininstration, I know they are up to no good. Recall their earlier effort at a major overhaul of agency’s risk assessment procedures; this was a proposal that was long on new one-size-fits-all requirements for agencies involved in health, safety and environmental protection, but woefully lacking in details about the alleged problem it was designed to fix. More importantly, it would have added new steps to the rulemaking process, making a dysfunctional system more so, and creating administrative obstacles for health protective rules. Thankfully, a failing grade by the National Academy of Sciences forced OMB to junk it.
This mysterious draft proposal at OMB makes me wonder whether this is the White House’s plan B for so-called “reforms” to agency risk assessments. Let’s see: they couldn’t impose their requirements agency-wide, so why not target specific agencies? What better place than those pesky rules to protect workers’ from dangerous contaminants?
by revere (cross posted at Effect Measure)
If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment agencies. But that was then. Last weekend the US Senate couldn’t even manage a paltry 60 votes to stop a filibuster of a bipartisan and none too strong global warming bill. This kind of failure isn’t new. The US slow motion fall in environmental leadership has been going on for decades. In the Bush administration it is no longer covert but displayed blatantly and without shame. The lack of commitment is not a result of public disinterest or hostility. Polling throughout this period shows continuing support for environmental protection, and mainstream environmental organizations have even increased their membership. So what’s going on? A recent scholarly paper pulls back the curtain on one reason for the long slide (cf. Jacques, Dunlap and Freeman, “The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism”, Environmental Politics 17:349 - 385, 2008).
The Weinberg Group is one of the product defense firms I write about in my new book “Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.” These firms help polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products avoid regulation – only now the Weinberg Group is not a product defense firm, it’s transformed itself into a “product support” firm.
The May 12th issue of Newsweek contains Sharon Begley’s excellent review of Doubt is Their Product (which should now be available in your local bookstore). Naturally, we like it because it says nice things about David’s book, but we also think Begley does a terrific job describing the kinds of abuses the book chronicles. It’s not surprising to see her giving a pithy summary of how polluters manufacture uncertainty, since she wrote last year’s Newsweek cover story “Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine,” which provides one of the best overviews of the global warming denial movement I’ve seen.
The review is well worth a read; here’s a taste:
Just as the 60-day deadline approached for filing a legal challenge to a new health standard to protect mine workers from asbestos exposure, mining industry trade associations submitted their petitions in federal court. MSHA’s rule was published on February 29, and tick-tock, like clockwork, the National Mining Assoc, the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Assoc (NSSGA) and others filed suits in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, requesting judicial review of MSHA’s rule. Under both the OSHA and MSHA statutues, ”any person who may be adversely affect by a [newly promulgated] standard” may file a petition in the US Court of Appeals challenging the “validity of the standard.”
These legal challenges to worker health and safety standards are typical—nearly every final OSHA health standard was challenged by some industry association—It’s just part of the standard-operating due-process protections afforded hazardous materials to which workers are exposed. Even in this case, for ASBESTOS, a known carcinogenic and respiratory toxin which has been responsible for the death and disability of hundreds of thousands of individuals, is still granted its “day in court.”
Doubt is Their Product is the focus of the second piece in a three-part series by Slate’s Daniel Engber on “radical skepticism and the rise of conspiratorial thinking about science.” After describing the strategy of manufacturing doubt, from its tobacco-industry roots to its use by energy and drug companies and politicians, Engber suggests that anti-regulatory forces aren’t the only ones using it. His perspective is an interesting and useful one for those of us who are immersed in the scientific back-and-forth and might not realize how the general public views the issues.
Diacetyl – the butter-flavoring chemical linked to severe lung disease in food and flavoring workers – hasn’t been in the news much recently. It got a lot of attention in September, when we drew attention to the case of a Colorado man who appeared to have developed bronciolitis obliterans from eating microwave popcorn twice a day for several years. (More details here.) Major popcorn manufacturers announced that they would be removing diacetyl from their microwave popcorn lines, and OSHA put out a press release saying it was initiating rulemaking on the chemical.
I haven’t written about diacetyl in a while but there are some new developments worth reporting.
On Monday February 4th, I’ll be doing the Public Health Reports’ monthly webcast, discussing the recent article Celeste Monforton and I wrote entitled Beryllium’s “Public Relations Problem”: Protecting Workers When There is No Safe Exposure Level. Here’s some background:
In a 1947 report, entitled Public Relations Problems in Connection with Occupational Diseases in the Beryllium Industry, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) asserted that the ability of the US government to produce nuclear weapons was threatened by the high incidence of severe health effects associated with exposure to beryllium, a metal vital to weapons production. In response, the AEC established a workplace exposure limit that dramatically reduced beryllium disease incidence. This limit is known as the “taxicab standard” since it was determined by two AEC scientists working in the back seat of a taxi on their way to a meeting.
Read the rest of this entry »
The journal Epidemiology has just published new evidence that drinking hexavalent chromium — also called chromium 6 — increases risk of stomach cancer. The study is important for public health purposes, since many drinking water sources are chromium contaminated (including the water in the community in the movie Erin Brockovich).
This new study is also the latest piece of a very ugly scandal that illustrates how polluters manufacture doubt to impede regulation. And this scandal is but one of several in which chromium polluters have manipulated epidemiologic studies to sow uncertainty - see our case study on chromium 6 at DefendingScience.org.
Pump Handle readers may recall our reporting on the controversy around a study of stomach cancer in Chinese villages where there were high levels of chromium in the drinking water. After an initial study reported elevated rates of stomach cancer, product defense consultants working for US chromium polluters reanalyzed the study, and the increased risk disappeared. The consultants re-analyzed the data and arranged for it to be published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM) without their names on it, hiding any connection to the product defense firm (Chemrisk) or the polluters who paid for the re-analysis. After the controversy was reported in the Wall Street Journal, the editor of JOEM retracted the study.
Over at The Intersection, Chris Mooney has a teaser about his terrific article “An Inconvenient Assessment,” chronicling the effort by the Bush administration, in cahoots with ExxonMobil-funded climate change deniers, to undercut a vitally important climate change report. The longer article appears in this month’s issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
While the report in question, officially known as Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, was issued in 2000, it was packed with information that could have informed a national discussion on the potential impacts of climate change over the last seven years. But the report was besieged by climate change deniers and disowned by the federal government.
After reviewing previously undisclosed documents*, the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward writes how a group of notable occupational health scientists and epidemiologists felt DuPont misrepresented the scientific evidence to-date about the health risks associated with PFOA (ammonium perfluorooctanoate, a.k.a. C8). Ward writes about concerns expressed in private email exchanges among scientists on the firm’s Epidemiology Review Board (ERB), an independent and external committee, when DuPont made a big public announcement (and to its employees at the Washington Works plant (near Parkersburg, WV)) about results of a worker-health study.
By Dick Clapp
Researchers devote a lot of effort to determining what causes cancer, and their findings can help us treat and prevent the disease. Industries that use and manufacture suspected carcinogens have something to fear, though, if research shows their products or processes to be contributing to cancer in workers or nearby communities. As a result, there has been a three-decade debate about the magnitude of the cancer burden contributed by these sources.
This issue is getting renewed attention because the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) recently released a report on “Attributable causes of cancer in France in year 2000.” This was a collaborative effort with the French Academy of Sciences, several other cancer-related agencies, and a distinguished international group of reviewers. It was begun in 2005 with the intention of updating the frequently-cited estimate of the attributable causes of cancer done by Doll and Peto in 1981, specifically as these estimates applied to France. The report reviews a large literature, goes through a long series of calculations and sensitivity analyses, and comes up with a set of conclusions remarkably similar to those of Doll and Peto’s estimates 26 years earlier. They attribute even smaller percentages of cancer due to occupation and “pollution” than did Doll and Peto.
The most surprising aspect of the new IARC report comes in the discussion section, though, where the authors suggest the possibility that low-dose environmental and occupational exposures might actually have decreased cancer incidence in France. In doing so, they invoke the notion of “hormesis.” Say what?
It no longer seems unusual to see an article in the Washington Post or the New York Times about Bush administration officials interfering with science for political reasons. Over the past week, though, two major news sources that reach a different audience have given this problem a lot of ink.
By David Michaels
More sickening revelations about FEMA’s lack of concern for the health of Americans, this time concerning their actions months after Hurricane Katrina. Spencer S. Hsu of the Washington Post reports that
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has suppressed warnings from its own Gulf coast field workers since the middle of 2006 about suspected health problems that may be linked to elevated levels of formaldehyde gas released in FEMA-provided trailers, lawmakers said today.
At a hearing this morning of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, investigators released internal e-mails indicating that FEMA lawyers rejected environmental testing out of fear that the agency would then become legally liable if health problems emerged among as many as 120,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina who lived in trailers. Read the rest of this entry »
By Liz Borkowski
An article in the latest issue of OMB Watch’s Watcher newsletter reports on U.S. Chamber of Commerce efforts to get EPA to make changes to its chemical databases. The short story is that the Chamber asked the EPA to correct what it claimed was “inconsistent and erroneous” information about chemicals in the agency’s databases, and EPA rejected the claim, explaining that there were “valid and specific reasons” why databases might contain differing information for the same chemicals. (See the article for the complete story.)
The important thing about this story is that the Chamber made its request in the form of a Data Quality Act challenge. The DQA (officially the Information Quality Act, or IQA) has what sounds like a reasonable goal: “ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” disseminated by federal agencies. Its history to date, however, shows it to be a tool for hindering agencies’ work to protect public health and the environment.
A couple of weeks ago, EPA proposed a new National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone (0.07 – 0.075 ppb) that was lower than the current limit (0.08 ppb) but not as protective as the limit many experts suggested (0.06). The agency also announced that it would be taking comments on alternative standards from 0.06 – 0.08 ppb. (Read this post on the announcement for more.) On Wednesday at 10am, this proposed revision will be the subject of a hearing held by the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee’s Clean Air & Nuclear Safety Subcommittee.
While we’re waiting to hear EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson give Senators more details about EPA’s ozone proposal, it’s worth checking out an editorial from a journal of the American Thoracic Society that gives the best one-page summary I’ve seen of the relevant science and the dangerous politics involved. (Via the American Lung Association’s Clean Air Standards page.)
Over the past few years, millions of formlerly secret internal documents from the tobacco industry have been made public and helped public health advocates learn how Big Tobacco deceived lawmakers and the public about smoking’s health risks.
Wading through all these documents is time-consuming, so the Center for Media and Democracy has launched a TobaccoWiki that will allow people interested in the subject to share their findings online. (A Wiki is basically a tool for online collaboration; see Wikipedia’s explanation to learn more about it.) Here’s their explanation of the project:
By David Michaels
Many people first heard about hexavalent chromium, or chromium 6, from the movie Erin Brockovich, which is based on the true story of a lawsuit over chromium-contaminated groundwater in the town of Hinkley, California.
Less well-known is the campaign waged by companies that manufacture or use chromium 6 to convince regulatory agencies that the chemical, which has recognized as a lung carcinogen for more than 50 years, just isn’t so dangerous. There’s a lot of chromium-contaminated water out there, and if chromium 6 in drinking water were acknowledged to be a cause of cancer, it would cost industry a lot of money in clean-up costs.
It won’t surprise regular readers of this blog – or anyone who’s seen our case study on industry efforts to delay OSHA’s chromium 6 standard – to hear that these companies have turned to product defense firms, and that the firms have produced studies that differ markedly from those completed by non-industry-funded scientists. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
OSHA has been taking a beating in the press recently and now they’ve started a small campaign to respond. It began with a blistering article (based in part on SKAPP’s work) by Steven Labaton in the New York Times, an article that was then reprinted in several newspapers around the country. Now, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Edwin G. Foulke Jr. is out there defending OSHA’s record issuing standards that protect worker health and safety.
Unfortunately, Mr. Foulke’s arguments are reminiscent of the climate change deniers who oppose government action on global warming, claiming the science is “not settled enough” for OSHA to do what needs to be done. The agency’s claims about the number of new regulations published are also quite misleading. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
All of a sudden, America has become acutely aware of the terrible lung disease caused by workplace exposure to artificial butter flavor. Last week, the failure of OSHA to do anything in response to the outbreak of cases across the country was the subject of several powerful newspaper articles (including a front page story and editorial in the New York Times) and hearings in the House and Senate. In addition, the obstructive lung disease cases in the flavor industry were discussed in an alarming article in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The article reported that
Bronchiolitis obliterans has been identified in microwave-popcorn workers in several states, including Missouri, Iowa, Ohio, New Jersey, and Illinois; bronchiolitis obliterans in flavor-manufacturing workers has been identified in Ohio, California, Maryland, and New Jersey.
No doubt prompted by all the unwanted publicity, OSHA has announced a National Emphasis Program, finally promising to inspect microwave popcorn plants. To me, this is little more than a half-hearted attempt to make OSHA look busy, since NIOSH has been focused on the hazards in microwave popcorn production for the last six years. If OSHA really wanted to inspect factories with dangerous exposures and sick workers, they would start at the factories where flavors are manufactured and mixed, then visit the plants where diacetyl-containing snack foods like Twinkies are made.
A colleague who has been following the developments in the artificial butter flavor debacle sent me a note, underscoring just why OSHA’s emphasis program misses the boat: Read the rest of this entry »
For those who’ve been following the investigations into how the Bush Administration interfered with government climate science, the news about political interference into Interior Department science had a familiar ring.
Chris Mooney sums it up well: “Substitute for Philip Cooney an Interior Department official named Julie MacDonald, and it’s basically the same story as it was with climate change: A political appointee, friendly with industry, overruling the determinations of agency scientists.” (Cooney was chief of staff on the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality – previously with the American Petroleum Institute – who altered government climate science reports.)
Viewed next to the details that came out of the latest hearing into the politicization of climate science, though, MacDonald’s misdeeds are less appalling.
By David Michaels
“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” - Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1914)
According to the Newark Star-Ledger, Lisa B. Jackson, Commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) has just issued a tough new standard for removing chromium 6 (a powerful lung carcinogen) from soil.
Three years ago, the same newspaper’s Alexander Lane wrote a series of articles (reprinted here and here) reporting how chromium companies Maxus Energy (formerly Diamond Shamrock), Honeywell (which took over Allied Chemical) and PPG Industries left massive soil contamination in Jersey City and Bayonne and then hired product defense consultants to convince the state government that chromium 6 was simply not so dangerous.
By David Michaels
The Guardian newspaper reports that The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the think tank/public relations firm, has offered scientists and economists $10,000 to undermine the report on global warming issued today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). According to the report, AEI “offered the payments for articles that emphasize the shortcomings” of the IPCC report.
The offers were made in anticipation of the report, which was released today. In its letters, AEI asserted that the IPCC was “resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work.” So, without reading the report, AEI commissioned rebuttals. Read the rest of this entry »
By David Michaels
“Risk assessment data can be like a captured spy: if you torture it long enough, it will tell you anything you want to know.”
- William Ruckelshaus, first EPA Administrator,
Risk assessment, explicit and implicit, is the motor that drives regulation. It can be a valuable tool for assisting regulatory agencies in selecting priorities and setting standards. It is also a means through which opponents of regulation can manufacture uncertainty and impede implementation of appropriate public health and environmental protection programs.
The failed White House proposal to restructure federal risk assessment activities (see Bob Shull’s post about the National Academy of Sciences’ SCATHING review of the proposal) is a terrific lens to expose how various powerful players have promoted their version of risk assessment to slow down or stop regulation.
By David Michaels
In today’s Wall Street Journal (sub required), Jeffrey Ball reports that ExxonMobil has decided to stop funding several of the groups that have been in the forefront of attacking the scientific evidence on global warming.
The campaign to shame ExxonMobil appears to be working. Earlier this week, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a damning report describing how the oil giant funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science:
In an effort to deceive the public about the reality of global warming, ExxonMobil has underwritten the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign since the tobacco industry misled the public about the scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease. As this report documents, the two disinformation campaigns are strikingly similar. ExxonMobil has drawn upon the tactics and even some of the organizations and actors involved in the callous disinformation campaign the tobacco industry waged for 40 years.
By David Michaels
The Bush Administration is manufacturing uncertainty about global warming, even as its allies in the carbon producing industries are abandoning it.
Last week, the Washington Post’s Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin reported that “top executives at many of the nation’s largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable.” John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co, said
We have to deal with greenhouse gases. From Shell’s point of view, the debate is over. When 90-plus percent of the world’s leading figures believe that greenhouse gases have impacted the climate of the Earth, who is Shell to say, ‘Let’s debate the science’?”
Yet on Wednesday, in front of the US Supreme Court, the Bush Administration said “Let’s debate the science.”
