Dark Ages EPA: An Unforgivable Politicization of Science

On the surface, it might not seem that America’s life of the mind is getting stuck in a surreal extension of Stalin’s brand of Soviet science which wasn’t about finding the truth but about kowtowing to the party line. And it may seem like a stretch to say that what we are starting to see at the Trump EPA is reminiscent in spirit, if not in practice, of the intellectual bog of the Inquisition when Popes burned scientist martyrs at the stake for speaking out about their observations and theories even when they contradicted church ideology.

But the facts back up the comparison. The Trump administration, and Republicans in general, are working a dangerously retrograde movida on the science practiced by the EPA. GOP pols are politicizing science so their operatives can be given license to determine the credibility of data gathered though the scientific method. The entire Republican party is trying to consign environmental science to a Dark Age of political dogma that would be the final arbiter of public health regulations.

The GOP says, ingenuously, that it wants to add a level of what it calls “transparency” to the stringent system of peer review to which every scientific finding must rigorously adhere. It wants to give itself the authority to “reanalyze” the raw data of scientific findings that thwart the polluting practices of its major corporate backers.

The upshot is simple. Trump’s EPA is demanding that anonymous but personal medical histories gathered from massive studies that credibly prove a certain pollutant is a danger to public health be subjected to a non-scientific assessment by a political appointee in the EPA. This would require revealing the identities of the subjects of the study, their names, conditions, and other personal and experiential data, even if study has millions of subjects. This not only amounts to a physical impossibility, it is, on the face of it, illegal. It requires the breaking of a contract with each subject of study, a contract guaranteeing them anonymity under a variety of federal laws, including HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) which protects individual health information. Seeing as how all EPA public health studies involve the medical histories of subjects under study, revealing their identities would be illegal.

To make matters worse, the proposed new EPA layer of political oversight could be applied retroactively, including to such “groundbreaking” research, the New York Times notes, as the Harvard study that “definitively linked polluted air to premature deaths, currently the foundation of the nation’s air-quality laws.”

It could undo regulations under the Clean Water Act as well, one on which New Mexicans across the state depend. In a place like ours that’s rife with fracking pollution, nuclear waste pollution from the national labs, groundwater contamination by the military and pollutants from energy production, a politicized EPA could turn out to be a public health catastrophe.

Republicans at a revamped EPA, who constitute the political power of climate change deniers, could throw America back into the days of lethal smog and burning rivers, and probably never get around to overseeing the clean up of sites like the massive jet fuel spill at Kirkland Air Force Base.

In other words, politicians would decide what’s good science, not scientists. This means, said a spokesman for the American Lung Association quoted in the New York Times, that “the EPA can justify rolling back rules or failing to update rules based on the best information to protect public health and environment, which means more dirty air and more premature deaths.”

This political manipulation of the scientific method would be carried out in an atmosphere that seems alarmingly like that of the Soviet Union or in Counter Reformation-era Europe. The politicization of science by the Soviets is, in part, what lead to their collapse in 1989. The Soviet state condemned whole fields of study as “bourgeois pseudoscience,” much like conservative propaganda mills banish climate research to the realm of junk science. Soviet science was caught flatfooted, especially in a global marketplace, because politburo bureaucrats constrained investigation and innovation.

Even the Catholic Church, itself, admits that its harassment of the astronomer Galileo some 360 years ago, and the Inquisition’s condemnation of scientific freedom, was wrong. When Galileo renounced his findings in 1633 that showed the earth moved around the sun, not the other way around, he had clearly in mind the fate of another pioneering scientist Giordano Bruno, who was burned alive in Rome in 1600 for refusing to recant similar views.

While the Republican’s aren’t going to burn anyone at the stake, we hope, their views of science and its methods are so stunted and backward they’ve left their party open to ridicule by anyone with even a kindergarten education. How pathetically venal and lethally irresponsible can you get?

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it