Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Term Analysis

Bad Science was a virtual self-help book for regulated industries, and it began with a set of emphatic sound-bite-sized “MESSAGES”:
1. Too often science is manipulated to fulfill a political agenda.
2. Government agencies … betray the public trust by violating principles of good science in a desire to achieve a political goal.
3. No agency is more guilty of adjusting science to support preconceived public policy prescriptions than the Environmental Protection Agency.
4. Public policy decisions that are based on bad science impose enormous economic costs on all aspects of society.
5. Like many studies before it, EPA’s recent report concerning environmental tobacco smoke allows political objectives to guide scientific research.
6. Proposals that seek to improve indoor air quality by singling out tobacco smoke only enable bad science to become a poor excuse for enacting new laws and jeopardizing individual liberties.

Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Kennedy PSAC report, Use of Pesticides: A Report of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, is notable in hindsight as much for what it did not do as for what it did. The scientists did not claim that the hazards of persistent pesticides were “proven,” “demonstrated,” “certain,” or even well understood; they simply concluded that the weight of evidence was sufficient to warrant policy action to control DDT.

[…]

Both science and democracy worked as they were supposed to.