NightTrain
11-24-2017, 11:26 AM
I knew Pruitt was the right man for the job.
The EPA was stacked with advisers who would, naturally, grant money to themselves to study and then create a new report - and I think we can all agree that the report would call for more studies.
This isn't the case anymore, and it's a beautiful thing.
Mr. Pruitt and his supporters say the move will help prevent any conflicts of interest on the committees, which review agency-produced science and act as something of a top-level peer-review system before the federal government proposes new regulations, adjusts existing ones, or scraps rules.
“Whatever science comes out of EPA shouldn’t be political science,” the administrator said late last month. “From this day forward, EPA advisory committee members will be financially independent from the agency.”
The policy is the latest example of how Mr. Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma who had battled the agency throughout the Obama era, intends to reshape the research community’s relationship with the EPA.
The agency says that over the last three years, members of the three EPA boards — the Scientific Advisory Board, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and the Board of Scientific Counselors — had gotten at least $77 million in grant funding while serving on those panels.
Naturally, there are a few Advisers who are a bit miffed that they're suddenly cut off from the taxpayer trough:
“I don’t think it makes sense to exclude the people who know the most about what the EPA is doing,” said Robyn Wilson, a professor of risk analysis and decision science at Ohio State University. “What the EPA decides to do has no bearing on what I do as a researcher. There’s no gravy train where the EPA is providing lavish vacations for scientists. It’s funny to me they’re willing to make this trade off, excluding people with legitimate expertise.”
Ms. Wilson, who said she learned she was about to be removed from the Scientific Advisory Board after getting a phone call from a reporter, had been part of a $750,000 EPA-funded grant program studying Great Lakes restoration. About $150,000 of that, she said, was coming to her team at Ohio State.
She was in the second year of her first three-year term when she was removed.
That's right, Robyn! No conflict whatsoever, because you're funneling money to yourself.
Republican Jim Inhofe summed it up succinctly :
“When science advisers are receiving millions of dollars from the very agency they are influencing, serious concerns are raised about the independence of those scientists and call into question the integrity of the process as a whole,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/23/scott-pruitt-kicks-out-professors-researchers-unde/
This is the sort of self-feeding monster that continues to put out skewed report after skewed report calling for more studies & reports.
I'm sure that NOAA and NASA are also hotbeds of corruption as well, but Pruitt's pond is the EPA and that's where we're seeing progress in dismantling the Beast.
We need at least 6 more Pruitts distributed around to identify and cure federal agencies... NPS, NOAA & NASA immediately come to mind.
The EPA was stacked with advisers who would, naturally, grant money to themselves to study and then create a new report - and I think we can all agree that the report would call for more studies.
This isn't the case anymore, and it's a beautiful thing.
Mr. Pruitt and his supporters say the move will help prevent any conflicts of interest on the committees, which review agency-produced science and act as something of a top-level peer-review system before the federal government proposes new regulations, adjusts existing ones, or scraps rules.
“Whatever science comes out of EPA shouldn’t be political science,” the administrator said late last month. “From this day forward, EPA advisory committee members will be financially independent from the agency.”
The policy is the latest example of how Mr. Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma who had battled the agency throughout the Obama era, intends to reshape the research community’s relationship with the EPA.
The agency says that over the last three years, members of the three EPA boards — the Scientific Advisory Board, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and the Board of Scientific Counselors — had gotten at least $77 million in grant funding while serving on those panels.
Naturally, there are a few Advisers who are a bit miffed that they're suddenly cut off from the taxpayer trough:
“I don’t think it makes sense to exclude the people who know the most about what the EPA is doing,” said Robyn Wilson, a professor of risk analysis and decision science at Ohio State University. “What the EPA decides to do has no bearing on what I do as a researcher. There’s no gravy train where the EPA is providing lavish vacations for scientists. It’s funny to me they’re willing to make this trade off, excluding people with legitimate expertise.”
Ms. Wilson, who said she learned she was about to be removed from the Scientific Advisory Board after getting a phone call from a reporter, had been part of a $750,000 EPA-funded grant program studying Great Lakes restoration. About $150,000 of that, she said, was coming to her team at Ohio State.
She was in the second year of her first three-year term when she was removed.
That's right, Robyn! No conflict whatsoever, because you're funneling money to yourself.
Republican Jim Inhofe summed it up succinctly :
“When science advisers are receiving millions of dollars from the very agency they are influencing, serious concerns are raised about the independence of those scientists and call into question the integrity of the process as a whole,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/23/scott-pruitt-kicks-out-professors-researchers-unde/
This is the sort of self-feeding monster that continues to put out skewed report after skewed report calling for more studies & reports.
I'm sure that NOAA and NASA are also hotbeds of corruption as well, but Pruitt's pond is the EPA and that's where we're seeing progress in dismantling the Beast.
We need at least 6 more Pruitts distributed around to identify and cure federal agencies... NPS, NOAA & NASA immediately come to mind.