TUCSON, Ariz., March 3, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Extremely costly rules that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is imposing on industry, especially users of diesel engines, have no sound scientific basis, writes John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., in the spring issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Stringent limitations on tiny particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5), like those found in diesel exhaust and dust, are based on what Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called "cargo cult science"— fake science that looks like science. This "develops when government money is lavishly given to people in the academy to support a political agenda built on a false threat of public harm," Dunn writes.
Dunn details his personal crusade to expose EPA's bad science and policy making, which began in the early 1990s.
Submitting well-researched public comments had no effect on EPA policy or attitude, he writes. "EPA continued to make absurd claims that this or that air pollution regulation would save lives."
There are well-developed criteria for establishing toxicity, Dunn writes, but EPA disregards them.
The California Air Resources Board (CARB), a subdivision of the California EPA, promulgated costly new rules, despite proof of major problems pointed out by Dunn and associates. It relied on an "expert" with falsified credentials; ignored contradictory evidence (even by its own experts); disregarded protests from taxpayers; used geographic gerrymandering and an invented methodological trick called "conurbation"; persecutes dissenters; and has serious conflicts of interest, Dunn states.
EPA's recent experiments that unethically expose human subjects to substances that the EPA has declared to be lethal, in a search for evidence of harm, is basically an admission that corrupted, unreliable epidemiology "is being misused as a false portfolio of evidence of air pollution toxicity," he writes.
Dunn discusses using Federal Rules of Evidence regarding admissibility of scientific studies to challenge EPA policy. Courts tend to defer too much to agency discretion, Dunn writes. "There is no law that Congress has passed that permits agencies to use and promote junk science."
The Journal is the official, peer-reviewed publication of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties, founded in 1943 to preserve private medicine and the patient-physician relationship.