June 26, 2020 2:51 PM EDT
In a win for independent science, the EPA said yesterday that it will rescind a policy banning many of the nation’s top environmental scientists from serving on the agency’s science advisory committees. The agency was under court order to remove it. Read more >
June 25, 2020 9:03 AM EDT
It is mid-June 2020 and another day of unrest in America. As I scan the news, I learn that the environment has been under attack. Again. President Trump recently signed an executive order to dismantle the process requiring environmental reviews of large infrastructure projects, including oil and gas pipelines. I also learn that the administration is proposing restrictions that would further weaken air pollution controls. As I dig more, I find out that it could get a lot worse for clean water too. Read more >
June 4, 2020 4:51 PM EDT
Here, now, the agency with its mission to protect human health and the environment is attempting to shovel tens of thousands of pollution-caused deaths off the main page and into the margins to make regulatory inaction pencil out. Read more >
May 15, 2020 10:37 AM EDT
Today, UCS submitted our comment on the Environmental Protection Agency’s flawed strengthening transparency rule. In our view, this is a proposal beyond fixing. It rests upon an erroneous assumption that the EPA’s regulatory science is not sufficiently accessible to the public. The rule would create a path for opportunistic representatives from regulated industries to challenge the science the EPA uses, tie up the agency in reanalysis paralysis, and saddle external researchers with excess work to arbitrarily give access to underlying data. It has got to go. Read more >
May 15, 2020 10:33 AM EDT
On March 18th, a date when many of us were already sheltering in place, the EPA announced a proposal to restrict how the agency uses science to protect public health. The EPA gave the public thirty days to provide comment. Held no virtual public hearings. In the middle of a pandemic. We urged the agency, repeatedly, to hold a virtual hearing on the proposal. Each time, they refused. So UCS decided that if the EPA would not do its job, someone would need to do it for them. EPA would get the feedback and the science advice whether they wanted to or not. Read more >
