EPA’s Lack of Transparency Is a Breeding Ground for Junk Science

From FEE.org (Apr. 3):

In a recent New York Times op-ed, two former EPA officials criticize a Trump administration plan that would require the EPA to reveal the details of studies used to craft environmental regulations. In this piece, Obama’s EPA director Gina McCarthy and assistant director Janet McCabe, claim that:

• current EPA director Scott Pruitt and “some conservative members of Congress are setting up a nonexistent problem in order to prevent the EPA from using the best available science.”
• EPA’s studies “adhere to all professional standards and meet every expectation of the scientific community in terms of peer review and scientific integrity.”
• the process of “peer review ensures that the analytic methodologies underlying studies funded by the agency are sound.”

A broad array of scientific facts and literature proves all of those claims to be false. This has important ramifications, for as explained in book Molecular Biology and Biotechnology: A Guide for Teachers, “there are risks in misperceiving” environmental risks, because “the experiences or products you avoid because of faulty assumptions and misinformation affect the quality of your life and the lives of those around you.”

Transparency Is Essential to Science

Since at least 1994, various scientists, including those on the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, have asked the EPA to “make available the primary data” used in studies for “regulatory decisions” that “have multibillion dollar impacts on society” so that “others can validate the analyses.” The EPA has often resisted and refused these requests using the same arguments as McCarthy and McCabe.

Such arguments, however, are contradicted by numerous scholarly works about scientific integrity. In opposition to McCarthy and McCabe’s claim that EPA studies based on undisclosed data “adhere to all professional standards” for “scientific integrity”:

• The Handbook of Social Research Ethics states that:
  • “any hindrance to the collection, analysis, or publication of data, such as inaccessible findings from refusal to share data or not publishing a study, should also be corrected for science to fully function.”
  • “scientific theories must be testable and precise enough to be capable of falsification,” and “to be so, science, including social science, must be essentially a public endeavor, in which all findings should be published and exposed to scrutiny by the entire scientific community.”

• the Handbook of Data Analysis states that “the techniques of analysis should be sufficiently transparent that other researchers familiar with the area can recognize how the data are being collected and tested, and can replicate the outcomes of the analysis procedure. (Journals are now requesting that authors provide copies of their data files when a paper is published so that other researchers can easily reproduce the analysis and then build on or dispute the conclusions of the paper.)”
• the book Quantifying Research Integrity states that:

• “when data are not available, researchers must either trust past published results, or they must recreate the data as best they can based on descriptions in the published works, which often turn out to be too cryptic.”
• “descriptions are no substitute for the data itself.”

Transparency is especially important when it comes to matters that broadly impact the public and are a matter of dispute.

………………

Peer Review Doesn’t Ensure Sound Science

Perhaps the most hollow of McCarthy and McCabe’s claims is that “peer review ensures” EPA studies “are sound.” This naïve notion is belied by reams of facts about peer-reviewed publications and candid statements from people involved with them. In merely the past seven years:

• the journal Nature published a study that attempted to confirm the findings of 53 prominent peer-reviewed papers that present results of lab experiments related to cancer drugs. The scientists were unable to reproduce 94 percent of these results, despite the fact that “when findings could not be reproduced, an attempt was made to contact the original authors, discuss the discrepant findings, exchange reagents and repeat experiments under the authors’ direction, occasionally even in the laboratory of the original investigator.”

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I agree. Transparency is important in science.

Another article on the subject: EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Moves to End Reliance on ‘Secret Science’