The National Association of Manufacturers submitted a formal request 10/9/07 to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency asking that it correct scientific errors in a package of documents related to its proposed revision of the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone. By law, these errors must be corrected to ensure and maximize the quality of scientific information disseminated by EPA and used for making regulatory decisions. Once these errors are corrected, the NAM is confident that EPA will have a much stronger scientific foundation for the final decision the agency will make on the ozone standard in March 2008.
The NAM’s petition identified several important information quality errors, such as:
• EPA’s risk assessment isn’t transparent.
EPA did not fully disclose analyses it recently performed and inserted at the last minute into the administrative record for the proposed revised standard. The Agency is obligated by law to ”show its work.”
• EPA’s risk estimates are purposefully exaggerated.
EPA misreported or exaggerated the results of the studies it relied on, and ignored studies that had found no health effects from ozone levels below the current standard. EPA knowingly used assumptions and models that give inflated estimates of health risks.
These practices are prohibited under federal information quality standards that EPA has adopted.
• EPA’s risk assessment did not follow technical recommendations made by the National Academy of Sciences.
Since the Clean Air Act was last amended in 1990, the Academy has issued a series of reports providing technical advice concerning how to estimate and portray the risks posed by air pollution. Among other things, the Academy has pressed EPA to be more candid about the uncertainties in its estimates and predictions. EPA has ignored most of these recommendations.
The practical effect of these errors is that the public is not accurately informed about what the science says about ozone air pollution, nor is it aware just how uncertain EPA’s risk estimates really are. Through our petition, the NAM expects that EPA will correct these errors as the law requires, and provide the public scientific information that is accurate, reliable, and unbiased, and presented in an accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased manner.
In March, 2008, the EPA indirectly responded to our criticisms as part of its general response to significant public comments. We were dissapointed that the EPA did not adhere to the substantive elements in its Information Quality Guidelines, especially in not acknowledging the validity of any of our complaints related to the covered information contained in its proposal and supporting documents.
Consequently, we filed a Request for Reconsideration of the EPA's denial of our Information Quality Act petition. See link below for further developments.