On Wednesday, EPA announced its intention to revise (pdf) the TSCA Inventory Update Rule (IUR). The TSCA Inventory is the official list of chemicals in commerce, and the IUR is the regulation that requires companies to submit production and use data to EPA to ensure the Inventory accurately represents all of the chemicals out there. This week's announcement marks the second time in ten years that EPA has decided the IUR needs improvement, based on agency staff’s efforts to regulate toxic chemicals using the data available to them.
As Dan Rosenberg points out over at Switchboard, the changes are mostly good, although EPA certainly could have gone further on a few fronts. For one, EPA has expressed some interest in changing the IUR’s requirements for reporting occupational exposures—changes that would be a huge improvement—but hasn’t yet decided exactly how to implement the changes.
Under current regulations, we don’t get much information about occupational exposures to toxic chemicals. In addition to total production volume data, companies have to describe the total number of workers likely to be exposed to a chemical (provided in a range), the maximum concentration of a chemical when it’s sent off site (or when it’s reacted on-site), and the physical form of the chemical. For chemicals produced or imported in quantities greater than 300,000 pounds per year, existing regulations mandate disclosure of some additional information about processing and use, but not enough to significantly improve our understanding of worker exposures. That’s in fact rather basic data, and leaves out the details that would allow for better risk management, including information on specific worker tasks and potential exposures. According to EPA, the information submitted under these regulations was so useless that the agency “could develop only qualitative exposure characterizations with relative ranking of low, medium, or high for characterizing potential exposures to various populations.”
Full textJust before the July 4 recess, Representative George Miller, Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, introduced the Miner Safety and Health Act of 2010. Recent explosions at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine, Tesoro’s Anacortes (WA) refinery, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, and U.S. Steel’s coke oven in Clairton (PA), highlight the life-threatening hazards that American workers face on a daily basis. Despite these hazards—and the myriad other less serious or even chronic hazards that don’t make headlines—workers continue to do their jobs day in and day out.
Contrast these workers’ diligence with that of certain members of Congress, who, in advance of today’s committee vote on the Miner Safety and Health Act, have said that they want to hold off on legislating until they see the official reports on the causes of the Upper Big Branch explosion. Sure, official reports on that explosion will reveal important details about exactly what caused that particular disaster, notable for its severity and harrowing death toll. But as MSHA proved with its five-day “inspection blitz” of 57 underground coal mines in April, miners continue to work in conditions that we know are hazardous. The problem isn’t that we don’t understand the hazards that lead to explosions or other dangerous conditions, it’s that companies are choosing not to comply with the standards that would protect their workers. In just three days, MSHA issued more than 1,500 citations for violations of federal mine health and safety standards. MSHA had to order a halt to operations at six mines in Kentucky because of rampant violations. Clearly, economics—not workers’ safety—is the driving force for these companies’ decisions about compliance with federal law.
The Miner Safety and Health Act is designed to alter the current economics of noncompliance, where the penalties for violating worker safety protections are too often seen as just the cost of doing business. Among other things, the law would increase penalties, force mining companies to fix workplace hazards while they contest citations, and give whistleblowers a right to sue employers on their own behalf when the government’s whistleblower protection agency works too slowly. The bill is a systemic response to systemic problems. Waiting for official reports about the specific causes of one disaster will only shift the debate toward piecemeal reforms that will leave millions working in the same dangerous conditions without the full array of new protections afforded by the bill as introduced.
Full textWith the strong support of their new Administrator, last year the EPA staff who administer TSCA came up with a novel idea for jump-starting a moribund regulatory program. They started publishing Chemical Action Plans (CAPs) for a selection of chemicals “that pose a concern to the public.” Having selected chemicals that are found in consumer products, produced in large volumes, have particular concerns for children’s health, or meet other criteria, EPA staff published action plans for the chemicals that provide a clear and concise profile of each chemicals’ hazards, exposures, and risks and lay out regulatory actions EPA might take in the near future. The documents are truly excellent pieces of work in that they provide a summary of complex and controversial science within the context of the agency’s duties and powers under existing law, and they do so without getting bogged down in scientific or legal minutae.
But now activists with the American Chemistry Council (ACC) have resurrected the wasteful practice of filing Requests for Correction under the Data Quality Act, this time (pdf) in response to EPA’s action plan for phthalates (pdf), proving once again that ACC will harass EPA for taking even the smallest steps.
The RfC alleges that the action plan contains “numerous factual errors” and that it therefore “fails to meet the requisite standard for objectivity.” A majority of their complaints focus on elements of EPA’s summary of potential hazards and routes of exposure, generally faulting EPA for not including references to studies that may provide evidence that would lessen the agency’s concerns. The general perspective underscores the real point of debate that ACC has manufactured with its RfC: What degree of precision is appropriate for EPA’s action plans?
Full textEPA today announced (pdf) that it will begin a general practice of reviewing – and likely rejecting – confidentiality claims regarding chemical identities and supporting data in health and safety studies submitted to the agency under TSCA. The news is long overdue, but very welcome.
One of Congress’s primary goals in drafting TSCA was to create regulatory mechanisms through which EPA would gather information about the human health and environmental effects of toxic chemicals. Recognizing the societal benefits of broad disclosure of that information, Congress created an exemption for “health and safety studies” from TSCA § 14’s general prohibition on EPA’s disclosure of information submitted to the agency and claimed to be trade secrets or confidential business information (CBI). Health and safety information, in other words, was too important to be hidden from the public.
But despite the plain language of the statute, EPA for years simply turned a blind eye when health and safety studies were submitted under the Act’s information disclosure requirements and stamped as CBI. In fact, EPA even developed a process through which companies could claim that elements of a health and safety study – including chemical identities and supporting data – pass as CBI.
Full textIn the year since EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced a new process (pdf) for updating chemical risk assessments in EPA's IRIS database, agency scientists have succeeded in getting some stalled assessments moving through the system. Since the May 21, 2009 announcement, EPA staff have competed nine new and updated assessments. Two others are in the final stages of review and 20 more are at the external peer review stage.
But just as EPA staff are getting geared up, industry, potentially regulated federal agencies, and the White House are trying to throw a monkey wrench into the works.
First, Inside EPA reports (subs. required, "Industry, Agencies Struggle To Revise EPA's Risk Assessment Process") that anti-regulatory advocate Jim Tozzi's Center for Regulatory Effectiveness is making the claim that external peer review must be "Data Quality Act compliant." That's a great way to strike fear in the minds of an embattled office like the IRIS office, but it lacks any real basis. The purpose of a Science Advisory Board SAB (SAB) review is to get outside scientists' opinion on specific science-policy decisions made by EPA staff in the process of developing the IRIS assessment. By definition, opinions are not "information" covered by EPA’s DQA guidelines (pdf, p.16), so the DQA doesn't apply. And even if it did apply, there's no checklist to make sure a document is DQA compliant. The DQA simply creates a (not-judicially-reviewable) administrative mechanism for outside parties to request that an agency correct information that they disseminate that does not meet the agency's DQA guidelines. At its core, the DQA respects the fact that agencies are staffed by dedicated and highly competent individuals who do high quality work. The burden is on an outside party to prove that disseminated information does not conform to an agency's DQA guidelines. There is no burden for EPA to perform any sort of DQA-specific analysis of a piece of information before disseminating it.
Full textVirginia AG Ken Cuccinelli II has taken his climate change vendetta to a new low, announcing that he will use Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act to force officials at UVA to spend months digging through a decade of university records in search of evidence that Dr. Michael Mann "defrauded" the Commonwealth by seeking funds to explore the boundaries of climate science.
Tuesday's article in the Washington Post gave the attention-seeking politician all that he needed from the civil investigative demand issued to Dr. Mann's former employer. Now Cuccinelli will move on to his next headline-grabbing venture without a care for the disruptions he's left in his wake.
As others have pointed out, threatening academics with legal penalties sets a terrible precedent that will stifle the innovation and progress that are the hallmarks of the United States' great research universities. It was bad enough when Rep. Joe Barton first started harassing Dr. Mann over his work, signaling to all climate scientists that they'd better be careful what they researched or the full force of a congressional investigation might be in their future. Now that Cuccinelli has set the precedent of making onerous demands on the universities that employ researchers who work on the cutting edge, there will be another dimension to the pressures that will constrain American academics.
Full textIn response to a question at a National Press Club appearance on Monday, Lisa Jackson said that the EPA would be finalizing an action plan on BPA in the "very near future."
As I noted here in January, the EPA had announced in September that it would be releasing action plans on a number of chemicals, including BPA, but when the first group of plans was released in late December, BPA was not among them. I raised a red flag because EPA had sent six draft chemical action plans to White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) on December 14, OIRA hosted a meeting with BPA industry lobbyists a week later, then the BPA action plan was absent from the list of plans released on December 30. OIRA had no business reviewing the chemical action plans in the first place since they are not regulatory actions covered by EO 12,866.
Last week, Sen. Chuck Schumer put some pressure on EPA and OIRA, asking Administrator Jackson for a written explanation regarding the “confounding decision” to hold back the BPA action plan. Now that the BPA action plan has been released from OIRA’s grip (Inside Story, 3/4/10) and delivered to EPA for publication, what can we expect it to say?
Full textToday the top brass from OSHA opened their doors to the many stakeholders who have something to say about how the agency is doing in its efforts to protect U.S. workers. Of course, they got an earful.
The event marks a new path for OSHA, in that the head of the agency and top career staff took the time to sit face-to-face with occupational health experts, workers, worker representatives, and even the families of victims of workplace accidents, not just the usual cast of characters from the industry lobbying firms.
And it wasn’t just a cattle call. OSHA head David Michaels, Debbie Berkowitz (Chief of Staff), Richard Fairfax (Director of Enforcement), and Dorothy Dougherty (Director of Standards) engaged the speakers in a way that showed they not only cared about what the speakers were saying but are genuinely interested in taking action to protect workers from occupational hazards – hazards we know about as well as emerging hazards.
My testimony, based on our recent report, Workers at Risk: Regulatory Dysfunction at OSHA, can be found here.
Full textAdd arsenic to the list of carcinogenic chemicals that will see delayed regulation from EPA as a result of OMB’s meddling. Last week, after almost seven years’ work, EPA released a draft assessment of the bladder and lung cancer risks posed by arsenic in drinking water. But the release of the final arsenic risk assessment is being delayed while EPA’s Science Advisory Board is asked to take yet another look at agency scientists’ work. As Jonathan Strong wrote in InsideEPA (sub. req'd) last week, the recursive review by SAB is “emboldening” activists who want to delay any potential new drinking water regulations.
Demanding external peer review of EPA scientists’ work on just about anything is a standard tactic industry uses to bide time before they have to shell out the money to clean up the messes they’ve made. Witness Sen. David Vitter’s hold on President Obama’s nominee for the head of EPA’s Office of Research and Development (the people responsible for IRIS assessments). Senator Vitter kept the hold on Dr. Anastas for months, until Administrator Jackson agreed to send the long-delayed formaldehyde IRIS assessment to the National Academy of Sciences for Review. That guaranteed Sen. Vitter’s constituents in the formaldehyde industry at least another 18 months of regulatory delay – more, if they can pull a few choice words from NAS’s eventual report and claim that they undermine the draft assessment.
A Senate hold on a presidential nominee isn’t the only way to ensure delay, though. Strong encouragement from people within the Executive Office of the President is another, and that’s just what the opponents of arsenic regulation got. In October 2008, EPA released an early draft of the arsenic IRIS reassessment for “interagency” review. OMB weighed in, as usual, with a set of comments that ask some highly scientific questions. As we’ve noted many times before in this space, OIRA’s small staff, with their expertise in economics and general regulatory policy and responsibility for overseeing the entire Executive Branch, should not be delving deep into the pre-regulatory science at one agency.
Full textFDA scientists have had a chance to develop an assessment of the risks of BPA in food contact applications using a fuller body of low-dose studies and concluded last week that there’s some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children (for a helpful analysis of the context of FDA’s decision, see Sarah Vogel’s post at The Pump Handle). Now, it’s time to look at what EPA is doing with respect to the ubiquitous endocrine-disrupting chemical.
In late September, Lisa Jackson announced that EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics would develop “action plans” for four chemicals or groups of chemicals, outlining potential future regulatory actions aimed at protecting the public and the environment from unreasonable risk. BPA was one of the candidates for an action plan, but when EPA released its four plans on December 30, BPA’s was not among them. EPA’s reason for delaying the BPA action plan was that it was waiting on FDA’s newest analysis and the results of $30 million worth of new studies being conducted under various grants from NIEHS.
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Guest Blogger: Liz Borkowski