Smog fills Utah's Salt Lake Valley in January 2017. Winter weather in the area often traps air pollution that is bad for public health. Photo: George Frey / Getty Images
Smog fills Utah’s Salt Lake Valley in January 2017. Winter weather in the area often traps air pollution that is bad for public health. Photo: George Frey / Getty Images

Rebecca Hersher
28 March 2019

(NPR) – Several members of a powerful science panel for the Environmental Protection Agency expressed doubt at a hearing Thursday about the long-established scientific consensus that air pollution can cause premature death.

The panel was meeting to consider recommendations that would fundamentally change how the agency analyzes the public health dangers posed by air pollution and could lead to weaker regulation of soot.

The recommendations concern how the EPA regulates microscopic soot known as particulate matter, which causes and exacerbates respiratory diseases such as asthma. Determining exactly how much particulate matter is safe to breathe requires complex analysis of an enormous — and growing — body of scientific literature.

Before the EPA disbanded it last year, a 20-person subcommittee called the Particulate Matter Review Panel was responsible for helping the agency decide how much air pollution is safe for Americans to breathe. With that group gone, only the seven-member Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee is left to make recommendations.

At a public meeting Thursday that ran nearly two hours long, multiple members of that committee, including Chair Tony Cox and Steven Packham of the Utah Division of Air Quality, said they do not agree that breathing air polluted with soot can lead to an early death. […]

The draft recommendations would dramatically limit the breadth and depth of the science used to determine safe air pollution limits in the U.S. by pushing the EPA to limit the types of studies considered during the regulatory process.

The EPA currently bases its air pollution regulations on a wide range of scientific studies about the relationship between health outcomes, such as asthma or premature death, and different types of air pollution, such as soot of different microscopic sizes.

“The EPA has a very well-vetted process that has been going on over the years called the weight of the evidence,” says Francesca Dominici, a biostatistician at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who recently wrote about the draft recommendations in the journal Science. “This is a process that has been endorsed not only by the EPA, but by the National Academy of Sciences, [and] is pretty well accepted by the scientific community.” […]

Decades of broad analysis have enabled scientists to make clear recommendations to the EPA about how to protect Americans from air pollution. “They’re providing a very robust message that air pollution is harmful to human health,” Dominici says. […]

“I just want to emphasize the fringe nature of these proposals,” says H. Christopher Frey, a former chair of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and member of the now-disbanded particulate matter review board.

“It’s kind of like the same issues that came up with tobacco denial of health effects or denial of climate change health effects,” Frey says. “There’s a very small community that have scientific credentials but are moving outside their area of expertise to try to raise doubt after doubt after doubt on issues where they really don’t have the strongest competence.” [more]

EPA Science Panel Considering Guidelines That Upend Basic Air Pollution Science