The EPA gives its clean air advisory committee a pro-industry makeover

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency continues to clean house by replacing qualified, independent scientists with those friendlier to its pro-industry agenda. The EPA announced five new members to its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), a group that helps inform the agency’s standards on ozone and other pollutants, and of those appointments, only one is an independent academic scientist. Go figure. The other appointees come from state agencies that have been notoriously critical of federal air-quality standards. To make matters worse, the EPA also did away with the Particulate Matter Review Panel, announcing that its responsibilities will now fall to the CASAC instead. The agency's suspicious sidelining of science is not new: Earlier this year, it attempted to severely limit the kinds of science available when crafting policy, and it routinely undermines the institutional knowledge of longtime EPA staffers.