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The Environmental Protection Agency is the U.S. executive branch agency, established during the Nixon administration, that is responsible for assessing and addressing environmental threats. It has been a primary target for the “merchants of doubt.”
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or refer to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 5
Quotes
Bad Science was a virtual self-help book for regulated industries, and it began with a set of emphatic sound-bite-sized “MESSAGES”:
1. Too often science is manipulated to fulfill a political agenda.
2. Government agencies … betray the public trust by violating principles of good science in a desire to achieve a political goal.
3. No agency is more guilty of adjusting science to support preconceived public policy prescriptions than the Environmental Protection Agency.
4. Public policy decisions that are based on bad science impose enormous economic costs on all aspects of society.
5. Like many studies before it, EPA’s recent report concerning environmental tobacco smoke allows political objectives to guide scientific research.
6. Proposals that seek to improve indoor air quality by singling out tobacco smoke only enable bad science to become a poor excuse for enacting new laws and jeopardizing individual liberties.
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Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Chapter 7
Quotes
The Kennedy PSAC report, Use of Pesticides: A Report of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, is notable in hindsight as much for what it did not do as for what it did. The scientists did not claim that the hazards of persistent pesticides were “proven,” “demonstrated,” “certain,” or even well understood; they simply concluded that the weight of evidence was sufficient to warrant policy action to control DDT.
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Both science and democracy worked as they were supposed to.
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Get the entire Merchants of Doubt LitChart as a printable PDF.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Term Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
The timeline below shows where the term Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) appears in Merchants of Doubt. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
...fund pro-tobacco research from 1979–1985, and the tobacco industry paid Singer to publicly question the EPA’s findings on the dangers of secondhand smoke in 1990.
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Chapter 3
...sulfur dioxide emissions through a “cap and trade” program. In 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that this program had cost $8-9 billion, but saved $101-119 billion, over the previous...
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Chapter 5
...Surgeon General’s report concluded that even non-smokers could get cancer from “secondhand” cigarette smoke. The EPA started to limit smoking indoors, so the tobacco industry hired Fred Singer to challenge the...
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...this backfired: the word “environmental” invited regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1992, an EPA report concluded that “environmental” smoke caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths and hundreds of thousands of...
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...perfect, because scientists can't expose test subjects to toxic materials like secondhand smoke, but the EPA considered the evidence on secondhand smoke as “conclusive.” So, the tobacco industry hired Fred Seitz...
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Fred Seitz proposed that the tobacco industry reject the EPA’s “balance of the evidence” approach and only consider perfect studies based on “ideal research designs.”...
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...“a means to challenge science on any topic.” Of course, the handbook focused on the EPA. It declared that the EPA report on secondhand smoke was “widely criticized within the scientific...
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...defending secondhand smoke. Its authors, Fred Singer and the conservative lawyer Kent Jeffreys, accused the EPA of trying to ban smoking entirely (which wasn’t true). They argued that secondhand smoke is...
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...is peer review. A board of nine qualified doctors and research scientists peer reviewed the EPA study, and they did recommend significant changes: they thought that the EPA was understating the...
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The EPA built a website to respond to the tobacco industry’s attacks and explain its findings about...
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Chapter 6
However, the administration took the report very seriously, using it to discredit the EPA’s efforts to regulate coal. In fact, officials guided the report from the start: they asked...
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Chapter 7
...and humans. In the following years, Congress passed bipartisan legislation and created institutions like the EPA, which banned DDT altogether in 1972.
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