Donald Trump has picked a member of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to sit on the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, the only remaining advisory panel focused on air quality as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate scientific voices from the policy-making process.
Trump’s pick, Sabine Lange, is a toxicologist who participated in a 2015 panel meant to undermine newly-created EPA rules meant to reduce pollution from smog and ozone.
On the panel, Lange tried to argue that the EPA’s ozone pollution standards – made by the same committee Lange now sits on – were too stringent because ozone exposure isn’t as bad for you as most scientists claim.
As one critic pointed out, Lange based this ludicrous claim on average exposure in healthy people. That was an extremely problematic suggestion because air pollution of any kind, including from ozone, disproportionately harms vulnerable populations. Using average exposure in normal people as evidence that current standards are too harsh is a dishonest way of hiding the worst effects of air pollution on at-risk populations like children and the elderly.
The Clean Air Act is clear that the EPA must regulate air pollution at levels adequate to protect public health – the public health of everyone, not just healthy people.
Lange’s position that ozone pollution isn’t really that bad is one shared by corporate polluters, who always oppose public-health regulations and her elevation to the EPA is a continuation of Trump’s campaign to silence scientific voices and allow polluters to control environmental policymaking.
Trump has tried to tap anti-science members of the TCEQ before.
In 2016 and again in 2017 he nominated the climate denier Kathleen Hartnett White to head the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), before Senate Democrats and environmental activists fought back and pressured vulnerable Republicans to abandon her nomination.
Hartnett White was the former head of the TCEQ and told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that the level of human influence on climate change was “very uncertain.”
Hartnett White’s nomination was so alarming that hundreds of scientists wrote to the Senate to urge them to reject her confirmation, arguing that allowing her to head the CEQ “would have serious consequences for people and the ecosystems of the only planet that can support us.”
The TCEQ has never been a friend of the environment nor has it listened to the concerns of vulnerable populations.
Most recently, it has been weighing approval of a Laredo, Texas land baron’s request to build a toxic waste dump in a floodplain.
The proposed dump threatens a colonia full of poor, Hispanic residents. Colonias are rural settlements populated by members of Texas’ poor, Hispanic community. These communities are often built without access to standard municipal services; the last thing their residents need is to be exposed to toxic waste in the form of a dump, or seepage running off from a dump should heavy rain occur.
The Laredo toxic dump threatens to poison the water that the local colonia residents rely on and wind could blow toxic air pollution directly into the colonia. In virtually any other state, that would make it a total non-starter, but TCEQ’s weak record of environmental protection— as seen through Lange and Hartnett White’s records— is manifest.
That Trump would nominate another of the TCEQ’s pro-pollution, anti-science goons is frightening indeed and signals that Republican’s War on Science will continue as long as they are in power.