Last September, Trump’s EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler sent a letter to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) threatening to cut funding because the state wasn’t meeting Clean Air Act standards in 82 areas.
But as CARB pointed out in response, that is a gross over-exaggeration, as it double, triple or quadruple-counts areas that are out of compliance with several pollution standards. Really, there were only 20 unique places where pollution exceeds the standards.
Why such a huge discrepancy? Did the EPA know it was inflating the figure by a factor of four, or was it an honest mistake made by someone who just doesn’t count so good? (This is the Trump administration, after all.)
New reporting from E&E’s Maxine Joselow sheds some light on the situation, as emails show that former EPA appointee Clint Woods was the likely source of the figure.
Who is Woods? Well, at the EPA, he worked on a variety of efforts to roll back regulations and bring in pro-tobacco “experts” who think it’s a good thing to expose people to pollution as part of the censoring science rule effort.
Prior to his stint in Trump’s EPA, Woods was the executive director of the conservative, anti-regulatory Association of Air Pollution Control Agencies. Before that, he worked for notorious denier Rep. Lamar Smith as a staffer on the House Science committee, and prior to that he was at ALEC. Clearly, he’s someone who’s made a career out of serving polluters, as opposed to protecting public health. After leaving the EPA in October, Woods went to Ohio State University, where students are none too pleased about having him in their Environment department.
And they’re obviously pretty well-justified in their concerns. The emails released to E&E show that the EPA was aware that when Woods counted up the 82 non-attainment areas (places that don’t meet clean air standards) it “takes into account that California has multiple areas that are not meeting several standards. For example, some areas are simultaneously not meeting four ozone standards (1979, 1997, 2008, and 2015), while also not meeting four PM2.5 standards (1997 and 2006 24-hour, 1997 and 2012 annual).”
So one area that needs to clean both ozone and soot levels was double-counted, and as the quote indicates, some were apparently quadruple or even octuple-counted.
Woods himself did not send or recieve any of the emails, they only show others having to backtrack and recreate his methodology. It’s not totally clear, then, if he intentionally inflated the area count for effect, or if he was just too lazy to check and see how many of the 82 areas were actually repeats.
But a career spent working on behalf of polluters and deniers doesn’t exactly inspire trust, because if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s the dishonesty of denial.