House Science Committee wants to investigate scientist for reporting science for the government
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Ever since the House Science Committee was taken over by the likes of Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, it has been using its powers to harass scientists, protect the oil and gas industry from climate change culpability, and generally attack the reasons we are suppoHouse Science Committee wants to investigate scientist for reporting science for the government
Ever since the House Science Committee was taken over by the likes of Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, it has been using its powers to harass scientists, protect the oil and gas industry from climate change culpability, and generally attack the reasons we are supposed to have a House Science Committee in the first place. Now Smith and Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs—best known for being booed offstage by his constituents for denying climate change science—have decided to go after a government scientist for … practicing science. Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, wrote an editorial called “Regulating toxic chemicals for public and environmental health” last month. In it she and co-author Liza Gross give a history of regulations in the United States since President Gerald Ford signed the United States Toxic Substances Control Act in the fall of 1976. In the decades since Ford promised a robust policy to regulate potentially hazardous chemicals, evidence has emerged that chemicals in widespread use can cause cancer and other chronic diseases, damage reproductive systems, and harm developing brains at low levels of exposure once believed to be harmless. Such exposures pose unique risks to children at critical windows of development—risks that existing regulations fail to consider. To address these issues, PLOS Biology is publishing a special collection of seven articles, Challenges in Environmental Health: Closing the Gap between Evidence and Regulations, that focus on US chemical policy [1]. In commissioning the collection, we aimed to reveal barriers to developing health-protective policies not only when the scientific evidence of harm is clear but also when it is uncertain. We sought to explore the technical challenges involved in determining how the hundreds of chemicals we carry in our bodies affect health. These challenges include ascertaining exposures and impacts of short-lived compounds; identifying chemicals that pose unique risks to the developing fetus; and assessing the risk of chemicals that cause proportionately more harm at the lowest levels of exposure in violation of longstanding toxicology principles. We asked authors to consider these issues within their field of expertise and to suggest ways to bridge the gap between evidence and policy. Birnbaum’s conclusions are that the U.S. is not keeping pace with scientific advancement, leaving potentially hazardous chemicals unregulated. Well, Reps. Lamar Smith and Andy Biggs want to investigate! Not the science. No, that would be doing their jobs. Instead, they want to investigate director Birnbaum for being an unpaid lobbyist for Big Environmentalism. Read more