The Bush Administration's War on Clean Air

The New York Times Magazine's cover story today exposes how the Bush administration and the electric power industry conspired to gut the Clean Air Act. The rules in question involved New Source Review, which until Bush's EPA radically liberalized them forbade companies from substantially rehabilitating coal-fired plants (and thus vastly increasing their electricity output and use of coal) unless they installed scrubbers. Coal-fired plants are major contributors to acid rain, ground-level ozone, soot and mercury pollution, which has been much in the news lately.

The article didn't cover the latest news. A number of state attorneys general have sued the government and won a temporary stay of the new rules. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Senate Environment Committee last December asked the National Academies of Science -- the organization whose studies are usually considered the gold standard on scientific investigations -- to study the impact of the rules as a sop to Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), whose state is a victim of ambient air pollution from power plants in states to its west.

But something strange is happening with that study. The NAS appointed a prominent global warming skeptic who has written for the right-wing Hoover Institution to chair the panel. Princeton University physicist Dr. William Happer's other interesting credential is that he was fired from his post as chief of research for the Department of Energy by the incoming Clinton administration because of his views on global warming.

In late March, several former EPA enforcement officials wrote NAS to protest Happer's appointment, and asked that Happer be removed from the panel. In my role as director of the Integrity in Science project at Center for Science in the Public Interest, I uncovered Happer's appointment and informed the broader environmental community about his impending role.

The question now is whether the NAS will allow someone with preconceived biases and who may hold a grudge against environmentalists chair one of its prestigious panels. Is this another case of the Bush administration manipulating science?