KINDER'S COMMENTARY: EPA TURNS DUBIOUS SCIENCE INTO EXTREMISM

My last offering described proposed new rules by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for air quality called the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone and particulate matter (PM). The proposed rules reveal a Clinton administration gripped by an extremist environmental mindset.

Consider who is doing the proposing: EPA administrator Carol Browner. She came out of Vice President Al Gore's office when he was senator from Tennessee, where she had been his chief aide for environmental issues. A few years back a book on environmental issues was published bearing Gore's name as author. It was a near-hysterical treatise entitled "Earth in the Balance," featuring laughably bizarre assertions such as, "The internal combustion engine is the greatest enemy of mankind," threatening our continued survival on the planet, blah, blah, blah. Compared to other national Democrats, Gore can be a centrist, even, on many issues, a force for needed moderation. All this goes out the window where environmentalism is concerned. Gore/Browner environmental thinking is truly extremist -- basically just bananas.

The Clean Air Act of 1990 established clear air standards and mandated review every five years. The standard established for PM was 1.2 parts per million. (Missouri and other states have been occasionally cited for not meeting this current standard.) The proposed new standard would take that down to 0.85 ppm. Some perspective is needed to grasp what parts of per million mean. Around the circumference of the earth there are approximately 132,000,000 feet. Measured against that figure, the existing standard would mean approximately 15 of 132 million feet; the proposed new, tougher standard would tighten that standard down to 10.8 feet out of the entire earth's circumference. Behold the Puritanical exactitude demanded by our pitiless EPA masters.

The new standards are too much for one of the greenest and most environmentally sensitive senior members of Congress, Sen. John Chafee, R-Rhode Island. On Dec. 10, joined by other senators, Sen. Chafee wrote the EPA's Browner to express his disapproval of the draconian new air regulations. Some excerpts: "... With very fine particulates, the available science doesn't identify which characteristics of these pollutants are causing the observed adverse health effects. Because there are many types of fine particulates and the biological mechanism(s) that lead to adverse health effects is unknown, there is a risk that the proposed standard may lead to expensive controls targeted on the wrong aspect of the ... problem."

What says the EPA's own scientific advisory committee? More bad news for administrator Browner's true believers. Addressing Browner, the EPA's own Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee noted in its review of the science of ozone, "the EPA risk assessment issued in support of your proposal shows only small incremental gains in public health for areas that already attain the current standards" -- to say nothing of these new, proposed, tougher standards.

That's carefully understated bureaucratese for "you ain't got nothin' to show for it all." It gets worse. Gently, Sen. Chafee's letter demolishes the EPA's reliance on alleged health risks of the existing standards that are associated with neither "illness nor decreased life expectancy."

In other words, says environmentalist Chafee, keeping the existing standards and rejecting the EPA's proposed new standards, would gain us nothing in either category. Moreover, concluded the EPA's scientific advisory panel, "there is no `bright line' that distinguishes any of the proposed standards ... as being significantly more protective of public health."

Forced back on these facts, exposed for their dubious science, the Gore battalions at EPA demand that we take it all on faith -- literally because they say so. All this presents Americans with a dilemma: Can what we used to call self-government respond to aggressive regulatory tyranny by don't-confuse-me-with-the facts neo-socialist environmental ideologues? Can Americans find leaders capable of summoning the will to stand up to phony rules, staggeringly costly rules based on bad science, or on no science at all? Put another way, are we still a free country?

NEXT: A proposed Missouri Senate resolution repudiating the EPA's bogus new standards.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.