EPA’s new science advisers add more industry experts, conservatives to the mix, by Juiet Eliperin.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt … has placed 66 new experts on three different EPA scientific committees, many of whom hail from industry or state government, and espouse more conservative views than their predecessors. Two of the new chairs — Texas’s top toxicologist, Michael Honeycutt  … and consultant Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox … — have harshly criticized the way the EPA has conducted science in the past.

Honeycutt has accused the EPA of “overstating” the risks associated with mercury, a neurotoxin, and of disregarding “good science which demonstrates a chemical is not as toxic as it thinks it is.” Cox wrote that the EPA’s methods for calculating the public health benefits of stricter national smog standards are “unreliable, logically unsound, and inappropriate for drawing causal inferences.”

Under a policy Pruitt instituted last week, scientists receiving EPA funding cannot serve as the agency’s advisers. Seven advisers stepped down rather than relinquish their grants, agency officials said, while two opted to forego the federal money in order to continue serving.

James Delingpole comments:

In WaPo’s eyes this is clearly an undesirable move. But actually it’s a vital correction. For years, the leftist bureaucrats, technocrats and activist scientists at the EPA have been waging war on the U.S. economy under the guise of protecting the environment. Leavening that mix with a few conservatives and people from industry should reduce its ability to do any more harm. As for the new policy on funding: how can you possibly be both an adviser to an agency and a recipient of its grant funding? This grantee cronyism should never have been allowed in the first place. …

And on Trump’s proposals to withdraw subsidies from the electric car and renewables industries:

Squeal piggies, squeal. Your giant, ugly, inefficient, bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes have trashed wildlife, blighted views, reduced property values, engendered insomnia and ill-health – all while raking fat profits for rent-seekers at the expense of the poor saps (taxpayers again) who have to subsidize these monstrosities.

hat-tip Charles, Scott of the Pacific