Meet the EPA’s Ghost-Writer
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2019
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A scientist on the outer fringes of his field has been patiently making the case that the U.S. government applies far too conservative controls on toxins in the environment. Now, he’s trying to implement his ideas at the EPA -- by writing a sweeping new rule that could make the agency unable to regulate pollution & other contaminants.
Guest: Susanne Rust, reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today's episode originally aired back in February. It's one of our favorites. So in case you missed it, we thought would give you another chance to listen. |
| 0:11.0 | I mean, how long have you covered the EPA? So I never, it's funny, people keep saying I cover the EPA. And it's never something I've ever sought to do. And I've never thought of myself |
| 0:21.0 | as somebody who covers the EPA. What Suzanne Rust sought to do years ago was become a scientist. |
| 0:27.4 | She worked as a biologist at a fishery. But now she's a reporter at the LA Times, where, yeah, |
| 0:33.2 | she covers the Environmental Protection Agency. What I've covered is the way I like to think about it is industry's role on science and |
| 0:42.0 | environmental policy. And that happens to end up a lot in the EPA. |
| 0:46.3 | The scientific method still governs Suzanne's work. She thinks about cause and effect. |
| 0:50.4 | There are all of these influences around us, toxins or climate or air pollution that affect |
| 0:57.8 | all of us at a very fundamental level. |
| 1:02.2 | It wasn't until I became a reporter that I began to see that there were these connections |
| 1:07.8 | between not just the science of all of these things, but the way we understand |
| 1:13.3 | that science. And that really, really became interesting to me. I moved from just the pure science |
| 1:22.8 | and the interest in the science to what's controlling the way we're exposed to this stuff and who's deciding |
| 1:30.6 | how much of this can we have? |
| 1:32.9 | Suzanne was one of the first journalists to report about the danger of BPA in plastics. |
| 1:38.4 | Even now she keeps a close eye on how the government figures out which chemicals are risky. |
| 1:43.5 | Last year, when the EPA proposed a new rule for how they do that, she looked it up. |
| 1:48.1 | And I see this little paragraph in this proposal, which says that they're going to throw away the way they've done this for 40 or 50 years, |
| 1:56.0 | which is we're going to assume there's some harm and we're going to control around that. |
| 1:59.5 | And instead, we're going to look into the idea that maybe this is these chemicals and these exposures and |
| 2:06.7 | radiation are actually good for you. I'm just going to interrupt Suzanne really quickly because, |
| 2:11.1 | yes, she just said that the EPA is considering the possibility that exposure to some chemicals |
... |
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