An environmental organization that gained national headlines in challenging President Obama's selection of New Jersey's DEP Commissioner Lisa Jackson to head the Environmental Protection Agency is focusing again on New Jersey environmental regulators. In a news release today, PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) claims that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) re-wrote an air pollution study on the impact of dust from a cement plant in a Camden neighborhood to allay industry objections.
PEER says that e-mails it forced the NJDEP to release under threat of a law suit "depict a clubby, closed door climate in which the state regulators seek to assuage industry concerns even while keeping the affected community in the dark."
In objecting to Jackson's confirmation, PEER painted a picture New Jersey's environmental agency, under Jackson's leadership, as one that compromised environmental science and standards to satisfy business interests.
Read the PEER news release and related information links here.
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2 comments:
Frank - thanks for posting this. There will be more shoes to drop in the collapse of scientific integrity and politicization at DEP. The Camden dust study follows the Jersey City chromium and Dupont PFOA scandals PEER disclosed. More to follow.
But eclipsing this story is the fact that today's criminal indictments of Assemblyman Van Pelt (CAFRA and wetlands permits) and Harvey Smith and his aide, Richard Greene (Site Remediation approvals) both involve DEP .
Frank - your readers deserve to read Dupont story as well - from West Virginia Gazette based on reporting by NJN news:
EPA’s Jackson tried to suppress N.J. PFOA study
by Ken Ward Jr.
A couple of months ago, a major article came out in a peer-reviewed journal that indicated the federal government’s health advisory for water contaminated with the toxic chemical PFOAwas not nearly stringent enough.
The Gazette carried an article about the study, which was especially interesting because it was produced by scientists with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which is where Lisa P. Jackson worked before President Barack Obama picked her to be administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
It turns out that Jackson, while still running the New Jersey DEP, took a special interest in this study — to the point that she tried to block, or at least slow down, its publication in the publicly available scientific literature.
Back in October 2008, Jackson e-mailed Eileen Murphy, director of the N.J. DEP’s Division of Science, Research and Toxicology, saying:
I believe this paper should be pulled from submission for publication pending the results of a peer review by a panel of scientists. I believe the same requirement should be applied to all scientific papers by members of this department that are based on work they do for this department or data that they have access to because of their work for this department. I thought that was SOP now? If not, it should be."
Link to full story:
http://blogs.wvgazette.com/watchdog/2009/07/07/peer-epas-jackson-tried-to-suppress-nj-pfoa-study/
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