"If you go down two or three levels in EPA, you have an awful lot of people that came onboard during the Clinton administration, to be perfectly blunt about it, and have a different approach than I do at Defense," DuBois said. "It doesn't mean I don't respect their opinions or judgments, but I have an obligation where our scientists question their scientists to bring it to the surface."
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How Environmentalists Lost the Battle Over TCE
THE NATION
First of two parts
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday March 31, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 71 words Type of Material: Correction
Risks of solvent: Due to an editing error, an article in Wednesday's Section A about the regulation and dangers of the industrial solvent trichloroethylene, or TCE, quoted Alex A. Beehler, the Pentagon's top environmental official, as saying: "We are all forgetting the facts on the table. Meanwhile, we have done everything we can to curtail use of TCE." Beehler actually said, "We are all for getting the facts on the table."
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The military has virtually eliminated its use of TCE, purchasing only 11 gallons last year, said Beehler, an attorney who used to head environmental affairs for Koch Industries Inc., a large industrial conglomerate in Wichita, Kan.
In its fight against the 2001 risk assessment, the Pentagon has gone to the very fundamentals of cancer research: toxicology, the study of poisons; and epidemiology, the science of how diseases are distributed in the population. This scientific approach has worked better than past arguments that cleanups are a costly diversion from the Pentagon's mission to defend U.S. security.
A few months after the 2001 draft risk assessment came out, an Air Force rebuttal charged that the EPA had "misrepresented" data from animal and human health studies.
It said "there is no convincing evidence" that some groups of people, like children and diabetics, are more susceptible to TCE, a key part of the EPA's report. And it said the EPA had failed to consider viewpoints from "scientists who believe that TCE does not represent a human cancer risk at levels reasonably expected in the environment."
But comments such as these are outside the scientific mainstream. Other federal agencies have also expressed grave concern about TCE and some experts say it is only a matter of time before the chemical is universally recognized as a known carcinogen.
"Do I think TCE causes cancer? Yes," said Ozonoff, the Boston University TCE expert. "There is lots of evidence. Is there a dispute about it? Yes. Whenever the stakes are high, that's when there will be disputes about the science."
The 2001 risk assessment found TCE was two to 40 times more likely to cause cancer than was found in an assessment conducted in 1986, a wide range that reflected many scientific uncertainties. Because cancer risk assessments are not an exact science, federal regulators have historically exercised great caution in protecting public health.
