Bush to Wipe out EPA Databases to Hide Polluters' Records

Hidden in Bush's reprehensible 2007 budget plan is a proposal to shut down the EPA's network of libraries - a network that is used not just by the EPA's own researchers but the public as well. Not only that, but Bush wants to -LITERALLY - wipe out 50,000 documents stored in the EPA's electronic catalog. Many of these documents represent years of research and provide data available nowhere else. And it isn't like this library is some obscure little operation that is rarely used. Each year, the EPA libraries receive over 134,000 requests for info from its own workers. If you add requests from the public, the number of people accessing the database probably tops 250,000.

Any researcher will tell you that if the EPA library and database is lost, it will make it nearly impossible to track EPA progress in some areas - making it extremely easy for the EPA to hide any setbacks or lack of progress from the public. It will also cost taxpayers tens of millions in wasted research dollars as researchers have to spend resources on needless "do-overs." Says Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), "How are EPA scientists supposed to engage in cutting edge research when they cannot find what the agency has already done?" The plan, says Ruch, "will not make us more competitive if we have to spend half our time re-inventing the wheel."

Some of the information about to be access is crucial to public safety: data on the safety of chemicals and the environmental impact of new technologies are stored in the EPA library. So, if you want to track down a local business's history of spills and cleanup efforts and what the effects of a given chemical are, forget it! That slate will be wiped clean - helping the polluters, but not the public.

And that it what the primary motivation behind this Bush move is: to protect corporate polluters. Guess who uses the EPA library more frequently than perhaps any other group? EPA enforcement staff. Without the databases, there will be no way to support pollution prosecutions and monitor the history of a industry's pollution pattern. Thus, if enforcement officers try to take their case to court and make it stick, they will have one damned tough time proving a history of offenses. Once again, the polluters win and the public loses.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2006/2006-02-10-09.asp#anchor2