Shocker: Chinese air pollution debunks U.S. EPA junk science

The Chinese city of Xi’an has some of the worst air quality in the world. Yet its air is significantly safer than the air in U.S. cities, according to a new study. And if you have trouble believing that, then you ought to have trouble believing Obama Environmental Protection Agency claims that U.S. ambient air quality is killing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people per year.

Chinese researchers compared data on air pollution and death rates in Xi’an from 2004 to 2008. In 2006, the World Health Organization ranked Xi’an as having the second worst air pollution in Asia, which means the second worst in the world. The study was just published online (Jan. 3) in Environmental Health Perspectives. The city of Xi'an had the second worst air quality in Asia in 2006. Using the same sort of data and statistical analysis employed by EPA-funded air quality researchers, the Chinese researchers reported having statistically correlated every 10 microgram per cubic meter’s (μg/m3) worth of fine particulate matter (soot or PM_2.5) in Xi’an’s air with a 0.2% increase in the city’s death rate.

While that sounds like a result in the statistical noise range — and it is as the mean daily death toll in Xi’an is only about 26.2 — we’re going to overlook that normally fatal flaw and, instead, momentarily embrace the result so that we can compare it with what EPA-funded researchers claim about U.S. cities. In a 2009 study of 112 U.S. cities, EPA-funded researchers reported that every 10 μg/m3 worth of PM_2.5 correlated with about a 1.0% increase in death rate. Once again this is, in reality, statistical noise. But in the fantasy world of EPA air quality science it is five times greater than what Chinese researchers reported from the second dirtiest city in the world. But there’s more. Just how dirty is the air in Xi’an? As measured by the Chinese researchers, the air in Xi’an is, on average, 9-10 times more polluted in terms of PM_2.5 than the median PM_2.5 levels of the two most polluted cities in the 112-city study (Rubidoux, CA and Los Angeles, CA). And that dirty Chinese air, according to EPA scientific practice, is safer than U.S. air by a factor of five. This is shocking since if air pollution really was deadly, one would expect to see this phenomena operating in high gear in the respiratory horror story that Xi’an should be. Keep in mind that EPA chief Lisa Jackson testified to Congress on Sep. 22, 2011 that:

Particulate matter [i.e., PM_2.5] causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.

Leaving the fantasy land of EPA air quality science and returning to the real-world, however, clean U.S. air is axiomatically not more dangerous than filthy Chinese air and so some sort of explanation of these results is required. The scientific and medical reality is that PM_2.5 — even as high as it is in China — does not kill or hasten death. PM _2.5 was such a public health problem in the U.S., in fact, that no one knew about it until EPA-funded researchers invented it in 1993 with the so-called “Six Cities Study” — 30 years after the Clean Air Act was enacted. Concern for PM_2.5 — the primary and virtually sole justification for recent costly EPA regulation like the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) and the Mercury and Toxics Standard (MATS) — has been entirely manufactured and ruthlessly exploited by the EPA for almost 20 years. The agency has been able to get away with this scam because it has cleverly hidden key data with a clique of private researchers in academic institutions who are beyond Congressional and Freedom of Information Act reach. Obtaining the EPA data may no longer be so important for debunking purposes, however, given the emerging reality in China.

Steve Milloy——Bio and Archives

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and GreenHellBlog.com and is the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them

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