While the president* is over in Asia demonstrating his vast knowledge of the local cultures, back home, his administration continues to hire nothing but the best people. For example, at the Environmental Protection Agency, energy industry finger-puppet Scott Pruitt recently appointed a toxicologist from Texas named Michael Honeycutt to head up the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. And, as The Texas Observer reports, Honeycutt has some interesting theories about environmental pollutants. Plumb crazy, mind you, but damned interesting.

Mercury? EPA is “overstating” the risks of exposure and ignoring the fact that the Japanese eat 10 times as much fish as Americans. Arsenic? It couldn’t be unsafe because we’re not seeing increases in cancer rates that would be true if EPA’s assessment is “realistic.” Ozone? EPA’s ozone rules are unnecessary because “Americans likely spend at least 90 percent of their time indoors.”

But where Honeycutt really gets wound up is on the topic of air pollution.

For more than a decade, Texas has been in a tussle with the EPA over limiting emissions of smog-causing pollutants from power plants. EPA’s limits on ozone, a component of smog, have grown more stringent with time, and as the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s chief toxicologist, Honeycutt has attacked the basic underpinnings of limits on smog. Reducing ozone levels, he has said, will not lead to any significant health benefits and if asthma “were actually tied to ozone, you would expect to see the instances of asthma decreasing, not increasing.” Those arguments are contrary to the overwhelming scientific evidence that higher ozone levels exacerbate respiratory illnesses, particularly in children and the elderly.

At least Honeycutt will have someone to talk with over lunch. One of Pruitt’s other appointees to this board, from which he has purged most of the scientists whose findings inconvenience his longtime benefactors, is this guy Robert Phalen, who runs a lab at Cal-Irvine that studies the health effects of air pollution. Phalen, it seems, believes that we are coddling our children with too damn much fresh, clean air. From The Independent:

Speaking to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, Mr. Phalen told the audience: “Modern air is a little too clean for optimum health.” Mr. Phalen has also argued that the risks associated with modern particulate matter are “very small and confounded by many factors”. In a 2004 study, he wrote that, “neither toxicology studies nor human clinical investigations have identified the components and/or characteristics of [particulate matter] that might be causing the health-effect associations”.

Suck it up, snowflakes. Put on your diving helmets and get on outside.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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