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May 16, 2007

Would you buy an asbestos study from this man?

He's back. Dennis C. Paustenbach, a.k.a. Dr. Evil, the science-for-hire consultant who rarely met a chemical he didn't like, is on the short list of potential appointees to the EPA Science Advisory Board Asbestos Panel. The panel has a crucial task: advising EPA's upcoming risk assessment for airborne asbestos, a killer that takes 10,000 American lives a year. Disturbingly, a number of names on the short list, including Paustenbach, have been paid defense witnesses for corporations in lawsuits over asbestos exposure. But Paustenbach's record of mercenary science goes far beyond that.

Paustenbach, you may recall, is president of ChemRisk, a San Francisco environmental consulting firm that specializes in defending big polluters. Working for Pacific Gas & Electric in the Erin Brockovich case, Paustenbach soaked in a hot tub full of water contaminated with chromium-6, the chemical PG&E had dumped in the drinking water of a small town, to try to show it was nothing to worry about. In 2005, separate investigations by EWG and The Wall Street Journal found that while on PG&E's payroll ChemRisk monkeyed with a Chinese study showing a link between chromium-6 in drinking water and stomach cancer, rewrote it to show no connection, and published it in a peer-reviewed journal under the original author's name. In 2006, the journal retracted the article because "financial and intellectual input to the paper by outside parties was not disclosed."

(UPDATE: Today a National Institutes of Health report concluded that chromium-6 does indeed cause cancer when ingested.)

But wait, there's more.

The EPA says members of the Asbestos Panel should display “absence of financial conflicts of interest” and “absence of an appearance of a lack of impartiality.” Last year, in an investigation of auto industry lobbying against federal rules on asbestos brakes, the Baltimore Sun found documents showing that ChemRisk and Paustenbach’s previous firm, Exponent, were paid more than $23 million by Ford, General Motors and Daimler-Chrysler to help fight asbestos lawsuits by former workers. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has documented more than two dozen other companies Paustenbach has worked for that have been sued over asbestos exposure.

And still more: At an asbestos industry conference last year, Paustenbach delivered a 30-minute presentation that was a thinly veiled pitch for asbestos defendants to hire ChemRisk. The video of the speech shows most clearly how chummy Paustenbach is with the asbestos crowd, but his words are damning enough. Notice how he uses the pronoun "we" in discussing the U.S. asbestos industry’s response to Congress’ proposed creation of a trust fund to cover claims:

It’s a complex subject, and it takes a lot of work and a lot of money to do them [studies]. But I can assure you it’s worth the effort. To the best of my knowledge in litigation that was traditionally lost in the United States, I’m not aware of a single case that has been lost when a high quality simulation study was done and exposures were considered de minimus.

. . .

It’s a shame to have to have spent, let’s say, $250,000 to do this study when it’s really intuitive that there wouldn’t be much exposure. But when it costs $4 million in the United States to work up and take a case to trial – that’s just the expenses, that’s not the outcome – a $250,000 or $500,000 study is a drop in the bucket. So when you heard yesterday – remember we turned down a settlement of $150 billion, that’s with a B, to settle the litigation crisis in the United States – these kinds of $250,000, $500,000 investments go a long way. If you’ve got 100 cases and it takes $4 million for the lawyers and consultants to get ready for the case and to take it to trial, you can see it’s a drop in the bucket. So when I hear people say, ‘We can’t afford it,” I don’t understand.

I think I understand. Paustenbach and his ilk are making big bucks helping corporations evade justice for threatening our health with asbestos, chromium-6 and other nasty stuff. They parlay their "expertise" into appointments on government panels, where they help their clients by watering down regulations. Then they can go back to their clients and charge more because their appointments to government panels increase their influence and access.

Want to tell the EPA how you feel about this? They're taking public comments through May 24.

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