Articles of Impeachment

1. William K. Reilly has gone out of his way to ignore the con-gressionally commissioned National Acidic Precipitation Assess-ment Program (NAPAP), completed at a cost of almost $600 million over 10 years. In contradiction to the report, which found acid rain a comparatively easily remedied minor nuisance, he played it up as an environmental disaster and by sly maneuvers smuggled it into the Clean Air Act of 1990, knowing well that the NAPAP report characterized the tens of billions spent on coal cleaning to be without significant effect on acid rain.

2. To the contrary, William K Reilly does nothing to eliminate the real dangers of coal burning by ending the witch hunt against nuclear power. His underlings smear it with falsehoods of techni-cal problems with waste disposaL preferring disposal of coal-fired wastes in American lungs, and the resulting 30,000 premature deaths per year [Brookhaven Ntl. Lab. data.]

3. William K. Reilly has concocted data in order to fan an "ozone depletion" panic. In March 1991 his agency arbitrarily placed a "trend line" through the large fluctuations from 1978 to 1991, in bold defiance of the scientists who collected the data, and found a decreasing trend of ozone concentration only up to the solar activity minimum in 1986, and a subsequent increase with rising solar activity. For these eco-ritualistic superstitions billions of dollars are to be sacrificed by phasing out CFCs; yet not the slightest connection of CFCs with the natural ozone layer fluctuations has ever been experimentally demonstrated.

4. William K. Reilly's hype about 200,000 skin cancer deaths by the ozone layer leaking UV radiation is nothing short of a bold-faced lie. Skin cancer varying with latitude and season (as does the ozone layer) is not dangerous; the dangerous form of skin cancer (melanoma) is only weakly correlated with latitude and appears on unexposed parts of the body.

5. William K. Reilly's panic mongering with dioxin, typified by the evacuation of Times Beach, Mo., and the alleged dangers of Agent Orange, cannot be dismissed by an honest EPA scientist changing his mind with new evidence. The absence of harmful effects in normally used dioxin was well known from scientific reports at least since 1984 and probably earlier.

6. William K. Reilly has zealously kept up the ban against PCB, a fire-retarding coolant used mainly in large electrical trans-formers, forcing utilities to use combustible mineral oil which frequently catches fire from electric arcs or other malfunctions. Particularly dangerous fires resulted in Denver, Chicago and New York (nobody keeps any statistics) with material damage in the tens (100s?) of millions of dollars and the number of human casualties unknown. The ban of a material on the false grounds that it is a dangerous carcinogen is a weighty accusation by itself (see Am. C. on Sci. & Health Report 1985); but its enforcement in full knowledge of the alternative fire dangers falls little short of deliberate arson.

7. William K. Reilly's total ban of asbestos was overturned by the courts in Oct. 1991, unfortunately only on economic grounds. But the ban would have killed untold masses of victims due to inferior brakes and many other irreplaceable applications. Reilly pretended that the two types of asbestos, amphibole (not found in the US) and chrysotile, are equally dangerous and banned the export of asbestos to Third World Countries for cheap construc-tion of water supply pipes. So well aware of the purely political motives was Reilly that he skipped this paragraph in reading his entire decree at a news conference in Nov. 1989.

8. William K. Reilly has used totalitarian methods to silence those who disagree with his high-handed, anti-scientific eco-rituals. When internationally renowned soil scientist and NAPAP staff member Dr. Edward Krug pointed out the utter absence of supporting facts for the acid rain panic and said so on 60 Minutes, Reilly had his underling W.G. Rosenberg issue an official EPA statement smearing Krug with "limited credibility' and being "on the fringes of environmental science." Krug is now blackballed ("Are you now or have you ever been . . . ") and unable to get a job [Reason, Jan. 92]. Similarly, when the President's Council on Competitiveness downgraded Reilly's definition of wetlands (vir-tually any puddle, so long as its promotion to "wetlands" destroys property rights), Reilly's habitually close collaborators, the NRDC saboteurs, unleashed a press campaign against one of its members, A. Hubbard, maligning him with "conflict of interest."