First sweeping carbon tax in North America Beginning July 1, businesses and residents of British Columbia (BC; Canada) will become the first in North America to pay a carbon tax on nearly all fossil fuels. Received with little opposition, the action could pave the way for other jurisdictions to set a price on greenhouse gas emissions, experts say. Announced on February 19, the tax applies to fuels such as gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane, and home heating fuel. The tax will start at $10 per metric ton (t) of carbon emitted and rise in $5
increments each year to reach $30/ t by 2012. After 2012, the government must decide whether the tax rate should change. The new tax is designed to be “revenue-neutral”—all of the $1.85 billion brought in during the next 4 years will be returned to businesses and individuals via tax cuts and environmental rebates. By 2012, BC will have the lowest total combined corporate tax rate (25%) among the world’s major economies, says Carole Taylor, BC’s finance minister. “The tax comes in slowly, ramps
OMB should rethink research evaluation tool A National Research Council (NRC) report released on January 31 recommends that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) modify the way it evaluates the efficiency of federal agency research programs. The report suggests that OMB move away from its current management-bythe-numbers approach and rely more on evaluations based on outside expert review. OMB uses a set of questions called the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to evaluate research programs at the U.S. EPA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and other federal agencies. EPA commissioned the NRC report in 2006 after years of having difficulty meeting OMB’s requirements. “During my time, EPA’s STAR [Science to Achieve Results] grant program for ecological research was cut due to a poor evaluation, and this led to congressional hearings,” says Paul Gilman, former head of EPA’s Office of Research and Development and a member of the NRC committee. The program was cut from $32 million in fiscal year 2002 (FY ’02) to about $8 million in FY ’05, according to NRC. The report criticizes PART
for focusing on ultimate outcomes—measuring lives saved, for example—instead of immediate outcomes, such as whether the research resulted in the dissemination of new tools or added to a body of knowledge. “Researchers can’t be judged on ultimate outcomes,” says Gilman, currently head of the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies. Such outcomes depend on decisions made by program offices and by the states, all of which are beyond the control of researchers, he says. The report also criticizes OMB for applying inconsistent standards to different agencies. “In an effort to satisfy OMB, EPA succumbed to using the number of papers each scientist publishes as a measure of efficiency,” says Gilman. “That’s really a crude measure, a lowestcommon-denominator measure. But even then, OMB accepted this metric from some agencies and rejected it from EPA.” In 2006, OMB faulted EPA’s Water Quality Research Program for using publications to measure efficiency. In 2007, the PART Appeals Board ruled that EPA could use the publications provided that the water program develops an outcome-oriented efficiency measure in the future.
up over time, and uses the revenue in a neutral way to reduce other distortionary taxes in the economy, which is just what economists have been recommending for more than a decade,” says Nicholas Rivers, an economist at Simon Fraser University (Canada). Initially, the tax will shave off just 5–10% of current emissions over the next decade, Rivers says. However, if the government chooses to keep raising the tax by $5/t each year after 2012, the tax would reach $80/t by 2022. “This is a price where you start seeing significant impacts on the emissions,” he adds. —JANET PELLEY
A representative from NASA told the NRC committee that PART examiners vary widely in attitude and experience. This strikes a chord with an EPA scientist, who says, “For PART, the [analysts with] MBAs arrive and expect us to tell them how we’re making progress on something we said we’d spend money on 5 years ago. But with research, you follow leads and surprises. That doesn’t correspond to the plan from 5 years ago.” The scientist, who was not authorized to speak on the subject and therefore requested anonymity, added, “You can’t really win with PART. If you do badly, you lose money. If you do great, you don’t get any extra money. Your budget just stays the same.” The NRC report recommends that OMB evaluate research in two different ways. An expert panel should evaluate “investment efficiency”, or how well an agency’s R&D portfolio, including the budget, is relevant, is of high quality, matches the agency’s strategic plan, and is adjusted as new knowledge and priorities emerge. For example, EPA currently uses its Board of Scientific Counselors and its Science Advisory Board to perform such expert reviews. “Process efficiency” or traditional input–output issues, such as the people, funds, and facilities as
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well as the services and grants delivered, can be handled through numerical assessment. For example, NSF asks external committees to conduct a portfolio-level assessment, called a merit review, every 3 years. NSF also tracks efficiency by measuring the time taken to reach a decision on research awards— 70% of applicants are informed
within 6 months. In testimony before the NRC committee, representatives from the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) emphasized that the substantial time and costs of complying with PART take away from these organizations’ primary purpose. NIH found that approximately
250 high-level staff worked fulltime for 3 months to comply with PART for the NIH extramural program. OMB has yet to fully evaluate the report, according to a spokesperson, who says that the findings will be reviewed and taken into consideration. —REBECCA RENNER
Interview
Great Lakes health data hidden head of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, State University of New York, says that he saw the report several times, and in a recent letter, he encouraged CDC’s director to publish it. Other reviewers reported technical problems, such as outdated information on the status NASA
The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) released a report at the beginning of February on health effects related to chemicals in “areas of concern” around the Great Lakes region. The nonprofit organization claims that the data were quashed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The Great Lakes region contains 43 recognized areas of concern, where nearby residents may be exposed to chemical wastes.
The study was commissioned by the International Joint Commission (IJC)—a Canadian–U.S. group that advises both countries on Great Lakes governance issues— and carried out by researchers at CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). The report, Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern, remains under wraps. IJC member David Carpenter,
of hazardous waste sites, and they are still waiting to see whether those problems have been rectified, Carpenter reports. The initial IJC call was triggered by a 1998 assessment from Health Canada. That report used data from the country’s public health care system to show increased hospitalizations for various diseases, more birth defects, and other adverse health outcomes in communities exposed to 17 hazardous waste sites
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on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes region. IJC’s intent was to get the same geographically correlated evidence for the U.S. side. Although such data have been published in the literature or are available in state databases, no one had gathered them together until the ATSDR report in question. Carpenter points to his group’s work, which provided evidence from New York sites that was quite similar to that in the Canadian report. He and his colleagues published data in the scientific literature last year linking elevated hospitalization rates from diabetes, particularly near the Hudson River, to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as PCBs. Levels of PCBs and some other chemicals have flattened out in the Great Lakes since the 1970s, but the current concentrations are still dangerous, Carpenter says. Even more worrisome is that “levels of new POPs are increasing.” He points to “an almost exponential rise” of brominated flame retardants—with structures similar to PCBs but unknown health effects—over the past few years. The report was scheduled to be released last July. To build a cohesive strategy to communicate the findings clearly once it was released at state and regional levels, in February 2007, ATSDR sent a final, embargoed version that was peer-reviewed to interested parties, including U.S. EPA regional offices, local citizens’ interest groups, and others, notes the report’s lead author Chris De Rosa of ATSDR. De Rosa served as director of ATSDR’s Division of Toxicology
