Thread by @EricLiptonNYT

Remember those "Super Polluting Trucks" that EPA's Scott Pruitt moved to protect by creating a loophole in federal law to allow large numbers of them to be on nation's highways. Some pretty extraordinary new FOIAs show how flawed study is EPA relied on. (Will explain in tweets)

Here is the NYT story I did in Feb on the topic, which shows how a major campaign donor to a House lawmaker from Tenn helped get this loophole from Pruitt nytimes.com/2018/02/15/us/…

The letters obtained via open records request show that the principal investigator at Tenn Tech who conducted study funded by Fitzgerald, the company that makes the so-called glider trucks, disavowed the work, saying that it had been distorted in a fraudulent way.

Here is a giant collection of documents I assembled on this topic. It is important stuff. Bottom line, these trucks the EPA wants to allow on the road spew 40 to 55 times the air pollution of other new trucks on the highways. documentcloud.org/documents/4378…

Thanks to Southern Environmental Law Center which sued to get copies of all these documents related to the Fitzgerald-funded glider truck study at @tennesseetech. There are now thousands of pages of internal documents public. Transparency matters. It is the public's right to know

Finally, here is a direct link to those memos from the principal investigator on the study, who resigned his position on the research project claiming academic fraud and conflicts of interest. documentcloud.org/documents/4378…

NYT has also written a piece about how TennTech withdrew this study after our story was published in February, and told EPA to no longer rely on it. These new memos give more detail on why that happened. FYI, EPA action on this is still pending. nytimes.com/2018/02/21/adm…

The EPA's Science Advisory Board is taking up this topic tomorrow. Its work group notes that there is “uncertainty about what scientific work, if any, would
support” the action by Pruitt to create the loophole for these trucks.