Who to believe?

I laughed at the EPA's announcement about US air quality. I figure I've already lost a few years by frequent visits to Kaohsiung. In this version of their announcement, the following caught my eye:

"The air is getting cleaner, but our standards are getting tougher," said Bharat Mathur, acting regional administrator in the EPA's Chicago office.

I was wondering about the announcement when I saw this. So I wanted to check up on Schwartz, and google led me to Harvard Magazine:

"The public and the courts long ago decided that it benefits the public to fund neutral, disinterested investigators to do research that supports public policy," says Joel Schwartz, an associate professor of environmental epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. "There are already numerous mechanisms to verify and correct shoddy research. This is not about public access. This is about industry access."

Schwartz speaks from experience. Both at Harvard, where he has done extensive analyses of air pollution's health effects in the late 1980s and 1990s, and previously at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where he did work in the late 1970s and early 1980s that helped inspire the ban on lead in gasoline, he has spent much of his time countering industry-funded campaigns to debunk his findings.

But this epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health himself got a three-year $196,000 grant from the EPA. Wait a minute, though--he's not the same one, according to the Clean Air Trust, which at one point named Competitive Enterprise Institute "adjunct scholar" Joel Schwartz the "clean air villain of the month". Of course Reason likes the American Enterprise Institute guy.