The Center for Regulatory Effectiveness states the Environmental Protection Agency’s new “preliminary” ecological risk assessment relies on computer models to predict environmental effects from use of the herbicide atrazine. The EPA released a draft proposal last week that suggests atrazine is harmful to the environment. The Center says those predictions are not true, adding that there is no real world data showing that EPA’s predictions have actually occurred, despite atrazine’s widespread international use for more than 60 years. The center claims EPA’s unsupported accusations violate EPA’s own Model Quality Guidelines, which require that model predictions be consistent with real world data before they are used to regulate.