It's official: your EPA Administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, is on Twitter.

Jackson's first tweet went up at 12:15 p.m. on Thursday, March 4. The post:

"I'm finally on Twitter! Any suggestions?"

A tweeting administrator was characterized by Jackson as part of the agency's larger effort toward greater transparency. This is a theme that has been repeated many times since the Obama Administration took office over a year ago. It comes directly from the top: President Obama issued his Open Government Directive through OMB last December.

Ostensibly, transparency from the agency is good. Transparency means the public gets to see the rulemaking process, to see for ourselves that agency regulatory decisions are not being hashed out in backroom deals. In the words of Peter Orszag, director of the President's initiative, "Transparency promotes accountability by providing the public with information about what the Government is doing."

Jackson has been talking the talk, but there have been some noticeable changes made in the name of transparency. This month, Jackson pointedly asked industry and the public to submit ideas for how EPA can become more transparent. In late December, the agency made changes to hazardous waste shipping so that transboundary shipments of haz-waste would require more documentation, which would be made available to the public. Also now available to the public are the chemical compositions of pesticides and other chemicals (so the public is left to make their own judgments as to what's safe and what's not, even after the agency's scientists give their opinion). Preliminary TRI data is going online as soon as it's collected – notably before certain important steps that would protect industry from a public backlash before everything's been explained.

EPA has already turned up some of its own dirty laundry. A report put together by a senior research scientist and a fellow at the agency questions some of the findings in the momentous decision by EPA to declare GHGs a threat to human health and the environment. Other EPA scientists said they considered the report, and didn't think it mattered enough for the final decision. The report's overall conclusion is that the most recent data on global warming contradicts the findings of the last IPCC report, upon which the agency's decision was largely based. It has since become political fodder for those against federal GHG controls, and the scientists who produced it have likewise become targets of ridicule for the pro-GHG control crowd. As usual, when it comes to topics of profound political consequence, context has been in short supply.

There is one potential downside of transparency: not everyone can be expected to act responsibly when given good information. Imagine if a faulty preliminary TRI report came into the hands of a local environmental group who didn't read all the fine print before telling the community that Local Inc.'s factory was killing their kids. Imagine the economic backlash against a fruit manufacturer using a pesticide approved by EPA but which includes a chemical that sounds scary. Imagine what political pundits, who be short on things like "context," can do with a good scientist's report that questions the basis of the agency's risqué conclusion.

In the coming year, there will be a lot more to see as the agency's transparency shtick kicks into high gear. This will be particularly noticeable in the arduous task of finally updating the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) database. In his letter, Orszag made it clear that "Timely publication of information is an essential component of transparency. Delays should not be viewed as an inevitable and insurmountable consequence of high demand." I think this means that we're about to be in for quite the ride as successive chemicals come under scrutiny. Oh, we may get to see each individual report as it's complete. But look again at Orszag's words: "inevitable and insurmountable," which are exactly the adjectives used in 2007 to describe the task of updating the IRIS process. In other words: there's no more excuses.

In a world where information is freely available, that can pretty much go for all of us!