BAD BUSINESS AT THE EPA…READ IT ALL
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=512699
With A New Ideologue In Charge, It’s (Bad) Business As Usual At EPA
By HENRY MILLER AND GILBERT ROSSPosted 11/17/2009 06:45 PM ET
The only things being protected these days by the Environmental Protection Agency are the insupportable, unscientific views of radical activists.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and her minions have gotten a 37% budget bump in their already-bloated funding — now over $10 billion a year — so she has to find problems, or even nonproblems, to solve.
As part of this effort, she has said that she intends to regulate according to “public confusion and anxiety” about what poses significant risks. This is a marked departure from her confirmation-hearing promise: “If I am confirmed, I will administer with science as my guide.”
Thanks partly to the lobbying and propagandizing of anti-chemicals zealots inside and outside the government, chemicals are the bogeyman of the hour at the EPA. The preferred choice for dealing with them is a bogus concept called the “precautionary principle,” which is already laying waste to Europe’s chemicals-based industries and pharmaceutical research.
An EPA hit list of important and demonstrably safe chemicals is about to be put through the regulatory wringer, and many are likely to be banned or severely restricted. These include bisphenol-A, phthalates, lifesaving flame retardants, the herbicide atrazine and fluorinated chemicals used to make Teflon.
There is no evidence that these “toxins” have harmed anyone at current levels of exposure. Moreover, what the bureaucrats may not realize is that the choice is not between these chemicals and nothing; industry and consumers will need to find substitutes, which in most cases will be less well tested.
The ideologues have lighted on a number of nonissues. One is the perseveration about the presence of trace amounts of certain “chemicals” that are present in our bodies. Report after report on activist Web sites and radio programs tells of common folk, even journalists, who have their blood and tissues assayed for a variety of chemicals, and are alarmed to learn that, yes, many are there.
Maybe these handwringers skipped science classes in middle and high school. Our bodies are made of chemicals! Given the sophistication of our modern analytical techniques, we can find infinitesimal amounts of almost anything we look for.
The mere finding of a substance, including a synthetic chemical — even one known to be toxic at very high levels — does not make it a health concern. As the 16th century scientist Paracelsus articulated it, the dose makes the poison.
Consider radioactive isotopes. Our bodies contain varying amounts of radioactive isotopes of common elements, including hydrogen, carbon and potassium. This is normal, a chemical fact of life. The presence of something does not imply that it is alarming and that it needs the attention of EPA bureaucrats.
Ironically, in recent weeks two of the favorite targets of the anti-chemicals crowd have gotten clean bills of health from objective sources: the American Journal of Epidemiology published a study exonerating dioxin as a carcinogen, and the U.K.’s Food Standards Agency confirmed that our dietary intake of fluorinated compounds is well below any conceivable toxic level.
The rationale for the anti-chemicals campaigns has shifted subtly over the years.
Initially the most common concern was “carcinogens,” but studies on a wide spectrum of alleged chemical threats showed no such risk. Then the activists found a new banner: “endocrine disruptors.” This was a good one, because of its vagueness.
They have not been able to produce evidence of concrete manifestations of the alleged phenomena, such as declining sperm counts or increased birth defects, so they have resorted to claims of “subtle neurodevelopmental defects” that are, conveniently, impossible to document.
How about actual human data on exposure and risk? Some are available, but when challenged to use them and to obtain more, the activists reacted with righteous indignation, decrying it as “human experimentation.”
Although this was absurd, it did expose their real goal: to maintain uncertainty about their claims and let the precautionary principle — “better safe than sorry” — do the rest. Such baseless and relentless alarmism has the potential to disrupt a critical cross-section of American industries, including pharmaceuticals, household cleaners, flame retardants, and agricultural chemicals — and to deprive consumers of useful products.
The EPA’s muddled machinations should not come as a surprise, because the agency long has been a haven for scientifically insupportable policies perpetrated by anti-technology ideologues in career and appointed positions. It has a sordid history of incompetence, duplicity and pandering to the most extreme factions of the environmental movement, all of which appears to be accelerating.
Again, no surprise, because Jackson herself is a veteran of 16 years at the agency, during which she developed some of its most unscientific, wasteful and dangerous regulations. During her previous stint, Jackson worked on Superfund (officially the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act), an ongoing EPA program intended to clean up and reduce the risk of toxic-waste sites.
It was originally conceived as a short-term project — $1.6 billion over five years to clean up some 400 sites (by law, at least one per state and, not coincidentally, about one per congressional district). But it has grown into one of the nation’s largest public works projects: more than $30 billion spent on about 1,300 sites.
University of California economics professor J. Paul Leigh has analyzed the occupational hazards of Superfund projects. He concluded that the risk of fatality to the average cleanup worker — a dump-truck driver involved in a collision or a laborer run over by a bulldozer, for example — is considerably larger than the cancer risks to individual residents that might result from exposures to unremediated sites.
(And consider that cancer risks are theoretical estimates over many years or decades, while worksite fatalities occur during the much shorter time of the cleanup.)
Putting it another way, the huge outlay on Superfund is a net killer of Americans.
Activism, mendacity and illogic are just business as usual at the EPA. How could anyone have thought that the new leadership would change things for the better?
• Miller, a physician and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, was an official at the FDA from 1979 to 1994. He is the author of “To America’s Health: A Proposal to Reform the FDA.”
• Ross is a physician and the medical director of the American Council on Science and Health.
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