Tobacco Documents Online

R1E VIIEW & UQJTL®OK Rethinking Risk • When the new Republican Con- ridation of water. unleaded gasoline gress convenes in January, one of the and used oil. for which some evidence top priorities ought to be rolling back of risk exists, but which on balance do what Lamar Alexander calls the far more good than harm. The report "Waxman State" -the torrent of rules asks why similar decisions haven't and regulations enacted into law by been reached about other alleged dan- the likes of Congressman Henry Wax• gers. For example, when the EPA man (D., Hollywood). This is an espe- tried to ban asbestos, it took into ac- cially pressing priority in the environ- count only the product's hypothetical mental arena, where Congress and cancer risk-not the many lives that various executive branch agencies would be lost if nonasbestos brakes have spent years passing onerous are substituted on cars. rules to deal with negligible or nonex- There's simply no rhyme or reason istent rishs. behind federal environmental policy. Environmental regulation is the Even the "one chance in a million" source of much public outrage nowa- standard used by many agencies to days. Often the rules are a tangled define a minimum level of cancer risk mess because Congress's underlying turns out to have no scientific basis. leo slation was complex in its goals * Kathryn Kelly, a Seattle environmen- and impossibly vague in how to meet tal consultant. reports in the newslet- those goals. The real rule-making was ter EPA Watch that this standard was left to the bureaucracies, which in basically plucked out of a hat by the curn produced their own Rube Gold- FDA in the 1970s to regulate animal bergian complexity. Now comes evi- drug residues. Now it's employed for dence from a most unlikely source- everything from hazardous waste the gos•ernment itself-to support the sites to pesticides-even though scien- contention that emirontner.tal spend- tists have generally concluded that ing bears little if any relation to the risks of less than one in a thous and real nsks faced by the public. can't even be quantified. -~ The Department of Energy has "It's insane that we're spending just released a report titled "Choices hundreds of billions of dollars chasing in Risk Assessmer:t." prepared by imagined risks," Steve 141iIloy. author a nonprofit research group. The of; "Choices." tells us. agency has good reason to study the The road to sanity starts with more subject: It could spend 5300 billion to rational risk/cost-beneflt analysis. 51 trillion over the next 30 years Bills to accomplish that goal were in- ; cleaning up waste sites. Does the sci- troduced in the last Congress but got entific policy behind those cleanups- nowhere becau6e of opposition from and other federal actions-stand up Democratic barans. Now that there to scruiiny? are new Kings of the Hill. swift action I The report delivers some clear an- is expected on this front. swers: "Most environmental risks are But the new Republican majority so small or indistinguishable that should be careful about the language ~ their existence cannot be proven." of cost-benefit bills. As "Choices" Scientific policy is "inherently biased points out, many risk-analysis ideas and can be designed to achieve prede- have already been implemented via tdrrnined regulatory outcomes." "Po1- executive order-to no effect. What's icymakers, the media aad the public needed is legislation with teeth-set ( are unaware of the role of science pot- out clearly what standards bureau- icy because of a lack of full and fair crats should follow, and give compa- d~sclosure." nies and local governments the right '• Consider just one example: the Oc- to sue if regulators get out of line. GOP cupational Safety and Health Admin- Sen. Trent Lott. the new Majority istration is now proposing sweeping Whip. has introduced a draft proposal indoor air-quality regulations that along these lines, and Rep. Dan Mica would include a ban on all workplace (R.. Fla.) will probably follow suit. smoking. But according to "Choices," Passage of their plans would be a a,major part of this policy-estimated first step toward dismantling the to. cost the private sector 58 billion an- crushing cost burden of the Wa.trnan j aeally-is based on a one-page. hand- State, which surely played a role in the ~ written chart that has never been pub- voters' recent decision to part ways ~ lished or peer-reviewed. with the Democratic Party. The The "Choices" report praises the party's public tastes simply had be- government for not banning the fluo- come too expensive. , I