That’s because industrial chemicals are presumed safe unless proved otherwise, under the 1976 federal Toxic Substances Control Act.
In other words, the EPA isn't _allowed_ to investigate products unless evidence that they are unsafe is brought before it. Makers get the benefit of the doubt.
Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.
And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.
All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just run your company.[1]
The environmental movement in America is worthless. They spent all of their time on lifestyle issues like battery cars, recycling, and global warming (issues that also line the pockets of their large donors) when there are real, profound issues like this. Even if the EPA can't act, how come only one crazy lady is working on building the case?
I wouldn't blame the movement itself. There's always a buzz around lifestyle issues because there's continual evolution. Every day millions of individuals make millions of choices, so every day the culture is changing in little ways. There's a certain portion of the population that is an easy target for the kind of education and advocacy that scientists are good at. Politics is a lot harder. It's harder to make people care, and the target audience is much more diverse. When it comes to people who aren't as well educated or who aren't members of the reality-based community, you need an entirely different message. You have to go toe-to-toe with industries that pay millions of dollars to lobbyists and trot out doctors who say you're trying to kill kids. And even if you try hard and do a good job, it's still boring stuff that's a lot harder to turn into a story than lifestyle issues. Would this article exist without a glamorous protagonist and the harm-to-children angle?
When it comes to people who aren't as well educated or who aren't members of the reality-based community,
Please. This is america. We don't need to talk down to people like this.
200/84000 = 0.24%. EPA doesn't have a clue about 99.76% of the registered chemicals for sale? Experts?
It doesn't take a rocket scientis or a member of the tea party to figure out something is odd-ball with that?
It would seem more politically feasible to say, here is some tax money. Lets test this stuff.
Because it looks like the original CA regs. requiring these chemicals was also written to "protect" the public? who's protecting the people from the protectors?
I didn't mean to rag on conservatives, though I guess my wording made it sound that way. I just mean people who aren't susceptible to argument with numbers and facts, the kind of argument you would be comfortable making, the kind of argument scientists are good at making.
It would seem more politically feasible to say, here is some tax money. Lets test this stuff.
You're suggesting the most politically appealing pitch would be science and government spending (on something that doesn't create working-class jobs.) I'm not an expert on politics, but luckily we do have an expert opinion to compare that to. The million dollar industry lobbyists thought the most effective appeal would be a scare campaign in newspapers and a venal doctor talking about imaginary suffering babies. They won. I think I'll trust them.
Because it looks like the original CA regs. requiring these chemicals was also written to "protect" the public? who's protecting the people from the protectors?
Whenever we let science affect policy, policy is open to revision, just like science is. We got seat belts right, we got a lot of emissions and pollution laws right, but we're never going to get everything right. It will always be a process of revise, revise, revise as we learn more about the science.
This is one of those cases where the old saying comes to mind:
Sunlight is the best disenfectant
Good news is that sunlight is cheap and easy.
Science needs to do science. Information needs to flow. right now, the system looks more a bunch of "experts" on the take or incompetent. More worried about securing funding, managing their careers, promoting their pet projects, etc. The [trust me] argument is a political failure, because of these demonstrated problems.
The situation is somewhat better with chemicals introduced after 1976. Any chemical that was in use prior to 1976 is grandfathered in, due to worries from industry that passage of the Act could suddenly call into question many chemicals then in use. Therefore anything that was already in use at the time is presumed safe and not investigated, unless significant evidence first piles up. The chemicals being described in this story (e.g. the PBDEs) are pre-1976, and hence not investigated.
Some of the older ones, like the PBDEs, have been the subject of thousands of studies and have since been taken off the market (although many of us still have them in our furniture).
--From the NYT article. There is alot of failure avoidance, it seems.
Edit: And also from the Wiki. you site:
The report further acknowledges that trade secrets are preventing effective testing. Sometimes the EPA does not even know what chemical the TSCA application refers to, and cannot report any problems because "health and safety data are of limited value if the chemical the data pertain to is unknown."[6]
This is going on with Fracking chemicals, at the moment.
The latter part is a major thing that really should be fixed, I agree. In many of these cases, it seems fairly clear that the invocation of trade secrets is pretextual (the goal is not actually to protect a valuable secret from competitors), and the real motive is preventing third-party investigations into chemical safety.
Well, EPA is really more "systemic" risk of chemicals, I think. It regulates chemicals at point of production and use mainly to prevent systemic environmental issues later on.
I was mostly wondering who regulates this stuff for point of consumption by consumers -- OSHA is pretty clearly focused on production or use in business, not in the home, and CPSC isn't really so "sciencey" as OSHA or EPA -- it's more concerned with grossly apparent problems with products like swallowing magnets and decapitation in cribs.
I don't know who proactively looks for risks of products in long-term exposure/normal use on a long basis. Arguably the non-consumers with the most to care about that would be health insurers, so either an industry association of those or a regulator or a government insurer (medicare/medicaid) would have an interest in doing something like Underwriters Laboratories.
Not that health insurers do such a good job at anything that we really want them to expand to looking at home furnishings and such.
More info here. TL;DR: Gov't still trying to figure it out.
GAO was asked to review the approaches used under TSCA and REACH for (1) requiring chemical companies to develop information on chemicals’ effects, (2) controlling risks from chemicals, and (3) making information on chemicals available to the public. To review these issues, GAO analyzed applicable U.S. and EU laws and regulations and interviewed U.S. and EU officials, industry representatives, and environmental advocacy organizations.
GAO is making no recommendations.
That’s because industrial chemicals are presumed safe unless proved otherwise, under the 1976 federal Toxic Substances Control Act.
In other words, the EPA isn't _allowed_ to investigate products unless evidence that they are unsafe is brought before it. Makers get the benefit of the doubt.