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Some of you may be familiar with the Precautionary
Principle, well established in Europe and Canada, and slowly gaining traction
here in the US. This spring I
wrote a brief introduction to the Precautionary Principle for the online
newsletter of Commonweal Institute, for which I am a volunteer research/writer.
The brief is attached (25 KB) for
those interested in the references embedded in it. As a follow-up, let me add that the Superfund is broke,
due largely to the fact that Bush2 has removed the imposed fees on the petro
industry that funded most of the superfund projects. Cleanups across the country are not just stranded but, as
with the City and Port of Portland, finding it difficult to attract new business
to a declared environmental disaster but without the means (or polluting culprits)
to fund the clean up. One of the
best features of PP, in my opinion, is building assurance bonds into projects
from the beginning, much as large construction projects are required to do, to
make the initiators responsible in the future if something goes wrong, not the
taxpayers. As below, it is not
just better to be safe than sorry, it is also cost-effective. - KWC Study
Finds Net Gain From Pollution Rules By Eric Pianin, Washington Post
Staff Writer, Saturday, September 27, 2003; Page A01 @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7586-2003Sep26.html A new White House
study concludes that environmental regulations are well worth the costs they
impose on industry and consumers, resulting in significant public health
improvements and other benefits to society. The findings overturn a previous
report that officials now say was defective. The report, issued
this month by the Office of Management and Budget, concludes that the health
and social benefits of enforcing tough new clean-air regulations during the
past decade were five
to seven times greater in economic terms than were the costs of complying with
the rules.
The value of reductions in hospitalization and emergency room visits, premature
deaths and lost workdays resulting from improved air quality were estimated between $120 billion and $193
billion
from October 1992 to September 2002. By comparison,
industry, states and municipalities spent an estimated $23 billion to $26 billion to retrofit plants and facilities and make other changes to comply with new
clean-air standards, which are designed to sharply reduce sulfur dioxide,
fine-particle emissions and other health-threatening pollutants. The report provides
the most comprehensive federal study ever of the cost and benefits of
regulatory decision-making. It has pleasantly surprised some environmentalists
who doubted the Bush administration would champion the benefits of government
regulations, and fueled arguments that the White House should continue pushing
clean-air standards rather than trying to weaken some. "I'm sure the true believers in
the Bush administration will brand this report as true heresy because it defies
the stereotype of burdensome, worthless regulations," Sen. Richard J.
Durbin (D-Ill.) said yesterday. "They clearly don't understand that the
government regulations are there to protect you -- and they work." John D. Graham,
director of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which produced
the study, said: "Our role at OMB is to report the best available
estimates of benefits and costs, regardless of whether the information favors
one advocacy group or another. In this case the data show that the Environmental
Protection Agency's clean-air office has issued some highly beneficial
rules." But an industry
official said the report may have greatly understated the costs associated with
environmental regulations. Jeffrey Marks, a clean-air policy expert with the
National Association of Manufacturers, said EPA "has traditionally
underestimated the costs of regulations on industry. . . . The tendency to
choose benefit numbers to correspond to favorable policy choices is strong
within the agency." The
findings are more startling because a similar OMB report last year concluded
that the cost of compliance with a given set of regulations was roughly
comparable to the public benefits. OMB now says it had erred last year by vastly understating
the benefits of EPA's rules establishing national ambient air quality standards for ozone and
for particulate matter -- a major factor in upper respiratory, heart and lung disorders. Also, last year's report covered the
previous six years and did not account for the beneficial effects of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act that sharply reduced the
problem of acid rain. …"The bottom line is that the benefits from major environmental
rules over the past 10
years were [five to
seven] times greater than the costs," said Kevin Curtis of the National
Environmental Trust. "And that's a number that can't be ignored, even by
an administration that has blamed 'excessive' environmental regulations for
everything from the California energy crisis to last month's blackout to job
losses to the failing economy."
(end of
excerpts) |
Precautionary Principle April 2003.doc
Description: MS-Word document
