[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 112 (Friday, August 12, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 12, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                           RISK A AND RISK B

                                 ______


                            HON. JIM SAXTON

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, August 12, 1994

  Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Speaker, the following speech before the New Jersey 
Society for Environmental, Economic Development offers another cogent 
argument for my legislation to create a National Institute for the 
Environment as an independent entity with a mission to improve the 
scientific basis for making decisions on environmental issues.
  The NIE would increase scientific understanding of environmental 
issues by supporting extramural, competitive peer-reviewed research, 
providing ongoing comprehensive assessments of current environmental 
knowledge and its implications, broadening and facilitating current, 
user friendly information about the environment, and strengthening the 
Nation's capacity to address environmental issues by sponsoring 
education and training activities. These activities are lacking in the 
Federal arena and are desperately needed if policymakers are going to 
make environmental decisions that will not cause undue hardship on the 
private sector and economic growth.
  I commend this speech to your attention and request your 
cosponsorship of the NIE bill.

                           Risk A and Risk B

    (By Merrick Carey, President, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution)

       Good evening. In 1967, a U.S.-Soviet summit was being 
     arranged and it was decided that LBJ and Premier Kosygin 
     would meet half way between the White House and the U.N., 
     where Kosygin was speaking. The halfway point is Glassboro, 
     New Jersey, and the Soviet Premier was driven in his limo 
     from Manhattan down the New Jersey Turnpike. He travelled 
     across what is probably the most famous industrial belt in 
     the world, from Jersey City to Newark, Elizabeth, Carteret, 
     and Rahway. Speechless, he saw the amazing array of gigantic 
     oil refineries, chemical factories and other heavy industrial 
     facilities, the sights and smells we in this room know so 
     well. Finally, he turned to his travelling aide and 
     whispered, ``Now I know why America is a great country.''
       It speaks volumes that a former communist leader 
     instinctively knows what so many of our present political 
     leaders have forgotten: that high levels of economic growth, 
     output and productivity, potently mixed with self-government 
     and democracy, have made America the most powerful nation on 
     earth, and arguably in all of history. I think the vast 
     majority of the American people understand this, and it gets 
     to the core of all our current policy debates. What is your 
     social or political goal? Do you want a powerful military? To 
     fight poverty? To clean up the environment? To roll back 
     crime? Those goals are probably not possible unless you 
     pursue policies that foster a dynamic private economy.
       Fast forward, if you will, to that same stretch of New 
     Jersey in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A visionary 
     businessman, Bill McCann, whom many of you know, came up with 
     the idea to link all the commuter rail lines that flow 
     through northeast New Jersey at one junction. By conservative 
     estimates, this project will generate 3000 jobs and over a 
     billion dollars in investment over a 7 year period. It has 
     been endorsed, on site, by a myriad of elected officials, 
     including former Governor Jim Florio.
       What has become of Allied Junction? It has been stalled, 
     held up, and delayed by unelected officials in the state 
     environmental protection agency and the Army Corps of 
     Engineers. If Bill McCann had not had the environmental 
     regulatory hassles from these agencies, Allied Junction would 
     have broken ground in 1990. They still have not broken ground 
     in early 1994. Unelected staff people at regulatory agencies 
     with uncontrolled authority can discount everything that 
     makes sense, and ignore the actual statutes involved, and 
     apply their own philosophies to monumental projects like 
     Allied Junction. And those philosophies have little to do 
     with generating growth and jobs.
       From 1985-1987, I had the good fortune to serve as former 
     Congressman Jim Courter's chief of staff, and I'll never 
     forget driving up and down Route 206 past dozens and dozens 
     of ``help wanted'' signs. It seemed they were in every 
     window. New Jersey's economy was literally booming in the 
     mid-80's, with full employment a reality, and a labor 
     shortage a potential problem. The kind of problem you like to 
     have. New Jersey's large corporations were hiring and 
     training, at their own expense, handicapped people to 
     undertake crucial corporate tasks . . . Not because the 
     government forced them to, or because they were being sued, 
     but because the companies needed their labor to grow.
       I don't need to tell you what has happened in New Jersey 
     since the late 1980s. In my opinion there are a number of 
     reasons your economy has imploded. Top of my list would be 
     the massive tax increases passed on labor and capital--by 
     both Republicans and Democrats at the federal level and by 
     Governor Florio at the state level--that have severely eroded 
     incentives to work, invest and do business in the Garden 
     State. Fortunately, Governor Whitman and the State 
     Legislature have already begun to roll state taxes back.
       A second area I would put the spotlight on is excessive 
     environmental regulation and ``the glut of special interest 
     groups now vying for attention in Trenton and Washington that 
     show little concern for insuring sound public policy,'' as NJ 
     SEED says in its charter.
       Somewhere along the way to the Endangered Species Act, the 
     Safe Drinking Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, 
     the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the Clean Air 
     Act, the Environmental Education Act * * * I better stop in 
     1978 * * * Somewhere along the way the environmentalist train 
     went off the tracks.
       The top 20 environmental groups in Washington will spend an 
     estimated $500 million this year to pursue their agendas. 
     Aided by these interest groups, the EPA has imposed 
     environmental regulations costing our economy over $150 
     billion per year. That figure is expected to rise to $185 
     billion by the year 2000. This outlay does not appear in the 
     federal budget, but it is reflected in higher prices in 
     stores and lower real incomes. It is a thoroughly regressive 
     tax, hitting rich and poor equally, raising the costs of all 
     goods, energy and transportation, and putting an annual 
     burden of nearly $1500 on every American household.
       As the level of regulation in the United States has grown 
     in leaps and bounds--measured in number of laws or in pages 
     of the Federal Register--we may be approaching the critical 
     level where in fact the economy is being strangled--where 
     enterprise is restrained, where entrepreneurship is stifled, 
     where jobs are not created.
       For this reason, one cannot stress enough the importance of 
     sound science in issuing environmental regulations. Recent 
     history is replete with policies begun on the basis of 
     nothing more than press releases that were not backed up by 
     peer-review scientific data. There are many examples where 
     science is ignored or misused in order to push particular 
     policies. There are even examples where science has reversed 
     itself, yet the policies march on as if nothing happened. The 
     scares over alar, dioxin, environmental tobacco smoke and 
     pesticides are only a few of the more famous recent 
     examples.
       The New York Times has summed it best: ``In the last 15 
     years, environmental policy has too often evolved largely in 
     reaction to popular panics, not in response to sound 
     scientific analysis of which environmental hazards present 
     the greatest risks. As a result, billions of dollars are 
     wasted each year in battling problems that are no longer 
     considered especially dangerous, leaving little money for 
     others that cause far more harm.''
       Consider the following examples of the tremendous cost of 
     senseless environmental regulation on businesses, 
     municipalities, and taxpayers:
       An analysis of Columbus, Ohio officials found that the 
     impact of complying with the weight of federal environmental 
     mandates on the city's budget would cost every Columbus 
     taxpayer an additional $856 per year by the turn of the 
     century.
       According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, EPA's 
     regulation of coke ovens will cost $682 million to prevent a 
     single instance of cancer. The cost of EPA's regulation of 
     the chemical benzine and the Clean Air Act's regulation of 
     air toxins would cost $5.8 billion and $6.5 billion per 
     cancer death averted.
       In New Hampshire, $9.3 million was spent a few years ago to 
     make a dump safe for ``children to eat small amounts of 
     dirt'' for 245 days a year, despite the fact that there were 
     no dirt-eating children in the area--and the area was a 
     swamp.
       While EPA regulates 83 specific drinking water 
     contaminants--many of which may not even be in a drinking 
     water system--it does not regulate more dangerous 
     contaminants that do occur such as the cryptosporidium that 
     killed 40 people in Milwaukee last year.
       Today's Wall Street Journal has a new item that beautifully 
     captures how far we have descended into the anti-growth 
     swamp: ``Come fall of 1995, pleasant bakery smells may be a 
     thing of the past as many communities throughout the country 
     comply with deadlines set by the 1990 Clean Air Act to have 
     industrial plants cut their emissions. The smell of baking 
     bread, it turns out, is a form of air pollution.''
       It turns out the ``yeast police,'' as bakers now call the 
     EPA, want the nation's large bakers to spend millions of 
     dollars to install new emissions controls. When flour, water 
     and yeast are kneaded together and heated, they create 
     ethanol, a non-toxic substance that contributes to ozone 
     formation. State regulators admit that bread ethanol emission 
     ``is not very much'' but they have to look everywhere to 
     comply with the radical new federal standards.
       The 1990 Clean Air Act is thus far the penultimate 
     environmental act. One title of this law deals with air 
     toxics, the emission of substances that could conceivably 
     cause cancer. The problem is that the cancer risk is 
     calculated for a susceptible person who is maximally exposed 
     to the atmosphere for 70 years, and that the risks are 
     computed based on dubious scientific data. Furthermore, the 
     analysis neglects the obvious: the fact that the person, like 
     you and me, will be indoors for much of his life exposed to 
     an indoor air quality that is likely to be much more 
     hazardous. Even so, cancer risk, normally about 25 
     percent, would be reduced to only 24.99999 Percent, but at 
     a multi-billion dollar cost that could have been used to 
     save many more lives by reducing more immediate risks. Or 
     perhaps giving the beleaguered taxpayer or entrepreneur 
     (or baker) a break.
       In Greek mythology, the gods punished a man by making him 
     too successful. It may be that the anti-growth environmental 
     movement reached its zenith when the Clean Air Act passed in 
     1990--and the debacle that has resulted from its passage. Now 
     every environmental initiative in Congress is being 
     scrutinized and risk assessment and cost-benefit requirements 
     are seeping into every environmental debate.
       In response to the explosion in environmental regulatory 
     costs and the government's practice of spending enormous 
     amounts of money to reduce small risks instead of big risks, 
     Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Congressman Richard 
     Zimmer have introduced the ``Environmental Risk Reduction 
     Act'' to ensure that the billions spent by the American 
     people on environmental protection is better targeted at 
     reducing the ``most serious and probable risks.''
       The Moynihan-Zimmer bill is designed to sharpen the public 
     debate over risk assessments and require the EPA to set risk 
     reduction priorities based on sound scientific analyses.
       Specifically, the bill would create two expert commissions 
     that would provide the EPA with advice on the ranking of 
     relative risks and on estimating the costs and benefits of 
     reducing risks to human health and natural resources. The 
     bill also creates a risk reduction research program that 
     would improve the data, methodology, and accuracy of the 
     government's risk assessments.
       For example, if the public knew that an average-sized plate 
     of shrimp contains trace arsenic levels of 30 parts per 
     billion, would they choose to continue paying for a costly 
     EPA water quality rule limiting arsenic levels to no more 
     than 2 to 3 parts per billion?
       Similarly, would the public agree with the 
     environmentalists' dream of banning the commercial use of 
     pesticides (thereby raising prices of fruits and vegetables 
     and throwing thousands of farmers out of work) if they were 
     informed of the fact that there are more known carcinogens 
     consumed by drinking one cup of coffee than the amount of 
     potentially carcinogenic pesticide residues the average 
     person eats in a year?
       Right now, however, the public isn't aware that they have 
     such a choice. ``Relative risk ranking and cost benefit 
     analyses are tools,'' according to Senator Moynihan. ``Crude 
     tools, yes, but perhaps sufficient in some cases to rank 
     activity A as more risky than activity B. If the costs or 
     political realities dictate that we should control B before 
     A, then great!''
       In recent months, the U.S. Congress has responded to the 
     public's growing concern about excessive environmental 
     regulation. Last spring, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote 
     of 96 to 3, the U.S. Senate passed legislation sponsored by 
     Senator Bennett Johnston and Congressman John Mica 
     requiring EPA to perform extensive cost benefit and risk 
     analysis to each regulation it issues. Earlier this year, 
     the House of Representatives shelved the bill to elevate 
     the EPA to a cabinet department because it did not include 
     the Johnston-Mica provision.
       Proponents of the Johnston-Mica legislation plan to offer 
     it as an amendment to every piece of environmental 
     legislation that the Congress considers until it is approved. 
     Therefore, in order for the environmental movement to advance 
     its ambitious legislative agenda in this Congress, it must 
     accept some form of expanded cost benefit and risk analysis 
     for environmental decisions.
       This week, risk assessment language is being discussed in 
     strategy sessions on the Superfund bill, and risk assessment 
     language is in the Safe Drinking Water bill that is heading 
     for the Senate Floor. If the Johnston-Mica legislation is too 
     much for environmentalists to swallow, then they ought to 
     consider the Moynihan-Zimmer approach. This bill could be the 
     ticket to a sensible, bipartisan compromise that would help 
     both the environment and the economy by prioritizing 
     environmental problems and lessening excessive environmental 
     regulatory costs.
       I'm going to close with what some might consider a radical 
     statement, but a view that I think gets to the heart of the 
     current environmental debate. If you accept the fact that we 
     have limited resources to deal with environmental problems, 
     you need to make a choice between low risk, which is ``A,'' 
     and high risk, which we will call ``B.'' You can make a 
     choice for ``A,'' to throw money at low risks, but if you 
     make that choice, you will have to live with more suffering, 
     more cancer and more deaths than if you choose ``B.''
       That is a statement that will be categorically rejected by 
     many in the environmental movement and at the regulatory 
     agencies. But I believe it is very hard to refute.

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