The EPA's Long War on Chemicals

By Alan Caruba

One of the shows I enjoy watching on the Science Channel is “How It’s Made.” All manner of things we use to enhance our lives start out as raw materials and the process of manufacture is a miracle of transformation.

Virtually all forms of manufacturing require some chemical element, often several. Given the indispensability of chemicals in society and commerce, does it strike anyone as odd that, if you were born after 1960, there’s a high likelihood that you grew up being told that “chemicals” are bad?

In 1962 Rachel Carson kicked off this bizarre notion with her bestselling book, “Silent Spring” and environmental groups have maintained a steady drumbeat of scare campaigns to drive home the message that chemicals are dangerous. However, it is rarely noted that most of the claims she made in her iconic book have long since been disproved by science.

One branch of science is called toxicology. Among its most honored truths, attributed to Paracelsus (1493-1541) is that “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.” This has been shortened to the statement that “The dose makes the poison.” The truth of this is obvious to most people and perhaps best illustrated vaccines. By introducing a minute element of a disease into our bodies, our immune systems can build resistance to it.

But problems arise when an ill-informed media latches on to the latest junk science craze and splashes misleading stories across newspapers and TV. Missing from virtually all of these stories are key facts – that a bunch of laboratory rats have been exposed to some chemical in doses far higher than would normally occur, for instance, or in ways that would never happen in real life, and then calling it a threat. But humans are not rats and this kind of sloppy science and extrapolation comes with serious issues of data interpretation.

This is one way in which the Environmental Protection Agency’s long war on chemicals is perpetuated. Much of the EPA’s abuse of power comes in the form of chemical action plans, which involve little oversight, even less transparency and little-to-no public accountability. However their power to over-regulate, remove valuable products from the market, and hobble commerce is almost unparalleled.

Currently in the EPA’s chemical action plan crosshairs are siloxanes, a type of silicone which, in turn, comes mostly from sand. Siloxanes are inert, non-allergenic, odorless and colorless. They’ve been safely used for decades in thousands of consumer and industrial products – everything from medical cream and sunscreen to automobile tires, high-efficiency insulation and spacecraft.

There are a wide variety of siloxanes, but the EPA isn’t saying which ones have been targeted making it almost impossible for outside parties to provide any sort of meaningful input to the process. If you wanted to stack the deck against something, that would be a great way to do it.

Another aspect of this latest EPA caper is that the agency draws much of its power from the Toxic Substances Control Act, otherwise known as TSCA. But TSCA is in the process of a congressional overhaul which will probably spill over into next year when a new and possibly Republican-controlled Congress returns in January. Why would EPA want to rush through a chemical action plan for siloxanes when it knows that Congress is still working on TSCA reform?

An unduly harsh chemical action plan for siloxanes could have devastating effects on our limping economic recovery. There is no single substitute for siloxanes that performs as well so industry would be faced with costly reformulations for their products and their manufacturing processes. If a particular business found this too expensive, they’d have to shut down, throwing more Americans out of work. If they can afford it, those costs would undoubtedly be passed along to consumers. And for what? No amount of research has shown any environmental benefit to banning siloxanes.

Since its establishment by an executive order in 1970, the EPA has become the master of misinformation and disinformation intended to drive all manner of beneficial chemicals out of the marketplace and to maintain a level of public fear concerning anything that involves chemicals. Siloxanes and the people who depend on them are merely in line to become the latest victims of the EPA.

It should be renamed the Ministry of Propaganda.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Destroying America One Environmental Law at a Time

By Alan Caruba

While America maintains the greatest military power in the history of mankind, fearful of another terrorist attack on its soil, it is being destroyed from within by the relentless imposition of laws that defy science and common sense.

Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) has introduced legislation to “reform” the 34-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act. Americans are hearing a lot about “reform” these days, having just had a healthcare “reform” imposed against the wishes of the vast majority. This bill has the support of the White House, environmentalists, and a suicidal chemical industry.

The chemical industry, like all others in the nation these days, is so fearful of the power of the federal government that it will agree to its own destruction. Thus, Cal Dooley, president of the American Chemistry Council, babbles about being “constructively engaged” in furthering the reform. Reportedly, DuPont, another chemistry giant, called the bill “a good starting point.”

The poison is in the dose.

It is one of the most ancient truths of science. It is the amount of a given chemical that determines its toxicity. We all take chemicals daily without any thought to this. Too much aspirin can be harmful. Too much of any of the vitamins, minerals, and herbal treatments can be harmful. Too much food can be harmful!

Everything has a level at which it becomes toxic. The proposed legislation would mandate that manufacturers submit health and safety data to the Environmental Protection Agency for 84,000 chemicals in use. The EPA has never met a chemical it has not wanted to ban, particularly if it has a use that is beneficial to human life.

This law has no purpose beyond expanding the authority and power of the EPA, an agency which is currently threatening to regulate carbon dioxide, one of the two gases along with oxygen on which all life on Earth depends!

If you think American companies do not conduct extensive testing of everything they manufacture, you do not know about the huge liability they face if they do not. By way of just one example, pesticide producers spend between $100 and $300 million to test a single new compound before it can be approved and made available either to pest management professionals or consumers.

The federal government has massive bureaucracies devoted to safety in all aspects of our lives. In addition to the EPA, there’s the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, the National Highway Safety Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission…to name just a few!

Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, addressing the proposed law, said, “It is impossible to prove that something is safe. You cannot scientifically prove a negative. Even water can be dangerous. They say this bill would make it easier for the EPA to ban chemicals that are known hazards. Hazards to whom? Laboratory rats?”

If you feed a laboratory rat enough of anything, it will become ill and even die. The environmentalists, however, subscribe to the “precautionary principle”, an idiotic believe that IF anything is believe to pose a threat to health, it must be banned from use. This is the guiding principle of the EPA.

Americans now have the longest life expectancy in the history of the nation. They live a lot longer than laboratory rats. They even recover from life-threatening disease through the use of drugs—medication—and other procedures.

If the EPA gets the power to ban 84,000 chemicals currently in use for a million different legitimate purposes and products, life expectancy will drop like a stone in water.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Christmas Kill-Joys

By Alan Caruba

I would like to reserve a special place in Hell for those people who, every year, issue warnings about “toxic toys” and thus add to every parent’s concerns additional worries about anything and everything they purchase for their children.

I was reminded of this when my local daily devoted a full page, plus scary cartoon illustrations, to the claims of a group in Michigan, the Ecology Center, citing an alleged threat from plastic toys that include the use of phthalates and other “chemicals” that will surely kill every child who receives one.

Here’s what the American Chemistry Council says about phthalates: “Most phthalates are used to make vinyl soft and flexible. From their use in medical devices to toys to cars to homes, flexible vinyl products help make our lives better and safer. And in hospitals and emergency rooms, they help save lives.” Such products are “high-performing and cost effective; their performance is difficult or impossible to match with competitive substitutes.”

The Council further notes that “Safety reviews by European and American scientific panels have specifically cleared phthalates for use in toys and in nail polish,” adding that “No governmental review has found any phthalate unsafe as used in products for the general public.”

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act will, as of next year, ban phthalates. Never mind the findings of scientific panels. Never mind the oldest principle of toxicology that it is the “dose”, the amount of any chemical or substance that determines whether it is unsafe, whether it is a poison or not. If you consumed too much salt, sugar or water, it would kill you.

There is, to my knowledge, no evidence whatever that phthalates have caused injury or death to anyone.

Do you know what actually kills children? From one to four years of age, the leading cause is “accidents”, followed by “developmental and genetic conditions that were present at birth", then cancer, also largely genetic-related. From age 15 through 24, the leading causes are “accidents” followed by homicide and suicide!

Consumers are being victimized by their own lack of knowledge about the use of chemicals while, at the same time, benefiting in countless ways from them. Pharmaceuticals, too, are “chemicals” that bring relief and recovery from all manner of illness and injury.

Plastic, a derivative of oil, has so enhanced our lives one could write a multi-volume history of how its use has been a benefit.

The problem is that the enviro-crazies don’t care about improving our lives. They are determined to deny humanity the benefits of modern life, returning us all to earlier times when epidemics swept over whole populations and destroyed them.

We are, as the expression goes, being nibbled to death by little duckies. A ban on DDT, a ban on phthalates, a ban on harvesting timber, a ban on irrigation to save some minor specie of fish, a ban on extracting oil from a tiny part of a vast wildlife reserve or of the thousands of miles of our continental shelf, attacks on “dirty” coal or “dangerous” nuclear power for our electricity needs, a proposed “emissions” tax on ranchers for every single cow, pig, sheep, and other livestock and poultry, and the list just keeps growing and growing.

Environmentalism has everything to do with its own perverted religion of protest and nothing to do with reality. Meanwhile, we find ourselves the victims of politicians who no longer care, nor bother to understand—if they ever could—the science of the issues. These are the same people who have destroyed the U.S. housing market and set in motion another Recession.

Much of the fear that Americans and others around the world endure is fed by the worldwide environmental movement with its locus in the United Nations. Its sole commodity is the generation of irrational fears.