Scientists learn pretty quickly to turn a deaf ear to abuses of fact and distortions of data. The reality is that if you tried to correct every huckster who makes outlandish claims for this diet pill or that new age “cleanse,” you’d quickly find yourself engaged in a full-time and futile effort.
There are times, though, when you can’t look the other way. When science is being bent into particularly unspeakable positions or when the perpetrator is someone others look to with trust, it is necessary to speak up and say, “Enough – this must be corrected; the truth must be told!”
Just such an occasion arises with the latest chapters in California’s ongoing effort to implement its four-year old Green Chemistry Initiative, which seeks to identify “chemicals of concern” in products made or sold in California and, where possible, establish a way to manufacture them with safer materials.
The state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control is charged with writing the rulebook for green chemistry. The staff got this job because they are, allegedly, the smart people in the room, the regulators who understand science and its intersection with commerce. Yet, time after time, the DTSC speaks and writes with no more scientific rigor than a late-night infomercial.
In promoting its latest version of green-chemistry regulations, the DTSC director tells audiences the need for the regulations stems from the fact that there are 100,000 chemicals used in commerce today and that science understands very little about many of them. It’s simply not true.
It’s not even clear how the DTSC arrives at this mythical number. The Environmental Protection Agency maintains a massive inventory under the Toxic Substances Control Act, but even that list doesn’t approach 100,000. In fact, the EPA inventory includes every chemical that ever underwent a pre-manufacture notification process, regardless of whether it was actually manufactured, used in commerce or vanished into oblivion. Chemicals that have been discontinued or that never saw life outside of the lab remain on the list forever.
The number of 100,000 chemicals used in commerce is invoked to imply harm, not unlike warning that you should be worried about the millions of chemicals that are in and around your body. In fact, we exist in a veritable sea of chemicals; indeed, we are chemicals. Some are natural and some are man-made but neither group is intrinsically more or less safe. Synthetic chemicals to be used in commerce are subjected to several kinds of testing before their commercialization.
Exaggerated claims about chemicals are nothing new, but now they are emanating not only from environmental extremists, but from California regulators. Those trusted with being the cooler heads in the discussion, those who are paid to know better and to protect the public interest, are stealing lines (and ideas) from the radicals. It’s very worrisome, like seeing your doctor holding a deep-fried Twinkie in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Unfortunately, this disregard for science is reflected in the proposed rulebook itself.
Rather than building a science-based process to evaluate chemicals, regulators opted to take a shortcut and adopt a massive “list of lists.” Like most science shortcuts, this move yielded embarrassing results: substances now identified as “of concern” now include things like coffee and air.
Perhaps most difficult to watch has been the DTSC’s attempts to explain its decision to forego any kind of scientific process by which it will establish risk categories for chemicals and products. Will it choose to regulate chemicals with the potential to cause skin irritation? Or will it limit its focus to those that could lead to cancer? What will it do when consumer health interests clash with environmental concerns?
These are difficult questions that should be governed by a clearly articulated, scientific and transparent process. Instead, the DTSC says it will use something it calls a “narrative process,” which seems to mean “we’ll make it up as we go along.”
There is enough mystery and invisibility involved in their described regulatory process to fill an eighth Harry Potter book.
It’s difficult to imagine why an agency charged with creating a science-based process would take such deliberate steps away from science. Is it an attempt to create an underground regulatory process where a vague process can be used to justify any decision? Or is it a concession to environmental activists, whose tactics thrive best in a climate of nescience and political correctness?
Either way, it’s a scary proposition. Because, while regulatory systems built on myth may crumble and fail, their negative effects on consumers and markets can remain in place for decades.
