An important environmental principle might be coming back to bite environmentalism in the behind.

Some hybrid-vehicle owners claim to be suffering health problems caused by the electromagnetic currents from the vehicles’ batteries.

Sounds dubious, even if The New York Times says otherwise (“There is a legitimate scientific reason for raising the issue. The flow of electrical current to the motor that moves a hybrid vehicle at low speeds (and assists the gasoline engine on the highway) produces magnetic fields, which some studies have associated with serious health matters, including a possible risk of leukemia among children”).

But as Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, points out:

Environmental activists routinely use the Precautionary Principle as a weapon against technologies and products they do not like. They assert that until and unless a product they oppose can be definitively proven to be safe, the product must be banned. Now, however, when consumers and some scientists assert that one of the activists’ pet products may be causing serious health harms, the activists act like they have never heard of the Precautionary Principle.

Here’s one explanation of the precautionary principle that seems to suggest hybrid cars should indeed be recalled:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.

Seems pretty cut and dried, doesn’t it?

“Could you get Salmonella even if you had inspectors?“

It depends on how you prepared them before cooking and how thoroughly you cooked them.

Doubt if hybrid motors are just going to get pulled willy-nilly, but if they are unsafe, statistics will start to pile up, and the lawsuits will follow next.

Just as, if ethanol turns out to be a boondoggle, eventually ethanol production will be scaled back (maybe).

This is no blow to environmentalism.

It only means the magic bullet is not there yet. 

A real solution will happen. Just a matter of time, money, and effort.

It’s a balancing act that often goes off-kilter in one direction or another. Often a political football too.

I don’t know if people understand the recent Salmonella scare for tomatoes arose quite possibly as a result of the lack of inspectors at the FDA because of huge budget cuts.

Some would say that too many inspectors increases red tape and bureaucracy and is costly, but what could possibly be more costly than growers and supermarkets absorbing huge losses because the public does not trust their product ? I ask you.  The irony is that the inspectors protect the industry too.

Tell that to beef growers faced with 80,000 people in S. Korea protesting the importation of American beef as “unsafe”.

I for one favor a strong FDA, EPA, ADA, FEMA, FAA,and anything else that ends in the letter “A”, but I fully agree that it is a balancing act, not a simple or easy choice.

If you want to see lax environmental standards for comparison, look at all the toxic messes in the former Soviet Union or in much of Asia.

Could you get Salmonella even if you had inspectors ? Yes, of course, but not so easily. Impossible to check every single piece of produce.

It also relates to sanitation standards in the fields and how tomatoes are grown and harvested, but then that’s a big political football too and a whole other topic.

My previous career was in the field of environmental safety and health regulation.  This always has been the big public policy debate in regulating substances and/or activities.  Should we (1) allow substances to enter the market or activities to go on unless or until there is some level of proof (choose your level) indicating that it actually is harmful, and then regulate it as necessary to mitigate the actual degree of harm presented, or (2) if there is any reason to suspect a substance or activity might present some threat to human health or the environment, regulate, restrict or even ban it until it can be proven to be safe enough to allow it to enter the market?

Environmental regulation in its infancy stumbled along under principle (1), then there were some pretty well-known disasters.  The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire - more than once - because it was so heavily polluted with industrial and chemical wastes.  That spurned Congress to take some sort of action about cleaning up the country’s waterways, and the Clean Water Act of 1972 was the result (which of course has been amended several times since then). 

Then there was Love Canal, and other less well-known such incidents, which led or gave additional impetus to such laws as CERCLA (known colloquially as the “Superfund” law), RCRA, and HSWA. 

The Exxon Valdez and other events motivated Congress to pass the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA `90). 

Reactive legislation. 

On the other hand, some lab data showing rats got lumpy if force-fed massive doses of saccharin led to FDA regulation of the substance in the 1970’s and pulling it off the market before anyone even alleged it had actually caused any human health effects.  PCBs were banned in 1976 by the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) based on research showing them to be not only toxic in various ways to humans and other living organism, but they also persist in the environment and bioaccumulate.

Environmental legislation in the 1990’s and today tends to lean towards principle number (2) above.  The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 were the largest single piece of environmental legislation in the history of the U.S. - over 800 pages of legislation, which were only AMENDMENTS to the existing Clean Air Act.  One thing the amendments did was create a giant list of “hazardous air pollutants” (HAPs) and stringently regulate them, requiring use of the the most technologically advanced control technology in existence on the market anywhere, pretty much regardless of cost, based on data indicating that these HAPs posed some sort of threat to human health or the environment.  It was a huge deal and a permitting nightmare for lots of facilities all over the U.S. - and still is.

I can’t pull the titles of the books out of the dim recesses of my memory now, but I recall reading, back in the `90’s, two books, each one advocating the opposite approach.  Sort of a “free market” versus “protect everyone using an overabundance of caution” approach.

As I understand it, there is sound data indicating extended exposure to strong magnetic fields can have serious adverse health effects.

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