Precautionary Tale

The latest environmentalist concept--the Precautionary Principle--seeks to stop innovation before it happens. Very bad idea.

Ronald Bailey from the April 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Really? Two hundred years ago, drinking from any stream, well, or spring could expose one to typhoid, typhus, cholera, and other diseases. In fact, chlorination has so improved drinking water quality with regard to health that people in the West no longer even think twice about drinking tap water. Unfortunately, more than a billion people in the developing world can't say the same; millions still die of water-borne diseases each year.

Proponents of the Precautionary Principle are trying to smuggle in a default position: The environment trumps all other values. Yet the panelists all pretended that the Principle is a value-neutral scientific procedure for determining which policies humanity should pursue. The fact is that the Precautionary Principle incorporates the values of the most extreme versions of know-nothing environmentalism. When challenged from the audience on this point, Breyman fumed, "We're talking about the survival of the planet and the human race here."

Breyman sees the Precautionary Principle as an essential part of a radical agenda to reshape human culture. He writes in his AAAS presentation, "Introduced as part of an overall green plan that included conservation and renewable energy, grass roots democracy, green taxes, defense conversion, deep cuts in military spending, bioregionalism, full cost accounting, the cessation of perverse subsidies, the adoption of green materials, designs and codes, green purchasing, pollution prevention, industrial ecology and zero emissions, etc., the PP could be an essential element of the transition to sustainability."

Jeff Howard later offered some corollaries to the Precautionary Principle that reveal just how sweeping a proposal it is.

The first corollary is that "the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof (reverse onus)." This means that "proponents would have to demonstrate through an open process that a technology is safe or necessary and that no better alternatives were available." Unlike the members of the AAAS panel, Boston University law professor George Annas, a prominent bioethicist who favors the Precautionary Principle, clearly understands that it is not a value-neutral concept. He gleefully told me, "The truth of the matter is that whoever has the burden of proof loses."

The result: Anything new is guilty until proven innocent. It's like demanding that a newborn baby prove that it will never grow up to be a serial killer, or even just a schoolyard bully, before the baby is allowed to leave the hospital. Under this corollary, inventors, scientists, and manufacturers would have to prove that their creations wouldn't cause harm--ever--to the environment or human health before they would be allowed to offer them to the public. This is asking them to prove a negative. How can someone prove that a new plastic will never, ever interact with any metabolic pathway in any plant, animal, microbe, or person? There is simply no way to test for all possible effects given the millions of different species living on the earth.

But is this inability to test for everything really dangerous? Howard thinks it's murderous. He warned the audience that humanity has been engaged in a "great global experiment since the dawn of the chemical age" and predicted that "death and disease will increase as a result."

The plain fact is that the introduction of thousands of synthetic chemicals has not resulted in increased levels of death and disease but has resulted in substantial health benefits and greater convenience and efficiency. Life expectancy has never been higher and, as just reported by the National Cancer Institute, even cancer incidence rates are going down. In addition, the Food and Drug Administration estimates that less than 2 percent of cancers are the result of exposure to man-made substances. Finally, the few bad actors, like some organochlorine compounds, have been replaced.

Under the "reverse onus" corollary, would-be innovators would have to demonstrate that a technology was "necessary" because no alternatives were available. Necessary? Like air, water, and food? This is potentially a very high threshold. Are antibiotics necessary? Computers? Microwave ovens? What makes something "necessary" or not depends on the goals that individuals are trying to achieve. Necessity is the mother of invention only to the degree that it is in the eye of the inventor.

This requirement of demonstrable necessity ignores a vital fact about progress: All technologies serve as bridges to other technologies, to ever-better alternatives. For example, without the production of fossil fuels, humanity would not be in the position to make the costly, knowledge-intensive transition to the solar/hydrogen future that environmentalists wish to subsidize into existence. One technology leads to another. As dirty as burning fossil fuels may be, they aren't a tenth as dirty as burning wood.

Embedded in the Precautionary Principle is the notion that we can anticipate all of the ramifications of a technology in advance and can tell whether on balance it will be a net benefit or cost to humanity and the environment. That's complete nonsense. To cite a single example, when the optical laser was invented in 1960, it was dismissed as "an invention looking for a job." No one could imagine of what possible use this interesting phenomenon might be. Of course, now it is integral to the operation of hundreds of everyday products: It runs our printers, runs our optical telephone networks, performs laser surgery to correct myopia, removes tattoos, plays our CDs, opens clogged arteries, helps level our crop fields, etc. It's ubiquitous. Yet no one anticipated--no one could have anticipated--how incredibly useful lasers would turn out to be, not even the wisest tribunal of environmentalist seers or panel of Federal Leaping Commissioners.

The same thing goes for items which eventually turned up on the environmentalist hit list: organochlorine pesticides. After all, it is not as though evil chemical corporations invented pesticides for the purpose of polluting the environment. When these compounds were introduced they were a genuine miracle; they saved millions of lives that would have been lost to malaria and malnutrition. No one could have anticipated that their persistence in the environment would allow them to accumulate in animal fat, leading to some reproductive problems in eagles and falcons. The data simply weren't there. Indeed, there was not even a theory of bioaccumulation. Only by gaining experience with these substances were we able to learn about their downside and eventually decide that other, less persistent pesticides achieved a better tradeoff between human benefits and harm to the natural environment.

A second vexed corollary is that "the process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties." At one point, panel member Breyman declared that we had to get environmental decisions out of the hands of EPA regulators. Sounds good, right? But what if the open, democratic process ended with a choice to exploit a natural resource in ways that environmentalists don't like?

The deputy administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, Andy Rosenberg, happened to be in the audience and offered an illustration of realpolitik to the panel's starry-eyed egalitarians. Rosenberg pointed out that if you allowed New England fishermen to vote on whether or not to keep the cod fishery open, they would fish it until the last fish was gone. Breyman responded lamely that if the fishermen did that, they didn't have enough information.

Other panelists suggested that the "affected parties" aren't just fishermen, but all of us. If we don't get the result we like at one democratic level, these panelists implied, we'll just keep shifting the definition of "affected parties" until we do get the result we like. But wait a minute. Does this mean that when one of us wants to engage in an activity that someone thinks may result in harm, we all get to vote on it?

Comments

Pingback| 12.23.09 @ 2:08PM

Is Global Warming Unstoppable? - Page 89 - PriusChat Forums links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…will not appreciate turning the principle around and examining the reverse idea of doing nothing if you can't prove a good reason for doing it. So, I'll be helpful in that regard as well. Precautionary Tale - Reason Magazine ...Environmentalists often liken technology and economic growth to a car careening down a foggy road. They suggest that it would be better if we slowed before we crashed into a wall hidden in…

Pingback| 12.31.09 @ 9:54AM

The constant economy « dw2 links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…Pacific Ocean. Other parts, however, made me think, “ Hang on, there’s another side to this story ” – for example, for some of the incidents described in the chapter about the Precautionary Principle, and for the section about nuclear power. This book is like a manifesto.  Mixed in with real-world anecdotes and analysis, each chapter contains a list of “Voter Demand Box” items.  For…

Pingback| 1.15.10 @ 1:15PM

Magenta Approaches to Biotechnology « No Hidden Magenta links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…when it comes to banning various proposed and actual biotechnological interventions. Both conservatives and progressives endorse the application of the so-called precautionary principle to bioethics. A profound attack on new technologies, the precautionary principle requires innovators to prove that their new technologies are totally safe before they are allowed to introduce them into the marketplace. And actually …

Pingback| 3.1.10 @ 5:51PM

The American Conservative » Ron Unz On Hispanic Crime: Nice Going, But So What If He’ links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…less safe. On immigration, the  Precautionary Principle must govern. I can already hear worldly libertarian pundits deriding this position.  Hasn’t the Precautionary Principle been  debunked as  incoherent? As Cass Sunstein writes in his book  Worst-Case Scenarios, the Precautionary Principle condemns both action (“Even if we don’t know whether immigration increases crime, so long as there is at…

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Brilliant article Ron. I did a college paper on "fringe environmentalists" and all of them seem to have the same fundamental hatred for innovation. Where those interested in human technological progress daydream of a future with flying cars and talking robots, environmentalists see bicycles and the return of de facto human slavery to a "benevolent" central power; think Demolition Man. Almost without exception environmentalists hate science fiction... I've always found that to be a revealing character trait.

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