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Society of Regulatory |
QUESTIONS FOR PANEL 3
GEORGE PARRIS, American Wood Preservers Institute. At the risk of being the most unpopular person here by dragging this thing out, I think it is worth pointing out, or at least my opinion -- I am not necessarily speaking for my Institute at this point -- I think this panel is very interesting. You make the assumption that this is all driven by public health. I think public health has very little to do with many EPA policies at this point. I believe their entire policies regarding the risk assessment policy, at least how they implement the risk assessment policy and particularly dioxin has to do a lot more with some social agendas tied to some political agendas that have very little interest in public health. It always interests me when you come in and you say, we have got great news. Dioxin isn't a hazard. Why aren't we all celebrating? This gentlemen, you know, nobody is for dioxin. We have discovered that it is not a problem. Everybody should be happy. The people who are not happy are the ones who want it to be a problem. The reason they want it to be a problem has nothing to do with public health. It allows them to regulate combustion, which allows them to regulate recycling and there is a whole chain of events like this which comes unglued if you unglue the risk assessment and if you unglue the dioxin risk assessment in particular. I think we are kidding ourselves if we are sitting here thinking that it has some public health implications, because it is really driven by some other factors which are very large and very highly obscured. DR. GRAY: Without commenting on whether those sorts of motives are really happening, one of my concerns is that, no matter why these decisions are made, they do have public health implications. MR. PARRIS: Absolutely. DR. GRAY: For example, we did our quick little thing with chloroform and ethylene dibromide. We chose chloroform. It wasn't really a risk. Those 68 people who are going to be harmed by ethylene dibromide were ignored. They were not helped. There are public health implications because we made the wrong decision. When we focus in the wrong place, for whatever reason we do, there are public health implications to that. MR. PARRIS: I will follow up with one question. Exactly your point, I would agree with it entirely. What is happening is that frequently we are being forced into making the wrong decision because we make the wrong assumption about public health. One of my hot buttons -- because I have a whole lot to do with this directly -- the recycling issue. I would argue that if something is not economical to recycle it is probably not environmentally sound to recycle it. The economy is driven by consumption of energy and all that sort of thing, transportation, et cetera. All of those things have environmental impacts. This ties into dioxin because it has to do with recycling plastics and paper and all those sorts of things. I agree entirely with your point. MR. JOHN COHRSSEN, the Public Health Policy Advisory Board. As a former counsel to the Committee on Commerce, I have got a question for the last speaker. I thought you made an excellent presentation, raised a number of serious questions. I was wondering, given this level of concern from the Commerce Committee, will the Commerce Committee, will Chairman Bliley raise any of these issues to EPA or has he already raised these. If so, what has been the response? MR. STANKO: I think the chairman has raised these issues to EPA in a great number of contexts. One that I will go over quickly is, during the hearings that we had on the new ozone and particulate matter standards, we found a whole range of comments on the science that had been made by other federal agencies that were not really, I think, addressed sufficiently in some of the EPA dockets. I want to choose my words carefully here. I do think that one of the benefits of those hearings was that we were able to get out into the public venue some of the concerns expressed by some of the other federal agencies about some of the analysis and the regulatory impact and some of the costs and benefits of this. Mr. Bliley has been a real champion of sound science in EPA. He filed an amicus brief in the chloroform case on that. In a number of other contexts that time precludes me from going into, we have pressed it with the Agency. I think the committee has a long history of doing that and we will be doing that the next Congress as well. MR. COHRSSEN: My specific point was on dioxin. MR. STANKO: I don't see why dioxin would be any different than other contexts in which we have pursued this matter. MR. QUILL: I think it was a very good point that many panelists made concerning about how the public just isn't going to understand the dioxin reassessment. I will give you an example. I was talking to my wife. She has a scientific background, but is basically a businessperson. She said, what is the worst thing that can happen. She said, yes, I know about that cancer stuff, but what about non-cancer effects? I said, well, some people are claiming a decrease in IQ of four points. She said, well, Terry, it appears that you have been exposed 10 or 15 times. It just goes to show how some people just don't understand the reassessment. I think the important question at this point is, where do we go from here. It is very clear we are going to have very limited opportunity to provide oral comments before the SAB. We will have a very short period of time. The SAB will have less than a month to read all these documents, digest them, and read any written comments that are sent to them. Our written comments will have to be short. It is very possible that the reassessment will be finalized in January barring a great disagreement from the Science Advisory Board. So, where does that leave us? I hate to say this, but we may be looking at litigation. Toxic tort litigation -- you know that is going to happen. It's likely that there are a number of lawyers out there that are just chomping at the bit to get a hold of this one, to use the reassessment to bolster claims of adverse effects. We know that they are going to dig up experts that will support these claims. There is just no question about it. But, let's put that aside. What other type of litigation might we see? Well, the first question is whether the risk assessment itself is judicially reviewable? Now, there is some precedent for challenging a risk assessment with environmental tobacco smoke. I would say that that was a rather unique case. Is the reassessment going to be like that? Well, let's see. We will have to think about that a bit. What would likely happen is that when the reassessment is used to support regulation, affected parties will challenge the regulation along with the underlying risk assessment. Therefore, when EPA starts regulating dioxin based on the reassessment, we may start seeing litigation. I just want to leave you with one question. Are the courts the most efficient place to try to work out some of these policy and scientific questions? Well, I will answer that. No. But that is where we will be. |