If, in the next few weeks, the National Academy of Sciences loses its epic battle with the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans are in for a shock. Overnight, the world will become a much more dangerous place, as the agency’s new “guidelines” on dioxin turn everyday foods — meat, fish, eggs, dairy, even water — into fearsome sources of cancer, and transform acres of urban land, possibly including your own backyard, into virtual toxic waste dumps. Most bizarre of all, if the new guidelines pass, breastfeeding, according to the EPA, will turn into a significant cancer risk for your baby.
Dioxin’s reputation has long exceeded the danger it demonstrates in the data, thanks to industrial accidents and assassination attempts. The chemical — a byproduct of forest fires, backyard burning, and industries, many of them long gone — has been declining in emissions and dropping in blood levels since the 1970s. There is no evidence that Americans are at risk, and yet, urged on by environmental activists and some of their supporters in the Democratic Party, the EPA is determined to purge dioxin from the soil to a point where it will be lower than the background level in nature.
The agency also wants to reduce what is called the reference dose — the maximum amount of a substance that can be taken orally — to a level that is below the trace amounts we consume each day in food. As dioxin accumulates in breast milk, breastfeeding would exceed the reference dose.
If vegans wanted to take over America, this would be their plan.
The consequences are staggering but largely unknown, because the EPA does not sully the purity of risk calculation with such picayune matters as impact; this is for others to figure out, fix and, of course, finance. But it is a sure bet that a huge amount of reclaimed land will fail to comply with the new standards, which means the soil will have to be dug up and shipped somewhere to be reburied.
Let’s do a quick-and-dirty calculation: New York City has 7,000 acres of brownfield sites, land contaminated with the pollution of industries past and earmarked for reclamation. Let’s assume each acre exceeds the new limits on dioxin (3 parts per trillion concentration for residential soil, 17 for commercial) down to the level of 3 feet. It would take 2,800,000 10-wheel dump-truck journeys to cart that soiled soil away — and if the dioxin originated from an industrial source, they would have to ship it to Canada to be burned (we don’t have the right kind of incinerators here).
Now envisage hundreds of similar expeditions across the industrial Northeast and Midwest: How many people will die, given the increased probability of traffic accidents? How much carbon dioxide will ascend into the atmosphere? How much particulate pollution will be added to our collective respiratory burden? How much will it cost each state to purify its soil? And, above all, how much dioxin will these diesel-spewing dump-truck journeys put right back into the environment?
This is the infernal feedback loop, the fine print in the bill of unintended consequences, that mocks the EPA: To remove dioxin from the environment, we will have to put it back into the environment.
Environmental activists, who are fuming over the delay in implementing these new standards, tend to stick their fingers in their ears and chant “Koch brothers! Koch brothers!” whenever questions are raised about whether this is stupidity’s equivalent of plutonium, but the scientific criticism of the EPA is not coming from billionaire energy moguls, it’s coming from one of the most august scientific institutions in America: the independent National Academy of Sciences. Even the EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Board thinks it’s left the orbit of reason.
The simplest way of explaining everyone’s problem with the agency is that it refuses to accept that the 16,000 or so studies on dioxin give sufficient grounds for certainty about how the chemical causes cancer at very high doses. Instead, the EPA says that in the absence of enough information, we must adopt a precautionary approach and treat the risk as linear — meaning that as long as there’s one molecule of dioxin somewhere, there’s a risk of someone getting cancer. Thus, the 3.7 parts-per-trillion concentration in the soil will, according to the EPA’s hypothesis, cause one extra case of cancer per million people over 70 years.
If this seems like math for crack addicts, consider the kicker: The EPA created that number using old data, and is now arguing that things are even more frighteningly uncertain and the soil concentration needs to be 10 times lower.
All of this has left the departments that have to deal with the guidelines — Agriculture, Defense, the Food and Drug Administration and NASA — in a state of alarm. If the EPA pushes ahead and ignores its critics, the regulatory equivalent of a tsunami is going to sweep across America and unleash havoc in the pursuit of zero risk. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but to the EPA, it’s the only guarantee of safety.
Dioxin’s reputation has long exceeded the danger it demonstrates in the data, thanks to industrial accidents and assassination attempts. The chemical — a byproduct of forest fires, backyard burning, and industries, many of them long gone — has been declining in emissions and dropping in blood levels since the 1970s. There is no evidence that Americans are at risk, and yet, urged on by environmental activists and some of their supporters in the Democratic Party, the EPA is determined to purge dioxin from the soil to a point where it will be lower than the background level in nature.
The agency also wants to reduce what is called the reference dose — the maximum amount of a substance that can be taken orally — to a level that is below the trace amounts we consume each day in food. As dioxin accumulates in breast milk, breastfeeding would exceed the reference dose.
If vegans wanted to take over America, this would be their plan.
The consequences are staggering but largely unknown, because the EPA does not sully the purity of risk calculation with such picayune matters as impact; this is for others to figure out, fix and, of course, finance. But it is a sure bet that a huge amount of reclaimed land will fail to comply with the new standards, which means the soil will have to be dug up and shipped somewhere to be reburied.
Let’s do a quick-and-dirty calculation: New York City has 7,000 acres of brownfield sites, land contaminated with the pollution of industries past and earmarked for reclamation. Let’s assume each acre exceeds the new limits on dioxin (3 parts per trillion concentration for residential soil, 17 for commercial) down to the level of 3 feet. It would take 2,800,000 10-wheel dump-truck journeys to cart that soiled soil away — and if the dioxin originated from an industrial source, they would have to ship it to Canada to be burned (we don’t have the right kind of incinerators here).
Now envisage hundreds of similar expeditions across the industrial Northeast and Midwest: How many people will die, given the increased probability of traffic accidents? How much carbon dioxide will ascend into the atmosphere? How much particulate pollution will be added to our collective respiratory burden? How much will it cost each state to purify its soil? And, above all, how much dioxin will these diesel-spewing dump-truck journeys put right back into the environment?
This is the infernal feedback loop, the fine print in the bill of unintended consequences, that mocks the EPA: To remove dioxin from the environment, we will have to put it back into the environment.
Environmental activists, who are fuming over the delay in implementing these new standards, tend to stick their fingers in their ears and chant “Koch brothers! Koch brothers!” whenever questions are raised about whether this is stupidity’s equivalent of plutonium, but the scientific criticism of the EPA is not coming from billionaire energy moguls, it’s coming from one of the most august scientific institutions in America: the independent National Academy of Sciences. Even the EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Board thinks it’s left the orbit of reason.
The simplest way of explaining everyone’s problem with the agency is that it refuses to accept that the 16,000 or so studies on dioxin give sufficient grounds for certainty about how the chemical causes cancer at very high doses. Instead, the EPA says that in the absence of enough information, we must adopt a precautionary approach and treat the risk as linear — meaning that as long as there’s one molecule of dioxin somewhere, there’s a risk of someone getting cancer. Thus, the 3.7 parts-per-trillion concentration in the soil will, according to the EPA’s hypothesis, cause one extra case of cancer per million people over 70 years.
If this seems like math for crack addicts, consider the kicker: The EPA created that number using old data, and is now arguing that things are even more frighteningly uncertain and the soil concentration needs to be 10 times lower.
All of this has left the departments that have to deal with the guidelines — Agriculture, Defense, the Food and Drug Administration and NASA — in a state of alarm. If the EPA pushes ahead and ignores its critics, the regulatory equivalent of a tsunami is going to sweep across America and unleash havoc in the pursuit of zero risk. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but to the EPA, it’s the only guarantee of safety.
