Posted on 09/13/2003 7:05:26 AM PDT by Stultis
Precaution Into Law
| By James Pinkerton | 09/13/2003 |
Editor's Note: This is the first of a two-part series.
CANCUN, Mexico -- September 11 will be remembered for many things, of course, but something that happened on 9/11/03 will also be remembered. The world may mourn -- or not -- the attack on the US two years ago, but the world environmental movement has definitely moved on. Here at the World Trade Organization meeting, the assembled multitude, both pro-trade and anti-trade, was confronted by the coincidence that Thursday marked the first day in which the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety entered into force. Right here, right now, there are more urgent issues for WTO-ers to discuss, but it won't be long before the Cartagena Protocol makes itself felt. So what is it, exactly?
The Protocol is the first legally binding agreement concerning the transnational movement of living modified organisms (LMOs), such as seeds and animals, resulting from modern biotechnology. According to the Montreal-based Secretariat of the Convention on Biodiversity, a sub-unit of the United Nations Environmental Programme, the Protocol seeks to "ensure an adequate level of safety in the transfer, handling and use of LMOs which may have adverse effects on the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity, also taking into account potential risks to human health." To many, all that verbiage might sound innocuous -- who's for risks to human health? -- but the Protocol is far more than warning labels or safety caps. Instead, it represents a new front in the Greens' never-ending battle to seize control of international trade. Such trade currently runs about $6 trillion a year, although, of course, it would be considerably less if the Greens had their way with it.
Maybe you don't remember reading about the United States agreeing to this Protocol; that's because we haven't agreed. Even the Clinton Administration wouldn't sign it when it came open for national signatures in 2000, even as 103 countries did ink it. Of those signatories, barely more than half -- 59, to be exact -- have gone on actually to ratify it. The Protocol took on legal force when the nation of Palau -- you know all about Palau, don't you? -- became the 50th ratifying country. But, you might be thinking to yourself, the United Nations has 191 member states. So isn't it a bit strange that international law comes into force when it's embraced by a quarter of the nations of the world? That's what I think, too. But welcome to the world of Green law, which would be regarded as merely wacky if the stakes weren't so high.
To be sure, countries that haven't acceded to the Protocol aren't bound by it, but here comes the rub: what happens when a Protocol country bumps up against a non-Protocol country? France, for example, is all signed up. Is it possible to imagine the French getting into a trade tiff with the United States? Or, to put it another way, the Protocol provides Paris with one more opportunity to pick a fight? In such a case, any dispute will likely end up in the lap of the WTO.
We'll consider the WTO's role later, but first, a point or two about the thinking -- maybe ideology is a better word -- behind the Cartagena Protocol.
Greens and other Cartagena-heads say that everything they do is in the name of "sustainability." But of course, there's much more to it than that. Readers of this space might recall that I've looked at both "sustainable development" and "sustainable trade," noting that these eco-buzz-phrases are manipulatable in the hands of manipulators. But here's another snatch of happy-talk to watch for: The Precautionary Principle (TPP).
When we speak of TPP, we might lower our voice a bit, because we're getting close now to the Holy Grail of Greenianity. TPP transports Green believers to a level above -- or below, your choice -- science. TPP takes Greenianity to the level of faith. And faith is hard to argue, let alone litigate.
The Preamble to the Cartagena Protocol, in which TPP makes its first of four appearances in the text, reads blandly enough; it claims that it is merely "reaffirming the precautionary approach contained in Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development."
OK, so what's the Rio Declaration? That was the document issued at the end of the "Earth Summit" in Brazil in June 1992. Here's what Principle 15 says, in full: "In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation." Let's dwell on some of this language a bit, because the implications are enormous.
Here's that last clause again: "lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation." Perhaps I could put this another way: "Lack of proof won't stop us from taking action." Or maybe this: "Just because we don't know what we're doing won't stop us from doing it." Am I being too harsh?
Well, how else can one assess something that doesn't rely on objective measures? Who will guard the guardians if they are not guided by objective, transparent law? Of course, if you say that the risks of human action are so great that we can't permit knowledge to moderate our fears and modulate our actions, then you agree with the Greens. Now, all you have to do is trust Greenpeace & Co. to administer the rest of your life.
Think I'm exaggerating? Consider the Kyoto global warming agreement, the official name of which is the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; note that "Protocol" word again. The Kyoto Protocol, signed by then-Vice President Al Gore in 1997, is such a radical document that the US Senate voted 95-0 to reject it -- alas, in a non-binding, non finalizing resolution. And if you don't believe that the Kyoto deal is a big deal, read this. And this. And this.
In comparison to Kyoto, the Cartagena Protocol is modest; this is, after all, just its second day of existence. But of course, every giant oak tree starts out as an acorn, and so it's hard to tell how the Cartagena Protocol will grow up. But some observers have some clues.
Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, maintains that "soft language becomes hard fact." That is, over time, even the windy and hortatory rhetoric of preambles has a way of working itself into international law. Just as American lawyers ingeniously pluck rationales and precedents from anywhere they can be found -- the Supreme Court cited experiments comparing children's preferences for white dolls over black dolls in its 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision -- so, too, with international lawyers. Smith notes that the European Union barely waited for the Protocol's ink to dry before it started citing Cartagena's TPP language as justification for its anti-LMO actions. In other words, even now, TPP, in all its all-over-the-placeness, is being codified into international law. And how will people adjudicate cases in which proof is not required? Good question. Maybe you've heard of the phrase, "might makes right"? Now try "Green makes right."
And so the contours of future politico-economic battlefields can be espied through the rhetorical fogging and pettifogging. Gary Horlick, former chief of the US Commerce Department's Import Administration, now a lawyer in Washington, sees some leading indicators about the Cartagena Protocol in past cases in which TPP was invoked.
One such case is beef hormones. In 1988, the EU prohibited the use of six different growth hormones in imported beef. The United States and Canada contested the prohibition, and, a mere nine years later, a WTO panel ruled that the EU's action was out of bounds, because it was not based on sound science. Indeed, Horlick points out, three of the growth hormones are natural -- so natural that it's impossible to tell whether or not an animal has even received them. Moreover, even as it banned American beef, the EU was still allowing EU cows to be treated with the same hormones. And most absurdly, the EU allowed contraceptives onto the market that contained 17,000 times -- that's right, 17,000 times -- the hormone level of banned beef.
Yet the Europeans had dug in their Green heels. To this day, the EU restricts the beef, even though, having lost the case in the WTO, it now must pay the penalty, in the form of retaliatory American duties on European exports. But of course, a free market economist would call this a lose-lose. Yes, America may be legally entitled to impose retaliatory duties, but the effect of those duties is to raise prices for American consumers.
But now, with The Precautionary Principle embedded in the Cartagena Protocol, the EU might feel emboldened to take another look at no-no-ing imports, for just about any reason. After all, when you have TPP, you don't need proof.
And if the EU feels emboldened, imagine what the Greens must be thinking. They see that the world -- or at least the World Trade Organization -- might yet be their prize.
Tomorrow: the Battle for the World.
Reason Magazine, April 1999
http://reason.com/9904/fe.rb.precautionary.shtml
Precautionary Tale
The latest environmentalist concept--the Precautionary Principle--seeks to stop innovation before it happens. Very bad idea.
Look before you leap.
Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? But how reasonable would it be to take such proverbial wisdom and turn it into a Federal Leaping Commission? The environmentalist movement is seeking to create the moral equivalent of just that. In effect, before you or anybody else can leap, you will not only have to look beforehand in the prescribed manner, you will have to prove that if you leap, you won't be hurt, nor will any other living thing be hurt, now and for all time. And if you can't prove all of that, the commission will refuse to grant you a leaping license.
At this year's annual meeting of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science in Anaheim, California, in a symposium titled "The Precautionary Principle: A Revolution in Environmental Policymaking?", environmentalist advocates and academics insisted that a principle of ultimate precaution should trump all other considerations in future environmental and technological policy making. They pointed out that the Principle has already been incorporated into several international treaties, including the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which require developed nations to cut back dramatically on the burning of fossil fuels to reduce the putative threat of global warming. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is already using it to help guide its promulgation of new regulations on synthetic chemicals.
Jeff Howard, a panel member who once worked on Greenpeace's International Toxics Campaign and now has a gig at the Center for Science and Technology Policy and Ethics at Texas A&M University, defined the Principle: It calls for precaution in the face of any actions that may affect people or the environment, no matter what science is able--or unable--to say about that action.
Before examining this concept, it's worth pausing to see where it came from. Howard's version of the Principle was formalized last year by environmentalist advocates who convened at the Wingspread Conference Center in Wisconsin. Gathering in such a place allowed them to give their ruminations a sonorous title: "The Wingspread Consensus Statement." (After all, you wouldn't want to call such a document "The Bronx Consensus Statement.")
That the Wingspread delegates achieved "consensus" on precaution might imply to some that their meeting was a strenuous, perhaps even contentious, effort by experts of diverse views to find a balance between the demands of scientific inquiry and the well-being of nature. That's certainly how the AAAS meeting treated this "consensus": as though it had arisen from a symposium presenting peer-reviewed scientific data.
But Wingspread's delegates were not exactly diverse; rather, they were a panel of activists with an agenda. They included representatives from an array of like-minded groups, including Green-peace, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Toxics Use Reduction Institute in Massachusetts, Britain's Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, the Environmental Research Foundation, the Science and Environmental Health Network, the Environmental Network, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the Environmental Health Coalition, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice. It's not hard to reach "consensus" when you gather a group of people who all share your values and views. If I hand-pick my delegates, I can achieve a consensus on just about anything. (How about the "Miami Beach Consensus Statement on Abolishing Social Security"?)
What did the Wingspread activists finally recommend? The actual text of the Principle that Howard offered at the AAAS meeting reads: "When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically."
The Wingspreaders and their followers on the AAAS panel want to apply the Principle solely to environmentalist concerns, but, in fact, their formula is essentially an empty vessel into which anyone can pour whatever values they prefer. It simply codifies a very risk-averse version of standard cost-benefit analysis; the Wingspread participants think that certain activities, such as manufacturing plastics or burning fossil fuels, are unacceptably risky. In other words, very conservative environmentalist values are being privileged over what, to other people, may be equally or more compelling values.
The formula can be adapted to fit many different agendas. Try this, for example: "When an activity (say, employment tests) raises threats of harm to equality and equal access, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established sociologically." Or this: "When an activity (say, higher taxes) raises threats of harm to private property or economic growth, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established economically." We could do this all day.
The heart of the Principle, of course, is the admonition that "precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." As one biomedical researcher in the audience objected, all scientific conclusions are subject to revision, and none is ever "fully established." Since that is the case, the researcher pointed out, the Precautionary Principle could logically apply to every conceivable activity, since their outcomes are always in some sense uncertain. Furthermore, David Murray, the director of the Statistical Assessment Service in Washington D.C., points out another possible--and disquieting--interpretation of the Principle. Anyone who merely raises "threats of harm" with no more evidence than their fearful imagination gets to invoke precautionary measures. Precautionists would not need to establish any empirical basis for their fears; they may simply posit that something might go wrong and thus stymie any proposed action.
Ah, so. Just what these activists had in mind all along, as we shall see.
But let's parse the Principle a bit more. One troublesome issue is that some activities that promote human health might "raise threats of harm to the environment," and some activities that might be thought of as promoting the environment might "raise threats of harm to human health."
Take the use of pesticides. Humanity has used them to better control disease-carrying insects like flies, mosquitoes, and cockroaches, and to protect crops. Clearly, pesticide use has significantly improved the health of scores of millions of people. But some pesticides have had side effects on the environment, such as harming nontargeted species. The Precautionary Principle gives no guidance on how to make this tradeoff between human health and the protection of nonpest species (though I suspect I know how the panel members would choose).
During the discussion period, another audience member asked panelist Steve Breyman, a professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, if he thought the last 200 years had been all bad. Breyman revealingly responded with something like, Oh sure, some things like life expectancy and living standards have improved, but there have been losses too. The quality of drinking water, Breyman asserted, has gone down.
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?
This problem--deciding who gets to decide what--is just one of many slippery slopes that the Precautionary Principle teeters over. Of course, it quickly became apparent that, for the AAAS panel, the only democratic decisions that are acceptable are those consistent with environmentalist goals. But other obvious problems were never acknowledged.
For example, democratic decision making concerning any and all environment-affecting actions could have the effect of ratifying extraordinarily conservative choices. That is, a community could use its environmental veto to say, No, we don't want a new store, a new housing development, a new factory, a new road. Basically, it means that the vested interests of the present can strangle the future. After all, as one wag noted, an environmentalist is somebody who already owns his second home in the woods.
Of course, neither the regulators at the meeting nor the environmental activists on the AAAS panel considered a real solution: removing the decisions about resources from the political process entirely. Politics is always win/lose, while market decisions are generally win/win. Give fishermen, loggers, and cattlemen secure property rights to the resources, and that shifts their incentives toward trying to protect and enhance their resource, rather than merely plundering somebody else's resource.
Draconian as the Wingspread proposals are, Jeff Howard doesn't think they are strong enough. He fears that wily capitalists and innovators will find ways around them, so he suggests five additional tenets:
n Precaution must become the default mode of all technological decision making.
n Even the most fundamental of past decisions must be subject to re-examination and precautionary reform.
n The primary mode of regulation and regulatory science should be at the macroscale.
n Knowledge of broad patterns trumps ignorance of detail.
n Human society must identify and accommodate itself to broad patterns in natural processes.
Consider for a moment the tenet that "even the most fundamental of past decisions must be subject to re-examination and precautionary reform." Actually, the process of technological innovation constantly "re-examines" past decisions, but that's not what Howard has in mind. He wants to create a political process, which he naturally insists would be open, that would eliminate technologies of which he disapproves: nuclear power plants, organochlorines, most plastics, etc. But what I find intriguing is the idea that "even the most fundamental of past decisions" could be "reformed."
How fundamental is fundamental? Decisions like the invention of the automobile? The use of fossil fuels? The development of agriculture? Fire? Look at Howard's last tenet, that society must accommodate itself "to broad patterns in natural processes." What violates the broad patterns in natural processes? Medicine? City building? Farming?
Before the AAAS session ended, Howard offered a third corollary to the Principle: "Precaution requires consideration of the full range of social and technological alternatives" to what is being proposed. It is very much in line with the Wingspread Consensus Statement, which declares that precaution "must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action."
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 the fog. The Precautionary Principle, its champions believe, "would serve as a `speed bump' in the development of technologies and enterprises."
Unfortunately, these principles and tenets may sound sensible to many people, especially those who live in societies already replete with technology. These people already have their centrally heated house in the woods; they already enjoy the freedom from want, disease, and ignorance that technology can provide. They may think they can afford the luxury of ultimate precaution. But there are billions of people who still yearn to have their lives transformed. For them, the Precautionary Principle represents not a speed bump but a wall.
Should we look before we leap? Sure we should. But every utterance of proverbial wisdom has its counterpart, reflecting both the complexity and the variety of life's situations and the foolishness involved in applying a short list of hard rules to them. For some people in some situations, "Look before you leap" is good advice. Others might be wiser to heed the equally proverbial, "He who hesitates is lost."
People have understood this maxim for millennia, and the chances are that its message will eventually reach even Wisconsin's Wingspread Conference Center. And when it does, I want the Wingspreaders to understand that the moral equivalent of a Federal Anti-Hesitation Commission isn't such a good idea, either.
Ronald Bailey is REASON's science correspondent.
| Mad Cow Madness--Understanding the costs of the precautionary principle. ^ |
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| Posted by SJackson On 03/05/2003 7:10 AM CST with 5 comments TCS ^ | 03/05/2003 | Iain Murray Since the early nineties, British scientists have been awaiting a cataclysm. They theorized that "Mad Cow Disease," bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) had crossed the barrier that seemed to exist between species and had infected humans as a disease known as vCJD. If their theory was correct, it was only a matter of time before thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Britons started dying from the disease. If ever there was anything that demonstrated the need for scientific precaution, they argued, this was it. The British taxpayer spent millions on remedial action. Even the American Red Cross decided to restrict who... |
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| No Food for You! The dark side of the precautionary principle. [Zambia starving for the sake of EU] ^ |
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| Posted by xsysmgr On 11/01/2002 1:33 PM CST with 3 comments National Review Online ^ | November 1, 2002 | Frances B. Smith The government of Zambia — with three million people facing death by starvation — on October 29 gave its final refusal to distribute U.S. grain already stored there to help feed its starving population. Zambia's Agriculture Minister Mundia Sikatana invoked the "precautionary principle" as his rationale — that is, since the grain was produced through the use of modern biotechnology, it has not been proven to be perfectly safe and may present some future risks to people or the environment. The Zambian government also said it fears European Union countries would refuse imports from Zambia since their crops might... |
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| Dangerous Precaution: The precautionary principle?s challenge to progress. ^ |
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| Posted by Utah Girl On 09/13/2002 11:37 PM CDT with 7 comments NRO ^ | 9/13/2002 | Jonathan H Adler Last month, the Zambian refused to accept foreign food aid, despite a crippling food shortage that threatens to leave some two million people hungry. In July, the government of Zimbabwe announced a similar decision. For each country the reason was the same: Aid from the United States could contain genetically modified food. Despite the utter lack of any scientific evidence suggesting genetically modified crops pose any new threat to human health or the environment, these southern African governments claimed the food was not safe enough to feed their people. Zambia's Information Minister claimed the decision reflected the "precautionary principle," because... |
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| Saving Lives by Rejecting the Precautionary Principle ^ |
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| Posted by Constitutionalist Conservative On 08/24/2001 1:16 PM CDT National Center for Policy Analysis ^ | 08/15/2001 | H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. and A. Wess Mitchell Many environmentalists, citing the adage "better safe than sorry," argue that the "precautionary principle" should govern policy making. By this, they mean that technology should not be used until or unless it can be shown to pose no threat to humans or the environment. The Politics of Biotechnology. In one form or another, the precautionary principle has been incorporated into domestic European and American legislation and into more than 12 international treaties, beginning in 1987 with the Ministerial Declaration of the Second Conference on the Protection of the North Sea. Environmental activists have proposed using the principle to frame ... |
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