Friday, October 12, 2007

America's Lost Leadership

One of the ironic and enduring legacies of the Nixon years was the passage into law of historic environmental protection laws. The National Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air and Water Acts, the Endangered Species Act and the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) were all passed in the late 60's and 70's. The Environmental Protection Agency was established to administer the new laws and others. These laws were unprecedented in scope and set the standard for the world in protecting public and environmental health. Because the United States is such a large consumer market, foreign firms making and exporting chemicals and other toxic materials to the US like France, Britain, Germany and Japan had to insure that their national regulations conformed with the requirements of TSCA. TSCA is not perfect, far from it. The chemical industry leveraged a giant loophole in the law, exempting every substance on the market before 1979. That is about 62,000 substances including highly toxic chemicals like ethyl benzene. Thirty years later 95% of all chemicals in circulation have never undergone testing for toxicity or their impact on the environment according to Mark Shapiro in his Harper's report, "Toxic Inaction." Since 1996, the chemical industry has contributed $47 million to federal election campaigns.

As a result of lax regulation and enforcement most Americans have dangerous chemicals circulating in their blood. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completed a screening in 2005 for 148 toxic chemicals. The vast majority of subjects had almost all the toxins in their blood. The EPA has only banned six substances from the market since it's beginning in 1970. It banned asbestos as a "known carcinogen" in 1989, but in 1990 that banned was overturned by a court because the Agency failed to meet its burden of showing the ban was the "least burdensome alternative". No other substances have been banned since that reversal. One study conducted in 2006 found toxic chemicals that cause cancer, disrupt endocrine functions, and mutate genes had passed from mothers to fetuses through the placenta. Cancer is second only to heart disease as the leading cause of death from disease in America. Many scientists believe that the toxicity of our manufactured environment is a major reason for the high incidence of cancer in modern society.

Europe is not exempt from the dangers of toxicity. World Wildlife International found 63 chemicals in grandmothers from 12 European countries, and 59 different toxic chemicals in their grandchildren aged 12 to 28. What is different is that the European Union is doing something to protect its citizens. It passed the Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals (REACH) law in December, 2006. The primary target of the new regulatory scheme are the 60,000 chemicals exempted from regulation by TSCA. The legislation underwent many amendments during its passage, but the core principles of reviewing thousand of untested chemicals, making the data public, and putting the burden of demonstrating safety on the manufacturers not the regulators, remain. Since 2004, the EU has banned whole categories of chemicals for use in consumer goods.

Once the U.S. was a respected pioneer in the regulation of public health and environment. Thirty years later, it was a leader in an unprecedented international lobbying effort to defeat the European regulations. High level trade delegations lobbied against the passage of REACH in Europe, and our Trade Representative submitted a protest to the World Trade Organization stating that REACH was an impermissible trade barrier. Shapiro says that the coordinated lobbying effort which reached into the parliamentary hearings, "revealed once again that our government puts business interests ahead of the safety of its own citizens. " I cannot think of the last time European politicians descended on Washington, DC to lobby in the halls of Congress against a particular piece of US legislation. But the historic intrusion into European legislative affairs did not upset the US chemical industry or it's official enablers. Toxic substance control cannot be that "bad for business" as claimed by chemical industry flacks: the Euro, which started being worth 80 cents, is now worth $1.50.

Undeniably, the world's moral leadership role has been assumed by the European Union. With 480 million people living in 27 democratic countries it is the biggest trading partner of every continent except Australia. Its gross national product is bigger than the US. Nations wanting to trade with it must conform to the EU's new laws controlling toxic substances or loose the market. Even progressive states like California, New York, and Massachusetts have begun exploring ways to implement some elements of REACH in their state regulations in the absence of direction from Washington. Once respected for it's progressive lawmaking, the U.S. is now only feared for the size of it's military machine.