The Danger of Hyping Hazards

Headlines earlier this month trumpeted a report released by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) that a 10-chemical toxic brew subjects Los Angeles residents to 426 times the permissible federal cancer risk. Drafted by Democratic staffers on Waxman’s House Government Reform Committee, the report was not just misleading, but it also shows how media-savvy environmental advocates increasingly distort public-health priorities.

Based on weekly air samples taken by state officials at three locations in greater Los Angeles from 1995-98, the report computed average annual concentrations of 10 auto-exhaust-related chemicals like benzene and butadiene. The results were then weighed against the purported “health goals” of the federal Clean Air Act. These goals aim to prevent more than one additional incidence of cancer per million people over 70 years.

Average concentrations of these exhaust-related chemicals, the report found, exceeded the goals. The committee staff and countless media reports grimly concluded that, despite apparent progress, L.A. residents are still being silently poisoned by the air they breathe.

This “finding” is simply false. There are no federal ambient-air health goals for the chemicals Waxman’s team examined. Sadly for government officials who deserve kudos, not criticism, California’s stringent controls are dramatically reducing such emissions at rates certainly faster than less-regulated regions.

The report’s most serious flaw is its misuse of federal regulations setting limits for individual emission sources as the measure of total ambient-air safety. Under the Clean Air Act, “point-source” standards for factories, gas stations, dry cleaners, etc., ensure that no single emissions source will unreasonably degrade the air. These separate standards cannot be used to measure overall air safety without producing absurd results.

Many of the chemicals studied by the report, for example, occur naturally in the atmosphere at several times the emission levels permitted from any point-source. If such standards embodied the nation’s overall ambient-air goals, the government would be in the difficult position of mandating air quality even nature can’t achieve.

It would be highly unusual, moreover, if a region’s ambient air didn’t substantially exceed a single source’s emission restrictions. The act’s health goals were set with the knowledge that individual point-source emissions would collect in the atmosphere. Using these goals to critique overall air quality is like claiming an airplane is unsafe because total on-board luggage exceeds the two-bags-per-person limit.

The report is also marred by numerous technical flaws. It calculates regional air quality for hundreds of square miles from sampling data that state officials specifically say cannot be used in this fashion. Scientific audits also show that chemical analyses of the gases collected in each sampling canister are subject to considerable error. Yet, none are factored into the report’s numbers.

Even more troubling is the report’s implication that that the public is being ill informed about, and inadequately protected from, toxic-air risks. Waxman’s staff focused on Los Angeles precisely because California collects and publicizes more detailed air-quality information than anywhere else.

It’s also misleading to suggest that California has done little in response. During 1990-96 alone, the same statistics used by Waxman’s team shows that the state’s tough emission controls reduced butadiene and benzene, which together account for more than 70% of the report’s purported cancer risk, by a whopping 40% to 67%. That’s a roaring success by any measure, particularly when the state’s car-driving population is growing.

Far more than the “health risk” it largely manufactured, the Waxman report highlights the growing lack of perspective that afflicts present-day environmentalism. At a time when California’s schoolchildren can’t match the reading skills of Mississippi’s, and 25% of the population is growing poorer amid an economic boom, why should public debate be diverted by an incorrectly stated “problem” that is, in any case, dramatically improving?

Ecological activists rabidly resist measuring their goals against other critical concerns like economics. No less than Vice President Al Gore repeatedly likens environmental-policy skeptics to people who ignored the sounds of shattering glass during the horror of Kristallnacht, the evening in 1938 when Hitler’s Brown Shirts stormed synagogues and killed scores of Jews. Contrary points of view, Gore and others urge, should just be ignored or downplayed. The growing waste and social conflicts generated by such pretensions, however, demand that scrutiny begin.

Even if accurate, for example, the 400-cancers-per-million-person lifetime risk the Waxman report “discovered” would amount to less than .16% of the total 250,000-cancer-per-million person risk everyone faces. Every form of pollution taken together, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, causes just 1% to 3% of all cancers, compared with 35% for poor diet or 30% from smoking.

A Harvard Center for Risk Analysis study showed that federal pollution controls cost $7.6 million to save a single life-year--the most expensive of all kinds of expenditures--versus $19,000 for medical care. If it were truly concerned with the public-health goal of reducing cancer risks, the Waxman report would focus on diets, smoking and medical care. Instead, like far too many environmental “crises,” it diverts attention from true priorities toward a narrow, far less significant agenda.

As environmentalism moves from immediate, but now generally regulated dangers, like massive toxic discharges, to more refined matters of aesthetics or suburban “livability,” latent class conflicts are also starting to erupt. Pollution abatement often imposes highly regressive costs. In the early 1990s, for instance, the cost burdens of Southern California’s air-quality management plans were estimated to be three times greater for the region’s poorest households than for its wealthiest.

Activists dismiss such irritants by arguing that a better environment helps everyone. An unequivocal ecological crisis notwithstanding, the adverse health consequences of reduced economic opportunities for the poor vastly overwhelm any environmental benefits they may enjoy from, say, cleaner air. Air pollution reduces average life expectancy in the United States by perhaps 30 days. Poverty strips away 10 years.

Driven by such enormous disparities, volatile social conflicts can result from ill-considered environmental initiatives. Last year’s fight over banning gas-driven leaf blowers pitted L.A.’s wealthier communities against Latino gardeners. Similar conflicts are emerging in other public-policy arenas. Urban development and ethnic activists, for example, are increasingly outraged by the unwillingness of well-heeled environmentalists to help resolve land-use and growth issues affecting their communities, such as cleaning up contaminated property.

America’s stock-driven prosperity may suggest that the concerns of the comfortable are of paramount political interest. It may be, as coverage of the Waxman report indicates, that placating such preoccupations earns short-term media and electoral rewards. But unless eco-advocates temper their efforts with badly needed perspective, their agendas may do more harm than good.*