Corporate Campaign Against Precaution

Corporate Campaign Against Precaution

Rachel's Environment & Health News #778

September 18, 2003 (Published October 9, 2003)

The purpose of this week's newsletter is to identify (and make available to you) the best sources of information about the precautionary principle.

What is the Precautionary Principle?

The good news is that the precautionary principle is steadily replacing old-style risk assessment as a way of making environmental decisions. The risk-based approach asks, "How much damage is acceptable?" In other words, "How much damage can we get away with?" Then the system sets numerical limits to allow precisely that amount of damage to occur. As you might expect, the numerical limits are often wrong, so more than "acceptable" damage occurs. This is why the entire planet is now contaminated and chronic disease is increasing.[1]

The precaution-based decision-making system asks a different question. Under precaution, we examine all reasonable alternatives and ask, "How little damage is possible?" In the face of scientific uncertainty, the precautionary system urges a "better safe than sorry" approach to decisions, instead of the old approach, "I'm barging ahead until you can line up the dead bodies."

Corporate Attack on Precaution

The bad news is that the precautionary principle is now under sustained corporate attack. For example, with corporate funding, the Keystone Center in Keystone, Colorado and Washington, D.C., in September tried to pull off one of its "mediation" meetings where extreme corporate bad actors (like International Paper, Georgia Pacific, Exx onMobil, General Electric, DuPont, and Kodak, among others) hold a series of meetings with "big green" environmental groups like the Environmental Working Group, Environmental Defense, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and Defenders of Wildlife, hoping to reach a new "consensus" about the precautionary principle on behalf of the rest of us. (http://www.keystone.org/)

The Keystone method is to invite 20 or 30 carefully-chosen "experts" to sit together and bargain with each other, pretending that they democratically represent everyone in America. They then publish a "consensus" statement that the corporate polluters can claim they worked out with full participation from the environmental community. The statement circulates in Congress and sometimes influences federal policy. For example, Congress authorized the flawed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada partly because of a Keystone mediation intended to "solve" the nuclear waste problem for the nuclear power industry.[2]

In September, a few principled environmentalists refused Keystone's invitation to sit with International Paper and Georgia Pacific to discuss precaution - a subject entirely foreign to the ethic of these particular corporations - and Keystone had to cancel the meeting. But Keystone has promised to try again. Keystone's letter canceling the meeting suggested that they may use a "divide and conquer" strategy to try to force the environmental community to the table next time. Environmentalists invited to participate in Keystone's next corporate-funded assault on precaution need to ask themselves, "Why would corporations spend tens of thousands of dollars on such an event?" They must think they have little to lose and perhaps something important to gain. And of course that's exactly right. The environmental community, on the other hand, has nothing to gain and runs the risk of undermining years of work spent patiently building the case for precaution world-wide.

Keystone's clumsy assault on precaution is not the only evidence of a coordinated corporate campaign against precaution.

Recently in California I heard four corporate speakers attack the precautionary principle using a remarkably consistent "party line."[3]

The party line goes something like this:

1) What's the problem? We don't need precaution because the system is working just fine. There is no harm being done to humans or the environment.

2) OK, maybe there's a teensy bit of harm being done but adopting a precautionary approach won't help anything because the chemical industry (for example) is already fully precautionary. They have been behaving in a precautionary way for decades and couldn't do any better even if they wanted to.

3) OK, maybe corporations could do a little bit better, but risk assessment uses "conservative" assumpt ions and therefore is fully precautionary. What we need is more and better risk assessments. To fix risk assessments, we can always just plug in another "safety factor" of 3 or 6 or 10. Risk assessment IS precaution.

4) OK, risk assessment may never be able to protect workers, the environment or public health, but the risk-based regulatory system itself is basically sound and can be tweaked to remedy any problems after "sound science" proves beyond a doubt that harm is occurring.

5) OK, the regulatory system does allow some major harms to occur and tens of thousands of real people get killed or maimed when risk assessments tell us that something dangerous (like the air in Los Angeles) is "safe." Nevertheless, precaution is bad for everyone because it will destroy jobs.

6) OK, if you must know, adopting precaution will not only destroy jobs, it will take down the entire economy of our state, and then our nation.

7) OK, if you insist, adopting precaution will undermine western civilization.

8) OK, everyone can now see that people who advocate precaution are extremists. In fact, precaution is an extremist doctrine INTENDED to destroy western civilization. Rejecting precaution is therefore the backbone of homeland security. God bless America!

One excellent response to this corporate campaign against precaution would be more people learning to think and speak in precautionary terms, until old-style risk-based thinking just fades away.

One way to do this would be to join Lois Gibbs's nationwide precaution campaign.

Check it out at http://www.besafenet.com/

To learn how to get involved, send E-mail to AnneRabe@msn.com.

To inform yourself about precaution in depth -- so that you can begin to think and speak precaution -- you might take a look at some of these resources: