If you were given a glass of water which virtually every mainstream scientist in the world told you was almost certainly laced with poison would you drink it because they weren't 100% sure?
That's is essentially what the Pentagon, supported by the White House, is asking Americans to do. (from an important article in the Los Angeles Times by Ralph Vartabedian, read the whole thing)
After massive underground plumes of an industrial solvent were discovered in the nation's water supplies, the Environmental Protection Agency mounted a major effort in the 1990s to assess how dangerous the chemical was to human health.
Following four years of study, senior EPA scientists came to an alarming conclusion: The solvent, trichloroethylene, or TCE, was as much as 40 times more likely to cause cancer than the EPA had previously believed...
By 2003, after a prolonged challenge orchestrated by the Pentagon, the EPA lost control of the issue and its TCE assessment was cast aside. As a result, any conclusion about whether millions of Americans were being contaminated by TCE was delayed indefinitely.
So let's layout the argument and you can determine who you would believe. Those on the side of caution.
- ... senior EPA scientists [in the 2001 study] came to an alarming conclusion: The solvent, trichloroethylene, or TCE, was as much as 40 times more likely to cause cancer than the EPA had previously believed ...
- "It is a World Trade Center in slow motion," said Boston University epidemiologist David Ozonoff, a TCE expert. "You would never notice it."...
- "Do I think TCE causes cancer? Yes," said Ozonoff, the Boston University TCE expert. "There is lots of evidence. Is there a dispute about it? Yes. Whenever the stakes are high, that's when there will be disputes about the science."
- "The evidence on TCE is overwhelming," said Dr. Gina Solomon, an environmental medicine expert at UC San Francisco and a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We have 80 epidemiological studies and hundreds of toxicology studies. They are fairly consistent in finding cancer risks that cover a range of tumors. It is hard to make all that human health risk go away."
And those who say, "ah just drink it. (I buy bottled water)."
- ... Senior officials in the Defense Department say much remains unknown about TCE.
- ... The agencies [Pentagon, Energy Department and NASA] argued that the EPA had produced junk science, its assumptions were badly flawed and that evidence exonerating TCE was ignored...
- ... But Raymond F. DuBois, former deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations and environment in the Bush administration, said the Pentagon had not been willing to accept whatever came out of the EPA, though it cared a great deal about base contamination.
- "If TCE is a human carcinogen, it isn't much of one," said Paul Dugard, a toxicologist at the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance Inc., which represents TCE manufacturers. "People exposed at low levels shouldn't be concerned...
- ...Gilman said an entire consulting industry has sprung up in Washington to attack the EPA and sow seeds of doubt about its capabilities...
- ... But industry experts fire back that evidence on TCE is still weak...
How widespread is the problem?
An internal Air Force report issued in 2003 warned that the Pentagon alone has 1,400 sites contaminated with TCE.
Among those, at least 46 have involved large-scale contamination or significant exposure to humans at military bases, according to a list compiled by the Natural Resources New Service, an environmental group based in Washington.
It does not take much of a genius to see once again that greed, myopia and ideology trump science.
[Air Force rebuttal to EPA study] ... said "there is no convincing evidence" that some groups of people, like children and diabetics, are more susceptible to TCE, a key part of the EPA's report. And it said the EPA had failed to consider viewpoints from "scientists who believe that TCE does not represent a human cancer risk at levels reasonably expected in the environment."
But comments such as these are outside the scientific mainstream. Other federal agencies have also expressed grave concern about TCE and some experts say it is only a matter of time before the chemical is universally recognized as a known carcinogen....
..."If you go down two or three levels in EPA, you have an awful lot of people that came onboard during the Clinton administration, to be perfectly blunt about it, and have a different approach than I do at Defense," DuBois said
...The military says it is only striving to make smart decisions based on sound science and accuses the EPA of being unduly influenced by left-leaning scientists.
Think about that last comment for a second. Somehow warning about an almost certain carcinogen is the position of a "left-leaning scientist. Since when is concern over drinking toxic water or breathing toxic air "left-wing?" I had always assumed that ideological differences arose when determining how to deal with problems such as these, but claiming concern over the issue based on innumerable mainstream scientific studies is left wing? No wonder Bush is so popular. Furthermore I believe most of us who appreciate and respect the scientific community know that politics has precious little to do with science, and the only way I can imagine any credible scientist leaning left is if their left leg were shorter than their right one.
In terms of the future:
Bush administration appointees in the EPA — notably research director Paul Gilman — sided with the Pentagon and agreed to pull back the risk assessment. The matter was referred for a lengthy study by the National Academy of Sciences, which is due to issue a new report this summer. Any resolution of the cancer risk TCE poses will take years and any new regulation could take even longer.
Of course we know there is only one reason to protest the scientific community's warning about TCE, and it ain't uncertainty over the science.
He (V. James Cogliano, lead author of the 2001 health risk assessment and senior official at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France) added: "The degree of opposition was not surprising given the degree of economic interests involved."
...[In the 1980s] ... Defense Department officials said, "You put in every margin of safety, because we want to be sure it will be safe," he said. "There was no argument. There is a different spirit today."
A different spirit indeed.
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