Rachel's Precaution Reporter #9  [Printer-friendly version]
October 26, 2005

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: ELIZABETH WHELAN DESERVES A RESPONSE

[Rachel's introduction: "Let's keep our focus on establishing the
precautionary principle at the 'new product development stage' so it
can redirect the path of innovation towards safer technologies, as it
has with food additives and drugs." -- Professor Clark Bullard]

By Clark Bullard

Elizabeth Whelan's essay "Can Too Much Safety be Hazardous? in
RPR #3 deserves a response. What she advocates is backsliding into
the same "risk assessment" morass that has failed us in the past.

She frames her critique around a hypothetical ban on chlorine,
asserting that evidence to date indicates that the benefits of
chlorine exceed its risk, and therefore a "precautionary" ban would be
unwise. And she makes the more general claim that "the precautionary
principle assumes that no detriment to health or the environment will
result from the proposed new banning or chemical regulation."

In fact the precautionary principle substitutes precaution for
recklessness, not for evidence. The idea is to apply the principle at
the outset, when a new chemical (or other risk) is first proposed and
ignorance reigns. Just as we do in the case of food additives and
drugs, we hold a new product off the market until evidence of its
safety is produced. Often those scientific experiments identify a
safer pathway to progress.

With 20-20 hindsight, Whelan claims that chlorine turned out to be
worth the environmental costs. We can never know whether a
precautionary approach would have led to the invention of ozone-based
bleaches and related technologies decades earlier. What we do know is
that other large-scale experiments on non-consenting human subjects
have turned out to be disastrous: DDT, lead-based paint, and CFC's,
for example. Now a billion people in the developed world are trying
another such [poorly designed, poorly controlled] experiment with
greenhouse gases, while billions of nonconsenting humans in the
developing world have the most to lose.

Would we perform such experiments in our laboratories? No, it would be
unethical. Has that moral taboo retarded scientific progress and
prevented discovery of some miracle drugs? Maybe. But I would not
recommend that we start conducting scientific experiments on
nonconsenting human subjects, just so we can look back a half-century
from now and see how many succeeded and how many failed.

Let's keep our focus on establishing the precautionary principle at
the "new product development stage" so it can redirect the path of
innovation towards safer technologies, as it has with food additives
and drugs.

Clark Bullard
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1206 W Green St
Urbana IL 61801
217 333 7734 (voice) 217 333 1942 (fax)
http://acrc.mie.uiuc.edu/