Contact Jim: jdipeso@rep.org (253) 740-2066 / 2008 Archive / 2007 Archive / 2006 Archive / 2005 Archive
What EPA Doesn't Want You to Know
December 5, 2005
Information is the raw material of free market capitalism. Without good information, markets don’t work as efficiently as they should. Buyers and sellers don't make fully informed decisions. Business managers persist with bad habits. Consumers make irrational choices.
Hidden costs stay hidden – especially environmental costs. Prices, the information carrier of free markets, often don’t reflect the impacts of resource extraction and consumption on land, air, water, and human health. When prices do not incorporate environmental costs, the next best thing is data disclosure.
Which is why the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), put in place during President Ronald Reagan’s administration, has proved to be a remarkably successful tool for reducing the amount of hazardous substances released into the environment.
So of course, an environmental program that works this well is bound to wind up in the present administration’s crosshairs. First, however, let's see why TRI works as well as it has.
TRI is an environmental policy that complements conservative ideas about using market forces to achieve environmental gains. Moreover, TRI’s authorizing statute, the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act that Reagan signed into law in 1986, is all about empowering local communities. In Chicago, for example, TRI information enabled a community organization to negotiate an agreement with a local brass foundry to reduce emissions of lead, a neurotoxin.
All TRI requires is the filing of annual reports by companies that release at least 500 pounds of any of about 650 substances into the environment in the course of doing business. TRI does not require affected businesses to eliminate or even reduce their releases. They only have to disclose what they’re putting into the air we breathe and the water we use for drinking and other critical needs.
Letting the chemical cats out of the bag has proved to be a strong inducement for image-conscious companies to cut down their releases. Thanks to TRI sunshine, releases of the 300 chemicals that have been tracked since reporting began in 1988 have fallen 60 percent. Between 1998 and 2003, releases of the 650 chemicals that have been tracked since ’98 have fallen more than 40 percent.
For the phony “conservatives” in the administration, however, disclosure is bad for you. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed raising the threshold at which companies must report quantities of tracked chemicals that they release into the environment, from 500 to 5,000 pounds. That doesn’t sound like much, but raising the threshold in that manner would deprive many smaller communities of valuable information that they need to fully understand public health threats that local residents face.
In addition, EPA plans to propose reducing the reporting frequency from every year to every two years, which would significantly dim the sunshine of disclosure that induces companies to improve their production processes and reduce emissions.
In the meantime, a culture that frowns on disclosure is taking over the agency. EPA has watered down a TRI companion report that helps lay citizens make sense of TRI data. The agency released the 2005 TRI report with little notice, a departure from past practice.
EPA claims that weakening TRI would reduce "burdens" on companies that are required to file TRI reports. The interests of citizens and communities that benefit from this information apparently aren't as important.
The free flow of information is good for our system of market capitalism and good for communities seeking to control their destiny. Stifling the free flow of information is an ingrained habit of those with self-serving agendas and authoritarian minds – something that the phony “conservatives” in Washington ought to think about if they ever experience an outbreak of reflective soul-searching.
