Balancing Environmental Protection and Public Health in the time of COVID-19 (and after)

Greenwire reported today that two medical sterilization facilities in Georgia that had been shut down or had production limited due to concerns about exposures to ethylene oxide would be allowed to increase operations in response to the need for sterilized medical equipment to address the COVID-19 pandemic.  The result is not surprising and, one assumes, appropriate in the circumstances.

It does highlight, though, a major flaw in our environmental and public health regulatory systems – we have no overarching regulation that provides a context in which to compare costs and benefits across regulatory programs.  Notwithstanding the concerns of my green friends, in an ideal world, we would be able to assess the costs and benefits of different regulatory strategies, compare them, and implement the global decisions necessary to balance different programs and yield the greatest overall protection of public health. 

Balancing exposure to a compound EPA has concluded is a potent carcinogen against the need to provide equipment necessary to respond to a global pandemic is particularly stark, but the issue arises daily in numerous contexts.  I’ll give just one other example from a much more mundane situation.  Early in my career, I went to a public meeting concerning the remedy proposed for a Superfund site in Somersworth, NH.  Somersworth’s population at the time was less than 12,000 people, and its share of the cleanup costs was projected to be more than $10 million.  Numerous residents commented that more lives would be saved by investing in police or traffic lights than the cleanup of a site that might have posed a 1/100,000 risk that someone would get cancer.

The point here isn’t that this anecdotal concern was legitimate – or not – but that we don’t have a framework that allows us to make these comparisons and we don’t have a regulatory system that would allow us to prioritize the greater public health benefit, even if we knew what that was.

My dream is still one overarching public health protection environmental law.

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