TECH: Mommy, Can the Dems Scare Me Some More?

TECH: Mommy, Can the Dems Scare Me Some More?

FOXNews.com - Views - Junk Science - Arsenic-laced Presidential Campaign?

Amid new arm-waving over the administration’s plan to reduce mercury emissions (search) from power plants, Democrat presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Lieberman recently said, “First arsenic, then mercury, what poison will the Bush administration seek to permit into our environment next?”

We can expect many more such comments during the 2004 campaign season from Democrats as they rant and rave about the president’s record on the environment. Their fearmongering about arsenic, however, will lack a factual basis.

A new study reports no increased rates of cancer in the two largest U.S. populations consuming drinking water containing relatively high levels of arsenic. . . .

You might think the combination of much lower exposures in the U.S. and no observed risks at those lower exposures would be a good enough reason not to burden U.S. water systems with expensive regulatory standards, but you’d be wrong.

Make-believe risk often serves as a sufficient excuse for environmental regulations and making up risks is what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency relishes most, and does best.

When the EPA has no data indicating actual cancer risk from real-life exposures to a particular substance, the agency employs a mathematical trick called the “linear no-threshold” (LNT) model that, by its very definition, simply concocts risk.

The LNT model dictates that any exposure to a supposedly cancer-causing substance increases cancer risk and that cancer risk increases in a linear fashion with increasing exposure. . . .

Needless to say, the new study exposes the revised EPA standard as being without scientific foundation. The Berkeley researchers notably remarked, “Interestingly, the overall risks were below those predicted using data from highly exposed populations in Taiwan.”

That’s not hard to believe given that the supposed risks predicted from the Taiwan data by the LNT model were totally fabricated.

And, no, the study was not paid for by the “arsenic industry.”

First, arsenic occurs naturally in drinking water. Next, the study was funded by the federal government and conducted by Cal-Berkeley’s Allan H. Smith -- a strong proponent of more stringent arsenic regulations.

About 4,000 water systems serving 11 million people nationwide would be in violation of the revised arsenic standard if it were to take effect now. It will cost about $200 million annually to bring these water systems into compliance with the new standard.

I only wish I could afford a television commercial where a little girl asks, “Can we waste even more taxpayer money on junk science, mommy?”