Precaution & Risk

Surprising Junk Science on Fox News

by Angela Logomasini on May 16, 2013 · 0 comments

in Environment, Features, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

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News stories trumping junk science are common, but I expect better from Fox News, which claims to be “fair and balanced” and hosts great shows like STOSSEL. And they’ve run some of my commentaries, which I appreciate. That’s why I am perplexed by some Fox reports on environmental issues, many of which seem to peddle junk science pushed by activists at the Environmental Working Group (EWG).

For example, the other day Fox published a silly story from Prevention magazine on how chemicals found in popcorn cooked in nonstick pans might give you heart disease based on a single study that found a statistical association, which can occur by mere chance. How many other studies failed to find an association?  The article doesn’t bother to go there—rather, it says: “Scary? You bet.” The article does offer a weak qualifier, stating that “more research needs to be done to determine the specific relationship between PFOA [the chemical used in non-stick the pans] and cardiovascular disease.”

Another recent Fox-published article highlights EWG’s latest Shoppers’ Guide to Pesticides in Produce. Fox offers no  critical analysis of the activist groups’ crazy claims.

Yet EWG’s Shoppers’ Guide is a perversion of data that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) collects annually to measure traces of pesticides found on produce. Residue levels are always extremely low, and USDA and the Environmental Protection Agency both explain that the data demonstrates that levels are too low to pose significant health risks. Yet EWG lists healthy foods—such as apples—as “dirty” because they have a few extra parts per billion of trace pesticide residues. The response should be: Who cares?  The levels are too low to have an impact, and eating these foods is certainly good for your health.

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“Shocking” Truth about Government and Soap

by Angela Logomasini on May 13, 2013 · 0 comments

in Environment, Features, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

shock

Is your hand wash slowly killing you as government regulators sit idly by? Sounds silly, but that’s what environmentalists seem to think about an antibacterial agent called triclosan, which is used in soap and other consumer products.

According to the NRDC: “In laboratory studies, they [antibacterial chemicals] have been shown to disrupt hormones and can encourage the growth of drug-resistant bacteria or ‘superbugs.’” The group wants consumers to urge the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “to pull products containing triclosan and triclocarban from store shelves.” The NRDC is also suing FDA for not completing its scientific review of triclosan, which has dragged on for more than 40 years.

The Globe and Mail reports: “Some Americans are shocked that the FDA has taken so long. Mallory Smith is troubled to learn that the government has never confirmed the safety of antibacterial soap’s key ingredient.”

Yet the fact that bureaucrats rarely move quickly isn’t shocking at all. In fact, the NRDC lawsuit proves why government isn’t well suited to take swift action or promote public safety. And there are many reasons why chemical reviews in particular take a long time, none of which have to do with safety.

First, chemical exposures from consumer products are generally too low to have any significant impacts. Measuring such negligible risks is akin to looking for needle in a field of haystacks. Government researchers can dig and dig, yet never find anything, nor can they prove a chemical is 100 percent safe since nothing is. So they continue with no end in sight.

For example, while triclosan has been used pretty widely for more than 60 years, there’s no hard evidence of triclosan-caused cancers or “superbugs.” The best greens can offer are allegations based on studies that suggest links between the chemical and health effects in rodents dosed large amounts. The same is true for naturally occurring chemicals in broccoli, coffee, pickles, and more. We don’t need an FDA review of these foods to know they are safe to eat and that these rodent studies are not particularly relevant to human health risks from trace chemicals.

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Correcting Misconceptions about Autonomous Vehicles: Reason Magazine Edition

by Marc Scribner on May 10, 2013 · 4 comments

in Features, Mobility, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Privacy, Regulation

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In the June issue of Reason, one of my favorite publications, Greg Beato has an article discussing the public policy implications of autonomous vehicles, such as Google’s Self-Driving Car. While I appreciate libertarians (being one myself) taking this technology seriously, Beato makes a number of questionable assumptions and outright factual errors in the piece. Here’s my quick attempt to address some of them.

Beato begins with obligatory Google-bashing common among techies, who seem to either love Google or despise it. (This is probably too simplistic, but this is how it looks like to a Silicon Valley outsider.) The legal issues with respect to Google’s collection of unprotected Wi-Fi data are complicated from a libertarian perspective, those related to Google’s settlement with the FTC “for bypassing privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser,” as Beato puts it, are not. No one’s privacy was ever violated. All Google was guilty of, as technology policy and privacy analysts here at CEI noted at the time, was

failing to realize a software tweak by Apple rendered one of Google’s help pages inaccurate. There is no evidence that any users were “taken in” or harmed by this inaccurate help page, nor does the FTC allege that Google knew or should’ve known that its help page was wrong. A four-commissioner FTC majority even admitted that Google’s alleged wrongdoing didn’t last very long or earn the company much money.

This is hardly the privacy-invading sin Beato implies it was, but he is obviously setting the stage for his arguments for additional public skepticism of autonomous vehicle technology.

But much of the beginning of the article focuses on the huge potential benefits of vehicle automation, which are large and which we at CEI have highlighted in the past. But at the halfway point, Beato drops this:

But is everyone really so eager to see the automobile, which stands as one of history’s great amplifiers of personal autonomy and liberty, evolve into a giant tracking device controlled by a $250 billion corporation that makes its money through an increasingly intimate and obtrusive knowledge of its customers?

Beato is correct that the automobile is one of the great technological liberators of mankind from the time-consuming drudgery that was previously associated with personal mobility. But the implication that Google is intent on destroying privacy protections by deploying a mobility-enhancing technology is over the top. Autonomous vehicle users in the future, just like users of any digital technology that transmits telemetric data, will be opting in. Google and other potential providers, in turn, will likely be responsive to privacy concerns. The real concern is the ability of law enforcement and other government bodies to access this private information.

But Beato instead makes questionable assumptions regarding technology that is not yet available to consumers, always a dangerous tack to take. For instance, Beato claims, “Even if it were possible to operate the car in some kind of ‘manual’ mode, you would likely still be sending information back to headquarters.” “Even if”? “Likely”? As far as the ability to operate a fully autonomous vehicle manually (i.e., not in autonomous mode), this will be standard. In fact, more than one of the four (not three, as Beato incorrectly states later in the article; they are Nevada, Florida, California, and Washington, D.C.) jurisdictions that recognize the legality of these vehicles (not where they are legalized – more on this in a moment) explicitly requires this feature.

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Government’s Chinatown Bus Shutdowns Based on “Statistical Malpractice”

by Marc Scribner on May 9, 2013 · 0 comments

in Mobility, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

Reason’s Jim Epstein has an article up that does a nice job debunking a National Transportation Safety Board study, prompted by a 2011 bus crash in the Bronx that killed 15 people, that led the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to shut down a number of supposedly unsafe small bus companies:

In 1997, Chinese-born entrepreneurs began regularly scheduled long-distance bus services that picked up passengers on the street. Tickets were priced so low that it was hard to figure how the operators could be breaking even, much less making a profit. Faced with declining market share, Greyhound and Peter Pan imitated the Chinatown model by teaming up to create a new venture called BoltBus. Then Coach USA got into the game with Megabus. Today, “curbside” buses—lines that begin and end their routes at the sidewalk as opposed to a traditional station—make up the fastest growing form of intercity travel in the U.S.

But over the past two years, the government has forced 27 bus companies based in Chinatown to close. The regulatory clampdown was fueled by a government study that found curbside carriers were disproportionately killing their passengers. Released by the National Transportation Safety Board, a federal agency, the study concluded that curbside bus companies were “seven times” more likely to be involved in an accident with at least one fatality than conventional bus operators. That finding was reported by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Businessweek, USA Today, the New York Daily News, WNYC, and Reuters, among others. Although the study did not single out Chinatown bus companies the headline in Businessweek read, “Chinatown Buses Death Rate Said Seven Times That of Others.”

The study is bogus. Not only is the “seven times” finding incorrect, the entire report is a mangle of inaccurate charts and numbers that tell us virtually nothing meaningful about bus safety. There’s no evidence that curbside or Chinatown buses are any less safe than any other kind of bus.

How did the study authors figure curbside bus companies are “seven times” more prone to fatal accidents? For starters, they counted 37 accidents during the study period involving curbside buses in which there was at least one fatality. When I rebuilt the study data and contacted the companies involved, I found that, in 30 of those 37 accidents, curbside buses were not involved. In fact, 24 of those 30 misclassified cases involved Greyhound’s conventional bus fleet. (Greyhound’s curbside subsidiary BoltBus had no fatal accidents during the study period.)

The National Transportation Safety Board denied my requests for the study data, even though it was a taxpayer-funded report with an impact on policy. After my Freedom of Information Act request also failed to return the information following a six-month wait, I began reconstructing the study data from other sources.

Proceeding on the time-honored hunch that people who are hiding something have reason to do so, I generated a list of the 37 fatal crashes using a database obtained from a federal contractor that collects nationwide accident data. I analyzed that data with help of Aaron Brown, a quantitative analyst with the hedge fund AQR Capital Management. Brown was the first to point out major flaws in the NTSB’s methodology in an article published by Minyanville.com, accusing the study authors of “statistical malpractice.” I also consulted with Ed George, a professor of statistics and department chair at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school, who examined the study for the purposes of this article.

“When I first read the NTSB report, I thought this is just terrible statistics,” says Brown. “But it goes way beyond that. It’s almost as if someone took some random data and shook it together.”

Read the whole thing over at Reason for an overview of the NTSB’s incredibly sloppy study methodology. Cato’s Randal “The Antiplanner” O’Toole has more.

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U.S. Government Bans French Cheese Based On Food Prejudices

by Hans Bader on April 30, 2013 · 0 comments

in Features, Health and Illness, International, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Trade

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The U.S. government is banning a standard, normal-smelling French cheese based on its own squeamishness. The cheese in question is Mimolette, a commonplace, orange French cheese so mild in flavor that I once confused it with cheddar when I visited my French relatives and ate it for the first time. The ban has triggered protests in New York City, reports the Global Post:

Around 40 protesters took to the streets of New York on Saturday to demonstrate against a US ban on mimolette that has angered lovers of the distinctive French cheese.

Since March, several hundred pounds of the bright orange cheese have been held up by US customs because of a warning by the Food and Drug Administration that it contained microscopic cheese mites.

The mites are a critical part of the process to produce mimolette, giving it its distinctive grayish crust.

The US decision has angered importers and consumers, who have even set up a Facebook page titled “Save the Mimolette.”

Benoit de Vitton, an importer of the cheese. . . said he was baffled by the recent blockade, noting he has imported mimolette for two decades without a problem.”They are afraid of allergies,” he said. “But we’ve been doing this for 20 years without any problem.”

Who cares if it has tiny, invisible mites in it? Cheese is the product of bacteria. Good yogurt has live cultures of bacteria in it, and that is beneficial for your health. Food that is alive can be good for you. The human body is full of living, friendly microbes that keep us alive. The cheese mites in Mimolette are there to enhance its flavor: as Wikipedia notes, the “crust of aged Mimolette is the result of cheese mites intentionally introduced to add flavor by their action on the surface of the cheese.”

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Why BPA (And Other Chemicals) Don’t Belong On Proposition 65

by Angela Logomasini on April 25, 2013 · 0 comments

in Environment, Features, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

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If you want to have fun in California’s Disneyland, avoid reading the warning signs saying that products used in the park may give you cancer and reproductive problems! They’re not just a buzz kill, they are plain dumb and misinformed. But it’s state law that they be there. You can find them in Starbucks and many other places throughout the state too.

California’s nonsensical Proposition 65 law directs regulators to place chemicals on a “toxic” substances list, and then forces companies to issue warning labels when they use these substances to make consumer products and food. But regulators list chemicals for myriad stupid reasons. For example, they may list a chemical simply because high doses give cancer to rats, which is also true of broccoli. It’s the dose that makes the poison, which is one reason that such rodent tests have little relevance to health impacts in humans.

If the logic behind is law were correct, you might worry about keeping a nickle in your pocket since California lists nickel as a toxic substance. It’s not clear why the federal government does not have to post warning labels on nickles. I guess the feds are exempt from state-level idiocy?

As I noted on the Independent Women’s Forum Inkwell blog yesterday, one chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), has recently gained a temporary — hopefully soon-to-be-permanent — stay from listing on the Proposition 65 list. This case raises questions about the thousands of other chemicals found on this list. Had industry fought as hard as the American Chemistry Council is currently doing for BPA, would fewer chemicals be on this list? Maybe so. After all, at existing exposures, none of these chemicals pose much of any risks.

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Why FAA’s Child Seat Campaign Is Deadly

by Adam Sandberg on April 22, 2013 · 9 comments

in Features, Mobility, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

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Federal law allows airline passengers with children under the age of two to travel with their children on their laps. This option, which has existed since the 1950s, has been under attack for quite some time by various agencies and consumer protection advocacy groups. These opponents claim that a lap-seated child is not afforded the same safety as other passengers, and may risk injuring or killing himself or other passengers in the event of strong turbulence or a crash. There are a very small number of plane crashes in which a lap-seated child died and in which the evidence suggests that he might have survived in a Child Restraint Seat (CRS). Nonetheless, requiring all children to be strapped in on an airplane is not a particularly good idea. As it turns out, CRS in airplanes would raise the cost of air travel for families with toddlers, making some of them travel in ways that pose a much larger threat.

Back in the 1990s, when FAA proposed mandating the use of CRS in airplanes, several researchers showed that this could result in another 13 to 42 added fatalities over 10 years in highway accidents. Since the CRS requirement would force families traveling with a child to purchase a ticket for an extra seat, the increased cost would make some travelers drive their cars instead. This, however, would make them subject to the risks of accidents on America’s highways. Because air travel is generally much safer than car travel, FAA withdrew its proposed regulation in 2005.

These findings where confirmed by FAA in 2011, when it concluded that requiring the use of CRS would increase total transportation deaths by 72 deaths over 10 years and by 115over 15 years.

Allowing toddlers to fly on their parent’s lap is therefore quite a good idea.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) opposes giving parents this option, and it criticized FAA in a not-very-persuasive 2004 study. The option is also opposed by the Association of Flight Attendants. Lap babies, however, are probably not the flight attendant’s favorite passengers. My guess is that they’d like to see babies on planes not only in a seat of their own, but bound and gagged.

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Separate Security Cameras and State

by Ivan Osorio on April 22, 2013 · 0 comments

in Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Privacy

In his column today, The Wall Street Journal‘s Gordon Crovitz notes the significant help that video footage played in helping police identify the Boston Marathon bombers. However, he seems to miss what the Boston police’s success actually implies — that government-run security cameras are unnecessary for protecting public safety.

Boston is one of the less-wired large cities when it comes to surveillance cameras, so authorities relied largely on footage from private parties, such as the Lord & Taylor department store near the scene. The most recent estimate, from 2010, is that Boston and surrounding towns have some 150 police surveillance cameras, plus 400 in the subway. This compares with more than 3,000 government and networked private cameras in New York City’s financial district alone, and some 400,000 cameras in London.

While Crovitz doesn’t explicitly say so, the seeming implication that  Boston being “one of the less-wired large cities” may be a shortcoming is troubling and misses the real lesson of the search for the bombers — the value of the public’s engagement in helping to protect their own city. The Washington Examiner‘s Tim Carney, on the other hand, gets it right.

So it turns out we already have plenty of cameras on the street. They’re not government cameras, but rather cameras owned and operated by private individuals and businesses. In a bout of public spiritedness, these pedestrians and businesses willingly shared their videos with law enforcement. Even if the crime had not been so notorious, the police could expect public cooperation — what merchant wouldn’t share his surveillance tapes to aid in a murder investigation?

Indeed, until private surveillance and recording of events prove inadequate — and there is no reason to believe that they will — the burden of proof should remain on government on the need to expand its surveillance capabilities.

UPDATE: In a related topic, David Henderson at Econlog explains the value of decentralized, citizen-driven information in ensuring public safety (h/t Iain Murray).

Don’t Waste Billions Putting Gun-Wielding Guards In Our Schools

by Hans Bader on April 17, 2013 · 2 comments

in Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Zeitgeist

School violence has diminished in recent years, but in response to a few mass shootings, the National Rifle Association and the Obama administration have advocated putting armed guards in every school, even though that would cost billions of dollars. The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy explains why this is a bad idea. As Healy notes, “if your goal is to prevent kids from getting murdered, the schools are about the last place you’d put new police, since 98 percent of youth homicides occur off school grounds.”

Even a high estimate of the rate of school shootings suggests that a typical “school in the United States can expect a school shooting” only “every 6,000 years.” Meanwhile, “to put ‘armed police officers in every school,’” as the NRA’s Wayne “LaPierre has frantically demanded that Congress do, would require hiring over 100,000 new cops,” notes Healy. Moreover, putting armed guards in schools increases the risk of accidental shootings, or armed guards “going postal.”  For example, “A New York town that began assigning an armed police officer to guard a high school in the wake of the Connecticut massacre has suspended the program after an officer accidentally discharged his pistol in a hallway while classes were in session.”

Additional critiques of this big-government scheme at taxpayer expense can be found at Reason magazine and Free Range Kids (“Our Schools Are Safe Enough: A Movement to Stop Overreacting to Sandy Hook” [click here])

CEI Podcast For March 28, 2013: The TSA’s Illegal Body Scanners

by Ryan Young on March 28, 2013

in Mobility, Podcast, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

Have a listen here.

The TSA’s controversial full-body scanners were implemented illegally, since the TSA never put them through the required comment-and-review rulemaking process. Despite a court order, the TSA is still dragging its feet on complying with the law. Fellow in Land-use and Transportation Studies Marc Scribner has the latest developments in the case.

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