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EPA and the public
Q: You seem to have a lot of faith in the idea that the common person, given the information, can make good choices.
MR. COSTLE: I think they can make common-sense, practical choices. That is always what it comes down to, anyway. I think that, if you do to people what they did to the people at Love Canal, with the leak of those unreviewed chromosome studies, you have put yourself in an impossible position. You have to get in early, to have the affected people participate in the process every step of the way. That is beginning to happen now with clean-ups at the old defense facilities at DOE, and it's working.
Q: You talk about common sense and also about the ambiguity of science. Yet, there is this deep sort of trust of science and technology in the American psyche. How do you grapple with that, or how did you, as a regulator? Or were you even aware of that?
MR. COSTLE: Every time we had to recalibrate a standard or set a new one, we faced this. You can't be in that business and not be aware of the uncertainties and ambiguities in the science. People tend to think science is hard and numerical and precise. It's not, particularly in the environmental area. But there is one way, and only one way, to deal with that, and that is just to be absolutely open and honest about the gray areas. Anyway you cut it, we're making judgments, social policy judgment calls, and we have to be willing to tolerate a certain level of intervention in the operation of a free market economy. We're forcing the internalization of externalities, and this must become a part of our economic decision-making. We're going to have to set some boundaries that will by nature be arbitrary. We can reduce the edge of the arbitrariness with research and with refinement of the science as we go along, but we are never going to get the kind of precision that we'd like. So we have either got to change our system for making these decisions, or we have got to live with this ambiguity. The cumulative effect of so many of these problems is gradual, and you can very easily reach a point of no return. That's what makes these problems so poignant.
I remember a group of scientists from Russia, China and the United States telling me, about 1978 or '79, that by the time they could definitively document global warming, it would be too late to implement preventive measures, so complicated was the job of tracking chemistry in the atmosphere and sorting out the impacts of man-induced climate change from normal weather variations over multi-year time periods. The only way I know to deal with such problems is to be straight up about what we know and what we don't.