Observations From the Back Row: 4-18-11

By Rich Kozlovich

“The public has been misled on this issue by an unholy alliance of environmental scaremongers, funds-seeking academics, sensation-seeking media, vote-seeking politicians and profit-seeking vested interests.” …Viv Forbes

Earth Day and Environmental Insanity
Anyone who has been paying any attention to the environmental movement has got to have concluded it is insane.

• While the United States stands poised on defaulting on its ever-growing debt—the highest in the nation’s history;

• While wars and insurrections are waged in the Middle East, across northern Africa, and in the Ivory Coast;

• While Japan struggles to deal with a major earthquake and nuclear plant meltdown;

• While Islam wages terrorism worldwide, and

• While European nations attempt to deal with their own financial crisis, the environmentalists—Greens—engage in the most absurd frauds and nonsense since the Dark Ages.

End the War on Dying Cancer PatientsPerhaps the best example of this is the war against the terminally ill. Did you know that if you are dying and want to take a promising new drug that could save your life you can’t legally do it unless the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says you can? A coalition of cancer patients recently sued the FDA for permission to buy promising new drugs that had been tested for safety in people, but had not yet undergone the lengthy and rigorous effectiveness studies. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, so the lower court ruling of 2007 still stands. The ruling says that you have no constitutional right to buy a drug—even one that might save your life—without FDA approval…….. Unfortunately, terminally ill people who might have been saved could not—and still cannot—buy promising new drugs until they go through an FDA-mandated 12 to 15 year development process.

My Take - This whole business with the FDA has been at issue with many groups, including the American Council on Science and Health. What to do in these situations? I keep coming back to why? Why does it take so long? I have no answers because I don’t know what actually goes on at the FDA and what motivates their decisions.

However, I do know what goes on at EPA regarding pesticide development. It has become a bureaucratic nightmare with regulations being piled on regulations, tests being piled on tests and seemingly for no other reason than to get rid of pesticides or to increase the cost of development. The development stage is so financially onerous that it costs on the average three hundred million dollars to bring a new pesticide to market. That doesn’t count the cost of the ones that fail. And then after 15 years the registrants have to go back and re-register the product after more testing, most likely unnecessary testing because after a product is on the market for 15 years we absolutely know what impact his has on the environment and society. Many just give up and “voluntarily” pull their label.

FDA is different from the EPA in that they want products to come to market, but they are sensitive to criticism that they were lax in their oversight. Just take a look at some of the lawsuits regarding some of the arthritis medications that were eventually pulled. However, that has nothing to do with terminally ill patients. The problem with government bureaucracies is the same no matter what agency or department they belong to the FDA or the EPA; they are all about procedure, not outcome. And lawsuits! Perhaps that is where the real problem lies!

GOP: EPA ‘evaporating’ from hearings House Republicans aren’t happy that top EPA officials are skipping hearings on efforts to roll back the agency’s regulations. “We could call them the Evaporating Personnel Administration, I guess,” Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton said Friday. “They don’t seem to ever show up and be accountable.” Of three Energy and Commerce Committee hearings held this week on controversial EPA rules, the agency sent an administration witness to just one.

My Take – Isn’t the EPA merely an agency of the Commerce Department? Perhaps the Secretary of Commerce could step in and explain what EPA is doing and why! Then again….does he really have a clue as to what this subordinate agency is doing? Does anyone really believe the EPA can be fixed?

EPA admits ignoring jobs in cost-benefit analysis
FLASHBACK: Executive Order 13563 of January 18, 2011 – Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review

Section 1. General Principles of Regulation. (a) Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation.

FAST FORWARD: In a revealing exchange Thursday on Capitol Hill, an EPA expert confirms that the agency, contrary to the president’s executive order, does not directly examine regulations’ impacts on jobs. Watch the startling exchange between Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Mathy Stanislaus, EPA Assistant Administrator for Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. Watch the EPA official squirm in this Congressional hearing:

“De Omnibus Dubitandum”