The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. SAFETY
Some homeland security analysts call on the federal government to re-design safety systems at industrial facilities to safeguard against biological and chemical attacks.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Risk & Environmental Policy Angela Logomasini on why the federal government makes a poor safety engineer:
“Department of Homeland Security regulations rightly focus on managing the risks of chemicals rather than the government-directed elimination or reformulation advocated by Prof. [Lawrence] Wein. If we learned anything from the fall of communism, it’s that government regulators are particularly bad in designing and managing industrial processes. Regulators are likely to make fatal mistakes that jeopardize society’s continued access to the products that play critical roles in cleaning drinking water, disinfecting hospitals, and producing food and medicine.”
2. ENVIRONMENT
German Chancellor Angela Merkel urges her fellow European Union leaders to establish ambitious new targets for reducing greenhouse gases.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Christopher Horner on the attempt of EU leaders to cover up their poor performance thus far:
“[EU] Ambassdor [John] Bruton’s complaint, in short, is that not everyone is behaving and bending to EU insistence that all discussion about greenhouse gas emissions be in the context of a 1990 emissions baseline, which affords Europe credit for two political decisions preceding and unrelated to the Kyoto Protocol or any effort to reduce GHGs. As more modern performance comes to light, Europe is facing a serious embarrassment of being outperformed by the U.S. in terms of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, particularly the key target carbon dioxide, the target of all proposals floating around Washington.”
3. HEALTH
New research suggests that the prevalence of organic food can add to childhood allergies.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Director of Food Safety Policy Gregory Conko on the organic spinach that was behind last summer’s E.coli outbreak:
“Last summer’s outbreak of E. coli contamination in packaged spinach that killed at least three people and sickened more than 200 others has now been confirmed to have come from a 50-acre organic farm in California’s San Benito County. According to the Associated Press, at a legislative hearing in Sacramento on Tuesday, California Department of Health Services officials said that ‘investigators identified the grower who was farming that plot, which was in the second year of a three-year transition to organic production.’”