Reject the Precautionary Principle, a Threat to Technological Progress

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Increasingly, governments and environmental activists are demanding that producers of both new and old technologies prove that their products are totally safe. Although this may seem like a reasonable approach—“better safe than sorry”—health and environmental risk issues are not so simple. Nothing is totally without risk, and the reason for adopting new technologies in the first place is that they often improve our well-being by protecting us from the risks of older, more established products and practices.