Bureaucracy Isn’t the Answer

Apparently California attorney General Jerry Brown believes that bureaucracy is the answer to alleged environmental woes. He and ten other state attorney generals have launched a lawsuit against the Bush Administration for trying to cut a little bit of bureaucratic red tape for America’s small business. At issue is Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to reduce paperwork for small companies that contribute a total of less than 1 percent of “releases” under the Toxics Release Inventory. Jerry Brown complains in today’s in The Los Angeles Times about such changes, whining: “As we swim in this chemical soup that modern society serves up, we certainly have a right to know what we are encountering.”

What a bunch of bunk! As pointed out before on the Open Market Blog and in CEI publications (see pages 179-182 of this document), this reporting mechanism had no real impact on public health. Instead it simply serves the agenda of the greens–and public officials like Jerry Brown–to needless hype risks about chemicals.