House Passes Chemical Reform Bill, Delighting Chemical Industry

by Shawn Drury

One of the biggest applause lines at a rally for a Republican presidential hopeful comes when the candidate bashes the EPA. It’s nearly Pavlovian at this point. Thanks to the public relations arm of the GOP known as Fox News, there are segments of the population who see the EPA as nothing more than a bunch of bureaucrats standing in the way of endless riches for small businesses.
The fact is, environmental regulations keep us safe. Without these laws there would be an untold amount of chemicals in our air, land, and water. And some of those laws, like the Toxic Substance Control Act, are woefully out of date. Passed in 1976, the TSCA is both obsolete and toothless. Critics say the TSCA did not give the EPA the ability to label something as toxic and gave it little guidance on the chemical regulation process.
For example, the chemical that spilled into a West Virginia river last year, which caused tens of thousands of people to go without water for months, was not considered toxic. Believe it or not, asbestos is still legal in the United States. The EPA tried to ban it, but it lost in court in 1991. It hasn’t tried to ban a chemical since.
State environmental agencies could conceivably fill in where the EPA has not, but many of those, thanks to governors like Rick Scott in Florida, have seen their budgets slashed.
An attorney and advocate for chemical-regulation reform told Think Progress that 85,000 chemicals have been commercialized since 1976 and only a thousand have been “well-tested for their human health and environmental effects.”
But the House of Representatives is on the case. On Tuesday, the GOP-led body passed a reform to the TSCA. The bill requires the EPA to test at least 10 chemicals a year, but offers little else in the way of keeping our air, land, and water clean. The new bill requires the EPA to prove a chemical is dangerous before testing it.
In a statement, the Environmental Working Group noted:

The bill would allow chemical companies to pay for quick reviews and approval of their favorite chemicals. But promised reviews of the truly dangerous chemicals that persist in the environment and build up in Americans bodies could languish for lack of funding Congressional appropriators.

Coming out in favor of the bill? The American Chemistry Council.
The Senate is expected to take up a similar bill before it goes to summer recess. That legislation was more to environmentalists’ liking, but it too has been criticized for being too friendly to the chemical industry. How friendly? Well, Hearst got a hold of an early draft of the bill which showed the author to be…The American Chemistry Council.
That’s right; lobbyists for the chemical industry were literally writing the legislation that is meant to prevent them from polluting.
I don’t think this is what the framers had in mind when they put pen to paper and began work on the Constitution.