Risk: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Fischhoff Baruch & Kadvany John

Author:Fischhoff, Baruch & Kadvany, John [Fischhoff, Baruch]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

Rules and regulation

Risk regulations are a form of bounded rationality, applying the same rule to many hazards, while ignoring differences among them. How well regulations work depends on how well their bounds are set. One aspect of those bounds is how regulatory categories are defined. For example, regulatory rules in the US are less strict when (a) a herbal remedy is classified as a dietary supplement, rather than as a drug; (b) a cheese pizza has pepperoni, so that it is regulated by the Department of Agriculture rather than by the Food and Drug Administration; or (c) investments are deemed unsupervised hedge funds, rather than regulated securities.

Applying general rules requires translating them into specific terms. For example, in the US, ‘new’ electric power plants are regulated more strictly than existing ones. However, ‘new’ and ‘existing’ are sufficiently ambiguous terms that electric companies sometimes rebuild plants almost completely in order to stay under the more lenient old rules. Some nuclear power plants still rely on huge ‘old’ cooling water intakes that kill billions of fish eggs and larvae, rather than deploy ‘new’ technology. Looking at risk outcomes, terms like ‘adverse environmental impact’ (the brief phrase long used in the US) have so many interpretations that regulations using them are hardly rules at all. Sometimes, the vagueness is deliberate, leaving regulators with discretion that belies the promise of standard rules; sometimes, it is inadvertent, as with the cooling water language that emerged from frantic, last-minute negotiations in the US Congress.

As seen in Chapter 2, definitions express values. For example, decision rules often invoke ‘fairness’. However, that term will have different winners and losers, if it means (a) dividing water equally among all farmers versus first honouring the oldest water rights; (b) requiring new housing developments to pay for their infrastructure (roads, sewers) versus charging everyone in a jurisdiction; (c) imposing toxic clean-up costs on all ‘responsible parties’ versus only current property owners; or (d) applying carbon emission limits on all nations versus just developed ones, in so far as developing nations have not had the benefits of historic energy use.

Once assigned to a regulatory class, hazards must be bounded to some portion of their life cycle. For example, the risks from a solvent may be very different if regulators consider just the health and environmental impacts of its direct usage or also those of its ‘downstream’ fate (waste transport and disposal), ‘upstream’ sources (mining and transport), occupational exposures, and those of the intermediate chemicals used in its production. As another example, the benefits of chlorination far outweigh its risks, when regulated just for its use in controlling microbial diseases in drinking water (dysentery, hepatitis, giardia, cholera); that balance can be less clear when regulations also consider carcinogenic by-products, such as chloroform.

Unless regulatory rules are enforced, the trade-offs they embody will not be achieved or remain highly uncertain. For example, lax supervision can allow farm labourers to re-enter fields too soon after pesticide use. Strict regulations can also prompt evasion, as with the

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