October 8, 2006
Sunday morning news blogging ::
politics — tagged congress, environment, legal, newsblogging, politics and sustainability
11:08 am
Now that I live without a television, my Sunday mornings are usually spent reading news sources and political blogs rather than idly worshipping the institution of Sunday morning punditry. So with that, let me start what I hope to be an ongoing tradition here at The Pages Within: Sunday morning news blogging. With that, two interesting articles worthy of reading.
The first is an LA Times piece on the products allowed into US markets that other countries ban. At the top of the list is Chinese-produced plywood coated in formaldehyde, which incidentally the Chinese government has banned in its own country. The lack of regulation in the US, however, has created two separate camps of corporations—one that is self-regulating, and the other that chooses to take advantage of the lack of health regulations in this country. The self-regulating companies instead “comply with EU standards, the most stringent chemical laws in the world.”
“We don’t operate to different standards in different parts of the globe, regardless of differing environmental standards,” said John Frey, manager of corporate environmental strategies at Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard.
Those companies that choose to adhere only to the minimal US regulations have a predictable argument:
[T]heir products have undergone rigorous reviews in the United States and are not only legal here but safe. They say some governments, particularly the EU, have overreacted and banned chemicals with little or no evidence of a human health threat.
Similar to this case, his book Collapse Jared Diamond contrasts the business practices of two oil companies, and talks about how one company—Chevron—discovered it was better to self-regulate, setting the bar higher than the law necessarily requires, both because taking precautions is always cheaper than dealing with a disaster, and because, like it or not, the tendency of government is to implement more stringent health and safety requirements. So it’s good to be ready for it.
The second article is a slightly more self-explanatory piece in Slate about Congress’ use of the language of addiction. You might not have thought that the Foley scandal and the passage of the (likely unconstitutional) detainee bill are related, but apparently they are.
