[quote=njtosd]
Carcinogens (and other toxic substances) are like people. Some are well known and common in the popular press while others are less well known. But they are everywhere. The key to whether something poses a dangerous risk of carcinogenicity/toxicity has much more to do with concentration than with chemical characteristics. For this reason, it is perfectly reasonable to question whether the economic cost of lower emissions is actually justified by the benefit gained by the public.[/quote]
Who makes the decision on what is an acceptable cost to the public? You? Me? Is it acceptable to you if you get cancer because someone decided that it was an acceptable ‘cost’? I guess so.
Typically, it’s the poorest people who have to bear the brunt of the ‘cost’ as they tend to have little political power that would enable them to keep the big polluters away. So basically what you are saying is that it’s OK if some of the poor are killed so long as the executives doing the poisoning don’t have to take a pay cut.
I don’t like your standard and prefer the standard proffered in the article I linked to: Best available technology. Polluters should be forced to use the best available pollution-prevention technology available. Let the CEOs running these outfits wait another year to add a second yacht to their fleet. The wait won’t kill them.
