Congress tends to address environmental problems one at a time. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act are each massive, complex laws, and we rarely take the time to examine where these laws intersect. Last week, this Committee held a hearing on the Streamlined Environmental Reporting and Pollution Prevention Act, which I have introduced with Senator Crapo and which, Mr. Chairman, I hope we can mark up soon. That bill reduces the administrative burdens associated with the piecemeal nature of environmental reporting.
This hearing essentially addresses a similar issue. In this hearing, we will discuss whether our current environmental laws are focused on the whole forest, or just a few well known trees.
That may sound like an abstract notion, so let me bring it to life. In Toms River, New Jersey, there has been observed a higher than normal incidence of certain childhood cancers. It's a terrible situation, and one that is likely happening undetected across the country. So what's causing it? How do we prevent it? Was it caused by any of the dozens of chemicals found in tiny amounts in the water? What about the radioactive materials released to the air from the nearby nuclear plant? What about the pollution from the cars on the parkway which bisects Toms River? What are the greatest environmental risks to this community?
And these are just the questions science can answer. When we as policy-makers decide how best to prevent environmental risks in this community and across the country, we face other questions that have no scientific answer: How do we compare the risk of an elderly person's premature death to that of a child's asthma attack? How do we compare risks to our health risk to those of our grandchildren and their children? How do we compare a human health risk to the extinction of an animal species? At what point do we decide we know enough about an emerging risk to take a precautionary approach? There are no scientific answers to these questions - yet we can't decide how best to allocate our risk reduction resources without resolving them.
That all being said, I look forward to the thoughts of our expert witnesses on these challenging issues.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.