On perchlorate, regulators have abandoned duty to public
In California, the state’s financial and weather outlooks are in many ways the same: all dried up. Now, environmental lobbyists and restless government regulators aim to worsen the forecast for both.
The duo have managed success largely as a consequence of the complicated nature of the issue, relying on an uninformed and distracted public — like cattle to the slaughter, taxpayers and consumers won’t know what’s happened until it’s already over.
The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA)—think of it as red tape ground zero—recently revised the state’s public health goal for perchlorate, from six parts per billion (ppb) to a unnecessary and expensive standard of one ppb. Perchlorate is a manufactured chemical that also happens to be present naturally at low levels.
Don’t get lost in the science of parts per billion: a tighter standard simply means that the state regulators would force water utilities, consumers and farmers to cover the hundreds of millions of… Read More