SULFUR, ARSENIC, AND SUSPICIOUS REGULATION

April 20, 2001
Recent experience of the oil industry hangs a suspicious cloud over a dispute about arsenic in drinking water.

Recent experience of the oil industry hangs a suspicious cloud over a dispute about arsenic in drinking water.

Linking the issues is the scorched-earth environmentalism practiced by the Clinton administration in its final weeks.

One nasty product of that lurch is a sulfur content standard for highway diesel fuel far stricter than it needs to be.

The refining industry never challenged the need to lower the amount of sulfur in diesel burned in highway vehicles. It never disputed the reason for the cut: to protect emissions-control equipment required in new vehicles.

In fact, the industry supported a 90% reduction in diesel sulfur. The Environmental Protection Agency nevertheless published a rule last December requiring a 97% cut.

The main difference between the industry-supported sulfur level and the one mandated by EPA is the required investment in refinery equipment. It is great. Yet there may be no difference at all in the performance of emissions-control equipment between the two standards. If there is an environmental difference it is slight.

Industry groups have challenged the diesel-sulfur overkill in court. If the challenge fails, the rule will cost consumers much.

There is no question that highway diesel supplies will suffer as refiners unable to meet the investment needs quit making the product or close whole refineries. The price of highway diesel therefore will rise. Truckers will suffer. Some portion of the increased transportation costs will have to be paid by consumers.

The arsenic controversy fits this pattern.

There is general agreement that arsenic is a human carcinogen. In many places, it shows up in drinking water. The controversy focuses on concentration levels that can be deemed safe.

The current standard is 50 ppb. In its final weeks, the Clinton administration moved to cut the standard to 10 ppb, a level first proposed by the US Public Health Service in 1962.

The American Water Works Association, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, says EPA's cut would require investment of $4.5 billion in treatment facilities nationwide and raise the costs of water treatment by $500 million/year. Costs of compliance might threaten the existence of small rural water systems in some areas.

Industry groups say arsenic in water doesn't have to be cut by as much as the Clinton administration EPA proposed to protect human health.

Now the Bush administration is under attack for recommending a review to see if an arsenic standard between 10 ppb and 50 ppb would better balance costs and health effects.

Maybe drinking water should contain no more than 10 ppb arsenic. But similarities between the Clinton administration's handling of the issue and its slam-dunk on diesel sulfur justify skepticism.

Both moves look calculated to impose maximum burdens on the affected industries in service to questionable margins of safety and in defiance of concern about the ultimate costs to individuals.

What's more, neither move pays sufficient heed to broader issues of human well-being.

Medical supplies, to make a simple point, move to where they are needed in trucks. And the affordability of drinking water is a health issue not lacking in significance to the arsenic controversy.