{"id":5364,"date":"2016-06-22T07:11:48","date_gmt":"2016-06-22T12:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/?p=5364"},"modified":"2024-02-12T11:01:51","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T16:01:51","slug":"a-strong-new-tsca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/2016\/06\/22\/a-strong-new-tsca\/","title":{"rendered":"A strong new TSCA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Denison, Ph.D.,\u00a0<\/em>is a Lead Senior Scientist.<\/p>\n

Those are four words that I thought I might never get to say and see over the many years I\u2019ve worked on this.\u00a0 But today, at a ceremony to be held at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, President Obama will sign the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Lautenberg Act amends the core provisions of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), our nation\u2019s main chemical safety law, for the first time since its passage 40 years ago.\u00a0 Those amendments are extensive, reaching into nearly every aspect of TSCA \u2013 reflecting the need for a top-to-bottom overhaul.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve already blogged recently about both how this was made possible and why it is so significant (see here <\/a>and here<\/a>).\u00a0 And I\u2019ve developed some resources <\/a>for those wanting to understand what the Lautenberg Act does and how it changes TSCA for the better.<\/p>\n

The path leading to today\u2019s historic Presidential signing opened up just over 3 years ago, when two Senators who couldn\u2019t have been more different politically \u2013 the late Sen. Lautenberg and Sen. David Vitter \u2013 came together to introduce the first bipartisan TSCA reform legislation.\u00a0 At that time, I and others here at EDF had a tough decision to make:\u00a0 lend our support to give momentum to a bill that we knew had serious flaws, or withhold that support \u2013 lest it give momentum to such a bill.<\/p>\n

We took the calculated risk \u2013 and it was a big one \u2013 to support the bill for four reasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n

First, we believed Sen. Lautenberg, our community\u2019s longtime champion on this issue, deserved our support.\u00a0 Second, the bill, despite its flaws, held the seeds of many of the reforms we sought even as it had many provisions we did not support.\u00a0 Third, we were concerned that, were there to be no support from our community, the bill would be unlikely to advance and we would lose yet another opportunity to reform TSCA.\u00a0 Fourth, we believed that the best way to fix the serious problems with the bill was to help get it moving through the legislative process, work diligently to find solutions to those problems that could still retain bipartisan support, and encourage the engagement of additional lawmakers to make those changes in exchange for their support for the bill.<\/p>\n

I fully recognize and respect that others in our community chose a different approach, didn\u2019t support EDF in our decision, and maybe still don\u2019t.\u00a0 To that, I\u2019ll quote a song from the 1960s<\/a> I still love: \u201cDifferent strokes for different folks.\u201d\u00a0 There\u2019s simply no way we would have passed this law \u2013 and this strong a law \u2013 without multiple actors taking multiple approaches to getting it done.<\/p>\n

The path by which this new law wended its way through Congress over the past three years has been likened to climbing a very high mountain.\u00a0 You can\u2019t do it all in one climb; you can\u2019t begin to think about doing it by yourself; and you need to establish and attain multiple base camps on the way up.\u00a0 (I could torture the analogy further:\u00a0 watch out for avalanches and sudden storms that can sweep you away at any moment; expect to suffer repeatedly from exhaustion and shortness of breath; don\u2019t hurry and stick close to the ropes; and so on.)<\/p>\n

Before I get carried away, let me close by restating something I said in a recent perspective piece<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Of course, now the real work begins\u2014implementing the law. Which brings me to my last point: A fervent hope that stakeholders will give this new law every chance to work. … I realize it\u2019s a tall order to expect stakeholders with strong interests in certain outcomes not to use every possible avenue to influence every step the EPA takes under the new law. But it\u2019s vital that its implementation lead to improved public health protection as well as a restoration of public confidence, after decades of erosion of that confidence under a badly broken chemical safety system. That means the EPA needs to be given some breathing room, to get a new system up and running, and to get some points on the board early that demonstrate its ability to make decisions and take needed actions.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I\u2019ll say those four words again: \u00a0A strong new TSCA.\u00a0 That sounds really great, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Denison, Ph.D.,\u00a0is a Lead Senior Scientist. Those are four words that I thought I might never get to say and see over the many years I\u2019ve worked on this.\u00a0 But today, at a ceremony to be held at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, President Obama will sign the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,114108],"tags":[56107],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-5364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policy","category-tsca","tag-lautenberg-act"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12770,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5364\/revisions\/12770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5364"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}