Proving They Are Still Dead

Back in 2020, when they endorsed Joe Biden for president, I wrote an epitaph for the magazine Scientific American.  Sure, it is still being published, but it is now just another Trump bashing bit of media and no longer worth the effort necessary to pick it up.  I haven’t looked back, but just to prove my point they published an op-ed last Friday concerning the two tank incidents I looked at yesterday.  (A friend sent it to me, I did not go looking.  It may or may not be behind a paywall for you.  I was able to read it for a couple of days before the paywall notice started to appear.)  It is not science – it is anti-Trump drivel.

The article insists that a proposal by the Trump administration’s EPA to rollback some risk management provisions lies at the heart of these coincidentally concurrent accidents.  The claim is, on its face, nonsense as the rollback has not yet occurred – it is still in the public comment stage.  The existing rules still apply.  A fact they do not mention until late in the article.  While I am unfamiliar with Washington State regulation, I know California intimately.  California never saw a federal regulation it could not make much tighter and more burdensome.  In California you paid little attention to federal regulation in industrial settings because California regs were so much stricter that once you complied with them, you were guaranteed to be federally compliant.  I know this is true in risk management.  In the SciAm piece, again late in the piece, they quote a California state official discussing how California has the tightest risk management requirements in the world – a claim I certainly could not dispute.  Federal requirements are simply moot.

But regulation notwithstanding, it is not as if either of these companies wanted these incidents to occur.  The incidents are extremely costly even before the regulatory penalties become involved.  The loss of equipment and its replacement are bad enough,  In the Washington case they will have to, at a minimum, compensate the families that lost loved ones.  In the California case they will spend untold dollars in defending themselves against the storm of litigation that is already swirling around them.  The cost of business interruption created by these incidents is immense – and will ripple into the community as the employees are currently furloughed and may never have the opportunity to come back to work.  Both incidents will involve insurance claims in the many millions of dollars – and both will have insurance companies beating them like a drum to make sure no such incident will happen ever again and especially not in other facilities they may operate.  Risk management regulation is unnecessary as there are plentiful natural consequences to occurrences like these to motivate any operation.

There have long been regulatory requirements when it comes to occupational safety.  There is already strong government incentive to avoid incidents like this to avoid complications from those agencies.  But that is not within the purview of environmental agencies so they’ll just go ahead and double regulate.  Risk management regulation is little more than an excuse to add more staff, and power, to some regulatory agency and a means of taxation as there are, of course, associated fees.  The vulture metaphor of fining a company that has just suffered immense financial loss is too apt and too disgusting to contemplate.

Scientific American used to be known for its in-depth and penetrating analysis.  They gave that up long ago, but here again, we have a reminder.  Rather than analyze and understand, they simply react with an anti-Trump impulse.  That seems to be the case with so much happening these days.