On this pop-up episode of She Thinks, IWF’s Director for the Center of Policy & Innovation interviews David Clement of the Consumer Choice Center on people’s misunderstanding of risk. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the way many Americans look at risk, but the concept can be also be applied to other areas of life like food regulations and vaping regulations.
TRANSCRIPT
Julie Gunlock:
Hey everyone, I am Julie Gunlock, the Director of the Center for Progress and Innovation at the Independent Women’s Forum, and today I’m going to be talking to David Clement. He is the North American Affairs Manager for the Consumer Choice Center. Hey there.
David Clement:
Thank you much for having me.
Julie Gunlock:
I’m glad to have you on. Before joining the Consumer Choice Center, which is a great organization — you all should definitely follow Consumer Choice on Twitter — I think you’re on Facebook, and I’ll let you give all the contact information in a minute, but I’m a huge fan of your work. As a mom, you guys do a great job of reassuring me as a consumer. So before joining the Consumer Choice Center, David was a research assistant to the Canadian Research Chair in International Human Rights. David has been regularly featured on the CBC, Global News, The National Post, Globe and Mail, and various other major Canadian news outlets. I love Canada, so welcome from Canada.
Recently, David wrote a report, a really great report — I really urge all of you to read it, explaining the difference between hazard and risk. I’m not kidding you, this is a really big issue, a really big problem within the regulatory world and a lot of people don’t really understand the difference. He examined how a hazard-based regulatory approach, he looked at that regulatory approach in four areas of manufacturing, and how that approach will mean fewer choices for consumers, lower quality products, and higher prices. So welcome, David.
David Clement:
Thank you. Thank you for your kind of words about the report.
Julie Gunlock:
It really is a great report. And the other thing is, I find this actually a confusing issue. I mean, I write on these issues and I write on regulations, and I actually do find it confusing, and one of the best parts of this report were your graphics. You had a bunch of graphics in there, so I have to tell you, as someone who struggles a little bit with this issue, and I’m embarrassed by the fact that I struggle with this issue, that was helpful. So I liked the graphics.
David Clement:
Well, I appreciate that. It’s one of those things where it’s totally fine and reasonable to be apathetic or maybe be uninformed on a lot of these big policy discussions regarding hazard and risk. It makes a lot of sense — people are busy, and so my goal was just to try and break down where we’ve maybe lost our way on the policy front and how we handle that, whether it be chemical policy, or even cannabis policy, it really applies across the board. And so I’m happy to hear that the way in which we approached this helped make it maybe a little more digestible than some long-winded scientific peer-reviewed journal or something like that.
Julie Gunlock:
Gosh, you know, David, are peer-reviewed journal articles long-winded or hard to read? You can’t be serious, right?
David Clement:
They certainly are.
Julie Gunlock:
Well I will tell you, one thing that IWF is known for, and I think that you are also known for, especially after this report, is taking on really complicated issues. Every month we issue a policy report, a policy focus, we call them policy focuses, where we look at an issue and instead of having a 30-page white paper, it’s a six-page paper, and we include talking points, and we may actually include graphics — we may actually steal that from you. But it really is important, because I think you and I can agree — people are busy, they are not necessarily in the industry that we’re in, so they may not have an opportunity to look at these issues.
But let’s get right into this report. What is the difference between hazard and risk? I’ll say this, I think those words, in many cases, people interchange them. They just say them and they don’t even think that these actually are different words. What is the difference?
David Clement:
So a hazard, in the simplest terms, is when something can be dangerous, but a risk is the hazard multiplied by the exposure. And I’ll give you a very funny example, one that really irritated me when I saw it, both headlines in Canada and the United States, and the headline was “Cheerios Contains Cancer Causing Herbicide.” I can only imagine the havoc that would wreak on parents who are regularly buying Cheerios. So when you see that, that indicates that if I eat that product, I’m going to be in danger. But how we calculate risk as opposed to hazard, which is if something could be dangerous, so risk, as I said is hazard times exposure, and so if you look at that particular example with Cheerios, I think you would have to eat more than your body weight in Cheerios a day for something like 30 years in order for the product to actually pose any serious risk to you, or any risk at all.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
David Clement:
And so when that’s missing from the discussion, or that’s missing in regards to headlines or how the media covers a particular story, that sends a wave of confusion through the market, and it often leads to really bad policy responses from government. I mean, I can understand if you’re a Congressman or Congresswoman, you’re sitting there and a headline that like that comes over your desk, you’re probably going to want to do something about it. But when you dig a little deeper and you actually look at the risk assessment of some of these more egregious headlines, really the first sentence of it should be, “but don’t worry because you’d have to eat your body weight of Cheerios every day for 30 years in order for this to be a problem.”
Unfortunately, it isn’t, so that was part of the reason why I wanted to parse this out for readers. I’m just making sure that it’s known that if we look at things from the hazard perspective only, and we ignore risk, then we’re going to have a lot of really bad policy made and that’s going to restrict the products that we like, the new products that maybe don’t even exist yet, and it just really creates a long list of bad externalities.
Julie Gunlock:
Let’s talk about that idea of not considering exposure a little bit more. Years ago, I actually wrote about this example in my book. I was a young mom, or rather I was not that young, but I had young kids, and they were very little and I put a baby pool out in the backyard and I put the hose on and they drank from the hose. And I’ll never forget George Stephanopoulos was on, he was subbing in, I don’t know for who, and it was the nightly news and he said, “Tonight, a very disturbing report about how garden hoses are made with plastic.” Oh, my gosh, they’re not straw? I thought they were straw. What are you talking about, right? And, of course, it was activist organizations that sent a portion of a garden hose to be analyzed, and oh, my gosh, it has plastics in it and all these chemicals in it, and I honestly, I wrote about this, I thought George was going to burst into tears, he looked so upset.
And so what I wrote about in my book is first of all, the child would die of a water overdose in order to get a toxic dose of that plastic, whatever chemical it was and there’s a million chemicals in a plastic hose. And so they would have to drink so much that their stomachs would explode or they would die of a water overdose. This never made it into the report, and by the way, this was about 15 years ago. It launched a thousand hose companies, safe hoses.
I mean, there is actually a market for this stuff for very nervous parents. All I could think about is all those moms out there whose kids are enjoying a summer day, running around in their diapers outside and taking a sip of the water and the mom freaking out and ruining that moment and being nervous, and there are costs to this that go beyond that. Because of course, this cottage industry sprung up expensive, natural hoses, and you may laugh at this, but there are costs associated with this kind of stuff. But there’s this unmeasurable cost, a cost that’s really hard to measure, about how it scares people. And it ruins days and it makes moms go out and buy more expensive products when they don’t need to.
So I think when you take this seriously and you don’t know the difference, and you don’t include exposure into that, it really trickles down to these very basic, happy things. I think that when you think of it in those terms, you realize there’s a lot of cost to this kind of stuff.
David Clement:
Yep, and we’re seeing that play out right now in regards to the debate over PFAS, which are man-made chemicals. There have been some legitimately scary examples, criminal examples, of where there’s been dumping from where these chemicals are used in the manufacturing process. That’s really terrible and if someone is caught doing that, they need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
But then what happens is you have someone like John Oliver dedicate a 25-minute segment to how all of these almost 5,000 chemicals need to be banned, when it’s framed in the way of using one really terrible example and then advocating that all of these chemicals be banned, you have to ask yourself, “okay, well, what is the actual risk?” So we need to, one, remove if there are instances of dumping, but where are these chemicals used?
I mean, one very prominent example, which we recently at the Consumer Choice Center spoke with cardiothoracic surgeon and congressman Larry Bucshon about, is that these chemicals are used in things like heart stents and very vital pieces of medical equipment, which, when used in that way, pose no risk at all to human health. They’re obviously a benefit because they’re being used to save lives. In chatting with him, cause obviously he would know the medical world far better than I do, he just explained if you’re going to get rid of these chemicals being used in medical devices, it’s going to have a horrific impact on access to the things that save people’s lives, and for what?
Because the “for what?” answer is that this does nothing in regards to the instances of bad behavior on the industry side. But what it does do is it makes it a lot harder to treat whatever ailment you have, whether it’s something trivial like getting a hernia fixed, like the mesh that goes on that, or something more serious, like a heart surgery.
These policies, when we take them to the extreme and we remove any type of risk assessment, lead to heavy-handed policy that just makes ordinary people in that instance have less access to high-quality medical equipment, but as you can imagine, it’s a long list of products where these chemicals are used. That’s obviously just one of them, but there is a long list, most of which don’t pose any risk to human health in how they are currently used.
Julie Gunlock:
You talk about PFAS as this darling of the activists. There’s a doctor named Trasande, I think, I can’t remember his first name, I actually looked him up before this podcast. Is it rude to look at my phone while I’m on with you? Leonardo Trasande, I think he’s at New York University or somewhere, and he’s a respected researcher and medical professional. Well, I think in certain circles he’s respected, but he’s one of these activist-scientists, and he recently came out with a study, and it doesn’t even matter that it’s peer-reviewed because he gets it in the Daily Mail and a bunch of other publications where it goes viral. Trasande is known for these studies that say, “Millions will die,” but what he’s saying that millions will die or could die or might die.
It’s very Greta Thunberg-y, “the world is falling apart and it’s all because of these chemicals, these man-made chemicals.” He just says, “They’re just laying around. There’s no reason for them, they’re just in there, and they’re just to kill people.” But they never mention these products like heart stents and other things, and there’s a big push now for single-use plastics, to get rid of those. Well, single-use plastics are a miracle. They’re used to be able to keep things very clean, and hospitals really need single-use plastics. You used to do human rights, I’m sure you understand the uses in some of these developing nations where single-use little shampoo packets or things that can be bought in smaller amounts, or water, for goodness sake, and water bottles.
You never hear the good uses of these things or the really terrible consequences of getting rid of these things. I think part of that is these scientists wanting to get headlines and wanting to get more funding. Why do these scientists do this, why do they scare people? They want to keep us ignorant. Why your report is so important is because they want us to not understand the difference between risk and hazard. But why is that? What motivates these people?
David Clement:
I think they probably come from a good place, because obviously we can highlight examples of where something is actually quite dangerous, but they make the false jump from “We’ve highlighted one instance of where this is problematic,” and, let’s say, it shouldn’t be used in this product anymore, but then they forget to extrapolate that out and say, “Okay, well what actually happens if we go all the way with this?”
I mean, one other example, which I’m sure every listener of your show would relate to, because there are 275,000,000 of them in the United States, is smartphone users. So again, the example with PFAS is that these chemicals are used in the production process for your smartphone, for things like moisture control and heat transfer properties that make sure your cellphone doesn’t overheat and explode. Those are all really good things. The cellphone in your pocket isn’t going to get you sick or have any negative health externalities for you because of the way in which those chemicals are used in the production process.
And so we have to say, “Okay, we may have identified that something is a hazard, but what is the risk?” In order to do that, you have to look at each use case, which ironically is what Canada is doing right now in regards to PFAS. I’m usually quite critical of the Canadian government and how they regulate, but they basically said, “Okay, we’re going to take two years, we’re going to evaluate this on a use-case basis, we’re going to take a clean drinking water approach, which is obviously the right way because you don’t want this stuff in drinking water, then we’re going to classify everything and figure out what the appropriate regulations are.”
And then on the flip side, you have some very strident members in Congress pushing just from a legislative perspective a complete ban. And it’s like, ah, I don’t know guys, I think really you have to prioritize the instances where the risk is actually high. How do we deal with those? And we certainly should, but then if there is no risk or there’s limited-to-zero risk, then I think we probably have to take a more hands-off approach in how we’re dealing with this.
That comes mostly from a cost-benefit analysis and an economics viewpoint, which is something that we don’t necessarily see in the scientific community. I mean, we saw that, not to make this about COVID because everyone’s talked about COVID for that last 18 months, but there all sort of instances where, based on very scary projections, I mean, if you look at Australia, they’re still arresting people for being outside without a mask. Obviously, whoever is creating their policy is not doing so on any type of risk assessment. They just know that COVID is a hazard and therefore they’ll do anything in their power to limit exposure to that hazard. But if you ignore risk, what happens is you start arresting people for not wearing a mask outside. Well, that’s obviously silly.
They probably come from a good place because they identify something that is a legitimate hazard, but then they very quickly extend that across a wide range of consumer products and they don’t do a cost-benefit analysis. It’s not in their academic training or background to really look at that and say, “Okay, how do we extrapolate this? Where are the actual individual risks and how should we address those?” They usually go right to the one-yard line and say, “Hey, we’re here.”
Julie Gunlock:
Well, David, this is another scientific fact: you are certainly nicer than me. Because I’m not sure I give them as much leeway as you do. In your report, which you divided into several different areas, you talk about chemicals. We’ve talked about that here. I feel like we could do a show alone on talc.
David Clement:
Oh, of course.
Julie Gunlock:
And Johnson and Johnson, that issue is a perfect example of not understanding the difference between hazard and risk. You also talk about cannabis and glyphosate, which for those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s more commonly called Roundup. It’s a weed killer, exceptionally useful, and crop farmers love it. It’s very useful, it’s very safe, non-carcinogenic, I don’t think you can say that in Europe, but it’s been found to be very low in terms of carcinogens. And so, give me kind of a few thoughts on each; talc, cannabis, and glyphosate. What is the major misunderstanding between hazard and risk on these issues, on these items?
David Clement:
Yeah, so my understanding on talc is that it came down to whether or not there were trace amounts of asbestos in the production process. This is also where, which is uniquely American problem, this is where court reform, or the need for court reform, merges with bad science. And so you have a jury trial trying to understand or navigate, I mean, it’s a jury of your peers…
Julie Gunlock:
And you have a jury trial of someone who’s citing cancer — their body’s riddled with cancer — and they say it’s because of talc or glyphosate, because we have the same thing with glyphosate. And then we have the “big industry.” I mean, it’s a jury trial. Who do you think they are going to choose — the guy who has cancer who says, “Oh, my family.” I mean, this is unfair.
David Clement:
Yeah. It’s a very strange way to come to some sort of conclusion that there’s danger. And then, as that’s been played out, things have been thrown out in regards to those claims about talc, and those are some of the more taboo hot topics. But we see this run through government policy on other issues, so I use the example of cannabis in Canada to highlight this and it’s because the way in which the Cannabis Act is written in Canada. CBD products, which contain no THC at all, so they don’t get you high, there’s no psychoactive element to that, they’re as highly regulated as THC products.
And so right off the bat, anecdotally, I’m saying this from Canada, there are instances where you can get a cannabis beverage and the warning label on it will warn you about the dangers of smoking cannabis. And it’s like, okay, well, whoever has done the assessment on these products obviously either has no idea what they’re talking about or just got lazy and said “We’ll just treat everything the same.” And so, hemp CBD products in states who still have cannabis prohibition have more open markets for CBD products than Canada, where it legally recognized and federally legalized. I use that as an example, just because it pulls it away, and chemicals can be a little more of an intimidating subject, but the same goes for alcohol policy in some states the same goes for how we treat cigarettes versus vaping. Another common area where we get it wrong time and time again.
It’s just one of those things, and we’ll continue to add to this report as time goes on because there are countless examples of where government has got it wrong and just really demonstrated their inability to navigate and regulate based on a proper risk assessment.
Yeah, those are two of the other ones. Obviously we’ve mentioned talc and glyphosate. I mean, the funny example with glyphosate. Another one is beer. That was another common headline, both in North America and Europe, because Roundup is used on the grains when they’re grown, and so the claim was “Your favorite beer, Coors Light, has cancer-causing glyphosate, or Roundup, in it.” And obviously when people read that they were scared, but in order to actually have any type of serious intake of glyphosate, you’d have to have 2,114 pints of beer in one day.
Julie Gunlock:
I’d like to volunteer for that study.
David Clement:
Yeah. I think what would pose a bigger risk to you obviously is the alcohol content and then, too, the caloric intake before you could get to that point.
Julie Gunlock:
Well again your stomach would explode, like it’s impossible to get there. It’s frustrating.
I feel like once you sit down and explain this to people, most people see what’s going on here, but that’s the point — you have to sit down and look. We’ve been talking here for 25 minutes or something, and I think people are reasonable, right? And they can see what’s happening here which is why it makes me so mad because, again, I think we’re dealing with moms at the grocery store, and there is evidence of this, there are studies of people who actually don’t choose to get fresh vegetables or fresh fruit because, oh goodness, it might have glyphosate residue on it or, oh dear, it might be a GMO, which is another area where people don’t fully understand this issue.
And so, what do they do? They go to Whole Foods and they spend four times what they could if they were just buying conventional food or non-organic food or whatever. The point is that I see a lot of people making choices based on bad information or being frightened because fear is an incredibly powerful weapon and activists use it really, really well, and they do affect consumer behavior. And I think especially now, in a time where in the United States and around the world in many cases, we’re looking at some really crippling inflation and extremely high cost for food and, my goodness, my son plays travel baseball, and I can’t believe how much I’m spending on gas and I’m lucky I can afford that. But that has made an impact on our family budget.
Listen, I hope you’ll come back and talk more about this as you expand on this report. This report is great stuff. Look, to anyone listening, sometimes these scientific issues, I say the word glyphosate and people are like “click,” but this is stuff that will help you make better decisions about consumer goods, about food, all sorts of stuff. And David, I really appreciate you writing this report, making it readable, making it understandable, and having those graphics there. I like that. And really helping people to understand it is a complex issue, but you’ve really made it understandable, so I’m thrilled that you did this. And thanks to you and the Consumer Choice Center.
Tell listeners where they can read more of your writing and where they can find the Consumer Choice Center.
David Clement:
Yeah. So the Consumer Choice Center is consumerchoicecenter.org, @consumerchoicec on Twitter, where we’re obviously very active, it is the same tag for Instagram, and it’s Consumer Choice Center on Facebook. You can follow along with everything we’re doing — we talk about consumer policy across the board, whether it’s a local government trying to ban Uber or a national government trying to restrict something else that you may like, so if having people push back when the government tries to overregulate the things you like is up your alley, I certainly encourage you to check us out, and then I am @Clement Liberty on Twitter.
Julie Gunlock:
Well, we like the Consumer Choice Center so much that actually one of your colleagues, Maria Chaplia, is actually a fellow with IWF, and we love what she does. She’s written on glyphosate, she’s written on vaping, she’s written on a lot of EU regulations.
She makes us look very, very in the know about it, even things in Europe. So we love Maria. And thanks again, David. Again, if you add on to this report, I hope you’ll reach out and come back on and tell us more about it.
David Clement:
I certainly will, I certainly will. Thank you again for the time.
Julie Gunlock:
Thanks. Well, I hope you all enjoyed that. I really do encourage you to read the report put out by the Consumer Choice Center. He mentioned where you can find it, and thanks again for joining us today on She Thinks.