It's not obvious to everybody because it's false. The Precautionary Principle is deeply problematic. For instance: it is generally interpreted to favor existing fossil fuel power sources over nuclear, despite the fact that fossil fuel power generation and extraction kills enormous numbers of people every year. Precautionary Principle thinking is extremely vulnerable to narrative capture. A closer-to-home example: Precautionary Principle thinking cautions against adoption of genetically modified crops. The status quo agriculture it favors instead have both lower yields (and thus greater ecological impact) and more pesticide/herbicide use.
Precautionary Principle thinking, taken on its face, would have immediately halted the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines (VAERS data almost immediately showed things like blot clots), because Precautionary thinking tends to fixate on individual risks rather than a global risk picture; fortunately, Precautionary thinking failed to win the day and vaccines saved millions of lives instead. Note that this example flunks your Extended Precautionary Principle logic: there were certainly big companies that stood to profit from the right decision there!
You can put together a coherent and persuasive defense of the Precautionary Principle, but if you just cite it in passing and say things like "crazy everyone doesn't agree with me about this", expect pushback.
Are we even talking about the same thing? The precautionary principle, at least as far as I understand it, is to emphasize caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations with potential for causing extreme harm when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking. As risk increases, the threshold for certainty rises as well.
Is that something you consider to be deeply problematic and false?
Of course you can dispute both the risk and amount of certainty present, but claiming that the principle is fallacious seems absurd to me.
> "The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an actionor policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans",unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence"
We are obviously talking about the same thing, and nothing I said about the PP is novel.
I very specifically did not say that PP analyses were dead on arrival, or that problems with PP thinking were dispositive. I said rather that it is not enough to simply invoke the PP in policy debates; that rhetorical habit has bad outcomes. Again: the idea is not that "precaution" is bad. It's that you can't mechanically shift the burden of proof to anything "new" and assign a lower risk to the status quo by default --- you have to make that argument on the merits.
There's a good Cass Sunstein thing about the PP if you're interested in understanding critiques of it:
> It's that you can't mechanically shift the burden of proof to anything "new" and assign a lower risk to the status quo by default
Not quite - it is true that you cannot assign a lower risk to the status quo by default, but the burden of proof is on the new intervention to prove that it's safe, not on detractors to prove that it isn't.
In other words, if the world is functioning today, you need to prove that your intervention won't cause ruin, no matter how small the chance or how big the upside.
No because it wasn't mandatory in most places, so there was no systemic risk. People were free to take it, in the same way people are free to drink alcohol, and the precautionary principle doesn't apply to individual risk.
I still think we are talking about two different things here.
I'm not saying you opposed the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. That would have been a batshit position to take (though: many did). I'm saying that the Precautionary Principle calls for exactly that position, and, moreover, the Extended Precautionary Principle proposed upthread --- the one where we look especially askance at risks where a party involved stands to profit --- opposes it even moreso.
I can't say enough that this is not random message-board dorm-room logic, and that lots has been written about this flaw in the simplistic application of the Precautionary Principle. I already gave a link upthread; I feel like I've done my due diligence at this point.
We're talking about the same thing. I wonder if you've just never read anything deeper about the Precautionary Principle than activists weaponizing it to make points about glyphosate (or vaccines or nuclear power).
> I'm saying that the Precautionary Principle calls for exactly that position
Not necessarily. The PP is interpreted so many different ways, it was actually invoked by people like Nassim Talib to not only justify the vaccine rollout but to call for strict lockdowns among other measures.
There are many arguments made against the precautionary principle, just like there were many arguments made in favour of leaded gasoline. We all know who ended up on the right side of history on that one, and I expect it will be the same for roundup.
In the context of this article, we are discussing the PP as relevant to regulatory agencies. The EU employs the PP while the USA takes something called the Scientific Approach - in other words, the EU requires evidence that an intervention carries no risk, whereas the US requires proof that an intervention has significant risk in order to ban it. Idk about you, but I feel a lot better eating food grown in Europe.
Your position isn't unique, there are many very intelligent people who nonetheless overestimate their capacity for understanding the world and predicting the future.
How do you make that calculation when there is a small possibility of infinite risk? That is why the PP exists, otherwise you either ignore the possibility of total disaster events, or you cannot choose to act.
We are reasonably confident that no likely gamma ray bursters are pointed at us and within lethal range. We know dinosaur killers are out there--a failure to map every such object in the solar system is a small probability of an infinite risk. Why are there no ICBMs fitted for point defense against a city killer asteroid? You have the rocket, you have the boom. You need a seeker that can guide it to impact (there are other radars that could illuminate, it just needs to home on the reflection) and a standoff fuse that will fire it at the last possible millisecond.
In the real world you should not be looking at the risk of X. Rather, you should be looking at where X stands amongst the competing options.
Nuclear power is an extreme example of this going wrong. The US effectively legislated it out of existence by decreeing that reactors should be as safe as reasonably possible. The problem is "reasonably" is fundamentally fluid. In theory at least you can always make things safer by throwing more safety systems at it. And if nuclear power is cheap enough you can afford to throw more safety systems at it. Thus nuclear power is by definition too expensive. And that's before the NIMBYs abuse the regulatory system to drive the costs way up.
Look at the reality: Depending on your yardstick nuclear is either safer than any other large scale power source, or nearly as safe as anything else and far safer than where most of our power comes from.
(The yardstick problem comes down to Fukushima. That's more than half of the "nuclear power" deaths right there--entirely because the politicians messed with things. Listen to the engineers, there would have been an expected death toll of zero. But nuclear power is blamed for the political decisions that killed hundreds.
And the yardstick comes down to a dam failure in China--ascribe the deaths from their hydro power dam failure to hydro and it's out of the running.)
But in the real world natural gas has about 10x the risk of nuclear before looking at climate effects. And oil has about 10x the risk of natural gas, plus a bit more in climate effects (a greater percentage of an oil molecule is carbon.) And coal has about 10x the risk of oil, plus considerably more climate effects.
We don't have the power, civilization (and virtually everyone in it) dies. The plants must run, the question is what runs them. Society would be safest if we took the existing rulebook and threw it in the trash can, replace it with a standard that expects a given risk per terawatt-hour, it's the job of the regulators to devise rules that accomplish this and any company is allowed to present evidence that a different approach is better. (If we focus less on risk X and more on risk Y we can get more safety for less cost.)
That's at least half a million American deaths in the last three decades on the altar of the precautionary principle.
Precautionary Principle thinking, taken on its face, would have immediately halted the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines (VAERS data almost immediately showed things like blot clots), because Precautionary thinking tends to fixate on individual risks rather than a global risk picture; fortunately, Precautionary thinking failed to win the day and vaccines saved millions of lives instead. Note that this example flunks your Extended Precautionary Principle logic: there were certainly big companies that stood to profit from the right decision there!
You can put together a coherent and persuasive defense of the Precautionary Principle, but if you just cite it in passing and say things like "crazy everyone doesn't agree with me about this", expect pushback.