Introduction
Introduction
"It is man’s indomitable nature to scare himself silly for no good reason."
--Calvin and Hobbes.
The media assault homebuyers with stories that radon causes somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 lung cancer deaths a year, that asbestos in buildings is another cause of lung cancer, that lead paint can reduce children's intelligence, and that EMF causes brain tumors. Cautious, fact-based analyses that challenge those scary connections surface in the scientific literature, but the potential homebuyer rarely reads or even hears of them.
More troubling is the government's role in escalating anxiety. The Environmental Protection Agency, supported by the Centers for Disease Control, has been in the vanguard, publicizing high estimates of lung cancer cases from asbestos and radon and urging universal testing of children to determine concentrations of lead in their bodies, regardless of need or cost. The popular press has been vigilant in alerting the public about EMF, and state legislatures and public utilities have reacted with alarm, proposing and sometimes implementing costly measures to mitigate the supposed threat.
And costs mount. Testing each home in the United States for radon, as the EPA urged in 1986, would cost from $10 billion to $20 billion. "Remediating" homes to reduce radon concentrations in indoor air to the current "safe" level that the EPA says can be achieved in most homes would require from $500 billion to $1 trillion. Redoing the job in homes where the initial effort was unsuccessful would increase the bill, perhaps by several billion dollars. State legislatures debate "radon abatement" bills that would require testing in homes and schools at a cost of additional millions. The total cost to homeowners and taxpayers has yet to be calculated.
If the costs from radon are generally prospective, the past and present costs of asbestos are all too real. Through the 1980s, the EPA's insistence on the unproved theory that "one fiber can kill" led to panic and wrecked budgets as school boards ripped out asbestos-containing materials and owners of apartment and office buildings spent millions on asbestos removal rather than be saddled with unmarketable real estate. The discovery of asbestos in a house that is for sale is likely to force reopening of negotiations, trigger costly delays and higher closing costs, and, perhaps, expensive and unnecessary removal.
Lead awakens even more deep-seated anxieties. The fear of irremediably harming the mental abilities of one's children looms as a specter over the purchase of any home built before 1978, when lead paint was banned. "Getting the lead out" of housing is expensive; to remove all lead paint from all housing would cost $30 billion and escalate risk by releasing clouds of lead dust. As of December 1996, the seller in every real estate sale and rental transaction involving housing built before 1978 must disclose all known information about lead in the unit and give the buyer a pamphlet about the dangers of lead, or face imprisonment and a $10,000 fine.
The fourth major hazard--the power lines that march across the landscape and deliver electricity to homes--is far more visible than the costs it imposes. Fear of cancer from EMF has led to vast present and projected expenditures in the name of ``prudent avoidance.'' It is estimated that it would cost $200 billion to bury certain transmission lines nationwide and far more to reduce exposure to EMF from all transmission and distribution lines. The total cost of prudent avoidance, according to some estimates, approaches half a trillion dollars. Despite the repeated assertions of reputable scientists that such expenditures are virtually pointless, utilities and the government continue to pour additional funds into studies of the possible health effects of EMF.
The following chapters analyze the alleged risks from those hazards, the scientific debates surrounding them, and the federal policies that lead to vast expenditures to correct them. Have those outlays been necessary? The evidence induces skepticism. Credulity and fear have created an atmosphere of hysteria inimical to reasoned argument, diverting resources, burdening the taxpayer, frightening the homebuyer, and putting at risk the long-cherished goal of many Americans to own their own home.