PHASING-OUT CHLORINE: AN ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY EXAMINATION
From Love Canal to Columbia Beach to "Agent Orange" to the "ozone hole" to a myriad of other phenomena, the detrimental impacts on human health and environmental safety of chlorine byproducts gradually raised public awareness of the dangers associated with the industrial use of chlorine (Daniel, Reddy, Stober, and Olson, 1991, pp. 665-670; Daniel, Olson, and Stober, 1991, pp. 32-39). As public awareness of the hazards associated with the use of chlorine and chlorine byproducts has risen, so too have pressures for the discontinuance of the use of chlorine and chlorine byproducts increased in intensity (Amato, 1993, pp. 152-154). As frequently occurs in such cases also, a backlash directed at the opponents of chlorine has also occurred. Some of this backlash is from industrial interests whose economic well being depends upon the continued use of chlorine (Taubes, 1993, pp. 1580-1583). While such attitudes may be short-sighted, they are at least understandable. Some of this backlash also derives from scientific disagreement (Taubes, 1993, pp. 1580-1583). Both the uses of chlorine and chlorine byproducts and the undesirable outcomes attributed to such uses are frequently complex and difficult to tie together. Scientific disagreement in such cases is not unusual, and so long as such disagreement is not simply a part of an orchestrated campaign by industrial uses with an economic ax to grind, such disagreement is justifiable. Unfortunately, however, some of the backlash against the opponents of chlorine also comes from the loony-bin sector of society wherein Rush Limbaugh contends, as an example, that the ozone scare is nothing more or less than the product of a group of scientists attempting to perpetuate their research grants, and wherein the organization of Lyndon LaRouche, the jailed extremist politician, publishes a spate of books contending that almost all chlorine i...