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Republicans, though correct that environmental regulations cost money, are oblivious to the public health consequences of pollution and the economic costs of inaction.

About twenty years ago, Professor Nicholas Ashford of MIT came to Washington and testified before Congress in great detail about how and where safety regulations create jobs and make the economy more efficient in avoiding the costs of preventable injuries and disease.

WASHINGTON, Jun 2, 2010 (IPS) - The resources society derives from nature have been horribly mismanaged and this will lead to the children of the world's poorest people remaining in poverty, according to Paul Collier. The easiest of these resources to regulate is fish, but we have not even managed to get that right, he said.

"Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings - yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency's culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP - a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company - with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP - and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez."

Scientists have become increasingly worried that even extremely low levels of some environmental contaminants may have significant damaging effects on our bodies-and that fetuses are particularly vulnerable to such assaults. Some of the chemicals that are all around us have the ability to interfere with our endocrine systems, which regulate the hormones that control our weight, our biorhythms and our reproduction. Synthetic hormones are used clinically to prevent pregnancy, control insulin levels in diabetics, compensate for a deficient thyroid gland and alleviate menopausal symptoms. You wouldn't think of taking these drugs without a prescription, but we unwittingly do something similar every day.  An increasing number of clinicians and scientists are becoming convinced that these chemical exposures con­tribute to obesity, endometriosis, diabetes, autism, allergies, cancer and other diseases. Laboratory studies-mainly in mice but sometimes in human sub­jects-­have demonstrated that low levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in­duce subtle changes in the developing fetus that have profound health effects in adulthood and even on subsequent generations. The chemicals an expecting mother takes into her body during the course of a typical day may affect her children and her grandchildren.