Flaw #4: Powerful special interests obstruct government action to protect our health.

Polluting industries have conducted a coordinated campaign to promote these flawed policies and to obstruct health-protective policies that would restrict their products or processes.

Corporations have often used their financial and political power to block protective action by our government. For example, since the 1950's the chemical industry has systematically blocked efforts to require safety studies on the compounds it produces. Lobbying groups for the chemical, plastics, and oil industries have great impact on government policies and action.

In order to win legal permission from government officials to pollute, companies frequently conceal, deny and downplay the potential harm to health caused by their emissions or products.

Polluting corporations have insisted that the current policy of "acceptable risk" is necessary to support a growing economy. They take government regulators to court to block protective health and environmental policies. They consistently try to advance their economic interests with scientific arguments about uncertainty and lack of cause-effect proof of harm.

The delays that result place our health and our children’s future at risk.

While the site has not been kept up to date as of late, the Chemical Industry Archives will give you an idea of how industry has hidden knowledge about negative impacts their products and processes cause.

It describes how large chemical corporations knew for decades that their products posed serious, even life-threatening health risks to their workers and customers.

It describes how these companies concealed this information from the public -- and continued to sell products that they knew were dangerous. This website also exposes the industry-funded public relations and lobbying campaigns that were designed to obscure the truth about the health risks of toxic chemicals.