Flaw #3: Certain levels of harm are accepted and allowed by government authorities.

Current environmental and chemical policies focus on establishing "acceptable" levels of harm from toxins rather than on seeking ways to prevent harm in the first place.

Government regulators have set up a policy of "risk management" that includes setting standards for "acceptable risk." For example, the U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has set a standard for environmental pollution that allows an "acceptable risk" of one "extra" cancer death for every one million people exposed to one pollutant from one source. In the workplace, the federal government standard is that one "extra" cancer death is an "acceptable level" for every 1,000 workers who are exposed to a chemical. Even worse, these "acceptable levels" are usually based on studies of healthy adult males—not children, older people, or others who are more physically vulnerable.

In reality, everyone is exposed to many pollutants from many sources. The people who make these decisions may think of those numbers as mere statistics, but the result of their decisions is that real people are getting sick and dying.

Increasingly, government regulators are required to use "cost-benefit analysis" in their decision-making. This analysis assigns a monetary value to illness and death, and compares this to the cost of pollution controls or regulations. As a result, government regulators rely on mathematical formulas that are inherently biased toward short-term business costs (which can be more easily counted) and against protecting long-term public health (where costs are neither fully known nor quantifiable). If the projected cost of pollution controls is more than the value put on saving lives and protecting public health, then the pollution is often allowed to continue.