Ready, Fire, Aim: The Rush to Regulate Microplastics

When regulating toxic substances, we first identify a risk (aim), and then, and only then, take action to reduce that risk (fire). With microplastics, we don’t yet know which, if any, are risky.

Nevertheless, Europe is moving quickly to implement very expensive regulations to reduce exposure to them and activists in the United States are trying to get the U.S. to follow in Europe’s footsteps. If they do, we can expect to see risk analyses that predictably will find microplastics to be a significant danger. We are practically blind in our aim.

“Ready, Fire, Aim”: A Flawed Approach to Regulation

This is similar to how Jerry Ellig, a George Mason University economist, once described the way regulators frequently act—“Ready, Fire, Aim.” They decide what they want to do, propose a regulation, and then perform analysis to justify it.

This way of doing things allows regulators to claim they are doing something rather than just studying things. Regulators can even go so far as to, falsely, claim they are being precautionary. A movie with a similar theme was the 2002 Spielberg film, Minority Report, in which police use a group of psychics to find people they believe will murder people in the future and they arrest and convict them before they do so.

Europe, which has precautioned itself into incapacity, has already set out a Zero Pollution Action Plan as part of the European Green Deal. The European Commission asserts, “The case for preventive action is crystal clear” and “needs to see…. more ambitious rules on packaging and waste shipments passed swiftly into law.”

Read the full piece on my Substack here.