Frank Ackerman and Rachel Massey. Tufts University. August 2002.
If we understand that “an activity poses threats of serious, irreversible harm to human health or the environment, we should act to prevent that damage—even if science has not fully worked out the details of the relevant cause and effect relationships.”
Frank Ackerman and Rachel Massey explore this principle in their August, 2002 Precautionary Principal Project paper “Prospering With Precaution: Employment, Economics, and the Precautionary Principal”
This paper presents a wide array of information decoupling environmental regulation from job loss and economic decay, demonstrating that the precautionary principal could work quite well in practice. An exceedingly helpful table is used (showcasing information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) to prove that between 1996-2001 environmental regulation was responsible for a whopping 0.01 percent of job loss in America.
