Scientifically verifiable health & safety standards
The second aspect of establishing the right standards of health and safety is ensuring that they are "scientifically verifiable." This means that if you're going to assert that something is dangerous, you have to be able to demonstrate a cause and effect connection between the activity or substance and a negative impact. You can't just assume that if there's some kind of emission, that it must be bad. In my experience, most claims cannot show cause and effect. All they show are correlations. For example, opponents of nuclear power might say, "In this region more people had cancer, and there was more nuclear power in this region." Then they'll say, "Therefore, the nuclear power caused the cancer." No, not so fast. There may be a lot of other regions where the opposite is true, or the nuclear power may have nothing to do with that particular rise. Most claims tend to assume that any amount of emission is dangerous, but they can't prove it. With any substance, there are levels at which it's dangerous and there are levels at which it's not dangerous. Dose matters, and sometimes the same thing can be both beneficial and dangerous depending on the quantity, such as sunlight. We cannot simply declare that some substance is dangerous—we need to establish a cause and effect connection that takes into account the specific dose.