52 



Chairman Glenn. Risk assessment is one that I brought up earh- 

 er this morning and is one area where we are getting into several 

 different areas of government. I am not quite sure how you do this 

 and attach a dollar figure to it, which then results in management 

 approaching it from that standpoint. 



Mr. Costle, you were involved with all this, how do you prioritize 

 things? How do you set up a risk assessment group? That seems 

 very difficult to me to do. Is it possible to do that? You have to 

 make some estimates. You have to do that, otherwise you don't 

 know where to spend your scarce dollars. 



Mr. Costle. That is exactly right, and I think risk assessment 

 can help you do that. I think we also have to understand that the 

 current methodology for risk assessment is somewhat primitive 

 and is driven in large measure not by data, but by a lot of assump- 

 tions that are made in terms of how you run the modeling, so you 

 have to be very, very cautious about how it is used. 



On the other hand, it can tell you a lot about relative order or 

 risk and a lot of other factors go into deciding what risk you in fact 

 go out and choose to regulate. Your ability to actually accomplish 

 something is one factor that goes into that. There are some risks 

 we don't know how to regulate. 



Yes, I think we are at a point now where we are in for con- 

 strained resources for a while, we are going to have to set prior- 

 ities, we can't escape that. There are a variety of ways to help you 

 do that. It should be done explicitly and openly and debated. I 

 think there is a real need to look across not just at EPA's $500 mil- 

 lion and whether that is being spent more efficaciously. 



But I think you need to look at what environmental research is 

 going on across the government, and I think there is a need, for 

 example, to articulate a national environmental research strategy 

 and that ought to be pulled together by the Office of Management 

 and Budget under the guidance of the Vice President and the As- 

 sistant to the President for Environmental Policy, but it ought to 

 have the active participation of Jack Gibbons at the Office of Sci- 

 ence Adviser to the President, and we ought to take for the first 

 time a careful, thoughtful look and say do we have a well-articulat- 

 ed strategy or does it look more like Swiss cheese and who is doing 

 what. I mean that is the reality of the world we are going to be in 

 and it hasn't been done. 



Chairman Glenn. Is there a lot of international expertise out 

 there? As the biggest energy users, we are the biggest polluters in 

 the world and we think that we are the experts in environmental 

 control. But as the Rio Conference indicates, there is a lot of inter- 

 est all over the world and this is a problem that blows and flows 

 across international boundaries. Do we take advantage enough of 

 research and experimenting going on in other countries? 



Mr. Costle. Well, I think there has been a tremendous upsurge 

 in research by other countries. In many respects over the last 

 decade, they have mode out ahead of us. And whether we are ade- 

 quately capturing the benefit of their research and development, I 

 don't really know, but I think we need to have increasingly the ca- 

 pacity to have a clearinghouse for that research and development, 

 and we probably will need to do some very careful coordination 

 internationally on research and development. 



