Do you have evidence to back up this claim? I'm aware CA puts many warning stickers on various products... but isn't it possible that profit-seeking corporations are, in fact, using cancer-causing materials simply because they're cheaper?
For instance, Wikipedia:
> The requirements apply to amounts above what would present a 1-in-100,000 risk of cancer assuming lifetime exposure (for carcinogens)
Using the standard ~$5M statistical value of life, this mean that you need to label a product if it is estimated to impose the equivalent of $50 in costs if someone is regularly exposed to the chemical over an entire lifetime. I'm not sure what frequency of exposure is being assumed here, but naively that means that if I use the product once a week, it requires notification of about 2 cents worth of harm per usage.
Meanwhile the other examples it uses are that you have to be warned when you're being exposed to things like diesel exhaust. Which, um, actually does cause cancer.
And kids will lick a lampshade.
Regulations always have dumb results. If you put the warning on anything with lead in it, people make fun of the warning on a Tiffany lamp. If you don't, people are shocked that you don't have the label on a child's toy with lead paint.
Regulators are never going to thread the needle that well. They're not capable of it. This is a huge problem when they're banning stuff. When they're labeling stuff, eh. People will figure it out.
If you have warnings literally everywhere, for minor things, that noone really cares about, because the risks are miniscule, people will start ignoring even the dangerous but identical-looking signs. "this item causes cancer" ... are we talking about asbestos, or are we talking about a roasted potato? If the labels are the same, people stop noticing them.
But what he described is exactly how asbestos is handled in discourse in any other context. People absolutely lose their minds over it.
But, then I thought: hmm... maybe his is a great example. People are terrible at assessing risks. The word 'asbestos' is likely to cause a greater reaction than is warranted. It's the opposite side of the coin from peoples' reactions to those prop 65 signs.
I have changed my behavior in response to health info on labels, so this is anecdotal evidence against your assertion.
PR campaigns have been known to work, e.g. alcohol in Russia in the 90s.
The fact that every coffee shop in California is still open, despite people being warned for years that they sell products that cause cancer. The vast majority of people clearly do not care about the warning.
And what do you think is the benefit of putting unsupported warnings on things? Do you think it's actively beneficial? Do you think it's harmless? If it's beneficial or harmless we might as well go ahead and put a warning label on absolutely everything regardless. Then how do we react to this linked article? We'd ignore it.
If you're the one who wants warning labels on things that don't need warning about then you justify that position!
>The fact that every coffee shop in California is still open, despite people being warned for years that they sell products that cause cancer. The vast majority of people clearly do not care about the warning.
Or they care, but have balanced the risks vs. their enjoyment of coffee. But they may see a warning on, for example, olive oil which contains lead, and decide to buy another product.
>putting unsupported warnings on things?
What do you mean by unsupported here? As in, not supported by science? Or by the people? Because I'm pretty sure it's well supported by science that certain products are carcinogenic and that consuming them, unsurprisingly, isn't very good. We can argue about what thresholds constitute a tangible risk, for sure, but either way the fact that some things cause cancer is surely considered "supported".
>that don't need warning about
Same question -- just referring to coffee or all labels on everything? I agree with this if you're just referring to coffee, but there are certainly labels that I do pay attention to and consider a warning useful.
I think there's a happy middle-ground here. If my favorite juice has lead, I want to know. If my favorite coffee shop has a 1 in 10,000,000 of causing cancer, I probably don't need the warning each day.
What about the steering wheel and the arm rests?
My pen doesn't have a warning, is that because the manufacturer chooses to consider exposure through skin contact only, but chewing on it is actually a sizeable risk?
Devil's advocate, it has an effect on some minority of people. Then the company loses sales and has the incentive to stop using the carcinogen if possible.
Your lifetime risk of getting cancer from that thing might have been one in a thousand, so you don't really care, but the company has ten million customers and getting them to change prevents 10,000 cancers.
This is a pretty good alternative to banning the thing. Because if there is a reasonable way to stop using the carcinogen, you don't want to be the company that has the cancer warning when your competitors don't. But if there isn't, maybe the risk is low enough that people make an informed choice to take the risk for the benefit of the thing with no better alternative, and that's fine too.
When the risk is infinitesimal and the warning placed on so many items, what is the value of that warning?
I think the reality is we have so many terrible chemicals all around us that it feels like an over reaction, when it's actually the exact opposite -- manufacturers have made many a deal with the devil.
Everything has some amount of lead back from the days when it was used recklessly. Everything has some amount of mercury that's still going up smokestacks. (Now we catch most of it--not all of it!) Plants pick up some arsenic from the soil--for medical reasons I eat a lot of rice and it's enough of an issue I make sure to buy rice grown in low-arsenic areas.