Please Don't Feed the Trial Lawyers

The ABA is drooling over the payoff looming from environmentalist folly:

Congress is wrangling over a federal energy bill filled with pork. But budget waste has garnered less attention than one of the bill's most sensible provisions, limiting legal liability for producers of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE). Government normally shouldn't protect companies from lawsuits, but Washington is largely responsible for the problem -- the focus of a number of lawsuits, including scores of consolidated cases being heard in New York.

MTBE began as a gasoline additive in 1979 to make gasoline burn more cleanly. Congress mandated use of oxygenates to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, intending to subsidize already heavily subsidized ethanol.

However, MTBE proved to be the superior product. It could be shipped via pipelines and emitted less pollution than ethanol. The Sierra Club called MTBE one of the ten most environmentally useful products.

Unfortunately, the additive can contaminate the water supply if it leaks from a pipeline or storage tank. The result is unpleasant, not dangerous.

Robert M. Hirsch of the U.S. Geological Survey explained: "MTBE is primarily an aesthetic (taste and odor) problem." Thankfully, seepage is limited. Said Hirsch, "MTBE levels do not appear to be increasing over time and are almost always below levels of concern from aesthetic and public health standpoints."

According to the EPA, MTBE has contaminated just 16 of nearly 4,000 public water systems, or .4 percent, requiring clean-up. (Traces of MTBE, requiring no action, have been detected in others.)

Notes Nathan Vardi of Forbes, "This would not, in other words, be the stuff of toxic tort litigation in any legal system but the American one." But it is the American legal system. Thus, writes H. Sterling Burnett of the National Center for Policy Analysis, "trial lawyers [are] acting like sharks who smell blood in the water."

How many of the other environmental "solutions" will suddenly be discovered to have been somehow "damaging" to our well-being and thus a pretext for class-action suits?

How's this for tort reform----eliminate class-action lawsuits and require plaintiffs to actually significantly participate in pressing their legal claims?

The secondary benefit would be defunding the Democratic Party.