However, Kennedy points out that this is not the first time that agencies have worked together on a common problem. Earlier EPA, FDA, and CPSC joined forces to ban chlorofluorocarbon spray can propellants. "We tried it once and liked it," Kennedy declares. D
Deepwater oil port off Louisiana will go ahead A U.S. offshore deepwater port to handle crude oil imports now seems assured. Last week, the five remaining companies in Loop Inc. signed an agreement with the Department of Transportation for a license to build the port in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana. The current membership of Loop (an acronym for Louisiana offshore oil port) and their respective shares are Ashland Oil, 18.6%; Marathon Pipeline, part of Marathon Oil, 32.1%; Murphy Oil, 3.2%; Shell Oil, 19.5%; and Texaco, 26.6%. These membership shares reflect current participation after Union Oil dropped out of Loop at the end of July. Actual construction of the port will not begin until sometime next year, says William B. Read, president of Loop. Initial operation of the port is scheduled to begin in 1980 with a capacity of about 1.4 million bbl of crude oil a day. The license agreement just signed covers construction through initial operation. This phase will cost an estimated $430 million. Loop's plans call for two subsequent expansions of the port's capacity in increments of 1 million bbl Ker day. The third step, which will ring capacity up to about 3.4 million bbl a day, probably will be completed in the late 1980's, Read says. Crude oil from tankers using the Loop facilities will be stored in a salt dome on the mainland near Galliano, La. From storage, it will be sent to various pipelines connected with refineries near the Gulf Coast and up the Mississippi River Valley in the Midwest. The other proposed deepwater offshore port, Seadock Inc., remains in limbo. The current members of Seadock have not made decisions on whether to accept a license from DOT ( C & E N , J u l y l 8 , p a g e 4 ) . D
Federal agencies pool efforts on toxics Perhaps signaling a new era in interagency cooperation, four federal regulatory bodies have announced a program to streamline government efforts toward regulating chemicals and toxic substances. Cooperating in the new venture are the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food & Drug Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Occupational Safety & Health Administration. President Carter calls the move "a major con8
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Engineers, philosophers to explore ethics
Costle: reduce duplication of effort
tribution to the Administration's overall regulatory reform effort." At a joint press conference in Washington, D.C., last week, EPA administrator Douglas M. Costle joined with FDA's Donald Kennedy, OSHA's Eula Bingham, and CPSC's John Byington to explain the similar missions of the four agencies. Says Costle, "we all regulate chemicals and toxic substances and the industries that produce them." In addition, he notes, all four collect and store similar chemical data; they conduct risk assessments of chemicals and develop standards; and all four agencies have enforcement officers to see the regulations are carried out. Toward bringing about the cooperative arrangement, Costle says that seven items have been agreed to: • Developing compatible test standards and guidelines. • Developing a common approach to risk assessment of hazardous chemicals. • Coordinating information systems. • Developing parallel standards when possible. • Harmonizing compliance and enforcement efforts. • Coordinating interagency "public education" efforts (public relations). • Collective use, as much as possible, of each agency's research facilities. On the last score Costle observes that collaborative research is essential since "we will rapidly reach the point of surpassing our research capacity." Costle also explains that collaborative R&D will help head off "toxic chemical of the week" crises and it will reduce duplication of effort through the sharing of personnel and resources. In other words, FDA commissioner Kennedy observes, "a fixed amount of resources are going to go farther for you."
"Ethics" seems to be the watchword for everyone these days, engineers included. Next year the National Endowment for the Humanities will be funding a National Project on Philosophy and Engineering Ethics. The three-year project will pair 15 to 18 academic and nonacademic engineers with an equal number of philosophers to explore the ethical issues of engineering. Examples of such issues aren't hard to find: blowing the whistle on C-5A cost overruns, environmental quandaries over clearcutting and strip mining, the Kepone tragedy, the Lockheed payoffs—they seem to crop up daily. Many of these issues have parallels to problems in medicine, says project director Robert J. Baum. In fact, he says, the project was partly inspired by the fruitful collaboration philosophers have had with physicians in resolving questions in medical ethics. Baum, a professor of philosophy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y., is director of the Center for the Study of the Human Dimensions of Science & Technology, which will administer the project. The project will begin with special sessions at Rensselaer during the summer of 1978. A two-week session on philosophical ethics for the engineers will be accompanied by a twoweek session on ethical problems in engineering for the philosophers. Each participant will receive a stipend of $1700. A week-long workshop will follow, in which each engineer-philosopher pair will develop a joint research project. "We intend these to run the entire gamut," Baum says. The project could take the form of a case study of a specific incident, he says, or of organizing a symposium for a professional society, developing a new university course, or staging a public forum. Each project will be funded up to $4000. Articles about the national project soon will appear in professional society journals, and a mailing will go out to 10,000 to 12,000 engineers. Baum hopes that at least half the engineers involved in the project will be from the government and corporations. D CIRCLE 2 6 O N READER SERVICE CARD — •
