Assessing reducing spending

The importance of science, however, cannot be directly assessed using the criteria of immediate usefulness . As organic chemistry has evolved, synthetic chemists have striven to synthesize any compound that could be isolated from natural sources, especially from living organisms, often without any obvious relevance to the possible utilitarian value of these compounds. Some of these syntheses took decades to accomplish. At present, the gap between the discovery of a new natural compound (and such discoveries are made, in the true sense of the word, every day) and its synthesis is reduced to a very few years, or even months. However, why spend so much effort for the preparation of a compound already synthesized in nature ... 

An assessment to help reduce the spending on electricity bills and the amount of the pollutants produced was the highlight of the project. 

The primary disadvantage of self-reporting is that a company may pay a penalty for a violation that the EPA would never discover on its own. Even if the Audit Policy applies to reduce the penalties to zero, the company will have to spend considerable time in making the report and justifying complete penalty mitigation. Another disadvantage is that a self-reported violation will count as a prior violation that may increase the penalty assessed on a future violation. 

The method adopted in many industries is to use a Value of Preventing a Fatality (VPF). The VPF is the amount that an organisation will spend to reduce risk by a single fatality, and is used in cost benefit analysis (CBA) to assess reasonable practicability. The costs and benefits of a potential risk control are evaluated, and if the cost per life saved is less than or roughly equal to the VPF, the risk control is regarded as reasonably practicable and must therefore be implemented. The quantitative approach was formalised by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in its 1988 paper (updated in 1992) The Tolerability of Risk from Nuclear Power Stations and its 1989 paper Quantified Risk Assessment its Input to Decision Making Whilst the 1988 paper was developed for the nuclear industry, its principles have been applied widely. 

Since resources are always limited, spending an inordinate amount of money to reduce the risk only a little through costly engineering and redesign is inappropriate, particularly if that money could be better spent otherwise. That premise can be demonstrated through an example that uses a risk assessment matrix as a part of the decision making. 

Where employees are likely to be exposed to noise levels at or above the lower exposure action value, the employer must ensure that a noise survey is carried out by a competent person (reg. 4). Records of this assessment must be kept (reg. 5). In some cases the level of noise to which an employee is exposed varies considerably over the duration of a shift making it difficult to assess the exposme from a single or a few spot measurements. The use of a dosimeter will enable a single figure to be derived for a shift. The dosimeter is worn with the microphone close to the ear for the period of the shift and the results either read directly from the instrument or downloaded to a computer. When using the dosimeter it is important that the wearer works to his or her normal pattern and does not spend longer than normal periods in a noisy environment. Where a noise risk has been identified there is a requirement on the employer to reduce the emission to the lowest reasonably practicable level (reg. 6). 

Similarly, there are debates about the value of time—is recreational travel time the same as commuting travel time or the same as business travel time While these debates are interesting, they miss the central question Can public decision making be reduced to a simple dollar value that results from attempts to turn all the products and consequences of road transport into quantitative monetary units and combine them in a single equation As with the continuing debate over our conunon usage of the term accident when we should have used crash, we spend a lot of time on unproductive issues. The real question here is an ethical one—the sanctity of life. There is a major place for the monetary assessment of benefits and costs when choosing between policy options, but it must not be the sole criterion. 

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