Navy Tributyltin (TBT) paint environmental damage

Example of the Navy justifying environmentally damaging practices on national security grounds until Congressional intervention (~20–25 years prior to 2013).

Of course, you poison the atmosphere every time you exhale. You're putting out things like carbon tetrachloride in your breath. You produce it in your body — you have salt intake, you burn things in your body and you produce reaction products, some of which could put out a fire if they were at higher concentration. The Navy is sort of guilty of a number of environmental things. Anybody know about tributyl tin? It was allowed in paint. You don't need to dry it, clean it, touch it — tributyl tin will keep all those barnacles off. Not only that, it kills every mollusk in the harbor — oysters, clams, scallops, any mollusk in the harbor is dead meat, literally. About 20 or 25 years ago some people went to Congress and Congress told the Navy to quit using it. Economically it was great for the Navy, and the Navy can always justify doing things in national security. But Congress decided they'd rather have people scraping barnacles than wiping out all the fishery industry in the harbor.

Used to illustrate the limit of DoD national-security override of civilian regulation. Navy used TBT in hull paint for barnacle prevention; parts per trillion wiped out mollusk populations in every US harbor; Congress overrode the Navy in the 1990s.

Twenty-five years ago the Navy discovered that if you put tributyl tin in the paint on ships, you don't get barnacles growing. Great to save money on maintenance. The only problem is, not only do they not grow on the ship, they don't grow in the harbor. Parts per trillion of tributyl tin wiped out every mollusk in every harbor in the United States. Finally the oystermen and the clam diggers went to Congress, because the Navy kept saying, for national security we need to put tributyl tin in our paint. In the '90s Congress said no, take your tributyl tin out, get out your scrapers and start scraping again.

Student: It creates jobs.

It creates jobs, it increases cost. There are lots of things it does.