Environmental crises are a lot like TV mystery stories more fiction than fact. Yet even on television, the plot can't progress if the medical examiner--a qualified scientist says the victim wasn't murdered. No corpus delicti, no mystery; no investigation, no trial--and, above all, no sentence.

In true-life environmental sagas, however, environmentalists, the news and entertainment media, Congress, regulatory agencies, and especially lawyers have decided that no corpus delicti is needed. In this arena, accusations are proof enough, theories equal facts, and fear comes disguised as prudence. The significant difference between TV mysteries and environmental crises is that, in the latter, truth is the principal victim.

Federal Appeals Court Judge Stephen Breyer, now being touted as a possible Clinton nominee for the Supreme Court, addressed this regulatory nightmare in his Oliver Wendell Holmes lectures at the Harvard School of Law last fall.

Soon to be published by Harvard University Press under the title "Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation" his presentation--112 pages buttressed by 99 pages of footnotes--puts forth the first thoroughly documented analysis of this "lawyers vs. scientists" struggle that has bedeviled the regulatory process for almost a generation. Our presents system of environmental regulation is in chaos, Judge Breyer says--a chaos created by Lawyers seeking solutions to problems that are minor or nonexistent to scientists.

What Judge Breyer is telling today's lawyers is that regulation driven by logic without facts is insane. Much of the environmental regulatory system--and that is primarily the EPA--is run by lawyers who think like lawyers. They argue deductively from the "first principles of ... fairness or ... theory," rather than inductively from proven, demonstrable, scientific fact. Until that is changed, he says, "institutional solutions" will be based not on "substance" but on logical, legal and quite insane prescriptions.

Consider Agent Orange, allegedly a carcinogen, but actually a scapegoat for unresolved anger and guilt over Vietnam. Mr. Breyer notes that the judge in that suit, Jack Weinstein, said the case was scientifically "without merit," and deserving of a "directed verdict" in favor of the defendants, the manufacturers.

Instead, the manufacturers settled to get out from under a major public relations crisis. This action richly rewarded lawyers who had done little more than take depositions, and provided the plaintiffs with a few thousand dollars each--not nearly enough to compensate for any real harm but enough to win grumbling acquiescence.

Look at toxic waste. Judge Breyer presided over a New Hampshire case that dragged on for 10 years and generated 40,000 pages of documentation. Some $9.3 million was spent to make a dump safe for "children to eat small amounts of dirt" for 245 rather than 70 days a year. "But there were no dirt-eating children in the area" Judge Breyer observed. "It was a swamp."

The classic example is asbestos, which the U.S. government is now trying to eliminate through a massive removal program- estimated to cost upward of $150 billion to $200 billion. Asbestos allegedly causes 58,000 to 75,000 deaths a year, primarily from cancer. But the reality of the health impacts is quite different.

Quoting the Federal Appeals Court in New Orleans, which overthrew a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ban on asbestos last year, Judge Breyer reveals that "over the next 13 years, we can expect more than a dozen deaths from ingested toothpicks [emphasis in the original]--a death toll more than twice what the EPA predicts from asbestos pipe, shingles and roof coatings."

(In fact, the EPA admitted that only 13-15 lives a year might be spared by a total ban on asbestos--impossible anyway since the otherwise indestructible material will only be eliminated when the Earth eventually burns up some few million years down the road.)

Upward of $4 billion a year is spent to save one theoretical human life from the dangers of solid waste. By comparison, thousands of women could be spared death from breast cancer at a cost of $54,000 each by investing in mammography programs. "Vaccinating 18-month-olds against meningitis." says Judge Breyer. "would spare toddlers at a cost of $68,000 each."

He goes on to list some simple. basic facts, from impeccable sources, that should be memorized by every lawyer, environmentalist, journalist and citizen. About 2.2 million people die every year out of a U S. population of some 250 million. Of those, about 500,000 die from cancer: 30 percent or 150,000 from smoking and less than 3 percent l5,000 from pollution or industrial products." If regulations were flawlessly written and administered and today we're looking at "26 difterent statutes administered by at least eight different agencies"- -no more than 1,200 to 6,600 lives would be saved annually. That's between .02 percent and 13 percent of the 500,000 total.

But measure against that the negative impact of regulation in lost jobs, economic opportunity, and health care. Each $7.25 million spent on regulation can "induce one additional fatality through this income effect,'" Judge Breyer contends. Divide that into the annual cost of environmental regulation, estimated at $115 billion, and the result is 15,000 deaths the exact number presumably caused by "pollution." Even a committed environmental activist, such as Vice President Al Gore, cannot ignore that political calculus.

Judge Breyer has drawn an indictment of his legal peers based entirely on facts in sharp contrast to their rush to judgment on numerous suspected but unproven carcinogens. If history serves us, his presentation at Harvard--like the Holmes lectures given in past years by such luminaries as Learned Hand, William Brennan and Antonin Scalia will quickly become the accepted wisdom in the legal community, filtered through reviews and law clerks, and even circulated among the lawyers that make up President Clinton's "diversity" Cabinet.

Lawyers who refuse to heed his warning deserve to be held in contempt by their peers, and by the public. For the stakes are no less than the economic success and public health of a society that is wasting hundreds of billions of dollars to make the world safe for environmental hypochondriacs, and diverting scarce resources from real issues such as education and infrastructure, poverty and race.

Any Democrat should be able to figure out that the failures o Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" helped keep the Democratic Party out of the White House for 20 of the last 24 years. To continue to defend a "War on Cancer" launched by Richard Nixon and an EPA still operating under his executive order could lose them the White House again.

Nominating Judge Breyer to the Supreme Court may not be an act of principle on Mr. Clinton's part, but it would certainly be politically prudent.