A battle is shaping up in the House over a Senate-passed measure that would require risk and cost analysis for all of the Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory decisions.

The amendment, sponsored by Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, was part of a larger bill conferring cabinet status on the EPA. It passed the Senate on a 95-3 vote last May.

Now, however, several key congressmen are trying to block the amendment. Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee's environment subcommittee, and fellow California Democrats George Miller, George Brown and Norman Mineta, are urging President Clinton to join their cause.

The president should turn them down. Requiring a rational analysis of EPA regulations would give the public a broader perspective on the relative risks they face from different substances and activities. It also could put a halt to some of EPA's more irrational regulatory schemes.

Specifically, the Johnston amendment requires the secretary of the Environment to identify and analyze the risk to which each proposed rule relates, state and justify the cost of compliance and certify that all of this is based on the best science available.

The overwhelming Senate approval reflects the anger and frustration felt by many states and municipalities facing huge financial burdens in carrying out federal mandates that promise few benefits, if any.

Still, the bill is languishing in a House committee. Rep. Waxman, among others, complains the Johnston amendment places an unreasonable burden on the EPA and will Undermine the new department's efforts to protect our nation's health and environment."

Clearly, Mr. Waxman does not want the EPA to even study the consequences of its own regulations or of congressional mandates. This is in line with a tradition that exempts EPA - and the Congress - from filing environmental impact statements, which are required of every other government department and every private activity under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Instead, Rep. Waxman wants to leave any regulatory analysis to the "carefully considered judgments (of Congress)," even though Congress doesn't have the technical ability to judge the effects of regulations, especially those as yet unwritten. Politicians distrust scientists and economists, who base their decisions on numbers. They fear, with some justification, that rational arguments will curtail their political power.

Mr. Waxman objects particularly to any attempt to introduce a cost-benefit test into the rule-writing process. He asks rhetorically: "What is the price we put on one life saved, one birth defect avoided?"

But that isn't the right question. Limited resources must be deployed so the most lives can be saved. What is needed is an evaluation of one risk compared with another, rather than a futile attempt to place a dollar value on life.

In response to the Waxman letter, EPA Administrator Carol Browner and Vice President Al Gore's deputy chief of staff, Jack Quinn, met with Sen. Johnston and expressed White House opposition to the amendment. It's not clear yet if the administration opposes cost-benefit analyses of regulations on principle. Still, a working group chaired by Mr. Quinn is drafting an executive order that would give Mr. Core the authority to review regulations.

There is nothing wrong with the vice president assuming this responsibility. Former Vice President Dan Quayle-and George Bush before him-performed similar functions. It all depends on how it's done. Will scientific evidence again be considered irrelevant, as it was during the acid rain debate and as it seems to be now with global warming?

Recent history is replete with policy-makers who wrote environmental rules based on pseudo science or worse, and who applied them without regard for geographic differences or other common sense factors.

In the mid 1980s, for example, the EPA banned the use of Alar, a growth-regulating chemical used for fruits and vegetables. The agency claimed it was a dangerous carcinogen even though the EPA's own scientific advisory panel concluded there was little scientific basis for such action.

In another example, the EPA in 1983 forced the evacuation of the town of Times Beach, Mo. after discovering trace amounts of dioxin in the soil. But recent scientific evidence has found that exposure to dioxin levels 60 and 70 times greater than those measured in Times Beach has no measurable effect on cancer rates in humans.

What can be done about excessive environmental regulation? For one thing, the public can be made to "feel the pain," to borrow President Clinton's phrase. Public education on the cost of proposed rules and the relative risk of activities and substances could do much to increase pressure for limiting regulation.

That, in essence, is what the Johnston amendment would accomplish. It's not an entirely new idea: The National Environmental Policy Act calls for cost-benefit evaluations. With environmental costs now soaring to $150 billion a year-$1,500 a household-it's long past time for the EPA to observe the requirements of that law.

The irony is, with all of the resources and money that have been wasted on many of the big environmental scares of the last 15 years, adopting the Johnston amendment will probably result in a cleaner, healthier environment.