House Republicans, at the behest of the oil and chemical industry, have launched an all out assault on the Chemical Safety Board and its chairman, Rafael Moure-Eraso.

Industry lobbyists are coming after Moure-Eraso because he has been a high profile campaigner for implementing a European-style precautionary principle regulatory regime — known within the industry as “the safety case” — on oil and chemical companies in the United States.

Democrats, at the behest of the United Steelworkers Union, which represents the vast majority of chemical industry workers in the United States, will not defend Moure-Eraso and are hanging the CSB and its chairman out to dry.

The Republicans plan to ramp up their attack Wednesday when the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by its chairman, Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), holds a hearing titled Rebuilding the Chemical Safety Board: Finding a Solution to the CSB’s Governance and Management Challenges.

Chemical industry observers predict that no Democratic members of the panel will come to Chairman Moure-Eraso’s defense.

This despite the fact that Moure-Eraso has been perhaps the Obama administration’s most outspoken official on worker and plant safety.

Last year, for example, Moure-Eraso penned an op-ed piece for the New York Times titled — The Next Accident Awaits.

“It is clear to me, as chairman of the independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents, that urgent steps are required to significantly improve the safety of the nation’s chemical industry — an industry vital to our economy, yet potentially dangerous to those who live near the thousands of facilities that process or store hazardous chemicals,” Moure-Eraso wrote.

“Sifting through chemical-plant rubble from catastrophic accidents year after year, our board has long called on regulators to require — and for industry to adopt — what is known as inherently safer technology,” he wrote. “By this, we mean using safer designs, equipment and chemicals, minimizing the amounts of hazardous chemicals stored and used, and modifying and simplifying processes to make them as safe as practicable.”

Under the precautionary principle, or the safety case, the burden is on the industry to prove that the plants are safe.

It’s the kind of system used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in regulating the nuclear power industry and NASA before they launch a space shuttle.

Currently in the oil and chemical industry, under what is known as “process safety management,” the opposite is true.

The facilities are presumed safe until regulators prove evidence of a hazard.

Oil and chemical industry lobbyists are out to get Moure-Eraso for his advocacy of the safety case.

And the industry has an unlikely ally. It turns out that the United Steelworkers Union doesn’t like the safety case either.

“We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good or forgo useful incremental changes in the search for a more major change,” United Steelworkers Union safety officials Michael Wright and Kim Nibarger wrote earlier this year. “There are many things that OSHA and Cal/OSHA can do to improve the regulation of oil refineries and other high-hazard plants short of adopting a full safety case framework.”

Unions are also upset with the Chemical Safety Board for its five year and still yet to be completed Deepwater Horizon investigation — an investigation into a non union facility that has pulled enormous resources away from accidents at union facilities.

On Wednesday, Moure-Eraso will defend his agency’s work.

This work includes releasing detailed reports on serious or fatal chemical accidents — at Bayer Crop Science in West Virginia, Kleen Energy in Connecticut, Xcel Energy in Colorado, DuPont plants in West Virginia and New York State, Veolia Environmental Services in Ohio, Goodyear in Texas, Hoeganaes in Tennessee, Texas Tech University, Donaldson Enterprises in Hawaii, and Carbide Industries in Kentucky.