During the regular 2021 regular session of the Minnesota legislature, we posted Pollinator protection bills heard today in the Minnesota House Agriculture Committee at 1PM and Session Daily: Pesticide scrutinized for affecting child brain development could be banned.
Chlorpyrifos, that chemical that harms brain development didn't end up being banned, stripped from the omnibus ag bill under the watch of Elbow Lake Republican Senator Torrey Westrom.
The stalled effort to ban the chemical has an analogue on the federal level, according to a new investigative series of articles.
Two articles by Sharon Lerner in the Intercept remind us of the effort. In THE DEPARTMENT OF YES How Pesticide Companies Corrupted the EPA and Poisoned America:
. . . The Coulston study is just one of many instances in which an industry that is far more powerful and better resourced than the federal agency responsible for regulating it has hoodwinked, bullied, and persuaded the EPA into using inaccurate science at the expense of public health. And that influence over the research used to set the safe levels of pesticide exposure is just one of many tools that agrochemical companies like Dow have successfully wielded to increase and maintain the use of products even when they damage health and the environment.
Interviews with more than two dozen experts on pesticide regulation — including 14 who worked at the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, or OPP — described a federal environmental agency that is often unable to stand up to the intense pressures from powerful agrochemical companies, which spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbying each year and employ many former EPA scientists once they leave the agency. The enormous corporate influence has weakened and, in some cases, shut down the meaningful regulation of pesticides in the U.S. and left the country’s residents exposed to levels of dangerous chemicals not tolerated in many other nations.
While it’s impossible to catalog all the ways in which the EPA has failed to protect the public from the harms of pesticides, this reporting has brought to light several instances in which the overlooking, burying, or scuttling of science has had direct consequences for human health. The alarming discoveries include an EPA report warning about the link between the pesticide glyphosate and cancer that never saw the light of day; the failure to consider evidence that a neonicotinoid pesticide causes brain damage; the refusal to investigate evidence that another pesticide that is an ingredient in Roundup may cause cancer; the dismissal of science showing that the widely used pesticide malathion causes cancer; and the agency’s waiving of the vast majority of toxicity tests at the request of industry. . . .
In Whistleblowers expose corruption in EPM chemical safety office, Lerner reports:
MANAGERS AND CAREER STAFF in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention tampered with the assessments of dozens of chemicals to make them appear safer, according to four scientists who work at the agency. The whistleblowers, whose jobs involve identifying the potential harms posed by new chemicals, provided The Intercept with detailed evidence of pressure within the agency to minimize or remove evidence of potential adverse effects of the chemicals, including neurological effects, birth defects, and cancer.
On several occasions, information about hazards was deleted from agency assessments without informing or seeking the consent of the scientists who authored them. Some of these cases led the EPA to withhold critical information from the public about potentially dangerous chemical exposures. In other cases, the removal of the hazard information or the altering of the scientists’ conclusions in reports paved the way for the use of chemicals, which otherwise would not have been allowed on the market.
This is the first of a series of articles based on the four whistleblowers’ highly detailed allegations, which were supported by dozens of internal emails with supervisors, meeting summaries, and other documents. Together, the evidence they provided shows a pattern in which the EPA failed to follow the law that oversees chemical regulation, particularly the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, and depicts a workplace in which EPA staffers regularly faced retribution for following the science.
“The Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is broken,” the scientists wrote in a statement they provided to The Intercept and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “The entire New Chemicals program operates under an atmosphere of fear — scientists are afraid of retaliation for trying to implement TSCA the way Congress intended, and they fear that their actions (or inactions) at the direction of management are resulting in harm to human health and the environment.”
The four EPA staff members, who hold doctorates in toxicology, chemistry, biochemistry, and medicinal chemistry, said that they told colleagues and supervisors within the agency about the interference with their work. Each of the scientists also filed complaints with either the EPA’s inspector general or the Office of Science Integrity, which has pledged to investigate corruption within the agency. But because most of their concerns remained unaddressed months after they disclosed them — and because, in each case, the altering of the record presented a potential risk to human health — the scientists said they felt compelled to make their complaints public. . . .
One wonders what it's going to take to protect the public. Perhaps legislation at the federal level might pass. At Agri-Pulse, Philip Brasher reports in House spending bills promote climate, environmental enforcement:
. . . The Interior-Environment bill report provides support for a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that ordered EPA to revoke or modify tolerances for the insecticide chlorpyrifos.
“The Committee accepts the findings from numerous studies establishing the link between the use of chlorpyrifos and brain damage in children. The Agency is expected to meet its obligations to protect human health and the environment.” the report says. . . .
Image: Graphic from The Most Widely Used Pesticide, One Year Later, in Harvard University's SITN's Science Policy blog.
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