March, 17 2015, 01:15pm EDT
Groups Join Voices Against Industry Chemicals Bill
A growing chorus is speaking out against legislation to update federal chemical safety law that was introduced last week by Sens. Tom Udall, D-N.M., and David Vitter, R-La. The industry-backed bill would retain the existing weak safety standard for toxic chemicals and limit the ability of states to enact and enforce their own rules to protect public health.
WASHINGTON
A growing chorus is speaking out against legislation to update federal chemical safety law that was introduced last week by Sens. Tom Udall, D-N.M., and David Vitter, R-La. The industry-backed bill would retain the existing weak safety standard for toxic chemicals and limit the ability of states to enact and enforce their own rules to protect public health.
Environmental Working Group characterized the bill as being "worse than the existing Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA - a law so broken that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been powerless even to ban asbestos."
Dozens of other organizations, companies and well-known health advocates and consumer activists have also denounced the Udall-Vitter bill.
Here is what they are saying:
Erin Brockovich, consumer advocate, told The Hill newspaper:
If we take away states' rights and dump this back on the EPA, which is already overburdened, understaffed and without state funds, to me that's insanity...
Linda Reinstein, president and co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization:
The fact that the Udall-Vitter bill will not even restrict, much less ban, the deadly substance that claims 30 lives a day is nothing short of a national travesty...
Daniel Rosenberg, Senior Attorney in the Health Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said:
The proposal still contains rollbacks and loopholes that make it worse than current law. For example, a lax Environmental Protection Agency could use the bill to give a green light to deregulate hundreds of controversial chemicals with minimal review...
Andy Igrejas, director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families:
In its current form it would not make a big dent in the problem of toxic chemical exposure and would even do some harm by restraining state governments...
Nancy Buermeyer, senior policy strategist at the Breast Cancer Fund:
Congress negotiated with our health and the American public lost out to chemical industry profits...
Michael Green, Executive Director of the Center for Environmental Health, said:
We are terribly disappointed that this long-awaited proposal still retains provisions that put children and families at risk...
Shaney Jo Darden, Founder of Keep a Breast Foundation, said:
We need to demand a shift in focus from the welfare of industry to the welfare of humans...
Sahru Keiser, program manager at Breast Cancer Action:
The burden of proof still lies with us (and regulatory agencies) to prove chemicals are harmful, rather than requiring corporations to prove chemicals are safe...
Catherine Thomasson MD, Executive Director, Physicians for Social Responsibility said:
It's time to put health first. The public wants their children protected from dangerous chemicals. The Udall-Vitter bill is still a step backwards...
Click here to see a full list of statements from leading groups and individuals who advocate real TSCA reform, not the industry's bill.
The Environmental Working Group is a community 30 million strong, working to protect our environmental health by changing industry standards.
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'Landmark Victory': US Proposes Endangered Species Protections for Monarch Butterfly
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Biodiversity defenders on Tuesday welcomed a "long overdue" move by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service toward protecting the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act—the result, the Center for Biological Diversity said, of a lawsuit filed by several groups to safeguard the pollinators and their fragile habitat.
The FWS proposed designating the butterfly as threatened with extinction, four years after monarchs were placed on a waiting list for protection.
"For too long, the monarch butterfly has been waiting in line, hoping for new protections while its population has plummeted. This announcement by the Fish and Wildlife Service gets this iconic flier closer to the protections it needs, and given its staggering drop in numbers, that can't happen soon enough," said Steve Blackledge, senior director of conservation campaigns for Environment America.
Monarch butterflies journey from Mexico each spring to points across the United States east of the Rocky Mountains to pollinate and reproduce. When cooler weather arrives they migrate back to the south for the winter.
But their populations have declined by more than 95% from over 4.5 million in the 1980s, leaving the western monarch with a 99% chance of becoming extinct over the next six decades, according to federal scientists.
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Western monarchs are down to an estimated 233,394 butterflies, while experts say there are several million eastern monarchs in existence.
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This is a breaking story… Please check back for possible updates...
A day after Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged as the alleged killer of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, independent journalist Ken Klippenstien on Tuesday published what he said was the 26-year-old's highly reported on manifesto.
The existence of the handwritten document found on Mangione when he was taken into custody in Pennsylvania on Monday was confirmed by the New York Police Department, and major media outlets have quoted from it, but none had released it in full.
"My queries to The New York Times, CNN, and ABC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered," Klippenstein said on his Substack.
According to Klippenstein—who previously published dossiers on Vice President-elect JD Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the nominee for U.S. secretary of state—Mangione's manifesto reads:
To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.
Common Dreams has not independently verified its authenticity.
Klippenstein
said on social media that the manifesto he published is "the real one, not the fake one circulating online."
NBC News deputy technology editor Ben Goggin noted that language shared by Klippenstein "matches what NBC has reported here as real."
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A report released Tuesday from the environmental group Friends of the Earth finds that the U.S. food retail sector's use of pesticides on just four crops—almonds, apples, soy, and corn—could result in over $200 billion worth of financial, climate, and biodiversity risks for the industry between 2024 and 2050. Pollinators, including bees, form a crucial link between pesticide use and these risks.
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According to the report, an estimated one-third of world crops rely on pollination, and a little less than three-fourths of fruit and vegetable crops require pollination from insects and other creatures. Pollinators are often studied as an indicator for biodiversity risk and general environmental health—and experts cite pesticides as among the reasons that pollinators are in decline, per the report. Research also shows that pesticides poise a threat to healthy soil ecosystems, the report states.
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