Toxic Chemical Cocktails - Where Endocrine Disruption Starts To Sound Like Homeopathy

Science 2.0

By Hank Campbell — July 20, 2018 @ American Council on Science and Health

Paracelsus famously noted that the dose makes the poison.

His wisdom has been accepted for centuries, from the least educated to the most. At least until about 25 years ago, when environmental activists decided that there is instead a u-shaped curve for chemicals (1) they wanted to raise money scaring people about. At high levels a chemical can be toxic, sure, toxicologists, biologists, and chemists all accept that, but at low levels they aren't, so to get around that activists began using proxies and suggesting correlation. (2) And then some modern academics are able to fool people while armed with gavage tubes and cell cultures and science terms that have a ring of truthiness; like that any "toxic chemical" can change hormones, no matter the concentration.

That hasn't worked very well for them and the reason the public remains unconvinced is the American Council on Science and Health. We have been debunking these kinds of junk science claims since 1978. While I write this, the coffee I am drinking has changed my hormones. It's detectable. And coffee is toxic. Have you seen the LD₅₀ of caffeine? In rats, it's 10X as deadly as the weed killer glyphosate (3), which has activists and trial lawyers suing companies in California. (4) If you are selling fear and doubt, the presence of any pathogen is equal to pathology - if you can detect a drop in 160 Olympic-sized swimming pools full of water, and you can't say it is bad scientifically, you can instead claim that it "changes" the water.

If that sounds like homeopathy, they do share a lot in common.

And that is the credibility problem chemical activists like Pete Myers and Andreas Kortenkamp and Gilles-Eric Seralini and Christopher Portier face when trying to get attention for their beliefs; they have to say that Paracelsus is wrong. They have to throw out science and replace it with mysticism. Just like homeopaths do.

Since promoting the belief that any hormone change is bad hasn't worked they have instead been claiming that a "cocktail" of harmless chemicals is somehow doing something greater than the individual harmless chemicals can. Instead of water memory, the toxic cocktail myth claims that 5 or 10 or 100 different trace chemicals together "add up" to cause greater problems than if those same trace chemicals were given in sequence. To toxic cocktail believers, adding 100 things that are 0.000000001 all at once is going to give a different result than adding 0.000000001 in sequence 100 times. If they do it all at once, they claim, the harm is real whereas in sequence they concede the harm is not present.

They don't just deny chemistry, toxicology and biology. They deny simple arithmetic.

But denying arithmetic is what toxic cocktail activist Andreas Kortenkamp does in a new letter ("Perspectives" section) in Science, written with fellow environmental activist Michael Faust. What is their evidence for a toxic cocktail dooming us all? They don't provide any citation when they write "Scientific evidence for heightened toxicity from such mixtures is mounting" and editors at Science didn't ask awkward questions that real science journalists would have asked like, 'ummm, is this supposed evidence actually just crappy conspiracy papers in Environmental Health Perspectives and Endocrine Connections magazine?'  Given that the letter had little editorial scrutiny, they were able to nonchalantly claim that while NOAELs (no observed adverse effect levels) may not show harm from trace chemicals, that is because other scientists - hundreds of thousands of other scientists in an overwhelming consensus - simply don't understand additive power. And government is in the pocket of Big Chemical and therefore doesn't demand they test all the possible combinations together.

There is a reason Kortenkamp is on the conspiracy side and science is opposed to him. Dose Addition works. That science is settled. His belief that trace chemicals in a "cocktail" cause endocrine disruption is not based on anything but ideological voodoo.

He has an advanced degree so he must understand the concept of hormones and binding affinity and that measures in urine say nothing at all about absorption. Yet he ignores those inconvenient truths that have debunked this scaremongering time and again in their recent op-ed.

How can the public easily know they are being duped by that kind of truthiness? When the claims don't pass the four word test for harm: Where are the bodies?

There are none. We are healthier than ever.

Still, they ignore that and go on to suggest that governments force companies to test every chemical in every possible combination with every other chemical, because by doing so they can insure no chemical is ever approved - unless it is a chemical in a natural product that they want exempted from scrutiny. The kinds of "natural" and "organic" products promoted by groups that fund Kortenkamp and Faust and Pete Myers.

Scaremongering does nothing to help the public. Science magazine is actually promoting public distrust in science by giving this warmed-over conspiracy theory a new air of legitimacy.

Unfortunately this continues their recent pattern; they are regularly reprinting anti-science activist op-eds. AAAS, which publishes Science, is run by a politician, but that doesn't mean they should become overtly anti-science in the interest of shoring up their plummeting subscription memberships by appealing to the beliefs against science of one party.

We have been debunking toxic cocktail hype forever and endocrine disruption hype since 1999. You can even read our first book on it for free here. Thanks to all you readers and donors for continuing to make it possible.

NOTES:

(1) A u-shaped curve means that a chemical will have a response that varies from high to low to high as concentration increases. It defies the principles of modern pharmacology. Philip Landrigan, epidemiologist and pediatrician, is the go-to guy for the New York Times when they claim this sort of thing.
(2) Yes, they are suing over coffee also, California is a good state for anti-science beliefs because they abdicated their regulatory system to activist epidemiologists in France.
(3) It's even on our coffee mugs.

 

(4) An actual paper claimed living near farms caused autism - because pesticides. The authors did not actually test for any pesticides in anyone, they instead created a proxy. They took California pesticide applications and matched them to autism diagnoses to create a correlation.

Basically, proxies can do anything if someone wants to do advocacy rather than science. All you need is a small sample size and willingness to accept inconsistent data, like that near and far applications of pesticides caused harm but in the middle made no difference - a u-shaped curve for autism. Which principal investigator Irva Hertz-Picciotto of U.C. Davis readily did. Without disclosing her two conflicts of interest, which were leadership in an autism group and an anti-chemical group.

“Agro-Ecology” campaign enshrines primitive agriculture and malnutrition as human rights

Luddite eco-imperialists claim to be virtuous

July 22, 2018 by Paul Driessen and David Wojick, Ph.D., 3 Comments  @ CFACT

Not every poor person in impoverished places around the world aspires to the modern living standards they see and hear about: indoor plumbing, electricity for lights, a refrigerator and stove, a paucity of disease-carrying insects, top-notch schools and hospitals, their children living past age five. But many do.

Not every poor African, Asian or Latin American farmer wants to give up his backbreaking, dawn to dusk traditional agricultural practices, guiding his ox and plow, laying down meager supplies of manure to fertilize crops, surviving droughts, repeatedly hand spraying pesticides to battle ravenous insects – to reap harvests that often barely feed his family, much less leave produce to sell locally. But many do.

Unfortunately, they often face formidable foes. An absence of electricity, roads and other infrastructure. Corrupt, kleptocratic governments. Nonexistent property rights and other collateral to secure loans. Powerful, well-financed eco-imperialists whose policies perpetuate poverty, malnutrition and disease.

Banks and other carbon colonialists glorify limited wind and solar energy for poor villages, while denying financial support for fossil fuel electricity generation. Anti-chemical fanatics promote bed nets and narrowly defined “integrated pest management,” but bitterly oppose chemical pesticides and the spatial repellant DDT to kill mosquitoes, keep them out of homes and prevent deadly malaria.
Radical organic food groups battle any use of genetically engineered crops that multiply crop yields, survive droughts and slash pesticide spraying by 75% or more. They even vilify Golden Rice, which enables malnourished children to avoid Vitamin A Deficiency, blindness and death.

Now poor country families face even harder struggles, as a coalition of well-financed malcontents, agitators and pressure groups once again proves the adage that power politics makes strange bedfellows. Coalition members share a deep distaste for fossil fuels, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, corporations, capitalism, biotechnology, and virtually all aspects of modern agriculture.
Their growing social-political movement is called “AgroEcology.” While the concept is studiously vague, it essentially asserts that indigenous, traditional farmers must be shielded from market forces and modern technologies, so that they can continue using ancient, primitive, “culturally appropriate” methods.

AgroEcology is anti-GMO organic food activism on steroids. It rejects virtually everything that has enabled modern agriculture to feed billions more people from less and less acreage and, given the chance, could eliminate hunger and malnutrition worldwide. It is rabidly opposed to biotechnology, monoculture farming, non-organic fertilizers and chemical insecticides – and even despises mechanized equipment like tractors, and the hybrid seeds and other advances developed by Dr. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution.

AgroEcology advocates tortured but clever concepts like “food sovereignty” and the “right to subsistence farming by indigenous people.” It promotes “indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices,” thus excluding the vast storehouse of non-indigenous learning, practices and technologies that were developed in recent centuries – and are readily available to anyone with access to a library or internet connection.

Or as they put it: “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations.” Food sovereignty also “focuses on production and harvesting methods that maximize the contribution of ecosystems, avoid costly and toxic inputs, and improve the resiliency of local food systems in the face of climate change.” (The 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni, the first global forum on food sovereignty. In Mali!)

Some adherents even seek the “re-peasantization” of Latin American society!

AgroEcology has the financial backing of far-left foundations like the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which collectively have committed more than $500 million to a raft of like-minded NGOs.

Its precepts and policies are approved and actively promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank and other UN agencies at their taxpayer-funded international conferences. These agencies are even beginning to demand adherence to über-organic practices as a condition for receiving taxpayer funding for agricultural development programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America. (But taxpayers and legislators who provide the funding have been permitted little substantive input on any of this.)

It’s all justified – and often accepted without question in government agencies and universities – by reference to the politically correct, virtue-signaling terminology of our era: sustainability, sustainable farming, dangerous manmade climate change, social justice, indigenous rights, self-determination.

Also typical, anyone opposing these ideologies, policies and demands is vilified as a “willful supporter” of violence against women, “land-grabbing” by multinational corporations, peasant farmer suicides, “mass expropriation and genocide” of indigenous people, and crimes against humanity.

Imagine how intolerant AgroEcology ideologues would react if a farmer wanted to assert his or her food sovereignty and self-determination – by planting hybrid corn, using modern synthetic fertilizers or (heaven forbid) planting Bt corn (maize), to get higher yields, spend less time in the field, spray fewer pesticides, or improve the family’s living standards by selling surplus crops. And yet many want to do exactly that.

“By planting the new Bt cotton on my six hectares [15 acres], I was able to build a house and give it a solar panel,” Bethuel Gumede told the late Roy Innis, then chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, during a trip to South Africa. “I also bought a TV and fridge. My wife can buy healthy food, and we can afford to send the kids to school. My life has changed completely.”

“I grow maize on a half hectare,” Elizabeth Ajele told him. “The old plants would be destroyed by insects, but not the new biotech plants. With the profits I get from the new Bt maize, I can grow onions, spinach and tomatoes, and sell them for extra money to buy fertilizer. We were struggling to keep hunger out of our house. Now the future looks good.”

Equally relevant, how can agricultural practices that barely sustained families and villages before the advent of modern agriculture possibly feed the world? As Dr. Borlaug said in 2006: “Our planet has 6.5 billion people. If we use only organic fertilizers and methods on existing farmland, we can only feed 4 billion. I don’t see 2.5 billion people volunteering to disappear.”

AgroEcology promoters like Greenpeace, Food & Water Watch, Pesticide Action Network, Union of Concerned scientists and La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way) pay little attention to any of this. They’re too busy “saving people” from “dangerous” hybrid seeds, GMOs, agribusiness, farm machinery and chemicals. Not that any of them would ever want to toil on any of the primitive farms they extol.

Greenpeace frightens Africans by claiming “some researchers think DDT and DDE could be inhibiting lactation” in nursing mothers. So families are afraid to use DDT, and millions die from preventable malaria, while still more millions suffer permanent brain or liver damage from the disease. Would it also oppose cancer-curing chemotherapy because it causes hair loss and reduced resistance to infections?

Modern instruments can detect chemicals in mere parts per billion (the equivalent of a few seconds in 32 years) or even parts per trillion (a few seconds in 32,000 years). That’s hardly a threat to human health.

But Luddite eco-imperialists and über-organic food activists stridently oppose any manmade fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, while saying “natural” pesticides commonly used by organic farmers are safe. In reality, copper sulfate can kill humans in lower doses per kilogram of body weight than aspirin, and exposure to rotenone causes Parkinson’s Disease-like symptoms in rats and can also kill humans.

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, US and EU government agencies, and real human rights advocates should challenge and denounce AgroEcology agitators and their financial enablers for advancing fraudulent claims that perpetuate malnutrition, poverty and human rights abuses in the world’s poorest countries. They should also cut off funding to any government agencies that support AgroEcology nonsense.

About the Author: Paul Driessen

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for CFACT and author of Cracking Big Green and Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death.

Jeff Stier: When environmentalists oppose science

by Jeff Stier July 10, 2018 @ Catallaxy Files and @ Jeff Steir

In the era of self-driving cars, big data and increasingly sophisticated bio-medical advances, the age-old question of how regulation can keep up with technology is more relevant than ever.

Scientific advances touch every aspect our lives, often in ways we rarely think about. Today, we live longer, healthier, more productive and more enjoyable lives because of our access to products that were unimaginable for most of human history. So it's important to get the right balance when regulating our modern world, to both keep us and our planet safe, while fostering innovation that benefit society.

The debate over regulation often devolves into a debate about "too little" versus "too much" regulation, split along the ideological divide. Too little regulation, goes the argument, and we are exposed to too much risk. Too little, and we don't advance.

This binary approach, however, represents the dark-ages of regulatory policy. It was more frequently relevant when our tools to measure risk were primitive, but today's technology allows much more precise ways to evaluate real-world risks. With less uncertainty, there's less of a need to cast a broad regulatory net.

Regulation not warranted by countervailing risk just doesn't make sense. That's why a pseudoscientific approach, dubbed the "precautionary principle," behind much of today's regulation is so pernicious. This dogma dictates that it's always better to be safe than to ever be sorry. The approach is politically effective not only because it's something your mother says, but because it's easier to envision potential dangers, remote as they may be, than potential benefits. Uncertainty, it turns out, is a powerful tool for those who seek to live in a world without risk.

But what happens when regulators can get a reasonably good handle on benefits and risks? Some potential risks have been eliminated simply because the basis for the concern has proven to be unwarranted. For more than two decades, the artificial sweetener, saccharin, came with a cancer warning label in the U.S.But it turned out that the animal experiment which led to the warning was later found to be irrelevant to humans, and the warning was eventually removed.

Warning about a product when risks are not well-understood is prudent. But it would be absurd to continue to warn after the science tells us there's nothing to worry about.

Today, an analogous situation is playing out in the EU, where activists are using outmoded tests not just to place warning labels on silicones, a building block of our technological world, but to ban them outright.

The playbook is predictable: as the scientific basis for a product's safety grows, opponents go to increasingly great lengths to manufacture uncertainty, move the goalposts and capitalize on scientific illiteracy to gain the political upper-hand.

We've seen these tactics employed in opposition to everything from growing human tissue in a lab, to harm-reducing alternatives to smoking, such as e-cigarettes. Now, the effort to manufacture uncertainty is playing out in the debate over the environmental impact of silicones, which are used to in a wide range of consumer, medical, and industrial products.

Fortunately, in the case of silicones, regulators in a number of countries, including Australia, have put politics aside and adhere to appropriate scientific methods to inform their decision-making.

The Health Department's National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme published an environmental assessment for certain chemicals used to make silicones, in particular, a class of chemicals called siloxanes. Silicones have unique properties which make them useful in a wide range of applications, including aviation, energy efficient LED lighting, medical products and personal care products. But their widespread use and unique properties have raised questions about their effect on the environment, such as whether they bioaccumulate and pose a risk to aquatic life. The report employs a risk-based approach, the very type that European-based precautionary principle advocates oppose.

Here's where we get back the issue of uncertainty. Advocates for restricting the use of certain siloxanes rely primarily on studies done in laboratories, which don't replicate how the chemicals respond to real-world conditions, where for instance, they quickly evaporate. (This property is what makes them particularly useful in sunscreens which spread easily and evaporate quickly.)
Laboratory studies are a valuable part of evaluating chemicals because they can identify the potential that a particular substance poses a hazard. But hazard assessments are of limited value without considering real world circumstances. To do that, scientists do risk assessments, which takes into account factors such as the level of exposure to the hazard in conditions being evaluated.

We like to look at it this way: falling out of a boat and drowning to death is a hazard. However the risk of drowning in a desert is so low, because there's no exposure, that it a risk not worthy of concern.

This rational approach to hazard and risk was successfully adopted in Canada. Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), using real world exposure information, decided to minimize exposure to a level that didn't degrade the environment, requiring monitoring from certain industrial sources. In other words, the ECCC didn't just consider the hazard, they also considered the risk. As a result, Canada did not ban consumer use, but, instead, took steps to reduce environmental exposure from only a narrow group of industrial sources that were potential problems.

With regard to one siloxane, D4, ECCC regulators found that the chemical "is entering or may be entering the environment in a quantity or concentration or under conditions that have or may have an immediate or long-term harmful effect on the environment or its biological diversity." But instead of banning its use, consistent with their risk management approach, they required a significant reduction of "D4 releases to the aquatic environment" and encouraged the use of alternatives to reduce or minimize risks.

On D5, Canada's regulators did something even more practical. Recognizing industry objections to the E.U.-style modeling approach, which ECCC initially used for D5, the Board of Review took real-world exposures of D5 into account. Then they did what all good scientists should be prepared to do: they reversed course after finding that new, more accurate data conflicted with their initial findings. In light of the improved information, the ECCC regulators wrote that "it is virtually impossible for Siloxane D5 to occur in any environmental matrix at concentrations sufficient to produce harm to the environment."

Similarly, the U.S. Environmental Protection has been working in concert with manufacturers to measure the degree to which key chemicals used in the manufacture of silicones are released into the environment, as well as what happens to the chemicals in real world circumstances, rather than through modeling or laboratory studies which don't necessarily reflect what happens in nature.
Australia's report is consistent with these approaches, noting that "[t]he direct risks to aquatic life from exposure to these chemicals at expected surface water concentrations are not likely to be significant."

This is the very type of scientific analysis that European activists disdain. Because for them, environmental protection is not measured by outcomes, but by the severity of restrictions, regardless of the quality of science used to justify them.

We support tough environmental regulation when the best science supports it. But sadly, many of today's environmentalists see science only as a tool to advance an anti-progress political agenda. When the science contradicts the agenda, the science is the first to fall by the wayside.

In legal circles, they say "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table." The opposition to risk-assessments is the scientific equivalent to pounding the table.

The value of the Canadian and Australian approach is that consumers will continue to benefit from improved product performance provided by silicones. The environment will benefit as well, given silicones widespread use in green energy products, from solar panels to wind turbines and even in energy efficient lighting.

Australia's risk-based approach should be a model for other governments assessing not only silicones, but all innovative products because it ensures the protection of the environment, while at the same time, when the science justifies it, also protecting consumers' access to incredibly useful products.

Jeff Stier is a Senior Fellow at the Consumer Choice Center.

Follow him on Twitter, @JeffAStier

Under Trump, the media suddenly care about government emails

July 3, 2018 By Jack Hellner

Since President Trump has taken office, the media, especially the Washington Post, have gone after administration officials one by one. The most obvious target the last several months has been Scott Pruitt, and there has been an absolute vendetta to get him.

Ben Rhodes has shown how this works.

Members of the swamp have a story they want to get out, and they release that story to compliant journalists, who just repeat what they are told, no questions asked. Career people at the EPA and their lobbyists do not like Trump or his policies, so they need to destroy him and his people. It is truly all about policy.

This WaPo story is about emails between EPA officials and people they regulate – as if they aren't supposed to talk to those companies and lobbyists. The emails came to light because of the pure as driven snow Sierra Club.

If the Washington Post and other MSM had been concerned about all the questionable activities under Obama at the EPA and elsewhere, maybe the public could believe they actually care and that it is not because they are just supportive of Democrat policies.

Here are just a few of the questionable and corrupt activities under Obama...........To Read More.

Science Triumphs At The EPA. For Now

By Henry I. Miller May 17th 2018 @ Science 2.0

In The Neonic Ban: A Scientific Fraud Becomes Enshrined In EU Regulatory Law, I described the many elements of corruption that led to Europe’s recently announced ban on neonic insecticides (“neonics”) which is based on the fallacy that they are responsible for a supposed collapse in bee populations. In fact, bee populations are rising on every habitable continent in the world, and have been since neonics first came on the market.

So far, despite some worrisome signals from EPA early on, U.S. farmers appear tohave escaped the regulatory fate of their European counterparts. Largely unreported by the mainstream media, the agency recently released draft final assessments on neonics that reach dramatically different conclusions from Europe’s counterpart agency EFSA.

A few unresolved issues notwithstanding, EPA’s magnum opus – 12 separate, voluminous reviews of effects on non-pollinators, human health, drinking water and aquatic environments for the four major products -- imidacloprid, clothianidin, thiamethoxam and dinotefuran -- re-affirms the critical importance of neonics to U.S. agriculture and largely refutes the claims of environmental activists. Combined with earlier, positive assessments on bees and other pollinators, EPA has now effectively given neonics a clean bill of health.

As the Duke of Wellington said of his victory over Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo, however, “it was a close run thing.” This is not because the science concerning bees and neonics was in doubt. The campaign to ban neonics was never about science and facts -- it was about politics. While the U.S. regulatory system has more structural safeguards against manipulation than Europe’s -- which has practically none -- it is far from immune to political pressure. During the last U.S. administration, especially, it too often appeared that activists were calling the shots at EPA.

Activists were calling the shots

When the EU banned neonics in 2013, the environmental movement smelled blood in the water. Much of the activist cash used to promote the false bee-pocalypse narrative in Europe was subsequently targeted on the U.S. As usual, many in the mainstream media were willing accomplices in spreading their apocalyptic narrative. Time magazine’s iconic cover story, “A World Without Bees,” was just one of thousands declaring that honeybees were going extinct and that we’d all soon starve to death because bees “are responsible for one-third of everything we eat” (the latter part being yet another fictitious and endlessly repeated claim).

Like EFSA, the U.S. EPA knew full well that:

1) honeybee populations are rising, not falling
2) pesticides as a whole play only a minor role in bee health,
3) some of the most problematic pesticides are those used directly in the hive by beekeepers to control the deadly Varroa mite
4) neonics are significantly more benign than the older pesticides they replaced, such as organophosphates and pyrethroids, and
5) the real cause of honeybee health problems is the global spread of parasites and the myriad diseases that currently infect beehives. 

It was clear that mere facts weren’t going to matter very much, however. At the time of the EU ban, the head of the EPA office in charge of pesticides, Jim Jones, complained that the intense political pressure then being exerted on EPA would force the agency to either ban or tightly restrict neonics in this country as well. That pressure only became more intense when President Obama took a “personal interest” in bees and formed a White House Task Force on Pollinators.

EPA caved to political pressure from the White House

At first, EPA appeared to be capitulating. Neonics had already undergone rigorous assessments before they were commercialized, of course, but without any scientific justification those initial tests were now deemed insufficient, and new, more stringent standards were set up for an accelerated re-assessment. ThenEPA released a bizarre and unprecedented “efficacy” study of neonicotinoid seed treatments on soy that found they had little value to farmers.

That analysis was remarkable in several ways: EPA had never conducted such a study before; its authors neglected to actually ask soy farmers what they thought; and the overwhelming weight of evidence from other studies clearly showed substantial benefits. In fact, EPA’s manipulation of the facts and data was so egregious that USDA issued a public rebuke to theagency! Calling the report “incomplete,” “premature,” and damaging to farmers, they strongly urged EPA to withdraw it.

What canola fields really look like without neonics: Left has not been treated, while the right has. Credit: Gregory Sekulic, Canola Council of Canada Agronomy Specialist

Undaunted and unrepentant, EPA started laying the groundwork to restrict or even ban neonic use on citrus and cotton, in spite of the fact that neither crop requires bees for pollination. Inasmuch as orange and cotton farmers only allow hives to be placed on their property as a favor to beekeepers, who can charge a significant premium for orange and cotton blossom honey, it seemed as if EPA was punishing the farmers for being good neighbors.

Moreover,neither crop would survive without neonics, as EPA knew full well. Neonics areFlorida orange growers’ last line of defense against the Asian psyllid thatcarries citrus greening disease, an incurable infection that has alreadyslashed Florida’s orange productionby 70 percentover the last 20 years. The loss of neonics would be just as devastating for cotton, collapsing the industry and turning cotton-dependent communities throughout America’s southeast into ghost towns. Talk about the “Deep State” conspiring to injure the nation’s economy.

Something happened on the way to the activists’ party, however. The neonics kept passing EPA’s doubly rigorous scientific tests. Even before the first preliminary assessments, Reuters reported that the EPA official in charge of regulating pesticides admitted that that neonic seed treatments – which account for thevast majority of neonic uses – do not pose a threat to bees

If nectar brought back to the hive from worker bees had more than 25 parts per billion of the chemical, "there's a significant effect," namely fewer bees, less honey and "a less robust hive," said Jim Jones, EPA's assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention.
But if the nectar chemical level was below 25 parts per billion, it was as if there were no imidacloprid at all, with no ill effects, Jones said. It was a clear line of harm or no harm, he said. Levels depended on the crop, Jones said.

While nectar of cotton and citrus fruits were above the harmful concentrations, the levels were not harmful for corn — the nation's top crop by far — most vegetables, berries and tobacco. Other crops weren't conclusive and need more testing, including legumes, melons, tree nuts and herbs
Also, the controversial practice of treating seeds with the chemical seemed not to harm bees, Jones said.

Given that crop residues from neonic seed treatments fall far below 25 parts per billion – usually between undetectable and the low single digits -- it was becoming clear that there simply was no scientific justification for a widespread ban.

The recent draft assessments should cut off the last hope the activists have for significant restrictions. Effective reversals on restrictions of neonics on cotton and citrus acknowledge how critical these chemicals are. And on soy, EPA essentially issued a mea culpa, admitting that seed treatments are critical to crop survival in much of the United States.

Interestingly, Canada’s EPA-equivalent, PMRA, issued a parallel briefing in December on its long-awaited review of neonics’ health, safety and environmental risks in Canadian agriculture. In spite of intense lobbying by environmental activists in Ontario and Quebec for an outright ban on neonics, PMRA found that nothing more was justified to cope with a handful of minor and isolated risks than to prescribe a few targeted mitigation measures. That will likely be EPA’s final finding as well for the few unresolved issues that remain concerning birds and aquatic systems.

Neonics are OK in the United States for now - but environmentalists hate to lose against science

For now, neonics are OK in the United States. But how long will this last? Central to Europe’s regulatory dysfunction is the so-called “precautionary principle, ”which as I’ve written about before, is neither a principle nor truly precautionary. By writing into law the idea that hypothetical (and often, imaginary) threats are more important than actual evidence, the EU has fundamentally abandoned the field to the activists, who are masters at whipping up public hysteria over imminent crises, even if, as with the bee-pocalypse, they’re entirely fictional.

In the United States, by law, EPA regulation must still be based on science. Unfortunately, the activists are becoming increasingly adept at manipulating the process, producing junk studies by the boatload, continually pushing for relaxed evidential standards (such as greater reliance on easily fudged epidemiological studies), and proposing ever more novel theories of environmental and biological harm.

Science-based regulation can’t withstand political pressure forever if it’s intense enough. It would be naïve to think that we would be where we are with neonics if the2016 presidential election had gone differently, or that regulatory policy couldn’t deteriorate if the House and/or Senate majorities were to switch next year. For the time being, science is winning this battle, but the best we can say going forward is that it will continue to be a “close run thing.”

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the U.S. FDA's Office of Biotechnology. 

Henry Miller

More Articles

Science Triumphs At The EPA. For Now.

The Neonic Ban: A Scientific Fraud Becomes Enshrined In EU Regulatory Law

About

Henry I. Miller, MS, MD, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at the Hoover Institution https://www.hoover.org/

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Environmentalists And Government Officials: Who Else Is Being Bought And Paid For?

By Hank Campbell — January 24, 2018 @ The American Council on Science and Health

Competitive Enterprise Institute discovered that radical environmental groups are paying the salaries and expenses of staffers in Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s office. As is well known, Governor Inslee and his political allies have engaged in a number of tactics to undermine both evidence-based science and the federal government, and not just in relation to their political disagreements.

Okay, politics is dirty but everyone can play that game, states can obviously sue if they don't like what the federal government is doing, even about science. If they don't believe emissions rules from EPA are strong enough, they can institute their own and incur whatever benefits or consequences that brings them in the free market. And we will know about it. Government is transparent, if you can cut your way through the jungle of bureaucracy.

Unless it isn't.

And in Washington state, it isn't. Washington was certainly not being transparent when not telling its taxpayers that the World Resources Institute hired the state as a contractor, that the state agreed to perform a “scope of work” for WRI, itemizing “activities and deliverables” and in turn it funded the position of Reed Schuler, Governor Inslee’s senior policy adviser for climate and sustainability.   Under its contract, "Washington State sends progress reports alongside its $33,210 quarterly invoices to the nonprofit.”

Schuler's duties? He “prepare[s] letters, executive orders, and other directives for the Governor’s signature.”

So the state is working for the non-profit and the non-profit is paying for a staffer who is creating legislation. The Governor does not seem to believe this creates any conflict at all, saying Schuler is “a Washington state employee with the same scope of work, review process and accountability as any other state employee. The only difference is the funding source.”

WRI activists agree with him and also claim that what they do is common.

Oh, it is? Maybe in Washington state but if it is common in my home I am going to be outraged. But it was no secret in Washington government. An email obtained by CEI read, “Reed’s position is being supported by the Hewlett Foundation and the World Resources Institute."

Imagine the outrage from progressive organizations like Natural Resources Defense Council or Union of Concerned Scientists if they discovered a Republican governor had staffers on the payroll of a pro-science group who was writing legislation - and that internal memos made it seem routine. There would be lawsuits flying everywhere.

Instead, the pro-science side gets a heaping dose of hypocrisy from activists. If a science or non-profit group has ever gotten a tiny grant from a corporation in their history, all of them in the future are labeled  "shills" and smeared across the Internet despite the science being absolutely solid regardless of who donates. Meanwhile, prominent environmental groups haven't been critical of WRI or Washington state at all.

What dark money funds WRI? The money trail leads to the Hewlett Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation is run by Jonathan Pershing, who is a close friend of Schuler. They worked together in President Obama’s State Department. Obviously former Obama staffers are now found everywhere in politically allied states, like New York and California, too. Is this same sort of thing happening elsewhere and being hidden from voters?

CEI President Kent Lassman had a very good question in a recent email; who else is being bought off?

Science and health are intertwined with politics in 2018, so if anyone else has an agenda that isn't for the benefit of the American public we deserve to know.

Agitators, regulators and predators on the prowl

Corrupt anti-science, anti-industry agencies have gained disturbing power in recent years. This article recounts the incredible example of an EU agency that exerts major influence over the use of chemicals, especially in Europe, but also in the USA and world. As the article and linked sources demonstrate, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has engaged in unbelievably shoddy and even fraudulent science – and rampant collusion with anti-chemical activist groups – to pave the way for predatory lawyers to sue Monsanto and other companies for billions of dollars over phony cancer risks. The only thing that overshadows that behavior is the conniving of one of IARC’s principal scientists. It’s an unbelievable saga.
Thank you for posting the article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.

Best regards, Paul

They’re going for a knockout and jackpot on a farm chemical, a corporation – and science

Paul Driessen

Legal and scientific ethics seem to have become irrelevant, as anti-chemical agitators, regulators and trial lawyers team up on numerous lawsuits against Monsanto. They’re seeking tens of billions of dollars in jackpot justice, by claiming a chemical in the company’s popular weed killer RoundUp causes cancer.

A key basis for the legal actions is a March 2015 International Agency for Research on Cancer ruling that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen.” A previously little known agency in the World Health Organization (WHO), IARC has gained infamy in recent years – critics slammed it for manipulating data and altering or deleting scientific conclusions to advance extreme anti-chemical policy agendas.

Although it is funded by US and European taxpayers – and is at the forefront of controversial policy, legal and regulatory actions – IARC insists that its deliberations, emails, draft reports and all other materials are its private property. Therefore, the agency claims, they are exempt from FOIA requests and even US congressional inquiries. IARC stonewalls all inquiries and advises its staff to talk to no one.

Its 2015 ruling became the primary justification for California listing glyphosate as carcinogenic under Proposition 65, a European Parliament vote to ban the chemical, and a European Commission committee proposal to give it only a five-year extension for further use in the EU. These actions, in turn, have given trial lawyers the ammo they need for their lawsuits – and other legal actions they are already preparing.

Glyphosate is an herbicide. It kills weeds. Used in conjunction with genetically modified RoundUp-Ready crops, it enables farmers to practice no-till farming – wherein a couple of soil spray treatments eliminate the need to till cropland to control weeds. That preserves soil structure and organisms, moisture, organic matter and nutrients; improves drainage and soil biodiversity; reduces erosion; and permits the high-yield farming humanity must practice if we are to feed Earth’s growing populations without having to plow under millions more acres of wildlife habitat. It also reduces labor and tractor fuel consumption.

Banning it just in Britain would cost the UK $1.2 billion a year in reduced crop yields and farm incomes.

Moreover, as UK science writer Matt Ridley  points out, coffee is more carcinogenic than glyphosate. So are numerous other foods and beverages that we consume every day, adds cancer expert Bruce Ames.  Of all dietary pesticides that humans ingest, 99.99% are natural, Ames notes; they are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves against fungi, viruses, insects and other predators.

Indeed, every other regulatory agency and reputable scientific body, going back some 40 years, have universally found that this RoundUp chemical does not cause cancer! The European Food Safety Authority, European Chemicals Agency, German Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), US Environmental Protection Agency and even other WHO experts have all studied glyphosate carefully. They have all said it is safe, non-carcinogenic or “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans.”

And yet IARC villainizes glyphosate. In a way, that’s not surprising. Out of 900 chemicals the agency reviewed since it was formed, it found only one was not carcinogenic. Many other chemicals, and even GMO foods, may soon be branded the  same way, especially now that America’s tort industry senses more jackpots from “cooperating closely” with IARC and putting more agency advisors on its payroll.

The latest tactic is to claim the chemical is being detected in some foods and in people’s urine. We can detect parts per trillion! (1 ppt is two teaspoons in 660 million gallons.) But where does actual risk begin?

And how did IARC reach conclusions so completely different from nearly every other expert worldwide, whose studies confirmed glyphosate poses no cancer risk? That’s where this story gets really interesting.

IARC is linked inextricably to Linda Birnbaum’s National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, which gets millions in US taxpayer money. The NIEHS funds and works with Italy’s junk-science factory, the Ramazzini Institute, and is allied with radical elements in US and EU government agencies. One of the most prominent and recurrent names on the list is Dr. Christopher Portier.

According to investigative journalists David Zaruk (Risk-Monger) and Kate Kelland (Reuters), Portier worked for years with Birnbaum at the NIEHS. He has also been a principal US government liaison to IARC, was paid as its only “consulting expert” on the working group that demonized glyphosate as carcinogenic, and did so while also being paid by the US National Institutes for Health – and while simultaneously being paid by the rabidly anti-pesticide group Environmental Defense. Portier has also received over $160,000 as a consultant to law firms that are suing Monsanto and other companies!

Equally outrageous, Portier admitted that, before he was hired as an “expert” on IARC’s glyphosate panel, he “had not looked at” any of the scientific evidence and had no experience with the chemical. He signed his lucrative deal with the lawyers within a week of finishing his work on the panel – but later admitted that he had been working with them for two months: while he was consulting for IARC!

Portier, IARC and the predatory lawyers all worked diligently to keep these arrangements – and major conflicts of interest – a secret. As Ms. Kelland explained in another article, IARC was equally diligent in securing a “guilty verdict” on glyphosate – by ignoring or altering multiple studies and conclusions that exonerated the chemical. That scientific and prosecutorial misconduct was revealed when Kelland compared IARC’s draft and final report, and found numerous indefensible changes and deletions.

In multiple instances, she discovered, the IARC panel simply removed scientists’ conclusions that their studies had found no link between glyphosate and cancer in laboratory animals. In others, the panel inserted a brand new statistical analysis, “effectively reversing” a study’s original finding. Other times, it surreptitiously changed critical language after scientists had agreed to earlier language that made precisely the opposite point from what appeared in the final Monograph 112 report on glyphosate.

One animal pathology report relied on by the US EPA clearly and unequivocally stated that its authors “firmly” and “unanimously” agreed that glyphosate had not caused abnormal growths in mice they had studied. The published IARC monograph simply deleted the sentence.

Overall, Reuters found ten significant changes between the critical draft chapter on animal studies and IARC’s final published monograph. Every one of them either deleted key statements that the Monsanto chemical did not cause tumors, replaced them with assertions that it did cause tumors, or (six times) claimed IARC “was not able to evaluate” a study because of “limited experimental data” included in it.

In addition, IARC panelist Charles Jameson said another study was excluded because “the amount of data in the tables was overwhelming,” and possibly because it may have been submitted an hour late. Dr. Jameson also claimed he didn’t know when, why or by whom any of the changes had been made.

Zaruk’s meticulous and eye-opening analysis of IARC’s swampy, shoddy, deceptive practices, collusion with anti-chemical zealots, blatant conflicts of interest – and six reasons why agency director Christopher Wild should be fired – is must reading for anyone concerned about cancer research and scientific integrity. His discussion of “hazard” versus “risk” assessment is particularly enlightening and valuable.

Many would call this saga blatant corruption, manipulation and fraud. All funded by our tax dollars! It is uncomfortably similar to what we have seen over the years with IPCC and other work on climate change.

The lawyers hope that years of anti-chemical activism, carefully stoked public fears, doctored studies and silencing or marginalizing of contrary voices will bring them a huge jury jackpot – akin to what their brethren recently received in an absurd talcum-powder-causes-cancer case (which was also based on IARC pseudo-science), before the suspect evidence, verdict and award were tossed out on appeal.

It’s likely that the EU and WHO will do little or nothing about this cesspool. Thankfully, the US Congress, particularly Jason Chaffetz  (R-UT) and Lamar Smith  (R-TX), is digging into it. We can only hope that they and their committees will issue and, more importantly, enforce subpoenas. If Portier and other IARC staffers, panelists and hired guns refuse to comply, Chaffetz and Smith (and judges in the Monsanto cases) should arrest and jail them, until they open their mouths, books and deliberations.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)  and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.

Thought For the Day: Al Gore, Global Warming and the Left