Environmental Working Group, a litigation group devoted to food and chemical issues, is most famous for publishing its annual “Dirty Dozen” list to promote publicly available pesticide residues on food. While neglecting to mention that their organic industry clients are not tested separately.
Today, they charge that career scientists inside the U.S. government are in a conspiracy to violate the The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, which requires the Environmental Protection Agency to protect children’s health by applying an extra margin of safety to legal limits for pesticides in food. The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, passed by a Republican Congress, was created to “ensure that there is a reasonable certainty that no harm will result to infants and children from aggregate exposure to the pesticide chemical residue.”
A new op-ed by their group in a sympathetic journal claims that the EPA has failed to add a suitable “children’s health” safety factor to the allowable limits for almost 90 percent of the most common pesticides and found that for 47 non-organophosphate pesticides evaluated since 2011, trace amounts were sometimes above 10 percent of the safe level, which itself is far below the No Affect Level. Therefore kids are being harmed, they allege, without ever showing where, when or how.
Not wooooo! Just woo. Sorry, Ric Flair.
They often throw around cosmic numbers, like that they can prevent 100,000 cases of cancer if we listen to their lawyers and political science majors instead of scientists, yet they are not able to show any kids are being harmed. This is instead a way to promote a paper to be used in a lawsuit. They trot out Dr. Philip Landrigan, their favorite epidemiologist, who claims pesticides cause autism and breast milk is toxic. He is their go-to resource for claims that even if no one is being harmed, endocrine disruption, a piece of hype he pioneered, could be happening. And they suggest all organophosphates are just like sarin gas, which the chemistry, toxicology, and biology community has debunked on numerous occasions. They also note that chlorpyrifos is still in use, but fail to mention claims of it being harmful are only in mice.
They conclude their article by alleging EPA is also in a conspiracy to support glyphosate, neonicotinoids, 2,4-D, organophosphates, pyrethroids, and other chemicals not used by their clients.
Science used to be just a corporate conspiracy, but with a Republican in the White House, Science is now a Vast Conservative Conspiracy as well.