EU watchdog says no need to cut cap on BPA in food

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(Reuters) - The European Union's food safety watchdog said it saw no need to cut the official limit on accepted exposure to bisphenol A, a chemical in plastic containers which some experts believe may harm human health.

Frito-Lay sends noisy, 'green' SunChips bag to the dump

Full Story: CLICK HERE

 

By Bruce Horovitz, USA TODAY

Frito-Lay is preparing to quietly sack its "green" but noisy SunChips bag.

Roughly 18 months after Frito-Lay, with great fanfare, launched a biodegradable SunChips bag made from plant material that was billed as 100% compostable, the company is yanking the noisy material from the packages of five of six SunChips flavors immediately.

The company is returning them to their former bags that can't be recycled — but won't wake the neighbors — while it works frantically to come up with a new, quieter eco-friendly bag.

The noise of the bag — due to an unusual molecular structure that makes the bag more rigid — has been compared to everything from lawnmowers to jet engines. There's even an active Facebook group with more than 44,000 friends that goes by the name of "Sorry But I Can't Hear You Over This SunChips Bag."

Four Ways to Kill a Climate Bill (hee, hee, ha, ha, ho ho)

Four Ways to Kill a Climate Bill

By LEE WASSERMAN

Published: July 25, 2010

IF President Obama and Congress had announced that no financial reform legislation would pass unless Goldman Sachs agreed to the bill, we would conclude our leaders had been standing in the Washington sun too long. Yet when it came to addressing climate change, that is precisely the course the president and Congress took. Lacking support from those most responsible for the problem, they have given up on passing a major climate bill this year.

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Alex Nabaum

It’s true that passing legislation to rebuild our fossil fuel-based economy was always going to be a momentous challenge. Senators and representatives feel in their bones (and campaign accounts) the interests of utilities and the coal and oil industries. Even well-intentioned members of Congress struggle to balance the competing needs of energy-intensive industries, coal workers and American families.
But with climate change a stated priority for President Obama and Congress, how did they fall so short? By weaving four coordinated threads into a shroud of inaction. This began long before President Obama took office, but rather than rip up the old pattern — as he advocated during the campaign — the president quickly took his place at the loom.
Thread No. 1: Climate is out; green jobs are in. Despite climate change being the greatest challenge of our time, with millions of people facing inundation, starvation and conflicts over scarce resources, the White House directed advocates not to discuss it. At a meeting in April 2009 led by Carol Browner, the White House coordinator of energy and climate policy, administration message mavens told climate bill advocates that, given the polling, they should avoid talking about climate change and focus on green jobs and energy independence.
Had Lyndon Johnson likewise relied on polling, he would have told the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to talk only about the expanded industry and jobs that Southerners would realize after passage of a federal civil rights act. I could imagine Dr. King’s response.
The urge to avoid the topic of climate change is not new. While Bill Clinton and Al Gore have done noble work on climate since leaving office, when they had the presidential megaphone they did little to educate the public about the wolf at our door. President Obama has followed suit, and our national comprehension of climate change continues to stagnate. Virtually the only public officials working to shape opinion on this over the past two years have been those committed to misrepresenting the science.
Thread No. 2: Devising a bill for historic polluters, not the American people. Remember the president’s campaign pledge to represent the people, not the lobbyists? That’s not what he’s done on this issue.
For several years the Beltway wisdom has been that it is impossible to pass a bill without the approval of historic polluters, particularly the utilities, which run coal-burning power plants, the nation’s single largest source of climate-changing pollution. The administration and Congress did their best to get the industry’s permission for new regulations. They proposed handing power companies hundreds of billions of dollars worth of allowances to pollute, additional billions to subsidize the development of technology to sequester carbon from coal-fired plants, and evisceration of federal authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon. Peter Orszag, the budget director, said giving away pollution permits would be “the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States.” But no matter — it wasn’t enough.
Thread No. 3: A Rube Goldberg-policy construction. Because Congress built a policy machine designed for special interests, most proposals were chockablock with policy contraptions impossible to even explain, much less put into effect. Provisions included pollution allowances for favored corporations, carbon credit-default swaps, complicated worldwide offset provisions to enable avoidance of actual pollution reductions at home and loopholes to extend the life of the dirtiest coal plants. By the end of the process, even Campbell Soup demanded a special deal for the carbon-intensive job of making chicken noodle soup.
This rush to the trough was inevitable once President Obama ditched his plan to push a simple market-based bill that would have required polluters, rather than citizens, to pay for switching from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy.
Thread No. 4: The public sits it out. American history has few examples of presidents or Congresses upending entrenched interests without public pressure forcing their hand. Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore for a reason.
Citizens wouldn’t support an approach they couldn’t understand to solve a problem our leaders refused to acknowledge. Even the earth’s flagging ability to support life as we know it couldn’t stir a public outcry. The loudest voices insisted that leaders in Washington do nothing.
They obliged.
Lee Wasserman is the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund.

Slow Death by Rubber Duck

Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie's "Slow Death by Rubber Duck."

To the chagrin of climate scientists, some of the most graphic and telling descriptions of the world’s overheating--the rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers--turned out to be examples of “enviroporn," seductive, and seemingly plausible disasters that on closer inspection turn out to be implausible and fabricated or promoted by advocacy groups. To the dismay of toxicologists, enviroporn is rampant in the reporting of chemical risks, because, let’s face it, real chemistry is desperately unsexy, difficult (arguably the most painful part of a medical education) and toxic to explain to nonchemists. Particle physicists at least have a massive hole in the ground to point to, and a near diabolically wicked piece of engineering in the Large Hadron Collider. They are almost Star Trek. But even without the ultimate toy to re-create the original conditions of the creation of the universe, physicists have String Theory, possibly a vast waste of time and effort, but at least fodder for the comic genius of Eddie Izzard.
No comedian has yet managed to yuck up isomers and congeners, because the synthesis of chlorine elements is utterly humor-resistant, resulting in polychloro-dibenzobordom (QED). The result is that a host of environmental activists have stepped in with enviroporn, plausible scare stories about how you are on a fast track to a sex change or cancer from breathing the air in a new car or playing with a rubber duck in the bath. How else to explain a book in which the authors, two longtime Canadian environmentalists, expose themselves to products containing chemicals such as phthalates and then have their blood analyzed to show how dangerous putting on cologne is? Such practices have been deemed meaningless by the National Research Council here in the United States because for “most of the chemicals currently measured, the risks cannot be interpreted;” and when Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health" was first released in Canada, Canadian toxicologists said the same thing: “totally meaningless in a toxicological sense,” Keith Solomon, professor and fellow at the Academy of Toxicological Sciences at Guelph University told the National Post. Naturally, this hasn’t dissuaded news organizations such as NPR from taking the book seriously.
But there is an interesting story in isomers and congeners, and it is missed in Slow Death, even as Lourie and Smith talk around them. It involves two major cases of environmental poisoning that occurred in Fukuoka in western Japan in 1968 and in Taiwan in 1979, involving what the authors describe as one of the most “infamous environmental contaminants”--PCBs. In typical enviroporn fashion, the authors exaggerate the disaster: In Fukuoka, “many fell gravely ill,” they write, “babies were stillborn, and about three hundred people died in the ensuing years from the poisoning.” The footnote, however, takes you to a paper that reports that number as the overall number of those who are now deceased, not the number who are deceased because of poisoning.
But it is more instructive to turn to John Timbrell, professor of Biochemical Toxicology at the Department of Pharmacy in King’s College London, who tackles both incidents in The Poison Paradox: Chemicals as Friends and Foes (Oxford University Press, 2008), perhaps the only contemporary, accessible book that addresses the widespread concern over chemicals from the perspective of actual science.
As Timbrell points out, one of the confounding factors in both incidents was that the PCBs were heated, first in the factory, and then in the frying pans, and this created new and highly toxic chemical contaminants known as chloro-dibenzofurans (PCDFS). Similar in structure to dioxins, these PCDFS were still detectable in the victims of both poisonings over 11 years later and in much greater levels than PCBs. And because the levels of PCDFS correlated with the diseases found in the victims while the PCBs didn’t, “it has been concluded,” writes Timbrell, “that these contaminants are the causative agents.”
Whether PCDFS alone or in conjunction with PCBs were to blame, the victims of Fukuoka and Taiwan consumed huge quantities of both chemicals over time--between half a gram and 4 grams over three months of PCBs and up to 3.8 milligrams of PCDFS. By contrast, our exposure to PCBs through the environment is tiny.
But because PCBs are enviroporn stars, the tropism in the media has been toward hysteria. Such was the case when a study, published in the journal Science in 2004, claimed to find potentially dangerous levels of PCBs in farmed salmon and set off a worldwide health scare, “Some salmon are highly toxic,” said USA Today, while Britain’s Daily Mail cautioned “Only eat salmon three times a year.”
Missing in all of this was the math. The study had found an average level of PCBs in farmed salmon of 36 parts per billion. Using the Environmental Protection Agency’s guidelines for establishing the cancer risk from PCBs, this worked out to an increased risk of one extra cancer case per hundred thousand people over 70 years--if everyone ate 8 ounces of raw salmon with the skin every month. The victims of Fukuoka, by contrast, were exposed to average levels of PCBs in rice oil of 2,000 to 3,000 parts per million every day for three months.
Despite portraying PCBs as one of the worst of all possible environmental threats, the authors don’t mention the farmed salmon scare in Slow Death, perhaps because it did not turn out to be environmental advocacy’s finest hour. Responding to the controversy two years later, both the Institute of Medicine and a collaboration between Harvard’s Medical School, School of Public Health and Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital dismissed most of the risks of chemicals in fish as being inconclusive or negligible relative to the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids and a product of media exaggeration. As Dariush Mozaffarian, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, noted upon the study’s release:“[F]or farmed salmon, the cardiovascular benefits are greater than the cancer risks by a factor of at least 300:1. With the exception of some locally caught sport fish from contaminated inland waters, the levels of PCBs and dioxins in fish should not influence decisions about fish intake.”
Fish also provide a window on a more astonishing omission from a book that derives so much of its energy from the fear of endocrine disruption--the idea that chemicals can act like estrogen in the body and cause reproductive harm and other problems through repeated exposure.
As Timbrell notes, many of the claims for endocrine disruption are, to say the least, controversial, but the problem of ethinyl estradiol in sewage is less ambiguous and has been documented around the world. Outflows from sewage plants have shown that it is released in “biologically significant levels” and may be the major culprit behind all manner of developmental problems in fish (exposure in the laboratory to estradiol produces the same effects). But where does ethinyl estradiol come from? The contraceptive pill. And how does it get into the nation’s waterways? Urine.
If you aren’t on the rightward and religious side of the political spectrum, it’s easier to bash a hypothetical risk from a rubber duck than take on a potentially serious, unanticipated environmental risk from the contraceptive pill; moreover, the increasing evidence that extremely low doses of estradiol can cause endocrine disruption also comes by way of EPA studies exonerating BPA--the chemical-villain du jour--from being an endocrine disruptor and a threat to health. What to do? Pass the perfume, spray, spray, spray and keep up the pretense that enviroporn really represents a true love for science.
Trevor Butterworth is the editor of STATS.org, an affiliate of George Mason Universitythat looks at how numbers are used in public policy and the media. He writes a weekly columnfor Forbes.

Blinded by Science

Full Column: HERE

WASHINGTON -- Science, many scientists say, has been restored to her rightful throne because progressives have regained power. Progressives, say progressives, emulate the cool detachment of scientific discourse. So hear now the calm, collected voice of a scientist lavishly honored by progressives, Rajendra Pachauri.

He is chairman of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 version of the increasingly weird Nobel Peace Prize. Denouncing persons skeptical about the shrill certitudes of those who say global warming poses an imminent threat to the planet, he says:

"They are the same people who deny the link between smoking and cancer. They are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder -- and I hope they put it on their faces every day."

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

Story

The Continuing Climate Meltdown

More embarrassments for the U.N. and 'settled' science.

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

Public's Priorities for 2010: Economy, Jobs, Terrorism

Pew Research Center Article: HERE

Global Warming and the Environment

Dealing with global warming ranks at the bottom of the public’s list of priorities; just 28% consider this a top priority, the lowest measure for any issue tested in the survey. Since 2007, when the item was first included on the priorities list, dealing with global warming has consistently ranked at or near the bottom. Even so, the percentage that now says addressing global warming should be a top priority has fallen 10 points from 2007, when 38% considered it a top priority. Such a low ranking is driven in part by indifference among Republicans: just 11% consider global warming a top priority, compared with 43% of Democrats and 25% of independents.

Protecting the environment fares somewhat better than dealing with global warming on the public’s list of priorities, though it still falls on the lower half of the list overall. Some 44% say that protecting the environment should be a top priority for Obama and Congress, little changed from 2009.

Agency Will Create National Climate Service to Spur Adaptation

Those who point to the recent cold spells as evidence of the fallacy of global warming discredit science. If substantial global warming were really occurring (which it is not) severe cold spells would be expected in some areas. However, that does not keep me from appreciating the continuing irony of global warming events being canceled due to cold weather. The most recent occurrence was the ribbon cutting for NOAA's new climate change office:

www.climate.gov

The proposed entity would provide "user-friendly" information to help governments and businesses adapt to climate change, creating a central federal source of information on everything from projections of sea level rise to maps of the nation's best sites for wind and solar power.

"Even with our best efforts, we know that some degree of climate change is inevitable," said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department includes NOAA. "American citizens, businesses and governments -- from local to federal -- must be able to rise to the challenges that lie ahead. And that's where NOAA's climate service will prove absolutely invaluable."

Just as NOAA's National Weather Service provides information on short-range environmental conditions, the proposed climate service will provide long-term projections of how climate will change, he added.

"PolluterWatch"

A new Greenpeace website has been set up to combat congressional attempts to reign in EPA's abuse of the Clean Air Act as a vehicle for regulating carbon emissions. It is actually pretty entertaining and worth a look, especially the video. Parts of the website are set up like Match.Com, except for matching "polluters" and legislators.

http://www.polluterwatch.com/

Green Police Confused

www.greenpoliceconfused.com