Category Archives: Green Light

The Government Buried Some Really Important Herbicide News Right Before Thanksgiving

by JohnBorowski Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked its controversial approval of a novel herbicide mix, sending shares of its maker, chemical giant Dow, down nearly 3 percent in Wednesday trading.

The product, Enlist Duo, is the signature weed-killing cocktail of Dow AgroScience, Dow’s ag subsidiary. It’s composed of two endocrine-disrupting chemicals, 2-4-D and glypohosate, that have landed on the World Health Organization’s lists of “possible” and “probable” carcinogens, respectively. Dow markets it for use alongside corn and soybean varieties that have been genetically engineered to withstand the combined herbicides, to counter the rapid rise of weeds that have evolved to resist glyphosate alone. Approved by the EPA last year, Enlist Duo is the company’s “crown jewel,” a Wall Street analyst recently told The Wall Street Journal. The US Department of Agriculture thinks farmers will embrace it rapidly—it will boost 2,4-D use by as much as 600 percent by 2020, the agency projects.

How inconvenient for Dow’s shareholders, then, that the EPA has changed its mind. Last Tuesday, the agency petitioned the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals to revoke its approval of Enlist Duo, temporarily barring farmers from using it.

The reason for the reversal is fascinating. The decision hinges on the so-called “synergistic” effects of combined pesticides. When you combine two or more herbicides, do you merely get the weed-slaying properties of each—or do you also get something new and greater than the sum of the parts? There’s not a lot of data on that. Generally, pesticides are tested for safety in isolation, even though farmers tend to use several at once in the field. Yet studies have repeatedly shown—see here and here—that chemical combinations can be much more toxic than you’d expect from analyzing each of their components.

When the EPA reviewed safety data supplied by Dow, it found “no indication of synergism between the two Enlist Duo ingredients for mammals, freshwater fish, and freshwater invertebrates,” its court petition states, and thus it concluded that the “mixture of the two ingredients does not show a greater toxicity compared to either parent compound alone.”

But later, agency officials looked at Dow’s application to the US Patent Office for Enlist Duo, originally filed in 2013, and found something quite different: “claims of ‘synergistic herbicidal weed control.'” The EPA was not amused. “Specifically, Dow did not submit to EPA during the registration process the extensive information relating to potential synergism it cited to the Patent Office,” the agency complained to the court. “EPA only learned of the existence of that information after the registrations were issued and only recently obtained the information.”

In others words, Dow was assuring the EPA that its proposed cocktail was really nothing new—just the combination of two already-approved agrichemicals—while simultaneously telling the patent office that Enlist did indeed bring new and different weed-leveling properties to the farm field. In short, two different messages for two different audiences—the EPA sees potentially heightened toxicity from synergistic effects, while the investors who pore over patents might see a potential blockbuster in an herbicide mix that’s more than just the sum of its two components.

Dow has now handed that “extensive information” on Enlist Duo’s synergistic effects to the EPA. In a press release, Dow AgroSciences President and CEO Tim Hassinger vowed to resolve the EPA’s issues “in the next few months, in time for the 2016 crop use season.” Given that the EPA relies on company-supplied data to make these decisions, he’s probably right—the EPA’s action last week will amount to a speed bump on the road to Enlist Duo’s conquering of the nation’s vast corn/soybean belt. But considering the confusion so far, now might be the time for the EPA to demand independent testing of this powerful and potentially soon-to-be ubiquitous mix.

Meanwhile, last Wednesday’s action marks the second time in November the EPA has seen fit to revoke registration of a would-be blockbuster Dow pesticide. Just a week before, the agency nixed its approval of the insecticide sulfoxaflor, months after a federal appeals court found that Dow had delivered the agency “flawed and limited data” about the chemical’s impact on honeybees.

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The Government Buried Some Really Important Herbicide News Right Before Thanksgiving

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France Goes to War on Civil Liberties

by DrusillJnb Posted on November 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, many in France have said they finally understand what things were like for Americans just after September 11, 2001. The attacks have emboldened France’s conservatives, and pushed liberal and moderate factions rightward. On Friday, the French parliament voted to extend a nationwide state of emergency for another three months, granting authorities broad powers to limit civil liberties in the name of combating terrorism. The French public overwhelmingly supports the move.

The rise of a police state in France may come as a surprise to Americans old enough to remember when France stood out as Europe’s greatest critic of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror—a spat that peaked in 2003 when, in response to French opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the House of Representatives cafeteria rebranded its French fries “Freedom Fries.”

Nowadays, of course, just about everyone looks with disfavor on that war, which is credited with giving ISIS a foothold. Though France bombed targets in Syria on November 15, it has so far stopped short of sending in ground troops against ISIS. And, while it’s too early to tell, there’s no evidence its intelligence services are abducting or torturing terror suspects.

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France Goes to War on Civil Liberties

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Black Lives Matter Just Officially Became Part of the Democratic Primary

by ToddBainerry Posted on October 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee invited activists from two prominent groups within the Black Lives Matter movement to organize and host a town hall forum on racial justice for the party’s presidential candidates.

In recent months, the movement—which began with protests in response to the August 2014 killing of black teenager Michael Brown but has since grown to political organizing nationwide—has become increasingly influential in shaping the Democratic Party’s stance on racial and criminal justice.

In August, the DNC passed a resolution declaring its support for the movement. Bernie Sanders introduced a criminal justice platform days after activists from the Black Lives Matter network, which was founded after the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, interrupted him at a rally in Seattle over the summer. And members of the police-reform group Campaign Zero, which is also affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, introduced a well-received criminal justice policy agenda.

In one of several letters to leaders of the Black Lives Matter network and Campaign Zero, DNC Chief Executive Officer Amy K. Dacey wrote, “We believe that your organization would be an ideal host for a presidential candidate forum—where all of the Democratic candidates can showcase their ideas and policy positions that will expand opportunity for all, strengthen the middle class and address racism in America.”

The letters, which were obtained by the Washington Post, come a day after leaders of the Black Lives Matter network called on the DNC to hold an additional debate focused exclusively on racial and criminal justice. “We deserve substantive responses and policy recommendations,” Elle Hearns and two other leaders of the collective wrote in an online petition—which, just one day after it was posted, had garnered nearly 10,000 signatures.

While the DNC gave a green light to a racial-justice-themed town hall discussion, committee leaders said the organization would not add another debate to the six presidential debates already scheduled, according to the Post.

Reactions to that news from Black Lives Matter movement leaders were mixed. In her interview with the Post on Wednesday, Hearns called the town hall invitation “unsatisfactory.” Campaign Zero leader DeRay McKesson, however, indicated that he is already in talks with DNC officials to coordinate the town hall and has reached out to potential venues and corporate partners.

He has also been in touch with the Republican National Committee to explore including Republican candidates in the town hall as well. “We want to bring together all of the candidates, not focused on either political party, to have a conversation centered on race and criminal justice,” McKesson said.

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Black Lives Matter Just Officially Became Part of the Democratic Primary

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Congress Is Blocking Legal Weed in DC—and Maybe Causing a Spike in Murders

by CorrineMcCullou Posted on September 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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With John Boehner’s impending retirement, there isn’t much lingering fear that Congress will fail to pass the spending bills needed this week to avert a government shutdown. But in the process of keeping the government open, Congress will yet again trample on local governance in Washington, DC. Unless the legislative language is altered at the last minute before final passage, Congress will renew a rider from the last near-shutdown deal that prohibits the city government from spending any funds to set up a legal market for marijuana—as in Colorado and Washington State—despite the fact that DC voters approved, by an overwhelming majority, a ballot measure last fall to legalize weed.

There are a whole host of reasons the city government and voters would prefer a market where marijuana is sold in approved storefronts just like liquor. As Colorado has shown with its regulated system, bringing drug sales out of the black market can be a boon for tax revenue, with the state set to collect about $125 million this year from marijuana sales taxes. And before the ballot initiative last year legalized personal possession of small quantities of the drug, studies had shown that black residents of DC were 8.05 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than white residents, even though blacks and whites smoke pot at equal levels nationally.

But over the course of the past year, the DC government has found yet another reason to push for a fully legalized system: the role alternative, synthetic drugs might be playing in a rising murder rate.

Like many cities across the country, DC saw a sharp uptick in the number of homicides over the summer, which has continued into fall. Once the so-called murder capital of the United States, DC has steadily reduced its crime rate in recent years. But there have been 120 murders in DC in 2015, compared to just 80 at this time last year.

Analysts have yet to settle on a persuasive explanation for the spike in murders in many major American cities. DC’s city government has pointed to several possible causes. Perhaps it’s guns with larger magazines, making more shootings lethal. Or maybe it’s a glut of past offenders repeating. But there is one explanation that city officials have seemed surest about: an increase in synthetic-drug usage that has caused people to act erratically and sometimes violently.

Synthetic marijuana first hit DC head shops about five years ago, sold alongside pipes and bongs as a legal substitute for cannabis. Back then, drugs like K2 and Spice were milder cannabinoids that produced similar effects to marijuana. “They were much safer when they were legal than when they became illegal,” says Adam Eidinger, the author of last year’s ballot initiative to legalize marijuana and owner of Capitol Hemp, a local head shop that sold synthetic drugs when they were legal. But once the government banned the substances that produced the high, manufacturers went underground, experimenting with different strains of chemicals. The spiraling arms race to tweak formulas and stay ahead of regulators produced a far more dangerous substance, which in its current iteration induces more a high more like PCP than the mild cannabinoids of a few years ago.

Proponents of marijuana legalization avoid referring to the new product synthetic marijuana, as it’s commonly called. “Marijuana users should be outraged over this slanderous and fraudulent reference to the cannabis plant,” Jon Gettman wrote for High Times. “These drugs do not contain cannabinoids, natural or synthetic, and are in no way related to marijuana and/or the cannabis plant.”

“Often referred to as synthetic marijuana, this drug is not at all like marijuana, and the effects are very different,” DC police chief Cathy Lanier said in August. “It is an extremely dangerous drug and if not addressed federally, we will have a public health crisis on our hand as its use continues to expand.” She noted that 30 percent of police departments in major cities had reported more violent crime being committed by people under the influence of synthetic drugs.

In June, Mayor Muriel Bowser introduced emergency legislation to impose harsh penalties on stores caught selling the synthetic drugs: an automatic 96-hour shutdown for police to investigate the first offense, with a second offense prompting a 30-day closure and a $10,000 fine.

It’s not always clear that synthetic drugs are behind the crimes, as police struggle to test suspects and instead rely on visual clues to pin crimes on these drugs. In August, the NYPD held a press conference warning of the terrors of “weaponized marijuana” that had turned people into crazed criminals ready to wreak havoc on the streets. The presentation included a video a naked man trying to punch his way through a fence and then turning on a cohort of cops, and pointed to it as evidence of the perils of synthetic marijuana. But as Gothamist noted shortly afterward, the clip was actually pulled from an old episode of Cops. The footage, from 12 years earlier, showed a Des Moines man high on PCP, not K2. The footage still made it onto a CNN segment warning America about synthetic marijuana.

Although no one has conclusively traced the murder spike to synthetic drugs, usage of the drugs is certainly on the upswing this year—often with dangerous effects. DC recorded 439 trips to emergency rooms due to synthetic drugs in June alone.

DC officials and activists think the problem wouldn’t be so severe if Congress hadn’t interceded to block implementation of a legal market. “It would depend on the cost of the marijuana, entirely,” says David Grosso, a member of the DC Council and a longtime proponent of a tax-and-regulate system. “If it’s accessible and not expensive and not hard to get a hold of, then I think you’d probably see less synthetic drugs.”

Eidinger puts it more categorically. “There would be no demand for synthetic drugs if marijuana could be bought at any corner store in the city the same way alcohol is sold,” he says.

In November 2014, 70 percent of DC voters backed Initiative 71, a ballot measure that legalized possession of up to two ounces of marijuana and home cultivation in the capital. Shortly after the initiative passed, the DC Council drafted legislation to regulate the sale of marijuana like alcohol. In November, a council committee approved a bill that would have set the rules for production and sales taxes on marijuana. DC appeared set to follow Colorado and Washington in having legal dispensaries.

This prospect raised the ire of the Republican majority in Congress. Rep. Andy Harris, whose Maryland district sits on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, far from DC, had long challenged the District’s political autonomy, previously attempting unsuccessfully to prevent the city from lowering fines for marijuana possession. Shortly after the referendum passed, as part of a deal to avert a government shutdown Harris and his GOP colleagues in Congress barred the DC government from spending any funds on the legalization of marijuana. “The fact is, the Constitution gives Congress the ultimate oversight about what happens in the federal district,” Harris said at the time.

While the DC Council found a way around that spending prohibition to implement the exact text of the ballot measure, Harris’ rider has prevented DC from advancing toward a real legal market. That’s left the city in a limbo state. Instead of a fully legal market, DC currently has a hybrid system whereby possession of marijuana is legal but buying or selling it is not. Some enterprising individuals have entered what the Washington Post recently termed the “gray market,” starting clubs or selling other goods that just so happen to come with a free bonus gift of some weed. But for the most part, DC’s marijuana market is still operating just like every other black market in country, just a little bit more out in the open when it comes to possession, but still sold with the risk of arrest.

“Congress has failed us,” says Grosso. “They continue to block this effort. The people of the District of Columbia deserve this kind of a marketplace, and we don’t have the opportunity to do that.”

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Congress Is Blocking Legal Weed in DC—and Maybe Causing a Spike in Murders

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Shell Just Scrapped Its Arctic Drilling Plans for "the Forseeable Future"

by EthelChutqbor Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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And just like that, it was over.

After years of botched attempts, mountains of red tape, billions of dollars, and countless face-offs with protestors, Royal Dutch Shell announced today that it is pulling the plug on all oil and gas exploration in the Arctic ocean “for the forseeable future.” From the press release:

Shell has found indications of oil and gas in the Burger J well, but these are not sufficient to warrant further exploration in the Burger prospect. The well will be sealed and abandoned in accordance with U.S. regulations.

“The Shell Alaska team has operated safely and exceptionally well in every aspect of this year’s exploration program,” said Marvin Odum, Director, Shell Upstream Americas. “Shell continues to see important exploration potential in the basin, and the area is likely to ultimately be of strategic importance to Alaska and the US. However, this is a clearly disappointing exploration outcome for this part of the basin.”

There was always a chance this could happen. Given the sky-high costs of drilling and transporting oil in the Arctic, making the venture profitable required a complex soup of numbers to all fall in Shell’s favor, particularly how much oil there really was down there and how much Shell could expect to sell it for. (No amount of gas would likely be profitable.) The press release skimps on details, but it blames “the Burger J well result, the high costs associated with the project, and the challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment in offshore Alaska.” It also says that Shell is locked into paying $1.1 billion in existing contracts.

Thanks to climate change and the loss of Arctic sea ice, many energy experts have been increasingly bullish on the prospects for Arctic oil exploration. The area could theoretically have the potential to outstrip the Middle East, but as of now it’s now largely untapped. The decision today is a heavy blow to future offshore drilling projects in the Arctic, said Robert Dillon, spokesperson for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has been one of the biggest congressional proponents of offshore oil drilling.

“It’s certainly a disappointment,” he said. “It’s now becoming more and more questionable whether there’s going to be offshore activity at all. A lot of uncertainty of how we go forward in Alaska.”

The decision was also a major win for environmental groups, many of whom have made Shell’s Arctic exploration a central focus of their campaigns over the last year.

“It’s proof positive that it’s time to stop going to the ends of the Earth to search for dangerous, costly fossil fuels,” said Franz Matzner, director the Beyond Oil initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s not safe, it’s not what the science demands if we’re serious about climate change, and Shell just proved that it doesn’t make any sense.”

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Shell Just Scrapped Its Arctic Drilling Plans for "the Forseeable Future"

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How Climate Change Shrank These Bees’ Tongues

by PhilWessel Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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The story was originally published by the Atlantic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If you think about iconic symbols of climate change, you’ll probably picture a polar bear, emaciated, and clinging to a precariously small chunk of ice. You’re probably not thinking of a bumblebee, flitting about an alpine meadow with a shorter-than-average tongue. And yet, according to new research from Nicole Miller-Struttmann from SUNY College at Old Westbury, these shrinking tongues speak volumes about how nature’s most intimate partnerships might change in a warming world.

In the central Rockies, there are many species of bumblebee, and some have unusually long tongues for their body size. These are adaptations to the deep tubes of certain flowers like Parry’s clover and alpine skypilot, allowing the bees to lap at nectar that smaller-tongued species can’t reach. The tubes, in turn, are adaptations to the long bee tongues, providing exclusive access to nectar in exchange for exclusive pollination services. Both partners are locked in a co-evolutionary dance, held together by beautifully fitting tongues and tubes.

Recently, all has not been right with this dance. Miller-Struttmann’s colleagues, who have been studying the local bees and flowers for decades, started to notice weird changes. Long-tongued bees, which have been declining in many parts of the world, had become relatively rarer in the Rockies too. Meanwhile, foreign species from further down the mountainsides were encroaching on their terrain.

To work out what was going on, the team measured the tongues of the two most common bumblebee species, caught at three Colorado mountains in recent years. They then compared these lengths to those of specimens collected from the same mountains between 1966 and 1980.

These archived bees (has-bee-ns?) revealed that the tongues of these species have become 0.61 percent shorter every year, and are now just three-quarters of their former glory. “We were really surprised at the strength of the result,” says Miller-Struttmann. “We obviously asked the question but we weren’t expecting such a large response, especially over just 40 to 50 years.”

Why have the long-tongued bees evolved into long-ish-tongued bees? The team ruled out several possibilities. The bees weren’t becoming smaller overall, at least not to a degree that explained their shrinking tongues. Shorter-tubed plants hadn’t taken over the mountainsides; herbarium collections revealed that they are no more common now than they were in the 1960s. And immigrant bees from elsewhere in the mountains weren’t ousting the locals from their usual long-tubed flowers.

The best remaining explanation is that the changing climate of the Rockies has shifted the balance of flowers that the bees depend upon. Jennifer Geib from Appalachian State University, who was involved in the study, says, “Our field sites are part of what ecologists describe as high-altitude desert.” That is: they’re really dry. And they’ve become drier in the last 60 year, as summers have become 2 degrees Celsius warmer.

Water evaporated more quickly from the soil. Winter snowfalls started thawing out earlier, depriving plants of precious meltwater during the growing season. Many wildflowers that were already eking out a living on the brink of drought were pushed over the edge. On Pennsylvania Mountain alone, the team calculated that “millions of flowers were lost.” As such, today’s bees face about 60 percent less food than their predecessors from the 1970s.

The long-tubed flowers weren’t especially affected, but there were fewer of them—and not enough for long-tongued specialists to subsist on. So the long-tongued bees were forced to broaden their diets, drinking nectar from flowers of every length. Since they were now competing for resources that many other species could plunder, their long tongues no longer conferred any special advantages. So evolution, ever-thrifty and economical, selected for individuals with shorter tongues.

“That’s a really neat discovery,” says Jeremy Kerr from the University of Ottawa, who also studies pollinators. “I haven’t seen other research that suggests we’re likely to see rapid evolution in bumblebee traits because of climate change.” Kerr’s own research shows that North American and European bumblebees are being crushed out of their normal ranges by warming climates, seemingly unable to expand into more suitable pastures.

Miller-Struttmann’s study suggests that bees might be able to persist within these contracting habitats by changing their foraging habits and evolving accordingly. How they fare in the long-term is anyone’s guess. Certainly, the widespread decline of long-tongued bees, and bumblebees more generally, is a poor portent.

This isn’t the only mutualism at risk in a warming world. In warmer oceans, corals eject the algae that they depend on for photosynthesis, depriving them of both the energy they need to construct their mighty reefs, and the source of their color. Starving and alone, they become weak and ghostly versions of themselves.

Meanwhile, carpenter ants, a hugely successful group with around 1,000 species, depend on bacteria inside their cells to supplement their diets with important nutrients. These microbes are also sensitive to temperature, and it’s possible that a warmer world would crush these ants—and the many other insects that depend on supplementary microbes—into ever narrower niches.

And what of the long-tubed flowers, now decoupled from their partners in pollination? “Alpine plants are very long-lived, so any effects of reduced pollination efficiency from the recent past would likely not be seen in their populations for some time,” says Geib. “But if climate-change models are accurate, these plants are likely to face a multitude of synergistic pressures in the future, including drought, and increased competition as the ranges of lowland species shift upward. The combination of these pressures, coupled with decreased pollination, could forecast a troubled future.”

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How Climate Change Shrank These Bees’ Tongues

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You Can’t Go To Prison For Destroying The Economy, But Bad Peanut Butter Is Another Story

by AntoniaDWQ Posted on September 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Food company executives who play a role in outbreaks that sicken and kill consumers now face the prospect of decades in prison because of a recent precedent-setting case and a crackdown by federal prosecutors.

Stewart Parnell, an executive from Peanut Corporation of America, a now-defunct company behind one of the worst Salmonella outbreaks to hit the US, was sentenced Monday to 28 years in prison. He sold contaminated food products that claimed nine lives and sickened more than 700 people in 46 states.

It is by far the most severe punishment ever given for criminal food safety violations. His brother, Michael Parnell, also a top official at PCA was sentenced to 20 years and quality assurance manager, Mary Wilkerson was sentenced to five.

The hefty sentences signal that the feds are stepping up prosecutions against high-ranking officials and underscores some of the challenges agencies face when they want to hold companies accountable. Still, the crimes committed by the Parnells could have led to much stiffer sentences. Stewart Parnell was convicted of 47 offenses, which qualified him for a sentence of up to 803 years—and he was facing life behind bars.

“Honestly, I think the fact that he was prosecuted at all is a victory for consumers,” says Bill Marler, a foodborne illness lawyer who represents more than 50 victims of the outbreak. “Although his sentence is less than the maximum, it is the longest sentence ever in a food poisoning case. This sentence is going to send a stiff, cold wind through board rooms across the U.S.”

The massive 2008 Salmonella outbreak prompted officials to strip 4,000 products made by 361 companies from store shelves, resulting in roughly $200 million in losses. Ultimately, the tainted food was traced back to PCA—a manufacturer that sells peanut-based-products to companies like Kellogg, Sara Lee, and Little Debbie, as well as government programs that produce food for poor children and the military. According to a federal investigation, company officials spent years covering up unsanitary production conditions, faking test results, and lying to customers and consumers when salmonella was detected in their facilities.

Salmonella victim Jacob Hurley with his father Peter J. Scott Applewhite/ AP

Jacob Hurley was one of the victims infected with salmonella in 2008 after eating one of his favorite snacks—peanut butter crackers. At the time, he was only 3-years-old. Hurley, now 10, survived and traveled with his father to the sentencing on Monday. “I think its OK for him to spent the rest of his life in prison,” he told the judge.

Nine victims, such as Clifford Tousignant, a Korean War hero with three Purple Hearts who became ill after eating a peanut butter sandwich died from their infections caused by contaminated food.

The indictment against Parnell, which relied on uncovered emails and investigations, revealed that between 2003 and 2009 PCA shipped products before the results of tests were complete. Parnell green-lighted the use of faked and fabricated certificates of analysis, documents that certify food has been properly tested. Even after Salmonella had been detected numerous times, the company continued to claim that their products were safe and sell them to customers.

In several emails Parnell instructs his employees to violate standards. After being told in 2007 that salmonella testing results would take longer than expected and shipping would be delayed, he responded, “Shit, just ship it.” Soon after an employee sent an email saying that some peanut totes were “covered in dust and rat crap,” to which Parnell responded “Clean em all up and ship them.”

After the outbreak, PCA was liquidated through bankruptcy proceedings.

“Our prosecution is just one more example of the forceful actions that the Department of Justice, with its agency partners, takes against any individual or company who compromises the safety of America’s food supply for financial gain,” said Acting Associate Attorney General Stuart Delery in statement after the sentence was announced.

While victims and advocates are pleased that the case is finally coming to a close and the Parnells are on their way to prison, Marler says he hopes more will be done to stop shoddy business practices that could lead to future infections.

Largely because of the outbreak linked to Peanut Corporation of America the FDA has introduced new rules, along with the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)—a bill signed into law in 2011 intended to crack down on contamination before it reaches consumers. However, so far the agency has lacked the resources to fully implement them. Congress has appropriated less than half of what the Congressional Budget Office recommended was necessary to fund implementation of FSMA.

To make up for investigations into potential risks, Marler says the FDA has beefed up its prosecution of law-breakers.

And, in some cases, like Parnell’s it’s warranted, he added.

“I am not a huge fan of criminalization of things but I think there are instances where it’s necessary,” he says. “This is one of those necessary cases—the facts are so horrific and the clear knowledge that they had that they were shipping contaminated product.” But, he adds, “We would all be better served if we spent more money to have more FDA inspectors—and just avoided these problems to begin with.”

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You Can’t Go To Prison For Destroying The Economy, But Bad Peanut Butter Is Another Story

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The Feds Just Accused Volkswagen of an Unbelievable Scheme to Evade Pollution Laws

by SamualKaufman Posted on September 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Volkswagen produced hundreds of thousands of cars with a device made to intentionally evade air pollution standards, according to a citation issued today by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA alleges that nearly 500,000 VW cars sold in the United States over the last several years were equipped with the device, which the EPA says enabled the onboard computer to detect when the car was undergoing an emissions test. At that time, the engine would operate in a way that complied with emissions standards; at all other times, the car would produce emissions of harmful gases up to 40 times greater than allowed by federal law. The primary gas in question is nitrogen oxide, which causes smog, which is a leading cause of respiratory ailments.

This table from the citation lists the models that were allegedly outfitted with the illegal device. All of the cars in question had diesel engines:

EPA

The EPA cites a 2014 study by the International Council on Clean Transportation that found a troubling gap between real-world and laboratory emissions in some diesel cars, without naming specific manufacturers.

“When you test it in the lab, they looked great,” said Anup Thiruvengadam, one of the study’s authors. “But when you actually drive them around, emissions were much higher.”

The citation issued today lifted the curtain on the specific cars in question and delineates the federal laws VW is accused of violating. The EPA is continuing to investigate the charges and has passed the citation to the Justice Department, where it will be up to federal prosecutors to prove the charges. Volkswagen could be compelled to fix all the cars and pay up to $3,750 per car (roughly $18 billion altogether) in fines.

In a statement, a Volkswagen spokesperson said the company was cooperating with the investigation but declined to comment further.

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The Feds Just Accused Volkswagen of an Unbelievable Scheme to Evade Pollution Laws

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Jeb Bush Just Admitted to Smoking Pot

by PeggyNeville Posted on September 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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During the final hour of tonight’s marathon Republican presidential debate, moderator Jake Tapper asked candidates about their positions on marijuana policy. That’s when Jeb Bush, who has been previously accused of being a hypocrite by fellow presidential hopeful Rand Paul for his hardline stance against medical marijuana, weighed in with the following admission: Forty years ago, he too smoked pot. Just like nearly every teenager in America. He then sheepishly apologized to his mother.

The confession, which drew a handful of chuckles from the crowd, was immediately followed by a tweet from his campaign that reemphasized the important part of his statement:

Despite his admission, the presidential hopeful went on to defend his opposition to legalizing medial marijuana.

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Jeb Bush Just Admitted to Smoking Pot

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Federal Court to EPA: No, You Can’t Approve This Pesticide That Kills Bees

by DavidPigdon Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, a federal appeals court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of a pesticide called sulfoxaflor. Marketed by agrichemical giant Dow AgroSciences, sulfoxaflor belongs to a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which have been implicated by a growing weight of evidence in the global crisis in bee health. In a blunt opinion, the court cited the “precariousness of bee populations” and “flawed and limited data” submitted by Dow on the pesticide’s effects on beleaguered pollinating insects.

Before winning approval for sulfoxaflor back in 2013, the company hyped the product to investors, declaring that it “addresses a $2 billion market need currently unmet by biotech solutions,” particularly for cotton and rice.

US beekeepers were less enthusiastic—a group of national beekeeping organizations, along with the National Honey Bee Advisory Board, quickly sued the EPA to withdraw its registration of sulfoxaflor, claiming that the EPA itself had found sulfoxaflor to be “highly toxic to honey bees, and other insect pollinators.”

Thursday’s ruling, a response to that suit, took their side. It applies only to sulfoxaflor, which Dow markets as a foliar spray on a variety of crops, including cotton, soybean, citrus, stone fruit, nuts, grapes, potatoes, vegetables, and strawberries. It has no bearing on the EPA’s equally controversial approval of other neonics like clothianidin and imidacloprid, which are widely used as seed treatments on the two most prominent US crops: corn and soybeans.

But Greg Loarie, an attorney for EarthJustice who argued the case for the beekeeper’s coalition, told me that the decision has broad significance because the ruling “makes clear” that when the EPA is assessing new pesticides, it must assess robust data on the health impacts on the entire hive, not just on individual adult bees.

In its opinion, the court rebuked the EPA for approving sulfoxaflor despite “inconclusive or insufficient data on the effects…on brood development and long-term colony health.” That’s a problem, the court added, because pesticides can cause subtle harm to bees that don’t kill them but that “ripple through the hive,” which is an “interdependent ‘superorganism.'” Indeed, many independent studies have demonstrated just such effects—that low-level exposure to neonics is “sub-lethal” to individual bees but compromises long-term hive health.

“The EPA doesn’t have that hive-level information on very many insecticides, if any,” Loarie said.

And in the case of sulfoxaflor, the agency didn’t try very hard to get that information. In January 2013, because of major gaps in research on the new chemical’s effect on bees, the EPA decided to grant sulfoxaflor “conditional registration” and ordered Dow to provide more research. And then a few months later, the agency granted sulfoxaflor unconditional registration—even though “the record reveals that Dow never completed the requested additional studies,” the court opinion states.

In an even more scathing addendum to the court’s main opinion, Circuit Judge N.R. Smith added, “I am inclined to believe the EPA…decided to register sulfoxaflor unconditionally in response to public pressure for the product and attempted to support its decision retroactively with studies it had previously found inadequate.” The judge added, “Such action seems capricious.”

Sulfoxaflor’s twisted path through the EPA’s approval process isn’t the first time the agency has green-lighted a neonicotinoid pesticide under dodgy circumstances, as I showed in this 2010 piece on clothianidin, a widely marketed pesticide marketed by Dow’s European rival, Bayer.

In 2013—the same year the EPA approved sulfoxaflor—the European Union placed a two-year moratorium on clothianidin and two other major neonics, citing pollinator health concerns. For a study released last year, the US Geological Survey found neonic traces in all the Midwestern rivers and streams it tested, declaring them to be “both mobile and persistent in the environment.” In addition to harming bees, neonics may also harm birds and fish, Canadian researchers have found.

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Federal Court to EPA: No, You Can’t Approve This Pesticide That Kills Bees

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