Yesterday a three-judge federal appeals court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide made by DowDuPont that Europe prohibits but the US uses widely — the US Dept. of Agriculture routinely detects residues on tomatoes, cranberries, spinach, cucumbers, and many other kinds of produce. The court ruled that the EPA did not follow its procedures properly, and said that:
there was no justification for the EPA’s decision in its 2017 order to maintain a tolerance for chlorpyrifos in the face of scientific evidence that its residue on food causes neurodevelopmental damage to children.
Amanda Reilly reported in E&E News that former EPA official Joseph Goffman had this to say about the court decision:
This seems to be an example of where the agency, or at least the political leadership at the agency, knew what its preferred result was and did selective ignoring of the record in order to get to that result.
As Dale Kasler reported in the Sacramento Bee, a main concern about chlorpyrifos is its effect on pregnant women living near fields where the pesticide is used; exposure can lead to children with low IQs and other problems. Use of chlorpyrifos has fallen in California, from nearly 2 million pounds in 2005 to 0.9 million pounds in 2016, and Hawaii has banned its use. The court ordered the EPA to ban the pesticide nationwide within 60 days.
An EPA spokesman said that the agency was reviewing the court decision but was unable to “fully evaluate the pesticide using the best available, transparent science”. This comment refers to disgraced former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s move in April to require the EPA to use only studies where the underlying data are public; this new policy would eliminate most human health studies that use statistics from personal medical data to demonstrate significant health hazards.
Although Pruitt is gone, acting administrator Andrew Wheeler plans to continue to ignore studies showing harms from environmental hazards. For example, the EPA is considering changing its rules to say that inhaling soot is safe as long as you don’t inhale too much, with no scientific justification for the change; here the goal is to allow coal plants to put more soot into the air. And this is just how Republicans like it: a week ago coal-state Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) opined of Wheeler, “He's doing a wonderful job.”