Our Water

A major investigation by The Riverside Press-Enterprise finds that an industry-funded study, relied on by federal scientists to recommend drinking water standards for a toxic rocket fuel chemical, erroneously reported no effects on people from low doses of the chemical.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) today condemns the Bush EPA's proposed rule allowing power plants to trade mercury pollution credits. It's more evidence that the Bush Administration is abdicating a leadership role on the environment, and promoting policies that allow far more pollution than necessary, particularly for this case in hot spots and sacrifice zones around coal-burning power plants. The "cap-and-trade" plan was spawned from politically-driven science and faulty methods, according to two government investigations. It sets the U.S. forward as a poor example for the world, and does not move the country closer to the clean energy technologies of the future.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed into law groundbreaking legislation, sponsored by EWG, to ensure that California's drinking water standards are strong enough to protect children. Assembly Bill 2342, carried by Assemblymember Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) and sponsored by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), requires Cal-EPA to give special consideration to infants and children and other sensitive populations when reviewing and revising public health goals (PHGs) for drinking water. PHGs, which are formulated by the state Office of Environmental Health Assessment, are the scientific basis for setting California drinking water standards.

In a sharp rebuke to the Bush Administration, a federal advisory committee on children's health warns that the EPA's recommended cleanup level for a rocket fuel chemical fails to protect children, fetuses and mothers. The warning comes as Massachusetts, pointedly rejecting the EPA guidelines, is setting the nation's first enforceable safety standards for the chemical

Statement from Environmental Working Group Senior VP Richard Wiles and VP for Research Jane Houlihan The coal and seafood industries' interests today beat out the health interests of America's children in the form of dangerous advice from the FDA on so-called "safe" consumption levels for fish contaminated with mercury, particularly tuna. Air pollution from coal burned in power plants is a major source of mercury in fish. If women follow the FDA's advice and eat one can of albacore tuna a week, hundreds of thousands more babies will be exposed to hazardous levels of mercury.

Dozens of provisions in the GOP energy bill make it a threat to the environment, but none are more outrageous than the historic provision that would block efforts by states, counties, a school board, and even a Catholic chapel to get oil companies to clean up drinking water pollution from the toxic gasoline additive, MTBE.

Millions of consumers and their water utilities in 25 states will be forced to pay billions of dollars to remove a toxic, foul-smelling gasoline additive from drinking water under a plan to prohibit water pollution lawsuits against oil and chemical companies.

In 1998, EWG uncovered the disturbing revival of the discredited--and previously abandoned--pesticide company practice of paying people to eat or drink pesticides, then monitoring for resulting health effects for regulatory advantage. A National Academy

February 28, 2002