News Releases

Commissioner Thomas Moore of the federal government's Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) shares Environmental Working Group's (EWG) concern that children playing on decks, play sets and other structures made of arsenic-treated lumber may develop cancer later in life from arsenic that rubs off the wood and sticks to children's skin.

The California Air Resources Board today adopted the nation's most stringent smog standards, which state scientists say could avert hundreds of premature deaths, thousands of hospital trips and more than 3 million school absences of asthmatic children.

The ARB meets Thursday, April 28 in El Monte to consider recommendations from state scientists for adopting tougher ozone standards.

For decades, the oil and gas and mining industries have complained that they are locked out of access to public lands that could free the U.S. from dependence on foreign energy sources. Now the first-ever investigation of 1,855 taxpayer-owned natural treasures in the West reveals the truth: Drilling and mining interests already control land in or near more than two-thirds of national parks, forests and wilderness areas.

In a move designed to please big oil companies, 26 Members of Congress voted in late 2003 to stop their own communities from being able to sue oil companies for polluting their drinking water with a toxic gasoline additive called MTBE. Since that vote, communities in each of those districts have filed suit for help with cleanup, and if Members vote again this year with Big Oil they will be voting away their constituents' right to sue.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) today condemns the Bush EPA's proposed rule allowing power plants to trade mercury pollution credits.

The Bush Administration is paying some of the biggest and richest agribusinesses in America $17 million for cutbacks in their taxpayer-subsidized water supply. But an Environmental Working Group (EWG) investigation found that these same California agribusinesses — including the world's biggest cotton producer and the largest farm in America — already get hundreds of millions of tax dollars from other federal farm subsidy programs.

EWG today criticized the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) draft risk assessment on the toxic Teflon chemical, PFOA, as a post-election tilt toward DuPont. The Agency ignored its own science panel's guidance and internal industry research with today's assessment of the human health risks from the Teflon chemical. ( Read EWG analysis )

The Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study, or CHEERS study would measure pesticide and chemical levels in 60 Florida children who would be selected for the study based on heavy pesticide use in their homes.