September 10, 2019 1:05 PM EDT
At a hearing tomorrow in the House Oversight and Reform Committee, the primary makers and users of PFOA and PFOS, 3M, DuPont, and Chemours, will be testifying about their roles in the PFAS contamination fiasco. This follows a July hearing featuring the voices of community members and state agencies who have been impacted by the failure of these companies to control releases of these substances for decades. Read more >
July 26, 2019 12:59 PM EDT
The House Oversight and Reform Committee, Subcommittee on the Environment held a hearing this week titled, The Devil They Knew: PFAS Contamination and the Need for Corporate Accountability. The testimony of three people whose lives have been upended by exposure to PFAS chemicals was powerful and heart wrenching. DuPont and 3M should have been in the room. But seeing as they have been absent from communities except when legally compelled to be, they were not there to hear about the vast human cost they have caused by their suppression of science, stymieing of regulation, and foot-dragging on cleanup efforts. Read more >
July 11, 2019 1:42 PM EDT
The House of Representatives will vote today on the inclusion of several PFAS-related amendments to the House National Defense Authorization Act that will help us to understand the extent of the PFAS public health threat and its health impacts, limit current PFAS pollution, and clean up legacy contamination on DOD and Superfund sites and nearby communities. These are all commonsense measures that should have already been in place to protect us from these chemicals, but because of a failure of our regulatory system and industry hiding scientific data on its products, we have waited too long for policy remedies. Read more >
June 10, 2019 11:33 AM EDT
I was born an only child in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1979. My father, who is a retired military officer, moved us from coast-to-coast and across the country until we finally returned home in 1989. By the time I was 20, I had traveled and seen parts of the Western world that continue to enrich my life. However, Colorado has always held me safe, secure, and nestled in the Rocky Mountains as I continued to mature into adulthood. The quiet solitude the outdoors here provided me just as much ecological insight as scuba diving in the Grand Caymans or walking along the coasts of Hawaii. Now I’ve seen the delicate balance of nature in Colorado disrupted by devastating wildfires and operations from fracking plus other continued operations of big oil and gas. Read more >
June 4, 2019 1:58 PM EDT
The EPA’s key scientific sounding board, the Science Advisory Board (SAB), will be holding its first full public meeting of 2019 this week. And as Administrator Wheeler’s EPA continues to roll back policies that were informed by science or devise new strategies to restrict the way that science is used in agency rulemakings, the committee formed to help review the agency’s science should have a very long to-do list. Read more >
