With new analyses created by their employees to 'detect' chemicals in water, plus their war on seed oils, Environmental Working Group have joined Natural Resources Defense Council in becoming Republican allies.

Welcome to politicization of science in the 2020s. Just a few years ago, Republicans were the enemy of anti-science activists, but now the Trump administration has an environmental conspiracy theorist in the Cabinet. Science won't matter and that's good for environmental lawyers.

Scientists know that in the modern era we can detect anything in anything. We can detect parts per quadrillion in water now, 9 orders of magnitude lower the parts per million scientific concern threshold. Do you think a drop of something in 640 Olympic-sized swimming pools can harm you? Of course not.(1) 


You might be an anti-science activist if you believe the chemicals in the pizza box made you fat rather than the calories.

EWG employees found 328 chemicals in water across the US. Then they cited claims of harm that used tubes of those chemicals jammed into the stomachs of mice, plus simplistic correlation between Chemical X and Disease Y by fetishizing "statistical significance."(2) 

Now all they need is for Republicans to join environmental groups and whatever writers at Mother Jones are on their "A-Team" this year to promote it heavily and the lawsuits can commence.

Because this is not about public health, it is about money from jury trials, where no science is needed, just like groups have done with weedkillers and baby powder. Their best weapon is modern epidemiology and a template created by the Harvard School of Public Health in the 1980s; pick a problem to solve, link a food or chemical to it, get journalists to write about it(3), and then watch government grants come in to study it. Except no science will be allowed, the studies will just be more correlation so they can "link to" and "suggest" harm. Once enough papers are written citing each other, lawsuits will be filed and the epidemiologists behind the effort get lucrative expert witness contracts.(4)

It worked with gluten, it worked with red wine, it worked with vaccines. Now EWG and NRDC and plenty of others are getting ready for a payday using "Forever Chemicals" and "seed" oils like sunflower and canola, which, like natural gas, hydroelectric energy, and biofuels, they used to endorse.

Look for a progressive journalist to start promoting claims about cell phones causing cancer next, to see if they might be able to get a "Grain Brain" or "Callous Disregard"-type book deal. Publishing companies don't care, if someone will buy it, they will sell it, just like they did books insisting autism was caused by vaccines that used identical methodology to claims about PFAS. 

Like Environmental Working Group, book publishers are pure capitalists going where the money takes them.

NOTES:

(1) When scaremongering science fails in individual chemicals, they invent concerns about a "chemical cocktail" and claims FDA is part of a Vast Right Wing Science Conspiracy that doesn't test every possible combination before approving products and they are putting us all at risk. 

(2) There is a reason the science community, and even some in the social sciences, called on journals to stop accepting statistical significance as some badge of legitimacy. It is easy to get statistical significance. You can even get statistical significance for claims that coin flips are racist against heads. Or tails.

(3) Mother Jones reporter Mariah Blake already has a book out about Forever Chemicals, "They Poisoned The World", and she gushes about a positive response from, you guessed it, the progressive epidemiologist at Harvard School of Public Health who coined the term "Forever Chemicals."


They have been around forever, there are 12,000 of them, if they can't be detected in 95% of water your test is wrong. We'd be extinct if they were actually harmful, including the handful made by 3M. Chemists, biologists, and toxicologists have said for decades those epidemiology claims are nonsense, but science will always lose to progressive journalists. And thanks to Secretary Kennedy, Republican journalists will now campaign against science as well.

(4) An epidemiologist on an International Agency for Research on Cancer working group was caught, yet we have no idea how many have not yet been exposed as frauds. Epidemiologist Chris Wild had engineering the findings of the panel to claim a weedkiller was correlated to human disease but foolishly signed a contract with a law firm ready to sue over it in advance.