EPA rejects petition to ban pesticide linked to children's brain damage - Entrepreneur Generations

The Environmental Protection Agency has decided not to ban chlorpyrifos, a controversial pesticide linked to neurological damage in children. In a notice to the Federal Register filed Thursday, the agency rejected a petition from environmental and public health groups seeking a ban. In rejecting the petition, the EPA echoed its earlier arguments for keeping the pesticide on the market, saying that the data was insufficient to conclude that chlorpyrifos is dangerous, Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin report for The Washington Post. In April a federal appeals court ordered the EPA to make a final decision within 90 days on whether it would ban the pesticide.

The decision is a coup for farming industry and pesticide lobbyists who have been working for years to keep chlorpyrifos on the market. The EPA proposed a total ban on chlorpyrifos during the Obama era, but President Trump's first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, reversed that decision using the same argument: that the science was inconclusive, Dennis and Eilperin report. In the weeks leading up to Pruitt's decision, internal documents obtained by The New York Times show he had secretly promised farming industry lobbies that he was listening to their concerns.

Pesticide lobbyists had also convinced Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, then the deputy secretary, to block a 2017 Fish and Wildlife Service study that found that chlorpyrifos was so toxic that it threatened the existence of more than 1,200 endangered species.

Some states, like California and New York, are in the process of banning chlorpyrifos. But many farmers say they want to keep it legal because it works, Dennis and Eilperin report.

Though the EPA's most recent decision angered groups who have pushed for a chlorpyrifos ban, "the decision to deny the petition could bring the country closer to final resolution of a decades-long battle," since "critics can now challenge the EPA’s conclusion that the pesticide is safe," Dennis and Eilperin report.

"This is the entry ticket to the actual main event," Kevin Minoli, an attorney who served in the EPA’s Office of General Counsel under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations, told Dennis and Eilperin. "This is the end of the road."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2JHOAz3 EPA rejects petition to ban pesticide linked to children's brain damage - Entrepreneur Generations

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