Talk about regulatory capture by private industry!!! This is crazy. These chemicals are so bad for humans and all life, and the EPA is giving them a free pass to continue to make money at human's and the environment's expense. It isn't enough to just ban them, the companies making them and lobbying to keep them on the market when their safety was already an issue, should be fined and or shut down.

This kind of action by companies and their lobbying groups to keep products on the market to the detriment of our planet and people is a grave threat to all life and must be punished enough to dissuade companies from ever doing it again. Executives, corporate profits, board members, and anyone directly involved must be held accountable with serious costs and punishments, including jail time. We can't have companies continuing to play this game of treating this as just a cost of doing business, making billions and being fined millions, while humans, the planet and our descendants pay unbearable costs.

Opinion | EPA’s Whack-a-Mole “Forever Chemicals” Posture Is an Intolerable Failure | Common Dreams https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/epa-pfas-forever-chemicals-failure

#RegulatoryCapture
#GreedKills
#CapitalismKills
#JailExecutives

"To great applause, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last month proposed “maximum contamination levels” in drinking water for six per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) chemicals. This was the first such action that EPA had taken in more than 30 years on any drinking contaminant.

Unfortunately, despite the magnitude of this action for this handful of PFAS, there are at least 12,000 PFAS variations.

Before the applause for EPA could die down, this month, a study found 26 types of PFAS in drinking water samples from 16 states. Notably, EPA has no pending proposed standard for 20 of these PFAS. More disturbing, 12 of these PFAS are not included in EPA's current monitoring—in other words, EPA does not even currently test for them.

Furthermore, three of these PFAS fall outside the “working definition” for PFAS that EPA adopted without any outside review in 2021. This means that EPA is not considering regulating them.

The public health implications of its chemical-by-chemical posture are much too serious to accommodate (however lamely) EPA’s scientific self-image.

In fact, EPA’s working definition is far narrower than those adopted by other entities, such as the intergovernmental Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and members of the European Union. Nor is it as broad as the definition adopted by numerous states that have started regulating PFAS on their own, frustrated by the slow pace set by EPA. It is also substantially narrower than the definition EPA itself uses for research purposes and non-regulatory estimates.

Why would EPA summarily adopt a definition that leaves out thousands of PFAS?

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the organization I work for, asked the agency this very question. Just four months after EPA published this working definition in 2021, we submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents that would provide a scientific explanation or justification for this new definition.

We are still waiting.

Months after our request, EPA released some 2,500 pages of documents that did not answer the question. By June 2022, when it became clear that the agency would not voluntarily produce any meaningful response, my organization filed a federal lawsuit under FOIA demanding complete production.

In the ensuing months, like a squid emitting an ink cloud to throw off a pursuer, EPA’s attempts to evade production have only grown more convoluted. This exercise, however, appears to have confirmed the information we received from inside the agency – EPA’s working definition does not appear to be the product of EPA scientific research.

This working definition suddenly appeared out of thin air, with no discernible paper trail of parentage. We suspect it actually sprung from a chemical industry lobbyist’s pen, as the financial implications of this definition are enormous. If EPA admitted the definition’s true origin that would be embarrassing, to say the least, and puncture all of the lofty rhetoric its senior officials regularly spout about the rigorous scientific integrity behind agency decision-making..."