During the last periodic drought cycle, California politicians, catering to their environmental allies, told everyone to replace their grass with artificial turf so that bizarre environmental regulations mandating water flow into the Pacific Ocean could stay in place.
None of it had a basis in science. The 'flow' in rivers, so strong the state had to warn kayaks to stay out - during a drought - was chosen by activists who used a high level, not the levels that a state which is naturally a desert had in the real world world.
Artifical turf meant less water needed by humans, we were old, and compassionate voters dutofully ripped up their grass.
Now environmental activists say the grass gives them cancer. It's PFAS, a class of common chemicals in too many products to name, but because activists now term them "forever chemicals", all of them need to go.
Footing the bill will be consumers who believed California politicians "followed the science.' They weren't, any more than they're following the science now.
There is no evidence these chemicals, at any dose any human can get in 10 lifetimes, can cause any cancer, but activists and the trial lawyers they hire don't need evidence, they have epidemiology.
Just create a spreadsheet, correlate a chemical to a cancer, and pay a journal to publish the claim. Then get other members of the tribe to cite the paper and it creates 'emerging evidence' and then 'weight of evidence' and California is required under its disastrous Prop 65 to ban it.
In California, Starbucks gives you cancer.
California has warning labels on nearly every product except perhaps Whole Foods salads, and even those have warning labels on the plastic wrapping, and the cancer rates are the same as everywhere else.
That is the problem with ignoring dose and a need for scientific evidence and instead handling over regulatory power to 'suggestion.' It's only good for trial lawyers always searching for new targets.
It's worst for the poor. The cost of living in California is double other states, an entire Congressional seat of people fled during Governor Newsom's second term in office, but politicians believe they're doing God's Work.
But that's true only if God is a lawyer.
