Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of ~9,000 common chemicals that became popular as countries moved away from plastic. Like BPA, they keep food safe in ways that paper or metal cannot. Like BPA, they became a target of environmental lawyers because chemical names always sound scary to people who don't understand science.
Unlike BPA, this time lawyers won.(1) They got the Biden administration to create a regulation that had nothing to do with science. Instead, it seems to have been 'what is the lowest level that can be detected at all? and when the answer was 4 parts per trillion, EPA was told to use that. With that in place the Biden administration can now approve it and say 'the science is settled.'
Yet that is not science at all. That level is 25X lower than the World Health Organisation uses and they are extremely conservative. It is 50X lower than what other countries use. It is literally the lowest possible level that can be detected.(2) That means it's using a regulation to create a ban, and the Biden administration knows they can do it because of the 1984 Supreme Court "Chevron deference" ruling, which gave the White House the power to create laws without needing Congress - by using an agency to create a regulation that acted like a law and created policy.(3)
To satisfy this new requirement will require $4 billion per year in new costs. How are small towns going to pay their share? Yet if they don't, they will get fines and penalties from the Biden administration and lawsuits by environmentalists.
It is not too late to undo this attack on science, but given the recent landscape, the Biden administration is not only eager to approve it, they were behind creating it. And that means it may have been written by environmental lawyers behind the scenes.
NOTES:
(1) BPA is largely out of use, but that is more due to allies in epidemiology 'suggesting' effects, the broad and scientifically meaningless "endocrine disruption", and politically sympathetic journalists promoting every claim. Companies took it out of use so they could sell us a "nocebo" - a product that someone believed makes us healthier because it is missing something. Actual science studies showed no effects that you wouldn't get from eating anything else.
(2) For now. WHO is stuffed with anti-science activists just like the US government's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is, and they will now claim that 'the US EPA is showing leadership' and demand the same ban.
(3) Progressives can complain about the modern SCOTUS but the 1970s and '80s Supreme Court had five Justices as far left as Sotomayor, and they did far more lasting damage to culture and science than this court can dream about.
