Must-read recap: The New Lede’s top stories

Our latest stories about your health and the environment

Environmental battles – whether in court or with the White House – are the underlying theme of The New Lede’s (TNL) latest coverage of news about the planet and public health.

Here is a recap of a few of our latest stories:

As farmers struggle with PFAS ‘forever chemicals,’ Maine races for solutions

For the past 18 years, Maine farmer Bill Pluecker has worked long hours tending to his family’s organic vegetable farm, growing crops he sells directly to consumers through a community agricultural program.

Working on the farm is a job that Pluecker juggles with his elected position as a state lawmaker, and the combination of roles gives Pluecker particular insight into a devastatingly broad environmental contamination problem farmers are facing throughout Maine, and around the United States.  

The problem is PFAS. Often referred to as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down and can persist indefinitely, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have become recognized as a significant health and environmental threat with long tenacles. Researchers have found PFAS contaminating water, soil, food, and even the bodies of humans and animals around the world.

“It’s overwhelming; it’s in our products, in our bodies, in our food system,” said Pluecker, who is grateful that his own farm appears not to be contaminated with the PFAS he calls “poison.”

Maine has passed an array of measures to lead the nation in addressing the problems of PFAS on farms.

One recent estimate by the Environmental Working Group pegged U.S. cropland potentially affected by PFAS at 20 million acres.

Fight food and gas prices, or the climate crisis?

Inflation, food and gas prices, and supply shortages are all on the rise, and they are a central issue in the fight over a federal rule designed to promote biofuels.

The Environmental Protection Agency on June 3 legal signed the final version of its latest renewable fuel standard (RFS) rule – a regulation through which it sets annual prediction targets for renewable fuels such as corn ethanol.

The RFS, created by Congress in 2005, is a program through which the EPA sets annual production targets for cellulosic biofuel, biomass-based diesel, advanced biofuel and total renewable fuel, which includes ethanol made from corn, along with fuels derived from other material. The program was designed to expand the U.S. renewable fuels sector, lower GHGs from transportation, and reduce dependence on imported oil.

In meetings with EPA and White House officials ahead of the final rule’s release, industry players from jet fuel producers to pet food makers warned that any federal push to boost renewable fuel production could hike already rising food and gas prices and exacerbate supply shortages.

Biofuels proponents in their meetings with the Biden administration countered that there’s sufficient feedstock – renewable material which can be used or converted to use as transportation fuel, such as corn – to satisfy ambitious RFS goals while also meeting needs for non-fuel uses like food.

Later today, look for TNL’s in-depth compare-and-contrast between what groups wanted from the regulation, and what the EPA decided.

Monsanto’s former CEO testifies about Roundup

The former CEO of Monsanto was in court last week to testify in the case of Allan Shelton, a 34-year-old man suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma who alleges his repeated use of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicides caused his disease.

TNL’s Gillam was at the courtroom to report on the back-and-forth between former CEO Hugh Grant and attorneys:

Former Monsanto chief Hugh Grant spent several hours on the witness stand on Tuesday – testifying for the first time in front of a jury at a Roundup trial – telling the court repeatedly that global regulators had found no evidence that the company’s herbicides cause cancer.

Under sharp questioning from the plaintiff’s attorney in the case, Grant answered questions about whether or not Monsanto had a duty to warn consumers of a cancer risk by saying there was no such established risk.

“The product had been examined and studied almost continuously for 40 years around the world and had never been deemed to be a carcinogen,” he said. “It’s a circumstance that never occurred. There was never, never a need to communicate such a hypothetical.”