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California's "Skittles bill" could kick off broader actions against food additives; the climate crisis has become a home insurance crisis.

California’s “Skittles bill” could kick off broader actions against food additives

After years of US debate over widely used food additives, California is poised to become the first state in the nation to ban five ingredients found in popular candies and other processed foods.

Assembly Bill 418, which was passed by the California Assembly in May, targets red dye No. 3, titanium dioxide, brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, and propyl paraben – additives linked to health problems including cancer and hormone disruption. If successful, the bill would ban these ingredients, which are used in Skittles, Hot Tamales, and Sour Patch Kids, by 2025. Last week, the California Senate Committee on Health voted to move the bill forward.

Critics say the additives have not been meaningfully reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in decades despite scientific updates on their health risks, and that an FDA loophole has allowed thousands of chemicals to enter the US food system without proper safety reviews. They hope the California bill will help kick off broader nationwide efforts to reevaluate harmful food additives and ban those that jeopardize Americans’ health. (Read the rest of the story.)

Postcard from California: The climate crisis has become a home insurance crisis

(Opinion columns published in The New Lede represent the views of the individual(s) authoring the columns and not necessarily the perspectives of TNL editors.)

It’s an ominous sign of how the climate crisis is hitting ever closer to home: Because of the heightened risk of catastrophic wildfires, the two leading U.S. homeowners insurance companies no longer offer new policies in California.

Last month, State Farm, which insures 1 in 5 California homes, announced it would immediately stop selling new home and business property and casualty policies to avoid “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.” Days later, Allstate, the fourth-largest insurer in the state, confirmed it had quietly stopped writing new California policies last year, because wildfires had driven the cost of insuring and rebuilding homes “far higher” than it could recoup from customers.

Current State Farm and Allstate policyholders are still covered ­– at least for now. State data show that since 2017, insurers have cancelled or declined to renew almost 1 million homeowner policies, most in areas at high risk of wildfire. Some companies that specialize in insurance for high-end, multimillion-dollar homes have pulled out of the California market altogether. (Read the rest of the opinion column.)