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Defending the Real Spirit of Zero Waste
By Cecilia Allen, Global Projects Advisor, GAIA
(c) Nipe FagioOnce seen as the domain of dreamers, zero waste is now mainstream. It has even entered the language of the UN: the body created a resolution urging governments to “promote zero‑waste initiatives,” an International Day of Zero Waste, and a Zero Waste Advisory Board, and UNEP, UN‑Habitat and other UN bodies use the concept in campaigns and reports. This year, zero waste was named one of the top priorities on the Global Climate Action Agenda. Türkiye’s Zero Waste Foundation, a leading promoter of these efforts, is organizing its second Global Zero Waste Forum under the motto Road to Antalya: Zero Waste as Climate Action. Türkiye will be the host of climate COP31.
While this progress is exciting, words matter. When the same UN bodies that are meant to promote zero waste recognize waste-to-energy incineration plants and reuse of the highly toxic incinerator fly-ash as a zero waste solution, it means something is off. Likewise, when Pakistan claims to pursue a “zero waste” economy by increasing waste-to-energy capacity, alarm bells go off among zero wasters worldwide: Incineration is an oxymoron to zero waste. What these examples show us is that a true definition of zero waste needs to be adopted and vigorously defended.
What is zero waste?The concept of “zero waste” emerged 30 years ago by adapting manufacturing targets such as “zero defects” to solid waste. Zero waste is both a vision and an action plan. As an action plan it includes strategies to design out the idea of “waste”: waste prevention, redesign, reuse, changes in consumption patterns, recycling, composting, and other methods to reprocess organic material. Zero waste is guided by the goal of progressively reducing disposal in landfills and incinerators, a yardstick for judging the effectiveness of waste programs and policies.
As a vision, its ultimate objective is to change how we produce, consume and process discards so our materials economy fits within planetary boundaries. This concerns not only materials but our relationship with them, the environment, and one another. That is why zero waste is rooted in environmental justice– supporting the flourishing of everyone regardless of race, class, or any other identity, and the rights of nature. Zero waste systems are community‑based, recognize waste pickers as workers, eliminate “sacrifice zones” that disproportionately burden poor and marginalized communities, and put people at the center of solutions.
That is the beauty of zero waste: it offers an encouraging alternative to a linear waste system that perpetuates disposal, resource depletion, climate change and pollution that threaten public health and well-being. It will not happen overnight, but it sets a clear direction.
Defending zero wasteThere are multiple conversations within the environmental movement about the co-option of the zero waste concept. Should we let it go? Defend it? There are solid arguments on all sides of the table. But our objective is to expand true zero waste worldwide. Mainstreaming means ideas become accepted as normal because most people share them — that is what thousands of communities, government officials and businesses have worked toward for decades. Fighting this co‑option is therefore an inevitable part of mainstreaming.
Every time a waste‑to‑energy or plastics‑to‑fuel project is presented as “zero waste,” authorities in the field must set the record straight. Waste‑to‑energy incineration perpetuates waste generation because it requires feedstock to burn, competes with reuse and recycling for high‑calorific materials, relies on fossil‑based feedstocks such as plastics, produces greenhouse gas emissions, and creates hazardous residues. None of that could be farther from zero waste.
Most importantly, zero waste is not just an abstract concept. For over three decades, hundreds of cities, thousands of communities and many waste practitioners have led the transition toward it. They have shown that it is possible to achieve over 90% source separation, diversion rates of 80% and higher, improved working conditions for waste pickers, and local economies based on repair and reuse. They also demonstrate that following the waste hierarchy creates more jobs, reduces more methane emissions, and improves public health.
Enabling zero waste implementationIn recent years more governments, financial institutions, universities, and waste practitioners have embraced the zero waste vision and prioritized upstream measures over disposal. That is encouraging, but much more is needed. For example, only 1% of international finance aimed at methane abatement in the waste sector goes to zero waste strategies such as composting.
If multilateral development banks and other international financial institutions directed the remaining 99% shifted from harmful end‑of‑pipe systems like incinerators and megalandfills to community‑based organic waste prevention and recovery, the the playing field would level: there would be more incentives for a shift in production and consumption patterns, and local governments and communities would speed up the zero waste transition. If governments that claim to pursue zero waste acted accordingly, they would lead the transition and inspire others.
UN bodies such as UNEP, UN‑Habitat and the Zero Waste Advisory Board have a special responsibility to set a clear vision for governments and institutions, and promote an authentic zero waste agenda to advance environmental sustainability, social equity and economic systems that respect natural boundaries.
As we continue the work toward a zero waste future, let us honor its true spirit that drives systems change. And let us support and scale up the proven programs and policies that governments, communities, waste pickers, NGOs, and businesses are sustaining. Let us protect the term, and honor the practice: put real zero waste into action.
Rommel Cabrera/GAIA, 2019. Waste pickers collecting separated waste from households. Tacloban City, the Philippines.The post Defending the Real Spirit of Zero Waste first appeared on GAIA.
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Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 60
There is an ongoing lawsuit between the American Academy of Pediatrics and Robert F Kennedy, Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services. The lead attorney of the lawsuit challenging the HHS vaccine policy changes is EWG co-Founder and President Ken Cook’s guest today.
Richard H. Hughes VI is a professor at George Washington University Law School as well as a partner at Epstein Becker Green. In addition to the American Academy of Pediatrics, Hughes’ law firm also represents the American College of Physicians and the American Public Health Association.
Hughes breaks down the legal framework behind the lawsuit against Kennedy, including the effort to dismantle and remake HHS’ immunization advisory committee, the broader implications for federal vaccine policy, and the growing erosion of public trust in pediatricians, vaccines, and public health institutions.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
Ken Cook: Hello there. Ken Cook here, and I'm having another episode. You know, ever since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and specifically during his confirmation process, I've been keeping a close eye on the dismantling of our vaccine policy infrastructure. I suspect a lot of you have been keeping an eye on it too.
It's one of the top priorities of the public health community now. And I've come to think of the approach that he's taken, uh, I've, I've coined a term for it, I call it vaccilation. This is why, uh, he's able to make the case on the one hand to his anti-vax followers that he's doing all he can to pursue their agenda, and that agenda is to prove various things about vaccines being harmful, even maybe more harmful than the diseases they prevent, that vaccines cause autism and so forth.
And he always does it in a kind of vacillating, vaccilating way where science is never settled, so we can always ask questions. A gold standard science is needed, and he's bringing that because you can't rely on existing authorities. And m-most importantly of all, he's not wanting to be positioned as either anti-vaccine or supporting vaccine.
He's in that vaccilating middle ground. And that has worked for him surprisingly well. It didn't work for Casey Means. Ultimately, she got caught up by not really saying what she thought when she was rejected by the Senate in the confirmation process for becoming surgeon general. But for Kennedy, it has mostly worked.
But there's one arena where it does not work, not the arena of hearings where Kennedy gives and takes with senators, not press statements, not podcasts, not Instagram posts. In all of those places, vaccilation has been a very smart strategy for him to remain elusive about where he is even as he pursues anti-vaccine measures.
But the one place where it doesn't work is in court, in legal proceedings before a judge. And today I'm joined by a lawyer who's doing something about vaccilation. Richard H. Hughes IV, who is a partner at Epstein Becker Green, a health law professor at the George Washington University Law School. And the lead counsel in American Academy of Pediatrics versus Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This was a landmark lawsuit challenging the vaccine policy changes Kennedy has implemented at HHS.
And in that setting, there is no wiggle room afforded for vacillating. You have to follow the law. Now, Richard's clients have included some of the most respected medical organizations in the country: the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Disease Society of America, among others.
And in March, a federal judge looked at all this vacillating, and specifically the steps Kennedy had taken under the cover of vacillating, and handed these organizations a very significant early victory, ruling that HHS had acted arbitrarily, ignored established law, and failed to follow basic administrative process.
But the fight is far from over. Richard is one of the nation's leading experts in vaccine law, and he has spent his career building the very public health infrastructure that's now under attack. I'm grateful that he's here because he, like EWG, follows science, and his objective is very clear: to protect the health of America's children and their future.
Professor Hughes, thank you so much for being here. The stakes could not be higher. And knock on wood, at least from my perspective, and I'm sure yours. So far it looks like it's gone pretty well, but we've got quite a ways to go, no question about that. I just wanted to ask, how did you, as you were starting your career, what brought you, Richard, into the health arena, and specifically this subset of health pertaining to vaccines? If you don't mind. I'm just curious to know.
Richard Hughes: I don't mind. Yeah, no, Ken, I appreciate that question. It actually goes, uh... and, and thank you for having me. It goes so far back, long before I was a lawyer. I was a very young political appointee in my home state of Arkansas. So I was 22 years old, and I was appointed to the Arkansas State Board of Health, and I didn't know anything about public health.
I was incredibly unqualified. It was an undeserved privilege to get that appointment. And right after I was appointed, I survived a brain tumor.
Ken Cook: Oh my goodness.
Richard Hughes: Yeah. I was misdiagnosed with glioblastoma. It was basically a death sentence, and got a second opinion and found out that I was gonna live, and got involved in cancer issues.
And I said, "You know, I'm in this position, and I can do something, you know, to, to improve the health of Arkansans." I felt compelled to do that. And I learned about the HPV vaccine. So a colleague came to me one day and said, "There's this vaccine to prevent cervical cancer." And I didn't know anything about it.
But as I, as I dug into it, as I learned more about it, I said, "You know, we really need to talk about, uh, this vaccine, and we really need to make this vaccine accessible." At the time, this was before the Affordable Care Act, we had a lot of access issues in our state, and I knew that if we were gonna reach the most rural parts of the state, that we should consider requiring the vaccine.
That was a really unpopular opinion to have. It got me kicked out of party politics. It ended my political ambitions completely, and so I got my master's in public health, I moved to DC and said I'm gonna work in vaccine policy for the rest of my career. I went back to law school, and, um, you know, added a lot more tools to my toolbox.
Ken Cook: Wow, I, I had no idea there were so many layers to that, to your history, and, uh, just as a editorial note to start off with, you know, Environmental Working Group has, you know, we, we generally speaking, have, have always supported vaccine policy, the conventional policy that is now at least temporarily back in place, and the, the CDC's positions on all, all of those things.
We did raise questions about thimerosal back in the day, but those were resolved. But generally speaking on vaccine policy, my overall feeling is the environmental health community looked the other way on the vaccine debate, which was probably not helpful. I think we now find ourselves in a s- a situation where, uh, there is such a threat to that frontline defense, and so much energy around undoing the reputation of the CDC and of science and of practicing physicians.
I, I read some of the things people say about pediatricians, and I just... I wonder what, what pediatricians are they talking about? Uh, everyone I've ever met, and I've met, hundreds of them, because we work on children's environmental health all the time, and m- from my own experience having a son, I don't get it.
But anyway, I just wanted to, I wanted to put that out there... because a big part of this is the, the kind of atmospherics that drove you away from the job in Arkansas, right? I mean, you must feel that... in your current role as well, right?
Richard Hughes: I absolutely do. I absolutely do. And it was really hard to watch the distortion around vaccine science, and a lot of that was wrapped up in religion back in Arkansas, right?
And... you know, talking about abstinence and sex and, and that was unfortunate, but I feel like, you know, we're up against a lot of the same issues, a willingness to spread misinformation and disinformation so easily, a public that maybe at first glance sometimes, you know, you might see something, uh, that looks like a potential correlative relationship, and you might have real questions.
And I do think that we should be answering those questions and helping- Yeah ... people understand the science, right? But... it's really hard to, you know, sometimes get people off of these beliefs, these misguided beliefs, when you have somebody like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with the bully pulpit now, right, spreading all this misinformation.
Ken Cook: Yeah, no, and, and of course there's conspiracy-minded, uh, approaches to these issues. It's very convenient and very hard to overcome. It's, uh... a great, uh, retreat from, from critical thinking.
Richard Hughes: Yes, it is.
Ken Cook: Right? And that- that's, that's done a lot of harm. I found myself, when I read the judge's, uh, decision, uh, in March, I was fortified by that. Uh, not... not just because of the way the decision came down, but the learned way in which he argued it.
And I just want, I just wanna say, uh, just from the beginning of his order, uh, he, he writes that, "For our public health, Congress and the executive have built over decades an apparatus that marries the rigors of science with the execution and force of the United States government. One extraordinary product of that apparatus has been the eradication and reduction of certain communicable diseases through the development and use of vaccines."
And right there, he's drawing a distinction in his position, his conclusions, from Kennedy's, which... increasingly is to argue that these vaccines didn't play any role. And so, uh, the, the whole presence of the government in this sphere is questionable because, you know, better nutrition and sanitation and other measures… really, that's what caused polio and mumps and other diseases to be controlled. Patently not the case, but I appreciated that he was standing upright then.
Richard Hughes: Yeah. Yeah, I did too. I love that decision. It reads beautifully. I love that on the first page, he intertwines science and law, and talks about... the importance of process to both.
This is the first case I've worked on as a litigator. I'm not a litigator. I didn't go to law school to sue anybody.
Ken Cook: Oh, is that right?
Richard Hughes: It is. It is.
Ken Cook: Oh my goodness.
Richard Hughes: And sitting in the courtroom, you know, sitting in the courtroom as a vaccine law expert at the counsel table and, and really just hoping that we are doing the best possible job to help the judge get the facts right, to get the law right, to make the best, most informed decision, because we want the decision to stand.
He wants... to write an, an effective decision. He wants to get it right. He's not an ideologue. And, you know, the government over here is saying in the, in the courtroom that, you know, there's no binding, you know, guiding principles in the law that says the secretary has to do this or that, the secretary can just basically do whatever he wants, and that, you know, reasonable minds can differ on how to best prevent infectious disease, and that we're all here to protect public health.
It was really disturbing to hear some of those arguments and the way they framed it. And, and then it was so encouraging to hear the judge come back to them and, and, and to recite back to them law, and to see how he followed the apparatus that, that he described. And it has... I mean, I have to say, there was a time when all we had were vaccines, and we didn't put policy or the force of law behind it.
Sometimes then we would do that in an outbreak context. So late, you know, late 1800s, smallpox outbreaks, we're saying, "You have to go get vaccinated because we're trying to prevent it." But one of the greatest innovations in the law and in vaccine law and policy in the, in the 20th century was we realized, if we can just get everybody vaccinated early, we can actually stop the transmission of these diseases.
We can lower the overall incidence of disease, the overall morbidity and mortality, and we started to do that in a really systematic way with vaccine policy. And as the judge recited, we have these federal laws. The federal government is not making people get vaccines, that's the role of the states.
But there is a robust apparatus in federal law that says, you know, Congress has thought about this, and they've enacted a variety of laws where we essentially presuppose that vaccination is the best way to control vaccine preventable diseases in this country. And that's what, simply what we're trying to do.
Ken Cook: Yeah. I was astonished at some of, uh, when the judge asked certain questions about, well, how, how far could Secretary Kennedy go?
You know, how much power... does he have? Could he actually say, um, "Getting some of these diseases is okay, or is good, or we would, we would like to pursue policies that would encourage them to get these?" Which, which of course, Aaron Siri and others, Dale Bigtree have openly said they think that should be the case.
Yeah. I was astonished. What, what was it like in the courtroom when you were hearing that?
Richard Hughes: Well, what's really hard is when you're a... you know, I, I, I speak a lot on these issues publicly, right? I'm, I'm a policy-oriented lawyer, and I have opinions. And to sit in the courtroom at the counsel table and to really, you have to maintain decorum in the courtroom.
It's not a raucous place, right? You know? And, uh, you know, and so to have to sit and listen and keep a straight face to those kinds of arguments was really, really, really hard for me. And the number of things I w- I w- you know, that you wish you could say, right? And so for the judge to point that out, uh, and to use that example, and I think it's one of the great things that, that judges sometimes do, is to present absurd hypotheticals, and it was a really really, really effective one.
And so I think what gets overlooked is they frame up natural infection as just fine. You know? That, that natural infection is just fine. And what in reality is if you go to old graveyards and you look at the number of infant graves that are there, and you can, these graveyards are all over our country, right?
In the early 20s, late 19th century, early 20th century, right? And then I always go back, I, I tell my team all the time about this letter to the editor that I read around 1994 or 1995 in The New York Times, where a mother wrote to The New York Times, and she said, "You know, I just learned about this new vaccine to prevent chickenpox, and I don't understand why I wasn't made aware of this five years ago when the vaccine first became available."
Because she said, "To my family, chickenpox is not a minor illness." Chickenpox had devastated her household. Her kids ended up with all sorts of infections that I didn't even realize that, you know, measles, chickenpox, these things can result in other infections, other morbidities.
Ken Cook: Very serious, yeah.
Richard Hughes: Right. Very serious. Very serious, and, and sometimes very deadly. And so, you know, vaccination is a way not just to prevent cases and to have fewer or hopefully zero cases. You know, we have a sophisticated tool. People don't have to die from these diseases. They don't have to deal with the long-term effects of these diseases.
Ken Cook: And, you know, the, the consequence of not intervening through vaccines on the, the cost of the healthcare system, and I've even said to, to my colleagues in the environmental community, we all noticed what happened during COVID, where all the resources rushed from the CDC and elsewhere, rushed straight to the concerns and the, the need to a- adapt to the COVID conditions.
You lose a lot of ability to do other health-related interventions, including environmental health, and talking about pollution or, uh, contamination of food or what have you.
Richard Hughes: Yes. Yeah.
Ken Cook: That, that contracts in the face of emergencies, where it has a huge impact. I noticed, and I, I just, I wanna mention the other plaintiffs, because it's an impressive list. It's the American Academy of Pediatrics, the lead plaintiff, but it's also the American College of Physicians, the APHA, the American Public Health Association. We also have a longstanding association with them. Infectious Diseases Society of America, Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance, and I'm sure there are others that I'm not naming.
It's impressive to me, and I've, I've said this to several, uh, people, you know, when you look at the way these, uh, interests are arrayed on the two sides of this issue, it's kind of shocking to think that there is virtually no reputable independent science association or organization that, that stands with Kennedy.
Now, I think everyone agrees, yes, there can be vaccine injuries, and yes, we should address those, and we should, we should be concerned about those, and, uh, unfortunately sometimes they're, fortunately very rarely, but sometimes they are serious.
Richard Hughes: Yes. Yeah.
Ken Cook: No question about that. But on the basic question of whether we need vaccines, whether the, where any kind of mandate, again, at the state level, which is where these are proffered, it really is shocking that we're at the state of the debate that we're at. And even to the point where I noticed that quite a bit of time was spent by the government to try and make the case that the plaintiffs you represent shouldn't have had standing.
Richard Hughes: Right, right, right, right, right, right.
Ken Cook: Can you talk a little bit about that? I just- I mean, why not try it? Why not try it?
Richard Hughes: I sure can. And I... look, I'm very honest. I, I, I'm very honest and open about how we got to this point. We knew when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came into office that he was going to do a lot of these things. I knew he was gonna do a lot of these things because I've helped build up the system that he's trying to tear down.
And so I, I looked around me and I said to my team, I said, "You know, he's going to do these things, and we have to be prepared. We have to watch everything he does. We have to watch when he takes these actions, and we're gonna need to be prepared to put up a legal fight."
Okay, so we have a policy disagreement. Absolutely, we do. The government wants to suggest that that's all we have, and that policy disputes don't belong in court, and they belong in the legislature and, and, and all that. But there are real harms here. And I would not, I would not have pursued this and put my name and, and, and resources and effort behind this if I thought it was a mere policy disagreement.
I knew that this was going to harm, uh, not only public health and families, but that it was actually going to harm the organizations that we're representing. And they do have standing. And so if you look at the pediatricians of this country represented by AAP, not only has AAP itself as an organization had to divert all of its time and resources to deal with, with this, but the providers on the front lines, and they'll, they'll say, "Oh, you know, it's just… you know, they make a lot of money."
You know, it is so not true. Being a pediatrician is not some sort of gangbusters, you know, business to be in. It's very, uh, costly to maintain an inventory of vaccines in those practices, and the reimbursement, you know, it's not usually profitable. And so this is causing them, you know, the, the frustrating experience of having to address misinformation and disinformation that their patients are hearing, coming in confused, and to practice effective medicine.
That's been frustrated. And the same thing, uh, American Public Health Association, and, and Dr. Benjamin doesn't mind me telling folks that when I called him and I said, "You know, would you be a part of this?" He said, "We're in." It was a no-brainer. Because he and I knew, we instinctively knew, that this was going to impact health departments across the country.
There are clinical practitioners that are members of the American Public Health Association. They represent this vast constituency across the country of public health workers, clinical workers, all kinds of folks, and, um, we knew that the harm was going to just, just permeate the public health system. And so we demonstrated those harms.
We're proud to represent these plaintiffs and we take very seriously the work of showing the court that they have been harmed, and we did that. We went in in December. The government tried to get our case dismissed on standing. And we went in, and we, you know, demonstrated to the court — they're experiencing real harms.
And if anybody's interested, go read the declarations that have been filed by the dozens of, of physicians and others, uh, in the case.
Ken Cook: Yeah, I encourage people, you know, to read the whole record so far. Yeah, yeah. Every aspect of it is to me informative, up to and including the, the judge's order at, in mid-March.
You know, Kennedy's often claims that pediatricians are in the pocket of big pharma, as you suggested, and it's very profitable to, uh, give kids shots, and they make a lot of money doing it. Sometimes I've, I've seen it suggested that this is the main way they make money is by vaccines. I haven't seen any evidence of that.
But what interests me is that i- in order for his, uh, approach to work, he has to then say, "We want you to have a conversation with your doctor before you decide for yourself about getting vaccinated." So where do all the good doctors go, and where, where do all the bad doctors go that you can just... and it turns out that if it's your pediatrician, that's a good doctor.
But when they gather together under The Academy of Pediatrics or they, when they assemble, that's when they're evil. Makes no sense.
Richard Hughes: No, it doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't. And there are fringe, you know, very, very, very, very fringe physicians out there that are a part of his movement, right? That, and I'm, I'm sure that's who they would rather you go to and talk to. But they want to frame this, because these are political issues, right?
And they, they know he has a, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a base and a constituency that he is pandering to. And when they talk about medical freedom and choice and forced medical treatment, this is all so deceptive.
And so if you go back, the old case Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 1905, the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court said states can require vaccination. There's a lot of really great discussion in that case. It's a dense read, and I have my class read it every year. But it talks about sorting junk science from evidence, you know, in early 20th century terms.
And by the end of the decision, it talks about the importance that we not make people who shouldn't be vaccinated get vaccinated. It acknowledges that. That is in the opinion. So inherent, when I think about vaccine policy, and I think about requiring vaccines so that people can be healthy and we save lives, what I know as a part of that equation is that it's always going to be a conversation between the pediatrician and the parent about the child's health, and they should sit down, and they should say, you know, "Which vaccines do you need to get? Well, we have this schedule, and it's standardized, and it's based on evidence, and we should follow it."
But if this child's contraindicated, if they're at risk of some sort of harm that is ascertainable, you know, then we shouldn't vaccinate. But those cases are rare. Those cases are rare, and we should acknowledge when there are rare vaccine injuries, we need to compensate those.
We need to do it quickly and adequately. So that we can continue to pursue the public health goal. I ask my class every year, would you rather have 100 cases of polio or would you rather have, you know, two injuries? And, you know, we have to make some trade-offs. And there's a, there's a social compact here that they misconstrue, that they absolutely misconstrue.
Ken Cook: Yeah. No, I think that's right, and it's hard to think of a, of a medicine or a drug that doesn't have those kinds of potential complications for some subset of the population, these side effects. Um, and, um, I mean, even cancer drugs sometimes cause cancer, so it is a conversation with physicians, and to me, what, what I worry about is th- this debate is missing how to actually make parents better consumers of information and make them more able to have those conversations. You don't have a lot of time often in those offices. But how to, how to make the most of those conversations because that's certainly gonna be in the interest of the physician treating you as well.
Richard Hughes: That's right.
Ken Cook: So one of the things that I had all kinds of thoughts about which direction Kennedy might take vaccine policy.
I did not foresee him going immediately in the face of what he promised Congress and firing every member of the committee and replacing them summarily with his own people. B- but it goes to a, a question that I've, I've had, which is I thought in this second Trump administration they were being more careful than in the first Trump administration, certainly in environmental, uh, decision-making, where they, they made it easy to lose in court, and they mostly did lose to my colleagues in the environmental community who practice public interest law, so law that sues the government.
But then I, as I read this judge's decision and saw what, what was piling up, I was shocked at the fumbles, the mistakes that HHS made with the Administrative Procedure Act, that you made great use of, um, of that law to point out to the judge, and he ruled, I think in every instance, on your side. That's there for a purpose, too, in addition to vaccine law, which is, you know, it's to make sure that the government proceeds in an orderly manner.
It's not, uh, arbitrary. It's not capricious. And the thing that puzzled me the most, Richard, was, you know, if you're an environmental lawyer, the Administrative Procedure Act is central to how you think about challenging the government, maybe more than almost any other area.
Richard Hughes: Yes. Yes.
Ken Cook: Of public interest law, right? Because it's, it's, it's the clockworks of EPA and Interior Department and Fish and Wildlife Service.
Richard Hughes: Yes.
Ken Cook: And when they get a procedure wrong, when they're arbitrary, when they're capricious, when they side, uh, make a decision, you know, in favor of, of industry that is ill-considered, that's where the environmental community, and Kennedy in the past, has grabbed on.
I was surprised that there were so many mistakes that they're, uh, in the rush to get these decisions made, which to me tells me also that they're, they're not likely to be lasting. But I'll go back to that. But just talk a little bit about the the Administrative Procedure Act and how you saw that play in this case.
Richard Hughes: Uh, you don't even need to take a, a law school administrative law class to see that. I mean, it is so just patently obvious. I said early on, I said, "Anything this man does is going to be arbitrary and capricious because- ... the science isn't there." The science doesn't support it.
They're not going to be able to point to anything legitimate and to say, "That's the basis for this decision." Now, what I didn't expect was the lack of process. You know, the explanation part of it, and these are all, I'm talking about sort of the recipe of, of what we expect government officials to follow, right?
Ken Cook: Yeah, yeah.
Richard Hughes: We expect them to take a hard look at evidence. We expect them to follow a process to explain why they did it. I knew that they wouldn't find the evidence. I did think that they would at least try to give the appearance that they were following a process and taking a hard look. The way they throw around the term, the, well, the terms gold standard science and transparency and everything, I, I think it's very misleading, and I didn't expect a lot of explanation or transparency.
But I really did think that they would try to follow some process.
Ken Cook: So did I.
Richard Hughes: You know, right? And so for a long time environmental lawyer, who, as you said, you know, should have a deep understanding of the importance of the APA and procedure, to just go out one day and film a video, and in 58 seconds make statements like, "The previous administration's recommendations were based on nothing," right?
And to say that, "I, standing here, you know, a lawyer surrounded by two other political appointees, I'm just gonna tell you that I, I'm delighted, in fact, I'm gonna use the word delighted, to tell you that you no longer need to get the COVID vaccine."
I mean, it just reeked, it reeked of lack of process, of unseriousness. And, um, same thing with the January 5th schedule changes. And as President Trump is saying, "Well, let's look at the Danish schedule," I think there was actual reporting that, that HHS knew that what they were discussing would likely violate or potentially violate the APA. So they're, they know this, and I think that this is just evidence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the forces around him will stop at nothing, you know, to get their agenda through.
Ken Cook: Yeah, I mean, w- what I've been saying to my friends on the other side of this issue is, "If you really did believe that you wanted to tear down vaccine policy in this country, and do it on the basis of transparency and gold standard science, you've been failed by Kennedy."
The pace at which he's operated. The fact that, I mean, here he has, he has control over the, all these funds. He could launch- the study that he says we've long not done to link vaccine harm to, you know, autism or whatever it might be. I mean, th- you've got all the money now. You could, you could control it.
Where are the studies? Where is the evidence that you're- Yeah ... putting forward or, or what basis? And then you have a, a press conference in the, in the White House a- about Tylenol, and the promise that by September of 2025 we'll know what causes autism. So obviously these aren't serious people. They don't show their work.
Anti-vax interests, anti-vax proponents, ought to begin to understand by now that these changes are not going to endure. They're not gonna stand up scientifically, and as we f- see in the case that you've been arguing, it's not standing up in the law either.
Richard Hughes: No.
Ken Cook: And the political support seems to be eroding.
At least Republicans wanna talk about healthy eating, not vaccine policy anymore. It's a real shortcoming of Kennedy's approach, but I think it's what he's left with because the evidence really isn't there.
Richard Hughes: Yeah. You know, it's not, and ultimately we're gonna prevail. We have to litigate this thing, and I, it's, it's unfortunate, but we, it, I, I knew that if he did these things and if we were going to stop him and show to be true what you just said, is that they're not showing their work, this is all false, and we need to stop it, and we need to go back to... and it's not to say that our system before couldn't use improvements. Absolutely it needs improvements.
But, you know, if we were ever going to stop this and restore sanity, we were going to have to sue, and we still have the work to do to do, we're not done yet, right? But ultimately, yes, it won't endure. It won't endure because we're stopping it.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Now let me just ask you. Kennedy in, in recent weeks, and I, I, I don't know exactly where this stands now, so help me out here — he has proposed a restructuring of the, uh, advisory committee on immunization practice, the ACIP committee at the CDC, to restructure it to include the kinds of personnel that he thinks will represent vaccine-injured people.
I was surprised the judge actually went as far as he went in go- kind of going through the list of people appointed to this committee and basically- Yeah ... saying, "You know, we, this committee can't continue." It doesn't meet the, the, the test of the law for expertise. So how do you see this latest move by Kennedy to reorient the committee and give it a, a different charter?
Richard Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. So they are trying to circumvent the judge's ruling.
Ken Cook: Patently.
Richard Hughes: Patently. I hope the White House is watching. I hope that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is listening to this podcast, and I assume that she wanted him to cool it on vaccines, because that's not a popular issue. Going into the midterms, I don't think they want him to continue this.
Now, what they've done is they've gotten really creative. They said, "Oh, the charter's going to expire on April 1st." And so they got together, and Aaron Siri said, "We're gonna put in a petition, and we're gonna just change the charter." So Andel Bigtree, uh, has been on his podcast, and there was a Politico story that ran last week where he said, "Oh, you know, Kennedy basically just has to change the T's he's crossing and the I's that he's dotting."
Wow. You talk about transparency. I mean, they're being so transparent about their nefarious- Finally, yes. Finally.
Ken Cook: Right? Isn't it funny? So- finally some useful transparency,
Richard Hughes: Yeah ... ri- right. Very useful, because it's like, okay, you broke the rules, and you got your hand slapped, and so now you're just going to change the rules?
Well, I'm sorry, you have to follow some rules to change the rules. And it goes back actually to where we started in this conversation, too, is that the law presupposes we want to use vaccines, right, to control vaccine preventable disease. There is that thoughtful apparatus that's been set up.
They are flying, they continue to fly in the face of that. And so, you know, we'll see what he does. We need to see how he would execute on these charter changes. But it's, it's just egregious, and I hope it gets the attention that it deserves.
Ken Cook: Yeah, I do, too. Well, we'll certainly try and help as much as we can to shine- Thank you a light on that, because, you know, there's, there's never been a more opaque administration when it comes to decision-making.
And more arbitrary, almost clownishly so, and oftentimes to deadly effect. Lots of bad decisions on environmental policy that are causing harm. And we see from the shifting attitudes, the new poll that came out from Politico, that it seems like more and more Americans are, Republicans in particular, are vaccine skeptical and might decide not to have their kids vaccinated because of this ambient debate or discussion.
Debate's hard to say. Uh, it d- doesn't really suit it. What are the next steps that will unfold? Um, they haven't formally appealed yet, have they?
Richard Hughes: They haven't, and they don't have a window to appeal. There have been statements made out of HHS that they have, you know, 60 days following the ruling. This was an interlocutory decision.
They have 10 days. They would have had to have a question of law certified to be able to take it up to the First Circuit on appeal. They have missed their window. And so if they want to try to appeal this late, we would oppose that. And so where we are right now is in a relatively boring place, where we essentially are working with the government to get the administrative record and, you know, going back to the APA, because this is an APA case, we are entitled to see the record, and there are different records for each of the decisions, right?
And so we're, it's the ver- again, the very boring part of litigation, of trying to get the documents. Now, are they going to give us all of the documents we want? Are we gonna see the emails and the text messages? You know, we're looking.
Ken Cook: I would love to. I would love to.
Richard Hughes: I would, I would as well. I would as well. I would as well. So, you know, once we have that record, and once it's completed, we'll be pursuing a final judgment and to get a final decision on the merits. And, um- presumably that could be appealed in the future. I would assume they want that to happen after the midterms, because of the way we've talked about this.
But we're doing the work of getting to that final decision.
Ken Cook: Well, I wanna thank you for that work, and thank you for your time, Richard. Thank you. I've read deeply into the court record here. I, again, I encourage everyone to do the same, and I know your students will be reading through it.
Richard Hughes: Yes, they have. They have already been... yes.
Ken Cook: I, I'm sure, I'm sure. This is a pretty exciting time to be reading through something as a curriculum that's so present in the world, and that their professor is so heavily involved in. And I, I'm not happy that you had to leave your political career in, in Arkansas, but I'm, but I'm grateful in a way that where you ended up is, uh, making this case.
Richard Hudges: Me too
Ken Cook: These organizations, again, they're not perfect. The law is not perfect. The science is not perfect. But in the scheme of things, we cannot afford this area of law and policy and science to be degraded in the way it is, and that's my, one of my greatest regrets. People wor- worry about authoritarianism, I get that.
But I think before, well before we get to that, it's the corrosion in understanding what authority really means. The authority of, of knowledge and expertise as well as the, the authority of law. To me, that's the greater, that's the greater threat right now. Because that sits in a parent's head.
Richard Hughes: Yeah.
Ken Cook: Who do I trust?
Richard Hughes: I agree.
Ken Cook: If it's a pediatrician of the sort that Kennedy caricatures as in the pocket of big pharma, why would you trust them? On the other hand, you have a kid that, um, really will be vulnerable. Look at what's happened with, uh, all these infectious diseases just in the past year and a half. It's very worrisome.
Richard Hughes: No, it absolutely is, and we have so much work to do to actually reestablish trust. He talks about reestablishing trust. I'm not saying that we were ever perfect at communicating about vaccines. I think there are so many things that we could do better when it comes to talking with parents, right? You know?
Ken Cook: I agree. The fact that they feel ghosted is really upsetting to me. It is. People say that to me on, you know, on direct messaging and on, in LinkedIn and other ways I communicate, that I even questioned Kennedy, and we came out against his, his confirmation. And, uh, George Benjamin, when I called him, he said, "I'm in," when we were live streaming the con- confirmation hearings.
It's, it's like a no-brainer. And there's no one in the nonprofit environmental community who's standing up with Kennedy, which is also noteworthy. I say that to a lot of my friends who are, you know, MAHA fans and adherents that take note of that. It's kind of noteworthy that you don't have anyone in the major environmental groups that he worked with-
Richard Hughes: No ...
Ken Cook: Uh, who's willing to stand up for him. Quite the contrary, so.
Richard Hughes: That's right. That's right.
Ken Cook: Anyway. Well, thank you so much. I really-
Richard Hughes: Thank you, Ken
Ken Cook: ... appreciate it. As this evolves, I hope I can get you back on if there's-
Richard Hughes: Please, anytime
Ken Cook: ...important developments that
Richard Hughes: Please
Ken Cook: Really great. Thanks so much, counselor. Thank you so much.
Richard Hughes: Thank you, Ken.
Ken Cook: Thank you to Professor Richard Hughes for joining me today, and thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links so you can take a deeper dive into today's discussion.
Make sure to follow our show on Instagram, @KenCooksPodcast, and if you're interested in learning more about EWG, head on over to ewg.org or check out the EWG Instagram account, @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup. Now, if this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along.
The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly, who wrote that last sentence. Our show's theme music is by Moby. Thank you, Moby, and thanks again to all of you for listening.
Areas of Focus Family Health Children’s Health May 29, 2026Carving Out a Niche
NEW We the People Story Map
Backbone Intern Giacomo Moody's Story Map for We the People is now LIVE!.
The Story Map traces the journey of this Iconic image, from its 2007 debut at Seattle Center to its current deployments in pro-democracy protests around the country. Check out Giacomo's great work and the amazing fruits of our collective labors.
Learn more about joining us in DC or pitching in to support our team going to Washington, DC to mark the 250th Birthday of this country. We'll once again take the streets in a defiant and beautiful expression of common cause and our shared commitment to fulfilling mission of creating a more just, sustainable, and democratic nation, and a future we can be proud to hand our children.
Check out the We the People Story Map at BackboneCampaign.org/WeThePeople.
New report highlights Delta rice farming as key strategy for protecting California water infrastructure and building local economies
For Immediate Release:
May 29, 2026
Contact:
Ashley Castaneda, ashley@restorethedelta.org
STOCKTON, CA — Today, Restore the Delta released a new report detailing one of the many local solutions outlined in the recently unveiled Water Renaissance Plan: expanding rice farming in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as a strategy to combat land subsidence and support a more sustainable regional economy.
Supported by BEAM Circular, which sponsored the critical research for the region, the report documents that Delta rice acreage has increased fivefold over the past eight years and lays out the environmental and economic benefits of rice cultivation as a strategic defense against subsidence.
“Without major levee investment in the next 25 years, over $10 billion in infrastructure faces severe flood risk,” said Morgen Snyder, Director of Policy and Programs for Restore the Delta. “Flooded rice cultivation restores the anaerobic conditions that slow and may stop peat oxidation that has already caused some Delta islands to sink as much as 25 feet. Pairing Delta levee investment with rice farming and wetland restoration benefits ecosystem health, as well as driving new economic opportunities for the region.”
The report maps current residue management practices and emerging bioproduct pathways, while identifying a major economic gap in which nearly all milling value from Delta-grown rice currently leaves the region for Sacramento County. To address this, the report’s central recommendation calls for the development of a regional grain mill that would:
- Consolidate agricultural residue streams
- Reduce transportation emissions
- Support local bioproduct innovation
- Create new jobs tied to the local agricultural economy
Rice hulls already contribute to electricity generation in the Sacramento Valley, and the report argues that a local processing economy could make rice farming more financially viable for Delta landowners.
The report arrives shortly after the release of the Water Renaissance Plan, a statewide framework that shifts California away from expensive and unreliable imported water systems toward local, sustainable solutions that provide long-term water reliability at an affordable cost.
This latest research builds directly on that vision. By documenting the Delta’s expanding rice industry, available feedstock supply, infrastructure gaps, and emerging bioproduct opportunities, the report strengthens the economic case for the Water Renaissance Plan’s broader approach to water and land management, one that depends on maintaining healthy peat soils, protecting levees, and supporting resilient local agriculture.
“This is about more than rice,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Executive Director of Restore the Delta. “It’s about creating a durable economic model that helps protect California’s water infrastructure, supports local communities, and keeps the Delta landscape functioning for generations to come.”
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Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 59
Two major battles over pesticide policy are unfolding at the federal level, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The dispute: Can states protect their citizens from pesticide harms beyond what federal law requires, or will that authority be stripped away? These are the urgent questions that a pending Supreme Court case and a fight over the farm bill could play major roles in answering.
The chemical at the center of all of this? Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the keystone product of the Bayer-Monsanto corporation. Critics of the controversial weedkiller link it to a number of health harms through exposure.
To help unravel the legal docket, EWG co-Founder and President Ken Cook is joined by Chuck Benbrook, Ph.D. He has worked on pesticide issues in roles during the Carter administration, for Congress and with the National Academy of Sciences, and has served as an expert witness in many of the cases he and Cook discuss.
Benbrook is urging the Supreme Court to preserve the right of states to hold pesticide companies accountable when federal regulators fall short.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
RoundUp Ad Voice: Weeding again, hey Bob?
Bob: Huh?
RoundUp Ad Voice: Why not do it once? Do it right?
Bob: Why is your head in the ground?
RoundUp Ad Voice: I'm gonna watch Roundup kill these roots.
Bob: Hey, this is Spike's area.
RoundUp Ad Voice: Bob… Roundup can be used where kids and pets will play and breaks down into natural materials. Since Roundup kills the root, what's not coming back, Bob?
Bob: The weed.
RoundUp Ad Voice: You betcha. Bob, come on down and take a peek.
Bob: Can I squirt one?
RoundUp Ad Voice: Sure, Bob.
Ken Cook: Hello there. I'm Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. And this is an episode that's happening during glyphosate week, which is the end of April, beginning of May. It's glyphosate week for two reasons. There are two major battles that unfolded this week around this weed killer made by Bayer. One major battle took place in the Supreme Court.
And that's what we'll focus on with my guest today Dr. Charles Benbrook, who is a long time student, an expert in the field of pesticide policy, and has also been, uh, very deeply involved in some of the court cases that the Supreme Court is considering a measure to overturn. And we'll get into that. It's, um, it's, it's really directly relevant to a lot of what we've been talking about with respect to how decisions are made on pesticide policy and toxics policy generally, and how the Trump administration has time and again, taken the side of pesticide and chemical companies.
And this is, no, this is no exception. But the other thing that happened just this morning, and I'm talking about April 30th, took place in the House of Representatives. There was a move by the House Agriculture Committee in their Farm Bill. They put a provision in that would've blocked liability for Bayer and other pesticide companies in state court, and would also have taken away some of the ability of states just basically to protect their citizens beyond what EPA does.
You may have heard of this flood of litigation against Bayer, formerly known as Monsanto, with respect to this weed killer glyphosate — trade name is Roundup — the flood of litigation because thousands and thousands of people have gone to court and claimed that glyphosate contributed to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a kind of blood cancer that many people have come down with.
It's a, not an epidemic, but it's a, a serious disease that's growing in this country, and glyphosate has been fingered as one of the likely causes. So the House of Representatives weighed in on behalf, at least the House Agriculture Committee weighed in on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto and put this in their Farm Bill — brought it to the house floor.
We'll probably have another session on this topic too — brought it to the house floor — and it was challenged. First by Democrats, Chellie Pingree and Jim McGovern. Then challenged by Chellie Pingree and Thomas Massey, a Republican of Kentucky. And then, most notably challenged by Republican Congresswoman Luna from Florida.
And she stood up to the Trump administration, to the House Agriculture Committee, to Big Ag, to MAGA, to basically the powers that be in chemical agriculture and said, no, I am not going to vote and allow a measure in the Farm Bill to block liability for people who want to go to court, who believe that Roundup this chemical has caused their cancer or other harms.
So she stood up, an amendment. She got lots of grief from Republican leadership, lots of grief from the Republican dominated agriculture committee that voted overwhelmingly to put this amendment into the Farm Bill — against overwhelming opposition from Democrats on the agriculture committee. She went to the floor, and she got 73 Republicans to vote along with hundreds of Democrats to strip this language out of the bill.
And the final vote was overwhelming, a landslide, that stripped this Bayer, Trump administration, big Ag provision out of the Farm Bill, so that liability would not be blocked against people who were seeking justice in the courts. So it's an extremely important week in pesticide policy, an extremely important week with respect to the politics around MAHA, which we've been talking about quite a bit.
The fundamental question was, can states protect their residents from pesticide harms beyond what federal law might require, or the federal agency in charge EPA dictates, or will that authority be stripped away? And at least we know now from the vote in the House of Representatives this morning, that will not happen as part of the Farm Bill.
So the chemical, again at the center of all of this is called glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide roundup and other herbicides. And the stakes really couldn't be higher because human lives are at risk. They have been at risk, and human lives have been lost. So before we get into the episode, I wanna give some context on two things.
What does preemption mean and what is happening at the Supreme Court? Preemption is a legal doctrine that says, when federal law and state law conflict, federal law wins. In the pesticide context, the question is, if the EPA approves a pesticide and sets the language on its warning label, can a state court still hold a company liable for failing to warn consumers about health risks like cancer — risks that aren't mentioned on that federal label?
And EPA is very good about not mentioning on their label when pesticides might be linked to cancer. Instead, preferring, which is exactly what the pesticide makers prefer, that they make adjustments to how the pesticide might be handled or changes to instructions to farm workers or farmers put on gloves, change the time when you apply it, don't do it when it's too windy.
Soft changes like that rather than just coming right out and saying, “Hey, this stuff is carcinogenic.” Now, Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in a very controversial acquisition some years ago, they argue the answer is no. Since the EPA approved roundup and didn't require a cancer warning, Bayer says, the states have no business second guessing that through lawsuits or allowing litigation that second guesses that.
This is the preemption argument, federal regulatory approval essentially shields them from state liability. The case before the Supreme Court involves a plaintiff named John Darnell, one of thousands of people who claim Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate caused their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The Supreme Court asked the Trump administration to weigh in.
It sided with Bayer. It said, sure, we'll weigh in — their message, EPA approved the label — case closed no matter who got sick. A large group of state attorneys general, including some Republicans from red states, disagreed saying states have always had the right to hold companies accountable through their courts, regardless of what a federal label might say.
At the same time, as I mentioned, Congress was debating attaching a preemption provision to the Farm Bill and that was defeated, today. Glad to announce that. To walk us through all of this. I'm joined by Dr. Chuck Benbrook, a longtime colleague and one of the foremost experts on pesticide policy in the country, and specifically one of the foremost experts on glyphosate.
Chuck has worked on these issues from the halls of Congress to the Carter administration to the National Academy of Sciences, and he served as, as an expert witness in many of the cases, like the ones we're discussing today.
Dr. Benbrook recently submitted a formal scientific and legal argument known as an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to preserve the right of states to hold pesticide companies accountable when federal regulators fall short, and boy, do they fall short time and again. There's arguably no better person on the planet to walk us through how we got here, what's really at stake, and why the next few weeks could determine the future of pesticide accountability in this country for a very long time.
Not just glyphosate, not just this one pesticide, but the basic ability for people to hold these pesticide companies accountable. Chuck, welcome to the show and thanks for joining me.
Chuck Benbrook: Well, looking forward to it, uh, Ken. But first, uh, thanks for, uh, inviting me onto the podcast. It's a great honor, and I, I think I would be remiss not to share with your listeners, um, the, the day I first met you, I was, uh, working in the new executive office building for the Council on Environmental Quality in the Carter administration.
And you were a stringer for the Journal of Soil Water Conservation.
Ken Cook: That's correct.
Chuck Benbrook: Uh, a, a young reporter trying to scrape out a living at, uh, 25 bucks a piece, uh, for, uh, an article. And, uh, you called me up and said, I understand you're involved in this Resources Conservation Act implementation, that that was an issue for you and the journal.
And I said, yes, said, well, can I come talk to you? I said, sure. So you set at an appointment and you came into the building and back then they called you upstairs and you came down. And so I came down to meet my, uh, my soon to become very good friend Ken Cook, and greeted this guy in Birkenstocks without socks, white shorts, and a white t-shirt. I'll never forget it.
Ken Cook: Right. That was, that was a, a official journalistic garb for me back then. And, uh, it, it, uh, it served me well. I got a lot of scoops in that as I was writing that column for a decade or so, I can't remember. Max Schnat, the great editor of that journal, yeah, you can let me have my way. But yeah, I remember, I remember that very well.
Chuck Benbrook: It's been a, a, a wonderful friendship and a, and a wonderful journey in a lot of ways, and, you know, it's kind of a journey that feels like maybe things are turning around a little bit,
Ken Cook: Fingers crossed.
Chuck Benbrook: But where did all of this, uh, tension about glyphosate come from?
Well, a couple things that, that, that stand out. A, as you know, and most of your listeners know, glyphosate is a broad spectrum herbicide, and pretty much anything that is green and growing, if you spray it on it, it kills it. So, before the advent of genetically engineered crops that, that were genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate being sprayed on them, farmers could only use glyphosate before their crop came up, or they, they sprayed it on their crop. They'd kill the weeds and the crop, or it could be used at after the harvest to kind of clean things up and get a field ready for the next year. So the, the agricultural market for Roundup herbicides, which came on the market in ‘74, was quite limited by the very way that the product worked.
Until 1996, the year that the first genetically engineered, so-called Roundup ready crop came on the market, which was Roundup ready soybeans and roundup ready cotton. These new technologies which require genetically engineering the seed to express a gene that allowed the soybean plant and the cotton plant to go ahead, spray Roundup on me, “I, I'm, I'll be just fine.”
Ken Cook: “We love it. We love it.” Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: “We love it.” Yeah. Yeah,
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: That technology, it worked very well. And it came along at a time when farmers were super frustrated and pissed off about all the problems that they were having with weed control. The products on the market at the time, they were having to spray three or four different ones to control different weeds.
There were lots of bad interactions between the herbicides. They were spending more and more money. A lot of the herbicides were persistent in that they carried over, and if the farmers didn't watch it, they'd spray the herbicide and control the weeds in the soybean year of the rotation, but they'd end up screwing up the corn that was planted the next year.
So there were, there was a lot of problems with weed management. It wasn't working well. It was complicated. And the costs were going up. So when this Roundup ready system came along, which couldn't be easier, you just couldn't screw it up, it was such an easy system to do well because you pay the extra money for the seeds that had the trait, and then you plant your Roundup ready soybeans, and then when the weeds come up, you just spray Roundup and it kills all the weeds.
Ken Cook: Yeah. And well into the growing season, if you needed to it, the, the, the corn could be this high, the soybeans and, and you could take care of the weeds. It, it helped farmers a lot. I, one, farmers used to tell me all the time that they couldn't have made their operations bigger, which they wanted to do to generate more revenue, they couldn't have done that if Roundup ready technology had not come along and made that vital planting operation so much faster and simpler.
Chuck Benbrook: So starting in 1996, as this, uh, GMO crop revolution unfolded like, you know, a tsunami over American agriculture. It changed EWG, it changed what I was working on.
Ken Cook: Totally.
Chuck Benbrook: I got sucked from working on pesticides to working on genetically engineered crops. The foundations moved all their money, as you remember.
Ken Cook: Yep, yep.
Chuck Benbrook: And the sales of, of Roundup just took off like a, a rocket from 1996 until about 2005 or six, Roundup moved closer and closer to the most heavily applied pesticide in the country.
But around 2005, 2006, it passed atrazine and became number one.
Ken Cook: Another prominent weed killer. Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Another corn herbicide, but had some major growth still in it. And it peaked about 2015 and at that point there was about three pounds of glyphosate applied in US agriculture for every, every pound of atrazine.
So not only had it become number one, but it passed it threefold.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: It was by far the most heavily applied pesticide ever in history in the world. Around 2015, there was enough glyphosate applied in the United States to spray three quarters of a pound of the active ingredient on every cropland acre in the country.
And globally it was about two thirds of a pound. So you just wrap your mind around it.
Ken Cook: Yeah. I don't think I've ever, maybe I've shared this story with you. I, I talked to an editor from a, an agricultural trade publication around the 2005, 6, 8 period there, and, um, asked how things were going. And this person said, well, it's, it's pretty tough because we're losing advertisers.
And I said, well, why are you losing advertisers? And she said, well, we used to have all these pesticide companies, weed killer companies buying ads in our magazine. And that kept us afloat. But once Roundup came along and it was so universally used relative to anything else, the ad flow stopped from the other companies 'cause they just kind of gave up. So even, it even affected journalistic coverage of agriculture and the ability to do that. Incredible.
Chuck Benbrook: Of course. So I started my work in the pesticide world in 1981 when I took the job as the staff director of the DORFA subcommittee. And at that point, there were 23 pesticide companies that had Washington reps that came and lobbied young staffers like me.
23 of them. And now there's four left.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: So the, the concentration in the industry is a huge issue. So the use of glyphosate just took off like a rocket starting in 1996. But not only did the agricultural use go up, but there was continued growth in the lawn and garden, forestry, government arena, industrial arena, because Monsanto recognized that there were lots of other markets where they could sell Roundup, and in particular the home and lawn and garden markets, so people that would buy it at Walmart or Lowe's or Home Depot and spray weeds in their, you know, their driveway or in around the yard or…
Ken Cook: Yeah, playgrounds.
Chuck Benbrook: Or plant a garden. So you gotta kill the grass before you till the soil, so you spray Roundup. So Monsanto aggressively went after those markets with great success and had they had specially formulated versions of lawn and garden Roundup.
As the diversity of uses of Roundup expanded incrementally, but over 20 years, there were so many different ways that people were handling the product, spraying the product, and so many different ways that people were being exposed to the product.
Ken Cook: I have to remind you here, I was invited by one of the pesticide trade associations to address their annual conference, uh, because in their, by the early to mid 1990s, EWG was very much on their radar as a, a problem in pesticide policy.
And I reminded the audience of a Monsanto commercial at the time where someone dressed as if ready to go to the airport, and that was the plot line of the commercial, a TV commercial, leaned out the window of the taxi cab, and sprayed Roundup on his driveway and sidewalk to kill the weeds, and then just brought the Roundup bottle back into the cab and off they went.
And that's just how safe and easy it was. I don't know if we could ever find that ad, but they pushed it very hard and they brought modern marketing to bear.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. All throughout this period of when Roundup use was going up, glyphosate use was going up so much, the percentage of the total glyphosate sales represented by Ag versus the non-Ag market stayed roughly the same around 10%.
The Ag went up fast and the non-Ag stayed 10%, but it grew because the other was growing.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: In the last 20 years, Monsanto has made almost as much profit from the 10% of glyphosate they've sold into the lawn and garden market as the 90% that they've sold to agriculture. So what does that tell you? Well, they're obviously marking up the glyphosate much more.
It's a lot of packaging, a lot of promotion. And you know, somebody goes into Home Depot to buy a, a, you know, a gallon of ready to use glyphosate. They're not that concerned if it costs 19 bucks or 22 bucks, they know it's gonna last for quite a while and they want to control their weeds. So Monsanto was, has always been able to profit, uh, much more significantly from the lawn and garden market, but yet they never did any focused research on the exposure patterns and risks that were unique to that market.
Ken Cook: That gets us to Dwayne Lee Johnson, I think, doesn't it?
Chuck Benbrook: It absolutely does. So there's two major things that happened that brought glyphosate into the middle of this massive increase in the use and diversification of the ways that it was being used, and the ways that we were all exposed to it, including this crazy idea to start spraying it on a wheat crop two weeks before harvest.
RoundUp Ad: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: The so-called pre-harvest use — that you and EWG are finally, I think, going to have some success in ending. Thank God. That's half of it. Then the other half is that in March of 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization issued a very unexpected classification of glyphosate and glyphosate based herbicides, which would include Roundup as a probable human carcinogen.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: This came out of the blue. People, including me, were shocked 'cause we had followed the toxicity data and the EPAs human health risk assessments on glyphosate and, and, you know, glyphosate looked a, about as safe as any herbicide that had ever been registered and now all of a sudden IARC is saying it's a probable human carcinogen.
That's what triggered the interest among tort lawyers out there, and IARC said that the evidence was strongest linking Roundup to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. So people that had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and had been using Roundup for 20 years, they said, “Hey, geez, I wonder if the Roundup contributed to my non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.”
And so they talked to a lawyer, do I have a case? And indeed they did. And Dwayne Lee Johnson, the groundskeeper for the Bonita school district just a little north of where you live, Ken.
Ken Cook: Yeah, that's right.
Chuck Benbrook: I believe it was either six or seven school campuses that he was responsible for controlling weeds and other pest control activities.
So he probably spent more time spraying Roundup than almost any other specific task in his job. And in his years of doing that, he had two very serious exposure episodes where he really got dosed. That's why his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma came on in only four years after the exposures. Usually non-Hodgkin's lymphoma has a longer latency period, but those were the two events.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, carefully going through the data and explaining why in their judgment and based on their classification system, the evidence now supports the fact that glyphosate state-based herbicides probably cause cancer. Yeah. Well that, that's what triggered the initiation of the litigation.
Ken Cook: That was a case that was brought in state court right here in the state of California. The ruling came down in in his favor. And for most of these cases where it was in favor of the plaintiff, the initial amounts, the penalties or the settlements that were announced have been reduced by, over the course of appeals and reviews and so forth.
But it was very substantial. And on top of that, um, it, it was pretty clear that there would be many more such cases, and that has turned out to be in fact what happened.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, so the, the Roundup non-Hodgkin's lymphoma litigation ha, you know, has dwarfed any past pesticide litigation in the history of the US by multiple orders of magnitude.
And in fact, Ken, I think the only mass tort litigation that's involved more overall settlements would be asbestos. I mean, it's,
Ken Cook: Yeah, probably, yeah,
Chuck Benbrook: There's been about a 110,000 cases that either, the vast majority of course, have settled there. There's only been like 32 trials, in 11 years. It takes a lot to get through all of the hurdles to actually have a trial.
And Bayer Monsanto has not wanted to go to trial, because that's when they're vulnerable to, what's called a punitive damage award. So Lee Johnson, who, he had pretty strong evidence that his massive exposures to to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
And he had actually called the one 800 number on the bottle to talk to Monsanto physicians went after he'd been diagnosed and he asked them, is it safe for me to go back and continue to spray Roundup even though I've been diagnosed with non Hodgkin's lymphoma? And guess what they said?
Ken Cook: Yeah, no problem Lee.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, your use of Roundup had nothing to do with your cancer, when they knew that it probably did.
The jury was so convinced that Monsanto's behavior was unacceptable,
Ken Cook: And that resulted in punitive damages on top of, uh, other damages
Chuck Benbrook: $250 million for one man.
Ken Cook: So you were part of that legal team as an expert witness, that, that helped Johnson's legal team succeed in that case. And another person who was part of that legal team is our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he shared in the proceeds of the settlement, the share that went to the lawyers. Don't know how they divided it up, it's not been made public, but this was a case that he was integrally involved in.
And at, if you look back at the time, he made some very strong statements as he's mostly continued to make ever since about the importance of dealing with the threat that Roundup poses to human health, not just Mr. Johnson's, God bless him, but lots of other people. And he recruited people as well to bring similar cases as I understand it, uh, in other venues.
Chuck Benbrook: Let's also remember what else was going on at this time.
Bayer really wanted to buy Monsanto, either wanted to merge or acquire Monsanto, and that was actually coming to fruition in early 2018. The Lee Johnson trial started, I believe in March and concluded in May. Yeah. And the acquisition, the $63 billion check that Bayer wrote to buy Monsanto occurred right before that trial started, and at the time when Bayer wrote that $63 billion check to buy Monsanto and all of its liability, there were already 4,500 cases had been filed.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: So Bayer knew that it was going to be a significant body of litigation. I think it's, it's fair to predict that the Monsanto folks told the Bayer people, oh, this is just BS litigation. The science isn't there. We're gonna, we'll win the first few cases and it'll all go away.
I mean, there's no way that Bayer would've gone through with the acquisition.
Ken Cook: You wouldn't think
Chuck Benbrook: Unless they did believe that,
Ken Cook: You know, you, you wouldn't think, and back in around, right. At that time, I had some, some folks I was talking to with Bayer, based in Europe. And if you leave out the Monsanto conversations, Bayer was beginning to take much more seriously developing low risk, organic compliant, even pesticides of all kinds of different kinds.
They had an investment in a facility here in California to do it that I was proud to, to view. And the thought that a major player like Bayer would be weighing in, in a way that would be beneficial because of less toxic, maybe less immediately effective, as is often the case, but less toxic weed killers and other pesticides.
And I remember saying to them, when I heard that they might be buying Monsanto, I said, look, I don't know all the financial considerations or the market considerations, but what I will tell you is what I mostly know about Monsanto beyond what I know about, uh, what's happened with, with Roundup, is what they did with PCBs.
'Cause I have a member of my board from Aniston, Alabama, and we worked with him in the years before when Monsanto knew and lied about, hid from their community in Aniston what PCBs were doing to the community of Aniston, particularly a, a poor community that wasn't entirely African American, but, but largely African American.
And my current board member, David Baker, was the guy who pushed back against Monsanto, led the charge in the community, brought Johnny Cochran to town, had thousands of people lined up and got a huge settlement, the largest settlement at that time, based on fundamentally civil rights law, that they had violated the civil rights of that community.
And they, I think they came in with about a $700 million settlement for the community against Monsanto on PCBs. And I just said, look, if it's in the DNA of a company to not let you know. And this was always in the backdrop for the two of us, I think too with, with uh, GMO crops, right? This was not the kind of company that was gonna step up.
Now most of them don't. But we felt, I felt, in particular, knowing the PCB history, knowing how much money was at stake in, in Roundup, I just didn't trust the company, and I said that to these folks I knew at, at Bayer. But it was higher ups making the decisions. I think it was a bad call, but we'll see how the courts decide.
Chuck Benbrook: It's probably worth sharing, Bayer did not buy Monsanto for Roundup. They bought Monsanto for the intellectual property methods to genetically engineer seeds, and plus of course, they got all of Monsanto seeds. Monsanto, by the time Bayer bought them, had control of much of the base genetics for corn and soybeans in the United States.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: That was the real reason that drove Bayer to want to acquire Monsanto, because Monsanto was making a lot of money off of the licensing of the genetic engineering traits to all other seed companies. And when a company has intellectual property like that, that they license to other companies, it's a perpetual cash machine.
Ken Cook: Yeah. It's like owning the operating system for American agriculture in a significant way. Right? And look what that's done for Microsoft and Apple and others who stepped in, right?
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. Yeah. So that's what Bayer was, was after and, um, so the, the Johnson case happened and about six months later, the Hardeman case.
Ken Cook: Yes.
Chuck Benbrook: And the Hardeman case was very important because it was the first trial in the federal multi-district litigation. The MDL litigation run by a, a, a very hard-nosed judge named Vince Chhabria.
Ken Cook: Here in San Francisco, the Ninth Circuit, right
Chuck Benbrook: here in San Francisco, and Chhabria to the benefit of Bear and, and Monsanto, bifurcated the trial into two parts. The plaintiff's Hardeman had to get through the first part to get to the second part of the trial.
The first part was just the general causation. Was there adequate science evidence linking exposure to Roundup and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma to meet the standard of, it's more likely than not that Hardeman's exposure to Roundup contributed to his disease — contributed in a significant way?
Ken Cook: But where was Hardeman from?
Chuck Benbrook: He was from California. I don't remember where in California. He had used Roundup for 20 or 30 years
Ken Cook: On his property.
Chuck Benbrook: He wasn't a groundskeeper. He wasn't a farmer. He had been in good health. And the trial on the first part, on the general causation was.
Ken Cook: Yeah
Chuck Benbrook: That was Monsanto's and Bayer’s best shot at containing the litigation and the lawyers knew it, both sides, especially because the judge had seemed to be very open to many of the Bayer Monsanto attorney and expert arguments. Judge Chhabria was skeptical about the science.
Ken Cook: I was fully expecting the trial to end at that first juncture.
Chuck Benbrook: In that first phase of the Hardeman trial, the jury brought back a yes, we believe that Roundup contributed to his non Hodgkins lymphoma.
So phase two was liability and Monsanto's bad behavior, and how big should the compensatory damage award should be, how big should the punitive damage award be? And then just a few months after Hardeman, the Pilliod case. And the Pilliod case was what really blew it wide open. Alva and Alberta Pilliod, and after he retired from the Navy in good health, they would buy five acres of kind of rundown urban, suburban property in Northern California, clean it up.
They were birders, so they would take, each one would take their Roundup sprayer in the evening and walk through the properties and use the Roundup to make trails so they could go and watch the wildlife and the birds.
And, and it's hot, and it's hot in Northern California in the, in the spring and summer. And so they would wear flip flops or sneakers without socks. Shorts and t-shirts, because they'd been told it was safe. And because a lot of the spray solution would land on their lower legs and on their hands, they never got sick.
They didn't get a rash. Monsanto had told 'em it's safe and they knew they had it on them and they never got sick and they never had a rash. So they, they figured their lived experience was aligned with what Monsanto was saying. But Doc, there's a problem — when a chemical damages your DNA, you don't feel it.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: You, you don't get a rash.
Ken Cook: They were from Livermore, so they were out in the heat of the day. And if you've been to Livermore, you know how hot it gets over there, but yeah. And it, it got into their skin. And so what happened next?
Chuck Benbrook: Alva and Alberta Pilliod, a married couple, they got exactly the same type, the major type of non-Hodgkins lymphoma within like six months of each other.
So they got the same disease.
Ken Cook: Oh.
Chuck Benbrook: And the lawyer that presented the case, Brent Wisner, someone that you've met.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: He did a masterful job at the tail end of the case in presenting to the jury a way for them — if they so choose to impose punitive damages, how might they figure out the number? A million, 10 million?
And he brought to their attention multiple times during the trial, an email sent by medical doctor to the rest of the management team, the senior people in, involved in preserving their markets for Roundup. And this email chain was speculating about the impact of the IARC classification as a probable human carcinogen.
Ken Cook: Big problem for Monsanto. Big problem.
Chuck Benbrook: For big, big problem. And whether the IARC report would change the EPAs mind. So that they said no, the EPA position was, it was not likely to cause cancer. They, they were concerned about the IARC decision pushing EPA to at least go to possible carcinogen or maybe to a probable carcinogen, which is what the classification decision that IARC made.
So this, this medical officer wrote an email to the brass speculating about whether the, the IARC classification would change EPA, and he entitled it, the billion dollar question.
Ken Cook: There you go.
Chuck Benbrook: And Brent, in the end of his closing statement, the end of the closing statement, this is right before basically the case goes to the jury, he brought that that email back to the attention of the jury in a way that some of the jurors said, hmm, billion, billion, that, that's okay.
Well guess what the jury awarded? A billion dollars to both Alva and Alberta. So it's a $2 billion punitive damage award. One of the largest, punitive damage awards in history for two people.
Ken Cook: For anything. Yeah, for anything. It's this internal document, right? This secret stuff. Right. What they knew and when they knew it.
Profound impact, right? You could line up all the animal studies and all the rest of the evidence critically important to take that into account, but there's something about corporate malfeasance doing things dishonestly, that really rubbed a juror wrong.
Chuck Benbrook: So there were two other smoking gun, very impactful emails in all of these early trials.
The second one was an email by Donna Farmer sent to colleagues in Australia who were dealing with a major news program, investigative program, doing a story about this Roundup cause cancer. And they were getting advice from the brass in St. Louis about what they should say to the, the reporter. They had drafted a statement saying, oh, Roundup doesn't cause cancer, blah, blah, blah.
And she sends them an email saying, we can't say Roundup doesn't cause cancer, 'cause we haven't done the studies required to make that statement. Right in an email. Well, so the jury sees that email about five times.
Ken Cook: Yes, I remember that very well.
Chuck Benbrook: During the trial. And then my personal favorite, number three,
Ken Cook: I think I know which one this is, but go for it.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, yeah. You, you know what's coming. It was written by a senior scientist working for Monsanto Europe that had been involved with the very successful reregistration process in Europe, where the European regulators had basically told Monsanto Europe that they're gonna ban Roundup with polyethoxylated tallow amine POEA surfactants, because it was genotoxic, it was clearly damaging DNA.
Ken Cook: The surfactants are the things they add to the formulation to aid right in its efficacy on the leaf of the plant, right?
Chuck Benbrook: Correct. But it also speeds up the movement of the glyphosate through skin. And it also speeds up the glyphosate moving through a hematopoietic stem cell wall because the glyphosate's gotta get inside the cell to come into contact with the DNA to trigger the mutation that starts that cell on the path to non Hodgkin's lymphoma or leukemia or multiple myeloma, which are things that your buddy Benbrook learned through 11 years working on this litigation.
So this guy that helped Monsanto do this seamless transition where they voluntarily took all of the Roundup off the market that they were selling in Europe that was formulated with the POEA surfactants and replaced it with Roundup, formulated with another surfactant, coronary ammonia surfactants.
And it worked fine. They didn't lose any market. There was no big public concern. And so Dr. Richard Garnett, the guy that did this, was involved in a debate with the, again, the brass in St. Louis, the senior people who were trying to figure out what to do next. 'cause they were dealing with reregistration in the U.S.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: They were dealing with concerns in Mexico that wanted to end use of Roundup. Garnett and others put on the table, well, why don't we make the same change worldwide that we made to make Roundup safer in Europe?
Ken Cook: Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you?
Chuck Benbrook: Why wouldn't you? And, and so in the course of this long email change with, you know, the senior people, the key people that were the decision makers that
Ken Cook: Was never meant to be public.
Chuck Benbrook: That was never meant to be public.
This guy puts in a line, why should we keep making a hazardous pesticide when we know how to make a safer one. In the email!
Ken Cook: I remember
Chuck Benbrook: And, and so again, the jury saw that like five times over the weeks of the trial. I mean, what could be a clear admission that they understood that there were risks to the old Roundup? The Roundup that's still being sold to American farmers, by the way.
Ken Cook: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, that, you know, when will anyone learn if they haven't learned it already, that the coverup is worse than the crime.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. And that's when the advertising started all over the country. I mean, how many ads did all of us, you know, on the radio, on the TV billboards, if you used a lot of Roundup?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Mm-hmm. Call this number. Then of course the number of cases filed, you know, ballooned from several thousand to a hundred thousand, and now I think the total is, it's pushing 180,000 total.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: There's still new cases coming in. It's one of the things that, you know, we ought to talk about a little bit is that there's absolutely no change in how Bayer Monsanto has dealt with Roundup other than for the lawn and garden market.
They took the relatively low tox, active ingredient, glyphosate out of it, and put in three or four different herbicides, including most of them, that are much more toxic than glyphosate, which is just, it's such a irresponsible action by this company, and they say, oh, we did it because we have to curtail the liability risk.
Well. You know, there's gonna be a lot of people that are harmed by this new Roundup because it's still called Roundup. People don't know that there's four other pesticides in it and they think, well, I used to get it all over me and it never made me sick. Well, you get this stuff all over you, you are gonna get, you are gonna get sick. Other than that, they've done nothing.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. And they could have, as they said themselves. So let's talk through the case that proceeded that your Amicus Brief filed on behalf of Heartland Health and Research Alliance, HHRA. The Trump administration came in in the Ninth Circuit and said, yes, we want the Supreme Court to hear it, and yes, FIFRA preempts, the federal law preempts the states, being able to have any kind of parallel warning that should be made known to anyone who uses the product.
So that case just kind of dies out because the, the Biden administration comes along and says, no, we, we think FIFRA preemption here is not appropriate.
So Hardeman gets their settlement and then Mr. Darnell comes along. And at this point we have the Department of Justice under Biden is still saying, no, we, we don't, we don't think the Supreme Court should intervene. We don't think you should look at this case because it's settled. Preemption doesn't prevent these kinds of plaintiff's cases from coming forward.
But the new Supreme Court, as of the summer of 2025. Ask the incoming, the new Trump administration, been in office, not even a year, asks them, what should we do? Should we, should we take another look? Because maybe things have changed with the new administration. And sure enough, then that's when the Trump administration for the second time in the case, it's going to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration says the same thing in effect that it said before, yeah, these cases should be thrown out because FIFRA protects the companies.
Chuck Benbrook: I learned from a very reliable source that this issue of preemption and the tension within the MAHA world came up several months ago in a, a cabinet meeting that Trump was at, and he said, what's this about?
And somebody that knew a little bit about it said, oh, it's this preemption thing. And Trump said, we shouldn't agree with that. We don't want to give a free pass to chemical companies. He said that, and at the time wasn't expected, but the view was, well, it looks like the White House wasn't gonna, wasn't gonna weigh in on, on behalf of Bayer and Syngenta in this policy fight, but clearly other voices changed his mind.
Ken Cook: Yeah. And my colleague also, Brian Bienkowski for The New Lede works with Carey Gillam. He just won the North American Agricultural Journalists top award for news because of his study using the Freedom of Information Act to unearth just how many times Bayer Monsanto lobbyists met with the administration to argue for them to come back and come back, come home and stand for the companies and not for the, the victims of this exposure.
Chuck Benbrook: Oh my God. The, the degree to which Bayer and former Bayer people and people whose professional careers and livelihood has been dependent on Bayer and the other pesticide companies. I've never seen anything like it from the Secretary of Agriculture, Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, this major fundraiser, Brandon, somebody, the Florida guy.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: They all have deep ties into Bayer. This is how large corporations engage with government.
Ken Cook: That's how they get their way.
Chuck Benbrook: They establish long-term relationships with people of influence that they don't know exactly, I mean, who would've guessed that Brooke Rollins would be Secretary of Agriculture in 2026?
Ken Cook: No one in agriculture I guess, did.
Chuck Benbrook: No, nobody in agriculture. And you know, I think, you know, Brooke, Brooke, Brooke is doing a fine job on some issues. But, uh, she certainly is paying attention to her, her friends and colleagues in the Bayer world and the degree of influence that Bayer has now on this administration, I, I've never seen anything like it.
Ken Cook: It's shocking and, uh, you know, of course Lee Zeldin responded pretty favorably when the, uh, Attorney General, early in the administration came to him and said, here's our petition to you at EPA to, to intervene on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto and stand up for, for preemption of state law.
I think all of us were blown away by the executive order that invoked national security as yet another layer of defense. Look, let's think about the layers here. First of all, there's the proceedings in federal court where the solicitor general, the top trial lawyer for the Justice Department weighed in on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto.
Then you have this executive order that, hey, it's a matter of national defense that we keep, keep this stuff being produced. And then finally, we haven't yet heard what the administration will say, but I don't think it'll be a surprise — there's an effort in Congress to rewrite the law in favor of Bayer and Monsanto and lots of other pesticide companies to choke off any kind of state-based claims of harm and avenues for accountability.
So that's, that's really pretty impressive. Uh, we probably won't get to the prospect that a bad decision at the court or the passage of this bad amendment in the Farm Bill, the implications it will have for other pesticide litigation and other venues for holding pesticide companies accountable. But it's significant, right?
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. You asked about the Durnell case. Yeah,
Ken Cook: Yeah. Uh,
Chuck Benbrook: John Durnell was a very typical urban user of Roundup. Bought it at, you know, local Lowe's or Home Depot, sprayed it around his yard again for several years. And was exposed to enough of it that the amount of damage to the DNA in these hematopoietic stem cells in his bone marrow, it, it created enough mutated, uh, cells that are incredibly elaborate and redundant immune systems just couldn't keep up.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And sometimes a cancer will get ahead of the immune system when the immune system's fighting a urinary tract infection or an ear infection, or upper respiratory infection. Or sometimes people are put on immunosuppressive drugs 'cause they're having an a, an organ transplant. If there's some cancer cells in that person's body, they're gonna go wild.
So there, there's, there, cancer is such a complicated disease and there's essentially never or hardly ever one thing that causes a case of cancer. It's a series of things that unfold over at least a few years. Timing has a lot to do with it. John Darnell's case, uh, which I was involved with, I did an expert report and was deposed as, as part of the case — I didn't testify at trial. Uh, it, it reached a judgment. I think he was awarded 1.25 million, which was definitely on the low side.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Monsanto didn't pick the Durnell case because of the, the large award. There were other reasons that they felt it would be a good vehicle to get these, these issues back in, in front of the Supreme Court.
So when, Bayer Monsanto literally engineered the conflict between the appeals courts. They paid people to do the appeals and, and rewarded either plaintiffs or attorneys for an outcome in those appeals that set up the request for the Supreme Court to take the case.
Ken Cook: Set up by a split between two districts.
Chuck Benbrook: Three.
Ken Cook: The third. Three, okay. All right. I know it's the one in Philadelphia, obviously the one in California, and then where was the third one?
Chuck Benbrook: Uh, it's in the southeast.
Ken Cook: Okay. The Supreme Court's looking at it and saying, “Hey, we're getting conflicting readings right from the courts right below us. So that's an invitation for us to step in.”
Chuck Benbrook: Right. But one of the reasons this is so controversial within the legal community is that Bayer Monsanto paid for lawyers to create the conflict in a way that's been exposed.
Ken Cook: How did they go about it? How did they do it?
Chuck Benbrook: What it boiled down to is that they promised both the attorneys and the person that was the plaintiff in the litigation that they would receive financial compensation, even if they settled their case.
Ken Cook: Wow.
Chuck Benbrook: So once the Supreme Court decided to take the case, I said to myself, I've been dealing with preemption since 1981, when I served as the staff director of the DOA subcommittee. And the number one issue that the industry wanted changes on in 1981, in George Brown subcommittee was preemption. And why?
Because the state of California, Florida, Massachusetts, and New York were starting to impose further restrictions, mostly on insecticide use because they didn't want farm workers to be poisoned in the field.
Ken Cook: Yeah. These were parallel to what was required on the label, right? Not
Chuck Benbrook: Correct.
Ken Cook: Not additional to or substitutes to. They were just parallel, like you have to do this too under state law.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, let's use wine grapes. A lot of insecticides are used in in wine grapes. And the company gets a federal label that it, it says how much can be applied, how many times, what kind of sprayer? What sort of PPE the applicator has to wear.
Ken Cook: Personal protective equipment, yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: But doesn't say much about a farm worker, maybe in the next field over, or a, a farm worker that's going into pr...
Ken Cook: It gets on them. It spray, it drifts onto them, or whatever. A family. It could be anybody.
Chuck Benbrook: And the federal label doesn't have any warnings about if you are working in and around a treated field, make sure that you don't get, get exposed. 'Cause this, this stuff will kill you.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Federal labels were being approved that did not address in any way, shape or form many of the ways that farm workers were getting inadvertently, accidentally, exposed in places like California where you'd have a heavily sprayed grape field next to a strawberry field, next to a cauliflower field.
And you know, they're close enough together that some of the pesticides drift and people were getting badly injured, some people were being killed. So the states were requiring on state labels additional restrictions on when and where a field could be applied. And for example, the state of California wanted to put a sign on the corner of the field — this has been sprayed, stay out of the field for at least 24 hours.
And they wanted the signs to be in Spanish. What a radical idea.
Ken Cook: Of course.
Chuck Benbrook: Right. And this is what the pesticide industry at the national level, they didn't want states to be free to address these very localized and often really dangerous, high risk exposure scenarios. So they came to our subcommittee and and said, we want to cut back the role of states in pesticide labeling.
And states can't require anything more on their label than what the federal EPA did. And if a farm worker is injured and heaven forbid killed, they can't go into a state court and sue the company because they got sprayed from this application on the grapes and were exposed to enough to kill them. They couldn't bring litigation because the application was, complied with, what was on the federal label.
So what California was doing, they were adding additional requirements, including mandatory warnings. And so now the industry says, the argument behind the current effort, is that a farmer or a farm worker, or someone that is exposed to a pesticide in a state and is harmed. Either harmed economically, the pesticide killed their crop, killed their apple trees, damaged the paint on their Maserati, which was happening from some aerial applications in California, remember?
Ken Cook: Yeah, I do remember that.
Chuck Benbrook: You know, people were being harmed from legal, labeled uses of pesticides and, and because of state law, they would go into court and say the, you know, there was a failure to warn. But the pesticide companies want now the federal court system and the Supreme Court to say to the state court, you can't recognize a failure to warn claim unless the warning was on the federal label.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And of course, pesticide companies, they're responsible for writing the labels and they resist.
Ken Cook: They don't wanna do it.
Chuck Benbrook: They don't want to.
Ken Cook: It'll hurt sales. It'll hurt sales.
Chuck Benbrook: It'll hurt sales.
Ken Cook: Yeah. You have a phrase in your brief industry backed by the Trump administration, I'm gonna say it again, backed by the administration that includes Bobby Kennedy. What they're basically saying is, we wanna make sure that this preemption exists, not just for the things we warn about on the label, but for anything we didn't think of.
Chuck Benbrook: Or didn't understand.
Ken Cook: Didn't understand. No science. But the, the states are producing the science, Heartland Health and Research Alliance produced vital information. New science that wasn't originally considered in the registration of the pesticide you write about in the brief, but there we are.
Chuck Benbrook: Let me just briefly describe part of the HHRA amicus brief that, I think's gonna catch the attention of the Supreme Court.
Ken Cook: Fingers crossed.
Chuck Benbrook: At the core of it, the pesticide industry, Bayer Monsanto wanna take states out of the pesticide regulatory business
Ken Cook: Out of the game. Totally.
Chuck Benbrook: Out of the game. What's going on right now involving another major Monsanto herbicide called Dicamba. Dicamba is one of the herbicides that Monsanto has developed a way to genetically alter soybeans and cotton plants so that not only can you spray glyphosate over the top of the crop, but you can also spray Dicamba.
And Dicamba is very helpful in dealing with some of the difficult to control broadleaf weeds that are really plaguing corn and soybean farmers around the country now.
Ken Cook: And that because Roundup no longer works, right,
Chuck Benbrook: Because it was used too heavily and irresponsibly. Yeah, because Monsanto fought putting any kind of resistance management provisions on the label because they were afraid that it might curtail their sales.
'Cause Monsanto is all about maximizing the sale and profits from its products and anything that gets in the way of that, what they call they, they want to preserve the ‘freedom to operate.’ The freedom to get labels and then to prevent any limitations being put on the existing labels.
Ken Cook: Freedom to operate. I can see the bald eagles and the American flag — unless the pesticide has killed the bald eagles. Of course, I can see the bald eagles in the American flag in the background. Freedom. Freedom to operate.
Chuck Benbrook: Dicamba has been a hugely controversial development, these Dicamba tolerant crops, because Dicamba is very volatile.
So farmers would spray Dicamba and kill the broadleaf weeds in the soybean field. But then the Dicamba, it volatilizes and goes up in the air, and then it moves with the, the, the wind and wherever it next rains or, or a little dew, it's gonna come back down to earth. Well, guess what? There's a lot of plants and trees and shrubs that when that Dicamba comes back down to earth, it's gonna harm it, if not kill it.
So all over the Midwest, there's been, this movement of Dicamba and, and another phenoxy herbicide, two four D, which is also very volatile. So the, the, the herbicides, they don't stay on the field where they sprayed, funny thing, especially in hot and hum weather, they volatilize go up in the air and move.
And so this has just created havoc in these Midwestern and southeastern states where there's a lot of genetically engineered soybeans and cotton grown and a lot of Dicamba being applied. So what have the states done? The states all now do supplemental labels. And what's in the supplemental labels? They have things like, you can't apply Dicamba after June 15th north of, of Highway five or in X County.
So all of the states now are doing supplemental labels for the Dicamba product. That's registered for over the top use in association with a genetically engineered soybeans and cotton. And these labels have some combination of geographic restrictions where they can be sprayed and what the cutoff date is — because this volatilization problem, it gets worse as it gets hotter.
So the farther into the summer, the worse the problem is. From the first year it was used when they could use it, Christ, they could apply it in August and they were having huge problems. Now most of the states don't allow it much after the third week in June.
And basically the farther south you go, the earlier that date is.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: So now there are three companies, Bayer Monsanto, Syngenta, and BASF, that have EPA approved Dicamba labels for applications on genetically engineered soybeans and cotton. These products are now approved in 34 states. So do the math.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: 34 times three.
So now states are reviewing and approving a hundred supplemental labels. A hundred supplemental labels. These are labels that the states have to do, have to apply, they have to enforce, and there's all kinds of crazy ass implications that nobody thought of. You know, somebody's farming in Missouri along the Iowa border, and they go and they buy some Dicamba in Iowa and it's got the label for Iowa and they bring it to Missouri, who's at fault.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. It's
Chuck Benbrook: unimaginable.
Ken Cook: One of the dynamics here, and you brought it to my attention as these cases were unfolding in this instance, this is a farmer versus farmer thing, right? This is where the plaintiffs were the farmers who were complaining that the drift of this dicamba into their fields that weren't dicamba resistant was costing them a lot of money, a lot of damage, and, and, uh, very upsetting.
Much as they care about their neighbors, they want their neighbors to be able to do what they want to do, like they want to do with their own land. But this stuff doesn't stay on your land. It doesn't stay on your crops. It moves.
Chuck Benbrook: Just think of the hypocrisy here where Bayer Monsanto, for its Roundup product is saying, we gotta cut the role of states out, because we don't like the fact that sometimes we get hauled into court, maybe have to compensate somebody that's been harmed by our product.
But it, but for our Dicamba product, oh, we like it that the states are doing like a almost a hundred supplemental labels this year to allow farmers to spray Dicamba on genetically engineered soybean and cotton,
Ken Cook: And then it falls on the farmers, if they haven't obeyed the label, it falls on them. Not on Monsanto. Is that right?
Chuck Benbrook: Well, that, yes, that, that is exactly correct. Now, if Monsanto has written a inaccurate or ineffective or ambiguous label, they also can become part of litigation. But the, the thing that, that just boils my blood about this, Ken, is the current Supreme Court precedents and direction to state courts about when somebody, that, that is defending a Monsanto or a Syngenta in state court.
Somebody has Parkinson's disease, somebody has non Hodgkin's lymphoma and has brought suit, and that person is seeking compensation from the company, the instructions to the judge on how to deal with a motion — to throw out the failure to warn cause of action. The basis of the litigation.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Throw it out. You can't do it. That foundation, that interpretation of the FIFRA law was put in place in 2005 as a result of a bunch of cantankerous Texas peanut farmers.
Ken Cook: Yes.
Chuck Benbrook: These peanut farmers had bought a brand new Dow AgroSciences herbicide diclosulam. The trade name was Strongarm.
Strongarm, right?
Ken Cook: They always have the great trade names. Machete and whatever. Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: But there was one issue with Strongarm. Maybe more than one, but one issue that Dow knew about was that in soils, high pH soils, it didn't break down as fast as it normally did, and it was pretty persistent. So if, if a peanut farmer used it in the peanuts, it would work great, it would control the weeds. But then the farmer plants a cotton crop after the peanuts, the next year.
And holy shit, the, the Strongarm herbicide is still active and damages the subsequent crop. Well, that's what happened to this group of, of, I think there was seven or eight plaintiffs led by, the lead plaintiff was a, a guy named a farmer named Bates, and all they asked for was their losses to be covered. Which is the, you know, the amount of money that they paid to plant the subsequent crop and this, this kind of thing with, you know, carry over herbicide damage. Yeah. It, it was happening regularly all over the country.
And most of the time if it was a custom applicator, they would have insurance and the insurance would more than cover it. And sometimes the companies would kick in some of the money if it was a, a larger, broader adverse impact. But for some reason Dow decided that by God we're gonna fight this and try to get rid of this failure to warn cause of action.
And so Dow takes on this group of seven Texas peanut farmers takes on big Dow AgroSciences
Ken Cook: All the way to the Supreme Court.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. And wins.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And wins. And so now American farmers read the, the propaganda put out by the Modern Ag Alliance and other front groups that are being financed mostly by Bayer Monsanto and Syngenta — that are the two multinational pesticide companies facing billions of dollars of costs from litigation over, in the case of Syngenta, Paraquat Parkinson's disease, and in the case of Bayer Monsanto, Roundup and Non Hodge's lymphoma.
They are desperate, desperate to find a way to limit their liability exposure. And let, let me at this point, make one other point that is really important. Why is the pesticide industry so determined to try to get this change in law put in place?
And there's really a very obvious answer. Science is catching up with the ability to link exposure to a given pesticide to damage to DNA or some marker of the evolution of a chronic disease, which then clearly increases the risk of some bad thing happening. Science is catching up on all of the instances where the pesticide industry covered up knowledge and evidence of harm and convinced regulators to say, yeah, it's okay.
We'll label that. That pesticide can be in broccoli. This pesticide can be in carrots. This pesticide can be sprayed all over rangeland in the West. And EPA made those decisions, because the companies had successfully kept the regulators from understanding what the companies already understood about how the pesticide can damage human health.
And the companies know that there are going to be more of these successful efforts by the pesticide industry to keep products on the market, for decades, in some cases, after the company knew it was causing significantly heightened risk of, in the case of Paraquat and Parkinson's disease, the predecessor companies to Syngenta, remember back in the day when we called them Novartis?
Ken Cook: Okay, I do remember. Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we're going back, but in 1980s, Novartis sponsored cutting edge quality research on what Paraquat was doing in the human brain. And guess what they found? It was triggering damage to dopamine neurons. Completely consistent, and fundamentally part of the progression of damaged neurons to Parkinson's disease — in the eighties!
Ken Cook: Yeah. And another shout out to Carrie Gillum because she published something called the Paraquat Papers. They're on the The New Lede website right now. They were published by The Guardian as well, that again, once you lift this corporate veil and see what they knew and when they knew it, what they were talking about in memos and emails and other communications, they fricking knew.
And they have an obligation under law to let the government know and they didn't. And we know why they didn't. For all the reasons you just described, it's the beginning of the end for them.
Chuck Benbrook: And Ken, let, let me make really clear, 'cause I'm sure some farmers that do worry about access to Roundup are listening to this.
Monsanto knew that Roundup herbicides were damaging the DNA in stem cells in all of our bone marrow. They knew that by the early two thousands. They didn't have any tools to quantify exactly how big the increase in risk of non Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple myeloma, leukemia, the blood cancers.Very important cancers.
They didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle put together like we do now, today.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: But they knew enough to say, let's put a warning on it.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: You know, if you're using this product a lot and use it over several years, take extra precautions to avoid exposures. They should have put a requirement for for on the label when you are handling and applying this product, wear gloves. I mean, how simple is that?
Ken Cook: How about a long sleeve shirt? How about long — no flip flops, right?
Chuck Benbrook: No flip flops. The Roundup non Hodgkin’s lymphoma litigation is unfortunately stuffed with incredible stories. There was a woman in Florida, she loved her backyard garden, especially her rose bushes.
She had an area in her backyard with her rose bushes.
Ken Cook: My mom and Aunt Ruth did too. I think you saw it one time too.
Chuck Benbrook: God bless them.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Chuck Benbrook: Been a long time since they left a stock.
Ken Cook: That's right. That's right.
Chuck Benbrook: So this woman, she used bark mulch under her roses, very proud of her roses. And then she had her lawn and she hated it when her lawn started to creep out into her bark mulch, which, yeah, don't we all tend to do.
Ken Cook: Don't we all? Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: So she devised a creative solution. She would have her little Roundup canister that she bought at Home Depot and the little electric sprayer on with shorts on and bare feet.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And she would put her foot on top of the edge of the grass, on top of the edge of the grass and then spray the bark mulch with her foot catching the, the spray.
And she did that for several years. And guess what? She got non Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: I mean, people do kind of crazy things, but
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: When a, when a company tells people that their product is non-toxic, it's, it's all natural ingredients, biodegradable.
Ken Cook: You can spray out the window of a cab as you're on your way to the airport.
Chuck Benbrook: Right? Yeah. Right. And remember the ads for DDT with the kids in suburban areas?
Ken Cook: Yes, off course.
Chuck Benbrook: Of course. Walking behind the spray truck 'cause it looks like it's snowing. In an urban area.
Ken Cook: I did it in my suburban St. Louis neighborhood. Of course I did.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah.
Ken Cook: Of course I did.
Chuck Benbrook: We all did. So what, what does DDT and Roundup glyphosate have in common? They have an extraordinarily high LD 50.
Ken Cook: The LD 50 is the amount that will kill half the animals in an experiment.
Chuck Benbrook: Exactly. LD stands for lethal dose. Dash 50 is 50% of the animals. So this is the
Ken Cook: Died during the study
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. Right, right.
Ken Cook: It's not like this is, we wait around for them to get cancer. They're fricking dead.
Chuck Benbrook: Right
Ken Cook: In the cage.
Chuck Benbrook: Right, right. And so, you know, the, the, the LD 50 for glyphosate is like 4,000 parts per million. I mean, it's really high. Just the same as with DDT. I mean, you can stick your arm into a barrel of Roundup and pull your arm out and you're not gonna get sick. You're not gonna have symptoms, you're not gonna get a rash.
If you stick your little one finger just a little bit into that much Paraquat, you're gonna die.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Or any of the high risk, uh, organophosphate or carbonate insecticide.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. It varies. Well, you've been very generous with your time, so I just want to ask you one more question and, and you know, again, we're, this is gonna stay with us for a while, depending, especially depending on where, where the Supreme Court goes down, depending on what happens with the Farm Bill next week and what, we don't have time to talk about that particular scenario, but you and I have been through dozens of Farm Bills it feels like.
But what do you think is at stake now? So politically, there are all kinds of questions now in the world of MAHA because they feel betrayed, and rightly so. They shouldn't have been surprised, but because they don't know all the history that we know, uh, they just assume when Trump said he was gonna do something about pesticides, and it sounds like you've, you've heard he was surprised at the preemption position the government took, uh, in the end too.
So there's that political element where we gotta get people to wake up to what's really going on. But then there's, there's the real possibility that if this decision goes the wrong way, and we've had some doozies on the environment from this court, right — that we could, we could really be in trouble.
We could really lose one of our few remaining avenues, other than buying organic food. But certainly for a lot of people being exposed outside the dietary exposure route, we, we could really be in trouble when it comes to protecting human health and the environment and all kinds of critters from pesticides.
But, but what, what's your sort of closing thought on all of this, Chuck? You, I mean, you, you and I go back decades, but you've been, you know, a, a, a leader on pesticide policy and regulation and obviously deeply involved as an expert in this litigation now also for decades. What comes to your mind that, that makes you most concerned if this goes sideways?
Chuck Benbrook: Really important, uh, question Ken and I, I, I think the answer is that right now, the, the only meaningful accountability and concern about coming forward and getting high risk pesticides registered for uses that are gonna result in a lot of, uh, human exposure is the, the risk of litigation. If that risk is taken away, then, right now, the, the pesticide industry has a very cozy relationship with the Office of Pesticide Programs.
Ken Cook: Longstanding very long, unfortunately, uncomfortably longstanding. I think, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but, you know.
Chuck Benbrook: OPP started to go downhill by the late eighties, uh, and from basically the late eighties on, the ability of pesticide registrants to get their way with the Office of Pesticide Programs has steadily increased to, to the point now where they're, they're not really that concerned about getting their, their products on the market, and they're certainly not concerned about EPA taking a high risk product off the market.
I mean, look what happened just two weeks ago. Syngenta bailed on Paraquat before the EPA took it off the market.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And what, why did Syngenta bail on it? Because they know they're gonna keep getting sued. It, it's, it's been banned in China, which owns Syngenta. You know, it's, it's just, uh, the, the lax approach of the US EPA and the Office of Pesticide programs about well documented, clearly hazardous uses of pesticides.
It, it's, it's, a travesty. And I think that farmers are starting to figure it out — because they look in their neighborhood cancer, this family, two cases of cancer, this family, three cases in this family.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: They can see that people are getting sick.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And unfortunately we have big problems with how we grow food in this country, and then what we do with the food between when it leaves the farm and people eat it.
The concerns over ultra processed food are real. The health of the American public is a national disgrace right now.
Ken Cook: Yeah, for sure.
Chuck Benbrook: I think the public is about had it with it. And I think that the day is going to come, you know, in, in the next five or 10 years where there's going to be substantial changes in some of the laws and policies that govern agriculture and, and, and food safety and food quality.
We could have the most nutritious, delicious, diverse food supply in this country if we wanted to, but no. What do we have? We produce a lot of ethanol. We export a lot of food and we feed a lot of corn and soybeans to, to livestock and create unhealthy fats that keep us unhealthy. Our food and fiber system is seriously broken, and the, the, the time is, is, has come to fix it.
Ken Cook: Well, between your lips and God's ears, brother Chuck, I'm gonna end there and, and thank you for, uh, explaining all of this to me and to my, uh, audience and, and also for your decades of devotion, uh, intellectually and, um, devotion that comes from, from the heart. I know that firsthand, we'll come back when we find out how some of these deci, big decisions have come down.
The most momentous decisions really since the 1990, mid 1990s, Food Quality Protection Act and the National Academy, most momentous moment.
Chuck Benbrook: I, I knew you were gonna say that at some point.
Ken Cook: Yeah. We haven't agree. Had a moment like this and, um…
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah.
Ken Cook: We'll stick with it. Uh, Chuck Benbrook, thank you for joining and giving me another great episode.
Chuck Benbrook: Thank you.
Ken Cook: Thank you to Dr. Chuck Benbrook for joining me today, and thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @KenCooksPodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about ewg, head on over to ewg.org or check out the ewg Instagram account @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup.
Now, if this episode resonated with you, and I hope it did, and you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along. The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extremely remarkable Beth Rowe at Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is by Moby.
Thank you Moby, and thank you again out there for listening.
Areas of Focus Chemical Policy Glyphosate Pesticides May 29, 2026We the People on display at Folklife 2026!
We the People featured at NW Folklife Festival this weekend!
Two copies will be at Seattle Center this weekend at the NW Folklife Festival, one at the Mural Amphitheater Stage, near the Space Needle and another in the International Fountain Pavilion, with pens for signing. Use this chance to add your signature in time for it to be taken to DC this July 4th!
Over the last 19 years, Backbone's giant We the People banner has served as an icon of people power and our aspirations to fulfill the shared mission of creating a more perfect union. Adding two more Preamble sections has allowed it to appear in even more cities in the past year, collecting signatures and grabbing the attention of the press and public as a symbol of resistance and resilience.
2026 Northwest Transmission Summit Digest
In early May, we held our first-ever Northwest Transmission Summit in Boise, Idaho. Stakeholders from around the region, including Tribal, environmental, and community leaders, nonprofits, developers, policymakers, and energy and transmission experts gathered at the Boise Centre for two days to learn, share perspectives, and take action to build our prosperous future.
Thank you so much to Renewable Northwest who partnered on the planning of the summit and co-sponsored the event. Thank you to our sponsors:
Thank you to our speakers, to the Boise Centre for hosting, to everyone who attended, and to our community partners who helped us spread the word about the event.
We are so grateful for the diverse perspectives, insights, and deep engagement everyone brought to this summit. We recorded all of the panel discussions and have linked them below in case you missed the conference or want to dive in again.
What We LearnedAt the end of day two, our Senior Policy Associate and event host Ben Otto wrapped up the summit with an incredible summary of the themes and key takeaways that emerged throughout the event. Attendees also asked questions and shared what stuck with them.
We didn’t solve every problem, but we made great progress on some challenges, reflected on innovative solutions, and came up with more questions to stimulate lots of future conversations and actions. Stay tuned for a future blog on our learnings from the summit and our next steps.
Summit HighlightsWe opened and closed the conference with a few polls of the audience to gauge everyone’s interest, understanding of, and commitment to work on transmission issues. It was incredible to see the results on day two: participants’ understanding of transmission issues and how to engage in the region had markedly increased.
Our shared understanding of the primary barriers to building transmission also transformed after two days of discussion at the summit.
We were inspired by attendees’ key takeaways:
We look forward to building on the momentum from the summit and will share more transmission-related programming soon. We also welcome you to join us at our fall conference on October 15 at the University of Washington HUB in Seattle—check back here soon for registration information.
Keep in touch with us: email nwec@nwenergy.org or sign up for our newsletter.
Panel DiscussionsPanel 1
The Grid We Share: History and Perspectives on Regional Transmission
Panelists:
- Jillan Hanson, Climate and Renewable Energy Program Manager, The Nature Conservancy in Idaho
- Brant Johnson, Senior Vice President of Development, Grid United
- Jamie Hearn, Climate and Community Planning Lead, Front and Centered
- Donald Williams, Founder/Principal/CEO, From the Light Consulting
- Mike McArthur, Renewable Northwest
Moderator: Stephanie Lenhart, Associate Professor, Boise State University
Panel 2
Looking Ahead: Opportunities to Expand the Transmission System
Panelists:
- Casey Baker, Senior Program Manager, GridLab
- Hamody Hindi, Manager of Transmission Planning, Bonneville Power Administration
- Kyle Unruh, Director, Montana & Idaho, Renewable Northwest
- Curtis Westhoff, System Consulting Engineer, Idaho Power Planning Department
Moderator:
- Shanna Brownstein, Head of Utility Partnerships, GridCARE
Panel 3
Issues and Solutions Part 1: Community and Environmental Impacts and Siting Processes
Panelists:
- Shannon Stewart, VP of Environmental Compliance & Strategy, Invenergy
- John Robison, Public Lands & Wildlife Director, Idaho Conservation League
- Reuben Martinez, Energy Program Manager, Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI)
- Jeff Hough, Bannock County Board of Commissioners
Moderator:
- Aaron Menenberg, Idaho Policy Manager, Renewable Northwest
Panel 4
Issues and Solutions Part 2: Regional Planning and Coordination
Panelists:
- Rich Glick, Principal, GQS New Energy Strategies
- Caitilin Liotiris, Principal, Energy Strategies
- Donald Williams, Founder/Principal/CEO, From the Light Consulting
Moderator:
- George Lynch, Deputy Director, Western Interstate Energy Board
Panel 5
Issues and Solutions Part 3: How Costs and Benefits are Determined and Allocated at the State Level
Panelists:
- John Hammond, Idaho Public Utilities Commission
- Les Perkins, Oregon Public Utility Commission
- Brian Rybarik, Chair, Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission
Moderator:
- Megan Decker, Staircase Advisory
Panel 6
Issues and Solutions Part 4: Workforce and Construction
Panelists:
- Jake Pollack, Senior Director, Strategy & Impact, Strategic Energy Innovation
- Erich Orth, Bonneville Power Administration
- Jason Hudson, Government Affairs Director, IBEW 77
Moderator:
- Kate French, Senior Policy Manager, Power Sector, BlueGreen Alliance
The post 2026 Northwest Transmission Summit Digest first appeared on NW Energy Coalition.
HCA Fort Walton-Destin Hospital nurses to hold informational picket for patient safety
CELDF Publication – State of Rights of Nature Report
This first edition of CELDF's State of Rights of Nature Report represents yet another important contribution from CELDF to those studying, documenting, or actively working for rights of nature.
The post CELDF Publication – State of Rights of Nature Report appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.
Great Salt Lake Conservation Gains Momentum with $1 Billion Federal Push and Renewed State Commitment
On the road to extinction: 3 species we could lose
Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 58
This Earth Day, we’re not celebrating progress; we’re sounding the alarm. In today’s episode, EWG co-Founder and President Ken Cook sits down with Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney, co-authors of a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine that breaks down how the Trump administration’s sweeping environmental rollbacks are threatening the health of every American.
Landrigan is no stranger to these fights. As a young Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor in the 1970s, his groundbreaking research on lead poisoning in children helped drive lead out of gasoline and paint. This victory reduced childhood lead poisoning by 95% and raised the IQ of an entire generation.
Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Harvard Medical School, has spent his career fighting to protect his patients’ lungs – and now the very protections that keep those lungs healthy are being dismantled one regulation at a time.
Together, the doctors share with Cook all the vital rules that the administration is undoing, who will suffer most, and what it will cost the public in health harms and lives lost – from weakened air quality standards and gutted climate policy, to the quiet destruction of the scientific institutions that keep Americans safe.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
Ken: Hi there. I'm Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. On the eve of Earth Day, I'm really thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney to discuss their recently published article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “The Dismantling of Environmental Protections, a Grave Threat to America's Health,” that published on March 25th, 2026.
Dr. Philip Landrigan is a pediatrician and a legendary public health physician who directs the global observatory on planetary health at Boston College. A prominent figure in environmental health and guest on this show, Dr. Landrigan spent 15 years at the CDC and is internationally recognized for his decades of research on the health effects of toxic chemicals, pesticides, and pollution, particularly on children.
And it's always worth mentioning because it is so important: in 1976 alongside the late, wonderful, great Dr. Herb Needleman, another longtime friend of EWG, Dr. Landrigan led the US government to mandate the removal of lead from gasoline and paint. That action reduced childhood lead poisoning dramatically in the United States by 95% — that's legendary.
My other guest today is Dr. Adam Gaffney, who's an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance, a health policy researcher, and a writer and commentator on issues of medicine and policy. His research focuses on national healthcare reform, healthcare equity, and disparities in lung health.
The article was also co-authored by Dr. David Himmelstein, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, and researcher Sancia Sehdev. This team collectively brings decades of expertise in public health, health equity, and environmental medicine. Now on Earth Day, we like to think we'd be celebrating the progress made in protecting our air, water, and the health of future generations.
Instead, this episode finds us at a deeply troubling moment, one where the very protections that Earth Day was created to champion are being systematically rolled back. Rather than marking another year of progress, Dr. Landrigan, Dr. Gaffney, and their colleagues have felt compelled to sound the alarm, documenting in painstaking detail what is being lost and what it will cost us in human health and lives.
This is not the Earth Day any of us hoped to celebrate this year, but it is one that demands our full attention. Dr. Landrigan and Dr. Gaffney, congratulations to both of you on this paper. One of my frustrations, and I think as public health doctors, it probably is one of your frustrations too, is that the public often doesn't understand the connection of the environment to their health. And so the first step is to get people to recognize that.
But clean air, clean water, pesticide policy, all manner of issues involving climate change, all of these can have very distinctly important, indeed, profound impacts on human health — that are unfortunately tragically being eroded severely in this administration. So let me just start off and ask both of you, what made you take this article on this research project?
Dr. Landrigan: Well, Ken, firstly, let me say how nice it is to be here. It's really great to be to be with you again. I think we go back to the early 1990s when we were working together on pesticides in their hazards to children's health.
Ken: Yeah. I was in high school at the time, if you'll remember. I was.
Dr. Landrigan: You were possibly middle school.
Ken: Otherwise the math would be bad for me right now I think.
Dr. Landrigan: Exactly. But why did, why did we take this on?
Well, this, this is actually the second time we've taken this on. We actually did a similar exercise during the first Trump administration and we tabulated the rollbacks. And we published a paper in The Lancet, which is the world's most widely read medical journal, published outta London, and we calculated that environmental and occupational health rollbacks during Trump one were responsible for, in the neighborhood of 20,000 unnecessary premature deaths per year in the United States.
Most of those deaths were due to increased levels of air pollution. And a smaller but still significant number were due to rollbacks of occupational health and safety safeguards. The administration talks about these rollbacks as freeing industry from the shackles of regulation and about driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion.
What they don't talk about is that those common sense safeguards that they're rolling back actually protect people's health. They save lives and, and speaking as a pediatrician, they especially protect the health of children. We reckoned, Adam and I reckoned, that we needed to shine a light on what was going on.
Dr. Gaffney: You know, for me clinically, I'm a pulmonary and critical care physician, so the lungs are near and dear to what I do each day, and so many of these policies will do harm to, not only the lungs of the patients I treat or adults, but of children whose lungs are still developing and may never achieve the health that they could have had had they not been exposed to, uh, unnecessary levels of pollutants — like soot pollution and so forth.
So it's near and dear to my clinical work. I would also add that sort of, as you said, Ken, it's very easy for a lot of these policies to be implemented with relatively little public knowledge because they’re so complex, because there's so many, because it's a death by a thousand cuts sort of approach.
Whereby even if you do care about the environment, even if you are worried about the cleanliness of our air and water, you might not realize what is happening. You may not realize that polluters are going to be allowed to put more mercury into the air, to put more pollutants in the water, to release more air pollution into the environment.
So that's part of why I wanted to collaborate on this is to actually systematically outline what is happening in the potential risks for Americans.
Ken: And you've, you've really put your finger on something important here. I like to think I keep up as a professional paid environmentalist, but I can't. With all of the changes that are taking place just at EPA, then if you were to add in changes at the Department of Interior, even the Department of Defense, uh, certainly the energy department, all of these changes that have been made in the name of, um, you know, cutting regulation.
What does, uh, Zelin, the EPA administrator, he, his little micro brand is, um, the Great American comeback. That's how he advertises all of his regulatory cuts. But for sure, just keeping up with them is, is difficult. And that was, I think that's part of the plan.
We had an author on David Graham from The Atlantic who wrote a book about Project 2025, and one of the most important elements that was embedded in that, not just the document, but the strategy was to go fast, go quickly, do a lot of things at once so no one can focus for very long on any one impact. And I'm gonna get a little nerdy here, maybe for some listeners, but I encourage everyone to read this article.
It's, it's open source, it's available. Right. There's no paywall. You can get it and read it, and it's written for, you know, a concerned layman. It's not, you don't have to be a scientist to understand the impact of this very thoroughly documented piece, but the, you know, just the, the title Selected Health Effects of Trump Administration, Environmental Policy, Actions and Proposals, and you go through air pollution regulation, power plant regulation, climate change, motor vehicle pollution, water pollution, occupational health.
We've talked to, uh, I've talked to a number of people about different aspects of this, but you've put it all together when you stand back and look at the scope of it. And the, the speed, I mean, we're, we're really just over a year in, right? As public health professionals and, and, and clinicians, what do you make of the overall assault, I think is the only term that can be put, it's, is it, is it literally breathtaking for you as it has been for me?
Dr. Landrigan: Yeah. It's, it's, it's massive, Ken. It's, it's massive. And what we'll do next, the next phase of our work, which is just now getting underway. Is that we will actually do our best to tabulate the toll of disease and death that results from these rollbacks.
So for example, we'll look at how much air pollution increases in each of the 50 states over the next couple of years.
Ken: Yeah.
Dr. Landrigan: And we know very well from previous research that we and others have conducted, that each increment in air pollution causes more heart attacks, more strokes, more lung cancers, more deaths from chronic obstructive lung disease in adults, in kids, more still births, more premature births, more children with asthma.
We'll tabulate those impacts. There's no way in the world we can ever do a full accounting, but we'll do our best to count how much disease and death is due to, to these rollbacks. And you know, one of my mentors, decades ago when I was working at CDC, told me that statistics are people with the tears wiped off.
And in our articles, we won't be able to tell the stories of individual people. We'll leave that to folks like you Ken, but we can certainly present the, the statistics and thereby enable Americans to understand the, the magnitude of what's going on.
Ken: Yeah. Adam, is there, is there any proposals or actions across these issue areas that really stood out for you as a public health expert and then also as a clinician where you, where you thought, oh wow, this is just gonna make my public health and my clinical jobs much, much harder?
Dr. Gaffney: Well, it is hard to say one, and I'll, and I'll add this to that discussion, which is that, the problem is even larger than what that table shows. In another paper that Phil and I and many other colleagues published recently, we look at additional policies that are gonna harm the lung health of Americans.
So even beyond environmental and occupational policies, we're looking at 10 million people losing health coverage as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Right? We're looking at cuts and NIH funding. We're looking at cutbacks in research. We're looking at anti-immigrant actions that are going to have impacts on health and healthcare delivery.
So just to take a step back, this is actually part and parcel of a larger agenda for sure, that will for sure all be injurious to health. I think, you know, in terms of these specific policies, it is hard to pick it out. I mean, it's one, one year ago, Zelin, you know, had this press release where he declared the biggest deregulatory action in US history, quote unquote, and there were 31 different actions.
And some of the ones that we sort of described in this paper that I think I'll just highlight — one, rolling back the heightened standards for particulate matter 2.5 pollution, PM 2.5 pollution that the Biden administration in advance. Building on a huge body of science and knowledge that this pollution is harmful, it causes heart attacks, it causes strokes, it causes lung disease.
To go back into the past and undercut those protections to me is just mind bogglingly shortsighted. I also think the destruction of the endangerment finding, which is the policy that effectively allows the federal government to regulate climate pollution, uh, is going to have very harmful long-term effects.
We're basically taking away our own ability to do anything about climate change. So I could, I could kind of go on and on, but those two, I think, are worth highlighting at the outside of the discussion.
Ken: Yeah. No, I, I agree with you on those and it is hard to pick. I had, uh, Joe Goffman on, uh, the podcast a while back, who's one of the premier experts on Clean Air Act Policy and climate change policy ran the EPA programs, uh, under, uh, the Biden administration. And I said to him at the time, and you know, for me the Clean Air Act is the queen of environmental laws. That's the one that's really worked. And Phil and I have worked on pesticides and lots of other issues where we wish it worked as well as the Clean Air Act worked.
And I, I asked him if he didn't think, you know, the Clean Air Act and regulations around it really became kind of a, a bullseye, uh, for, you know, let's just be candid when, when Republicans take over and, uh, there's the kind of push there has been. And, uh, we have plenty of Republicans that support environmental protection, I don't mean that.
But there's an ideology here that really does seem to focus on what ends up in our lungs because they go after Clean Air Act regulations like the PM 2.5 standard, right? They wanna push those back. And Joe went into some detail about just the many ways they're trying to do that. And there are two elements here, and you touch on both of them in this paper.
One is a little easier to understand than the other. One is, I think one is the deregulatory steps are pretty easy to at least understand what they're doing. They're taking a specific regulation and they're gonna try and undo it — the endangerment finding or what they're doing on how our plant regulation, what have.
The, the more insidious and maybe the scarier element for me is the dysregulation that they're pursuing by reducing staff, reducing funding, getting rid of scientists. They don't have scientific debates in this administration, they just fire the scientists that disagree with 'em or sideline them or push them out. Talk a little bit about this long-term erosion of capability and capacity and how damaging that is going to be and hard to repair.
We might be able to reinstate a regulation and we might even defeat some of these efforts in court. The Trump administration's, you know, up against lots of litigation from folks in my community who are trying to stop these rules that they can, you know, I think in many cases are considered, you know, borderline if not illegal, and so they'll lose in court.
But the dysregulatory stuff — the long-term damage to these agencies and the staffs and the funding for extramural research funding that goes outside agencies to support academic institutions and children's health centers and so forth. That's really hard to tally up, hard to explain to people, but say, because you're both involved in it, say a little bit about how that hits.
Dr. Gaffney: Well, Ken, I think you are right, and the reality is, is that it's easier to destroy than to create. Institutions need to be built up over time, and it's very hard to put the net back together again. So, for example, the Office of Research and Development, the EPA’s internal research agency, which has been credited with all sorts of advances over time in terms of pushing forward our understanding of pollution, but also how to control it and how to regulate it.
That's, you know, being taken apart by the administration. And how does that get put back together again? I think you're seeing the same thing with research science at, say, the NIH. Congress rejected the administration's calls for cuts to NIH funding. But what happens to the know-how when people leave, when projects get defunded, when research gets interrupted when the clinical trials don't get completed.
That's harder to put back together again. I'll add one other thing though. I agree with you that there's the deregulation that's sort of easy to understand. It's sort of seen as pro-business say. Another thing that I truly can't understand is the assault on clean energy, which isn't even pushing business forward in America. It's really just favoring one specific sector and undercutting our ability to power America in a safe way, uh, for years to come.
Ken: I agree. And some of those forms of clean energy are also the cheapest forms of energy in terms of providing electricity now, and I'm really glad that I have solar panels on my roof and an EV out in the parking pad because, um, I'm not, uh, getting the direct hit from, uh the increase in gas prices we're experiencing now and the pollution that goes with it. But, you know, we have, we were inventing a new energy economy at the end of the Biden administration.
We were really just getting started and that's all been thrown in reverse and that's going to have big impacts on air pollution, our lungs, obviously on contamination of the environment with mercury from coal burning power plants, oil spills, all the rest.
Dr. Landrigan: And, and Ken, just think about the economics of it. I mean, this morning as I was coming into work, I passed a gas station. Gas was at $4 a gallon, 3.99 a gallon. At the same time, the cost of solar energy have come down by more than 90%.
Ken: Yeah.
Dr. Landrigan: The cost of wind energy has come down by 75 to 80%. The cost of battery storage have come down by 95%. We're turning our back on clean energy that is also affordable energy in favor of yesterday's energy source, which is oil and gas and coal.
Ken: Yeah. And turning the, all the advantage over to other countries, certainly China, uh, that's pushing ahead.
I mean, there's a global buildout on solar in particular that is mind blowing right now, both at the utility scale and rooftop and we're, we put the brakes on it, in fact, threw it into reverse. It's very discouraging because that will have. A great many environmental impacts down the road.
Dr. Gaffney: It's not only about taking away the subsidies that went towards battery production or electric vehicle purchasing, it's a direct attempt to undercut those sectors, you know, even on their own terms.
So for instance, the Trump administration, I don't know whether it stands now, tried to block a nearly complete wind farm, you know, in Rhode Island from being completed. That's just an example of using the power of the government to go after one sector of energy production. Meanwhile, they actually mandated that some fossil fuel power plants stay open even when the grid operators had already said, these are obsolete. That's a very stunning development.
Ken: Again, I think the, the, the boldness has always defeated my imagination when it comes to the Trump administration. Just things like the rep, last report I saw, I think it's, we might have the same wind energy proposal in mind, they were going to pay the company a billion dollars not to build the,
Dr. Landrigan: That's a different one. The one the, the one that Adam is mentioning is in Rhode Island. The one where they paid the billion dollars to the French investor was on Long Island, New York.
Ken: Yeah. I mean, I don't know how much dumber it gets, but that's right up there.
Unbelievable. So there's a really useful appendix, uh, with any number of tables that help people understand in detail. Where these proposals have landed. And one of the areas is occupational health, which I know is near and dear to you, Phil and I had a NIOSH scientist on, uh, on the program fairly early on in, uh, the last year, and she was third generation NIOSH scientist.
It's, NIOSH is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. It's part of the Centers for Disease Control — and that agency early on, they've, they've made some rectifications, but mostly they just clubbed it in the early weeks and months of the Trump administration. Laid off a bunch of scientists, she told me that it was so bad that in some cases scientists had to kind of go into their labs and euthanize the animals, uh, in the experiments they were doing because they weren't gonna be allowed in to, to feed them.
The experiments were supposed to just stop, uh, but the animals were there in their cages. But we don't spend very much money as it is on occupational health and the, and the returns are enormous to protect our workforce. Say a little bit about what you learned when you looked at what, what is going on with respect to investment and in understanding occupational safety and health?
Dr. Landrigan: Sure. No, it's a, it's, it's such a big thing. Uh, I worked at NIOSH for, for six years. I was, I was a medical epidemiologist there, and when I was at NIOSH, what we used to do, which, we would go out to factories, where our work sites were, where problems were reported. We would investigate the problem, we'd figure out what was going on, and then we would work with the employee, we would work with the employees, we would work with the union if there was a union.
And collaboratively come up with solutions that protected the workers' health, saved lives, and generally made the businesses more profitable because they weren't having to pay large sums of money for workers' compensation or face liability suits.
It was basically a, a partnership for health rather than splitting people apart and, and fermenting divisiveness. So, and when people have done economic analysis on occupational safety and health, the, the returns are anywhere from six to one, to 10 to one, to 12 to one. For every dollar that's invested in protecting workers' health and safety, that's a six, 10, $12 return in the form of lower healthcare costs and increased productivity.
Ken: And I think I had, until I interviewed the scientist, I didn't realize just really how modest our investment at NIOSH is. She, she said there were like maybe 800 total employees at NIOSH.
Dr. Landrigan: There are many, many more game wardens across the United States protecting deer in the forest than there are occupational safety and health inspectors.
Ken: Yeah, well talk about priorities. Um, but yeah, I was startled. And so even with that modest investment that was savagely reduced, at least in the early days,
Dr. Landrigan: Something like the initial cut was in the neighborhood of 90% of the staff.
Ken: Yeah. Yeah. Say a little bit if you can, um, about what you're hearing. I don't want you to betray any confidences.
Actually I do, if you would, if it's, if it's interesting, please do betray them. But, um, what's your sense of what's happening at NIH and at CDC? I know you, you both have dozens and dozens of connections there. What's the mood of the people I talk to are, uh, you know, they're sticking by their guns in many cases, if they can, and they're trying to do the best they can under the circumstances, but it's grim, right?
Dr. Landrigan: Yeah. Well, you know, I was including my six years at NIOSH. I was a total of 15 years at CDC.
Ken: Yeah.
Dr. Landrigan: And I must tell you, the CDC workforce are among the most dedicated, selfless people in America. They will drop what they're doing on a moment's notice to fly to West Africa to deal with the Ebola outbreak.
They'll stop whatever research they're doing to go to Utah or Alaska or North Carolina or Maine to deal with an outbreak of rabies or measles. Often at great physical hazard to themselves.
Dr. Gaffney: Yeah.
Dr. Landrigan: What they're doing is, I think that those people are dedicated to the mission. Many of your doctors, others, or nurses, epidemiologists, public health scientists, they deeply believe in the mission.
They're just going to do their best to, to hang on and, and ride this crisis through. I'm sure that day to day it's not easy, but you know, they, they have a sense of fulfilling a noble mission and they're gonna stick with it.
Ken: That's been my total experience with the, the CDC scientists and professionals that I've dealt with over the past 40 or 50 years.
It's just, um, if, if there was one agency that I really held in high regard, maybe because they're fundamentally not regulatory, but they're, you know, they're, you get the straight science from them. At least that's been my experience. It's just, uh, heartbreaking to see, see that under assault. Uh, same with just generally the, you know, the NIH. I mean, my goodness, and I know the big funding cuts were rejected, true enough, but, uh, there was, there's still been enormous, enormous damage done.
And, and the morale, the hit to morale, you know, you know that we were on the right track, for example, to take on a specific issue and then to find that stymied or, you know, distractions brought in, like, working on lesser topics like Ivermectin or whatever it might be.
Dr. Landrigan: You know, for decades, American science has been the envy of the world. Nobody else in the world, not in Europe, not in China, not in India, nowhere has done science as well as we do, and, and the reason we do it is several fold. Firstly, the funding has been generous. Secondly, it operates on a meritocracy and everything is peer reviewed.
Only the best of the best science gets funded. It's not a buddy system, it's not a crony system, it's not corrupt, it's transparent. And, um, if you wanna succeed in the system, you have to be good and you have to make contributions and, and you have to be about helping other people. And it's because American science has been so good that scientists have come here to American universities, to American think tanks from, from countries around the world.
Sadly, we're now squandering that advantage and, and we're seeing really good scientists, especially the younger ones who have not yet established their careers taking jobs in Europe, in Canada, in Australia, in China, in India. And what we're seeing is a brain drain from the United States. That is not good. Not good at all.
Dr. Gaffney: And I would just add very briefly, this is not just about funding cuts, which are devastating. There's this broader politicization and pseudoscience.
Dr. Landrigan: Yeah.
Dr. Gaffney: RFK junior anti-vaccine rhetoric. The embrace of pseudoscientific theories, as you said around ivermectin and chem trails. I could go on and on.
It's almost embarrassing to even talk about, and there was even a shooting at the CDC this year. Right? And so I can only imagine that that sort of environment is very demoralizing.
Ken: Totally. One aspect of politicizing that you consider in this brief paper is the fact that many of these environmental harms are visited most harshly on disadvantaged communities, low income communities, communities of color, and of course, that was sort of the first filter that was put in that we should stop research, regulatory enforcement, anything that related to diversity, equity, and inclusion or however they define that.
And I've learned so much of this from from Phil. We've focused on kids 'cause they're especially vulnerable. And we really have only begun to just catch up on the necessary focus on communities that are really benighted by pollution much more than than the rest of us.
And they tend to be low income communities, uh, fewer resources, fewer medical resources, harder to manage healthcare costs, and tremendous insults from air, water, occupational pollution, neighborhood pollution. Can you say a little bit about how that stood out in your analysis? That the impact of, uh, politicizing around DEI and how that might have affected environmental policy?
Dr. Gaffney: Sure. I think on the one hand, as you said, many of these policies are going to strike hardest against communities that are already suffering from poor health, lack of investment, discrimination and so forth. So you take something like the deregulation of mercury standards for power plants. Yeah, well, who lives close to power plants — and disproportionately — lower income people.
You know, I think that makes this easier in a sense for them to do, right? Because they view these communities as, as not their constituents in many ways. On the other hand, many policies that they're pursuing will in fact, harm what they view as their constituents. So if you take something like the rollback or the lack of enforcement, lack of implementation of these silica standards that were meant to protect minors from deadly dust that they encounter in their workplace.
And that's a disease that I might see — silicosis is a potentially fatal lung disease — those communities are disproportionately in red states. Similarly, if you look at the cutbacks to Medicaid, the public insurance program for low-income Americans, uh, yes, it will certainly take healthcare away from many, uh, working class folks in blue states who may be disproportionately black or Hispanic.
On the other hand, it will be devastating to rural areas, and to rural white areas that have a lot of low income folks who, who rely on this as their primary healthcare. So they're really, these policies really are going to be harmful for working class lower income groups across sort of demographic categories.
Ken: Yeah.
Dr. Landrigan: Ken, it's also worth saying something about the disproportionate impacts on infants and children, and I, I speak here as a pediatrician. This administration came to power talking about their commitment to the right to life, and yet by allowing increased levels of pollution, specifically mercury pollution, which damages the brains of infants in the womb. Fine particulate air pollution PM 2.5 air pollution, which damages the brains, the hearts, the lungs, and other organs of infants in the wound.
They're actually belying their own words — if they really wanna protect children before they're born, the last thing this administration should be doing is rolling back environmental standards that protect children before they're born.
Ken: I couldn't agree more. There's been so much made dur, during the election and then during the transition of the Trump administration's interest relating to what you just said, Phil, to Make America Healthy Again.
And while I think the ideologues, uh, have, are locked into their position, there are a lot of rank and file a lot of, you know, everyday Americans who, it sounds good to them and it sounds, why wouldn't it sound good to make America healthy?
Uh, whether you think again is appropriate or not is another matter. But there were so many big promises that were made and in many ways, the Make America Healthy Again, agenda didn't include a lot of the issues that you address in this paper. People are upset about food additives. My organization works on food additives.
We take a backseat to no one in trying to do something about that, but, but to think that, if we make any progress on that, it's okay to make the cutbacks in clean air regulation or vehicular regulation or any of the other environmental policy assaults. What, what do you tell someone who, who believes in or adheres to just the general principles of making America healthy again.
Polling is showing us now that even people who believe in that don't think the Trump administration has done a very good job, but, but how do you get someone to expand their horizon and think about some of these other issues — let's say someone who's focused on vaccines and they feel like the vaccines are harmful.
It doesn't happen to be my position, far from it. But if that's their focus and they're not gonna move from that, it's one thing. But for many people I think they're uncertain and they just don't know about the other dimensions of environmental health that really should be part of any agenda properly called make America healthy.
How do you talk to folks like that? You probably, you probably come across them all the time.
Dr. Gaffney: So I think that actually when it comes to these policies, it's an easy case to make. I'm going to mention healthcare first, but from the healthcare perspective, the policies of cutting back on Medicaid, uh, cutting back the Affordable Care Act are actually already unpopular even with Republican voters.
Dr. Landrigan: Yeah.
Dr. Gaffney: When it comes to clean air and water, actually these rollbacks are unpopular. And I think the main barrier you have is what we already talked about, which is the complexity of the issues and the getting lost in the details. I think when it comes to the MAHA agenda, they did raise some important issues.
As you've mentioned, the food supply needs to be improved. There are problems with metabolic health. These aren't made up concerns. But what they've done time and time again is a very superficial attempt to talk about these issues — not taking on powerful corporations, not really going after those who are purveying harms.
You know, making these sort of voluntary agreements, getting Shake Shack to put beef tallow in their fries or whatever it is. These kinds of very performative stuff that's kind of made for the media, but then behind the scenes, what's really happening and that's what we have to talk about and that's what we came in.
What's actually happening in the realm of policy, putting aside this sort of media show. And it's the kinds of policies that we've outlined in this article. It's the rollback of pollution, of, of measures to protect our air. It's the rollback of protections against mercury in our water. It's rollback of protections that are keeping miners from getting deathly ill.
So I think we need to move the conversation away from the sort of catchy media issues to the real policies.
Ken: So you're saying wrestling a, a, a Twinkie, is, uh, great for Instagram, but not so great, uh, if you're really concerned about making America healthy. It's, you know, it's an Instagram post, and we don't make policy by Instagram post.
Would that we could, um, that's all I'd be doing, but, uh, turns out you have to actually get in there. Debate powerful industries, bring evidence forward, fight through for regulations. Phil and I have done this dozens and dozens of times over the year. It's never easy. And it's really, it's really not just something you can do from a podium. You have to dig in.
Dr. Landrigan: You know, glyphosate is a case in point. So glyphosate, Roundup, is the world's most widely used herbicide. 11 years ago, in 2015, the World Health Organization did a very careful independent review and came to the conclusion that glyphosate, marketed as Roundup, probably causes cancer in humans.
When this administration, when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. first came into power, one of the chemicals that they talked about controlling was glyphosate, and they mentioned it in the first edition of the MAHA Report. But curiously, glyphosate was absent from the second version of the MAHA report. Most recently, just a couple of weeks ago, president Trump issued an executive order saying that glyphosate was a national security matter, that we needed it for the safety and the security of the United States of America — which is the first I'd heard that despite many years in both the US Public Health Service and the US Navy.
So I think that MAHA people are very sincere. What MAHA people are all about is protecting their kids, protecting their families. I don't agree with everything that they stand for, but I certainly respect their sincerity. My plea to the folks in MAHA is look at the issues one by one.
Look at food safety. Look at glyphosate, look at vaccines. Look at clean air, look at clean water. Each of those is an important issue in its own right, and they've all gotta be properly balanced. If America's children are gonna be protected.
Dr. Gaffney: One thing I'd add to that list, which I think says a lot about the priorities of the administration is tobacco policy, right?
Is there one thing that we can all agree on is an absolute poison than cigarettes? Talking about making America healthy. They completely defunded the office, the CDC um, office that works on tobacco control. They're not pursuing it seems a nicotine reduction rule that would help get people to stop smoking.
I think the priorities become pretty clear there.
Ken: Yeah, I agree. Well, thank both of you very much for coming on and talking about this amazing article. It's called The Dismantling of Environmental Protections, A Grave Threat to America's Health. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
We're gonna encourage everyone to take a look at it. It's very readable, it's very brief, and it's a devastating assessment of what's happening now. And I know you've got more work to come, we'll have you come back on and talk about it. Thank you so much for your commitment to, to public health and human health.
We count on champions like you to tell us what the score is.
Dr. Landrigan: And to you, for yours, Ken.
Dr. Gaffney: Thank you, Ken
Ken: Thank you to Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney for joining me today. And thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links To take a deeper dive into today's discussion.
Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @KenCooksPodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about ewg, head over to ewg.org. Check out the EWG Instagram account @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup. If this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along.
The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is by Moby, and thanks again for listening.
Areas of Focus Federal & State Energy Policy Chemical Policy May 29, 2026Africa Is Embracing Renewable Energy
African countries are increasingly looking to renewable energy to meet growing power demand.
Pizza Rolls & Public Health: How Double Kwik Created a Solar-Powered Hub for Community Care
For 60 years, Double Kwik has provided Eastern Kentucky with gas, essentials, and homecooking, like their infamous pizza rolls. As a convenience store brand, it might not be the first place people think of when they picture community leadership, but today they serve as an unlikely hero in many ways.
The company was started by Don Childers in 1966 with a handful of fuel trucks delivering to remote coal camps and job sites. By 1972, Don and his wife, Peggy, opened one of the area’s first self-service gas stations. Over time, they built a company that now serves 40 communities across the region with fuel, a selection of food including basic groceries and household goods, and in-store kitchens cooking up favorite dishes.
Having grown up around the business, Missy Matthews, daughter to Don and Peggy, is the President of the company which today employs around 850 people. Missy is a person many in the community turn to for her creative leadership and problem-solving.
A Building Reimagined for Public HealthAfter a bold move by Missy and Double Kwik’s leadership, Double Kwik headquarters now shares space with the Letcher County Health Department in Whitesburg, and has transformed a once underutilized building into an amazing asset, lifting a burden off the taxpayers of Letcher County.
Originally constructed by the county in 2008 to house the Health Department and additional providers, the facility was never fully occupied. It quickly became a financial burden on the county, particularly after the 2022 flood introduced a new host of economic challenges to overcome.
Though they had originally planned their headquarters for Jenkins, after the flood, Missy knew they needed to find as many ways to support the area as possible. They decided to buy the building from the county, and lease the first floor back to the health department, allowing the county to save the taxpayer dollars and reduced lease costs for the health department.
“Now, we bring anywhere from 45 to 80 people into downtown on any given day,” Missy said. “They’re walking to get lunch or coffee, supporting fellow local businesses.”
Finding Ways to SaveAfter purchasing the building, they renovated the second and third floors to include office space, a training kitchen and training spaces. At the same time, they looked for ways to combat rising energy costs.
“We pay an enormous amount of energy bills as a company—it’s one of our biggest expenses. Finding ways to manage that has always been important,” Charles ‘Junior’ Matthews, the company’s Chief Financial Officer, said.
After consulting with other local business owners with solar, including Kentucky Mist Moonshine, solar became “almost a no-brainer.” With facilitation by the Mountain Association’s Energy Team, they received a USDA Rural Energy for America Program grant, covering half the costs of the installation. The system now brings $18,660 in annual savings to the company.
Junior said the system has proven seamless and that they love to pull up their solar tracking app to see the savings rolling in on sunny days.
Commitment to Eastern KentuckyLooking ahead, the company is exploring additional solar and savings opportunities, continuing its efforts to reduce costs and increase resilience. For each dollar they save, they can put more investments into our region and quality jobs they create.
Staff Going Out on a Clean-upDouble Kwik has a strong history of supporting local students through scholarships, hosting teacher appreciation events, sponsoring community initiatives, and finding new ways to bring joy to their communities – like Elf on the Shelf pop-ups and their Pizza Rollsie mascot. In her role as tourism director, Missy has gotten the company involved in new initiatives, like community cleanups. Nine years ago, she began signing up for the toughest seven-miles of road between the turn off to Bad Branch and Pine Mountain Grill where their team collects nearly 300 bags of trash each year.
“We’ve always believed our responsibility goes beyond our stores. We know that if our communities are strong, we’re strong,” Missy said.
Whether through its stores, its headquarters, or its community efforts, they show up for our communities. From its start with a few fuel trucks in 1966 to a company helping sustain public health and community infrastructure, Double Kwik has become an essential part of the fabric of Eastern Kentucky.
The post Pizza Rolls & Public Health: How Double Kwik Created a Solar-Powered Hub for Community Care appeared first on Mountain Association.
Large-load customers can help commercialize new clean energy technology: CEBA
“In a lot of the partnerships that have been established around some of these technologies, it's really the tech companies that are taking on a lot of the risk,” Priya Barua, CEBA's senior director of utility partnerships and innovation, told Utility Dive.
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