American air quality is terrific. And despite the calls for more regulations on business, U.S. technology is way ahead of regulators. Huge emissions reductions aren't due to runaway solar or wind subsidies, but instead to modern natural gas extraction techniques, such as fracking, which caused power plant emissions to decline nearly percent from 2005 to 2017.
Chemicals & Chemistry
Laetrile, which is found apricot seeds, has been used by quacks to "treat" cancer for 70 years. It works, assuming that your goal is to poison yourself. But cancer claims, which were ridiculous in the 1950s, continue today. Psst. Keep this secret. It's cyanide, no more, no less. Don't let the screwballs tell you otherwise.
The study, CLARITY-BPA, represents a collaboration between two camps that have long been at odds over the safety of BPA: scientists and regulatory experts at the FDA, on one hand, and academic scientists on the other.
PCBs have been detected in the air from kitchen cabinets. Does it matter? Or is what inside the cabinets more dangerous. Answer: Neither.
The Organic Consumers Association, which promotes conspiracy theories about 9/11, chemtrails, and FEMA, is pushing another one: Pesticides cause school shootings.
The narrative that honeybees – which aren't actually native to North America, Europe or Australia – face mortal danger and will take us down with them has, for years, been advanced by environmental groups and repeated in the media. The only problem is that it isn’t true. According to the USDA, the U.S. honeybee population hit a 22-year high in 2016 before dipping slightly last year.
An article late last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association should not just have come with a well-hidden edit showing the conflicts six months later. It should have come with a warning label stating that no real science was involved.
A coffee lawsuit has turned science upside-down by requiring coffee companies to prove that their product isn’t unsafe. That is absurd, not only because it violates 400 years of common sense about coffee, but because it is impossible to prove a negative. Science also cannot prove that ghosts aren’t real. Perhaps all California residences should carry a poltergeist warning, just in case.
Another chemical scare group has a brilliant message: Don't eat at restaurants. The phthalates from plastic wrap and gloves will get you. If you eat at home they still will, just not as fast mega-stupid.
Essential oils have been in the news because they allegedly "disrupt" your hormones. They may or may not, but it's a pretty good bet that you don't know what an essential oil is. Here's a mini-lesson.
The authors had a clear strategy in mind: (1) Do a study on a common household object; (2) Produce boring data that doesn't surprise any microbiologist; (3) Write a provocative, fear-mongering headline; (4) Market it to a gullible, clickbait-hungry press, exhibiting no critical thinking; and (5) Watch the grant dollars roll in.
The FDA's new comprehensive, two-year study tells us what we already knew: BPA, a chemical long-used to make certain types of plastics, poses no human risk. Yet, some members of JAMA, presumably one of the world's most respected medical journals, refuse to accept the science. And if that's not bad enough, the refusal wasn't written by a scientist, but by an English major.