Bayer’s new Roundup products appear more toxic than prior formulations, new report asserts
By Carey Gillam
New types of Roundup weed killing products marketed to US consumers contain chemicals that pose greater health risks to people than prior formulations suspected of causing cancer, according to an analysis by an environmental health advocacy group.
Friends of the Earth (FOE) reported Tuesday it found four chemicals have recently been added to Roundup products that have been scientifically shown to cause a variety of health problems, including reproductive defects, kidney and liver damage, cancer, and neurotoxicity.
The analysis comes after the agrochemical company Bayer pledged that it would remove glyphosate from its popular Roundup herbicide products sold for residential lawn and garden use starting in 2023.
Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, made the change to try to curtail the filing of future litigation as it battles thousands of lawsuits filed against Monsanto by cancer patients who claim they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma from using Monsanto’s Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides.
But FOE said it found the chemicals used in the new Roundup formulations are, on average, 45 times more toxic to humans experiencing chronic exposure than glyphosate-based Roundup. The chemicals were roughly four times more acutely toxic, the group said.
Notably, all four of the added chemicals pose greater risk of long-term and/or reproductive health problems than does glyphosate, based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) evaluation of safety studies, FOE said.
Of the four chemicals found in the products – diquat dibromide, fluazifop-P-butyl, triclopyr, and imazapic – the “worst offender”, according to FOE, is diquat dibromide. It is 200 times more toxic than glyphosate when exposure occurs over a long period of time, the group said, and is banned in the European Union. It is 27 times more toxic in acute exposures, the group said.
Kendra Klein, FOE deputy director for science and an author of the report, said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be providing stronger oversight.
“People need to realize that the EPA has long put the profits of companies like Bayer ahead of their health when it comes to pesticides,” Klein said. “And now, they’ve allowed Bayer to quietly swap out the chemicals in Roundup, making it far more toxic to people’s health, without changing the packaging or warning consumers of the increased risks.”
Running dry – US Army base under fire for high water use in drought-stricken Arizona
By Carmela Guaglianone
The San Pedro River, nestled in southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro Valley just north of the US-Mexico border, is one of the last undammed rivers in the Southwest and is considered a biodiversity hotspot. Lined with cattails, willows and cottonwoods, the marshy waterway shelters hundreds of diverse bird species, including many considered endangered and protected by federal law.
The area is also home to the Fort Huachuca US Army base, which has been heralded as an example of the military’s efforts to become more environmentally conscientious due to its use of solar power and other “green” initiatives.
Ten years ago, Fort Huachuca forged a plan to achieve “net-zero” by 2025. But today, that goal has been largely abandoned, and an expanding group of critics says the installation’s well-meaning conservation efforts are falling short, and the Army instead is posing a dire threat to a protected conservation zone as a result of the base’s rampant pumping of precious groundwater.
The Army and the nearby municipalities whose residents rely on the base for employment, are the most prolific groundwater users, withdrawing an estimated 10,000 acre feet per year, according to a 2020 report from the U.S. geological society. That amount would fill nearly 41 million bathtubs.
Algae bloom kills hundreds of sea lions off California
Hundreds of sea lions off the coast of California have been poisoned this year amid a “highly unusual” algae bloom that has persisted in southern and central parts of the state into October.
Experts believe the blooms, which are becoming more common, may be linked to warming and changing ocean conditions. They harm sea life when algae produce a neurotoxic chemical that can be taken up by fish and crustaceans and absorbed by the larger animals that eat them.
Off the US west coast, the proliferations of algae, sometimes called “red tides”, usually peak in the late spring. For the last three years, however, harmful blooms have come on strong in the summer and, this year, lasted into autumn before mostly petering out.
That is “highly unusual,” according to Clarissa Anderson, a researcher with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who is also the director of the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System, which tracks harmful algal blooms.
“It’s catching us all off guard,” Anderson said.
Progress seen on overall industry emissions, even as oil and gas emissions rise, EPA finds
By Shannon Kelleher
US power plants, the largest stationary sources of greenhouse gases in the nation, continue to show reduced emissions but the good news from that sector comes as oil and gas emissions rise, according to new regulatory data.
Power plant emissions totaled about 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide last year, down 7% from 2022, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported. The agency collects data from over 8,000 industrial facilities for its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, accounting for about half of total US emissions.
However, greenhouse gas emissions from petroleum and natural gas plants increased 1.4% in 2023 over 2022, and the 2023 tally was up 16.4% from 2016, the EPA said.
Nine coal-fired power plants were among the top ten greenhouse gas-emitting industrial facilities for 2023, along with a Texas-based ExxonMobil refinery.
The worst emitter – for the ninth year in a row – was the James H Miller power plant outside Birmingham, Alabama.
Altogether, large industrial facilities’ greenhouse gas emissions, the chemicals that are driving human-caused climate change, dropped by 4% last year, the EPA reported.
“The progress is largely driven by the power sector, [which] has seen steadily declining emissions,” Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the National Resources Defense Council, said in an email, noting that the change reflects a shift away from coal over time. “The power sector can, and must, continue to decarbonize,” she said.