Bottles and bears

May 12th, 2009 at 07:33am Jennie Pollock

A few things in the news, in case you missed them:

1. Chicago is taking steps to be the first U.S. city to ban the sale of baby bottles containing bisphenol A, or BPA — a chemical that hardens plastic. A measure was passed Monday by a city council committee and goes up for the big vote Wednesday.

Minnesota has already passed its own measure limiting use.

The science is at what’s at odds here. I found this breakdown from the New York Times:

BPA is a strengthening agent in many hard clear plastics. It is also used in the lining of cans and myriad everyday products from CDs to eyeglass lenses. The Food and Drug Administration agreed in December to reconsider the issue of the hazards of BPA, after it received criticism from its own advisory board for a draft risk assessment it issued in August saying that the levels of BPA to which children and adults are exposed do not pose a meaningful risk. The chemical appears to have estrogen-like effects, and in animal studies it appears to accelerate puberty and pose a cancer risk. Other studies have linked BPA to higher risk of heart disease and diabetes in adults.

2. This is a little old, but … President Bush’s polar bear ruling will stand.  From the Los Angeles Times:

The Interior Department let stand a Bush administration policy barring the federal government from using the precarious state of the U.S. polar bear population as a reason to crack down on global warming, upsetting environmentalists and cheering oil and gas companies.

The decision means the government cannot use the Endangered Species Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, though Interior Secretary Ken Salazar explicitly has blamed those emissions for the habitat erosion that last year landed the polar bear on the list of threatened species.

The AP summarizes it like this:

The iconic polar bear was declared a threatened species because global warming is causing a severe decline in Arctic sea ice. But the Bush administration rules limit that protection, saying no action outside the Arctic region could be considered a threat to the bear under the law.

Environmentalists have strongly opposed the rule as have many members of Congress. They argued the limits violate the Endangered Species Act because the release of greenhouse gases from power plants, factories and cars indirectly threaten the bear’s survival.

But Salazar said the answer to dealing with global warming rests in a broader, comprehensive approach that limits greenhouse gases.

Entry Filed under: Nature, In the news, Living without plastic