Saying he was using “sound science in decision-making,” EPA administrator Scott Pruitt denied a petition by environmental groups to ban the insecticide chlorpyrifos, widely used in agriculture but criticized as a risk to children and farmworkers. Pruitt took a “final agency action” on the chemical, “suggesting that the matter would not likely be revisited until 2022, the next time the EPA is formally required to re-evaluate the safety of the pesticide,” said the New York Times.
The agency was under orders from a federal appeals court to decide by today whether to impose the ban that it proposed in 2015 on farm use of chlorpyrifos. Household use of the pesticide was banned in 2000. “We need to provide regulatory certainty to the thousands of American farms that rely on chlorpyrifos, while still protecting human health and the environment,” said Pruitt in a statement.
The Natural Resource Defense Council and the Pesticide Action Network of North America filed their petition to end use of chlorpyrifos in 2007. The NRDC said California “must take up where EPA left off, implement the ban and protect our state’s children from Trump administration backsliding.”
To read the EPA order on chlorpyrifos, click here.