A few years ago I sent an employee to a debate to argue over what was more harmful for your body, the pizza or the pizza box.

I am not kidding. A subset of activists absolutely says with straight faces that a trace chemical in a box is more harmful than getting fat. And now they have gotten Democrats in Congress to demonize over 6,000 forms of PFAS and open up nearly every company in America to lawsuits.

In reliable anti-science outlets like Guardian in the UK, whole sponsored sections of their publication are devoted to promoting claims by all kinds of groups. You can get published there if the check clears. And chemicals are so scary for their base that they will even believe pizza boxes are endocrine disruptors, so this stuff will be written by journalists there. But the public should not be fooled. 



A kid running a lemonade stand knows more about dose and dilution than editors at the Guardian. so it may be bullying to pick on them. The science community looks at them as the Breitbart of the activist community, but anti-science beliefs about chemicals do overwhelmingly skew toward one side in the U.S. as well. From energy to food to medicine, Democrats in the U.S. are more likely to deny the science consensus and now the House of Representatives has Frankenstein'ed together 11 different anti-chemical bills and say they are going to force EPA to create a de facto ban on perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyls - thousands and thousands of them.

Why? There is already a well-known safe level, 70 parts per trillion, but those who oppose all chemicals say that is still too high, and that this will bioaccumulate and kill everyone.

Such claims always get tripped up by that awkward four word question: Where are the bodies?

These PFAS chemicals have been in use for generations and there are no bodies. There are dead rats created by obscene doses, and there is statistical manipulation to try and correlate chemicals in pizza boxes to dead bodies, but those are the same shady tactics that had the science community apoplectic when environmental lawyers got juries to believe a weedkiller and baby powder can cause cancer.

Suspect epidemiology is why the House bill is dead on arrival. It is political theater by the majority in the House in an election year. They know the majority in the Senate is going to throw this out, because it is too cobbled together and so broad it will lawyers suing municipal governments over safe water.

The irony of all of this is that during the periods when Republicans had Congress, activists lobbied hard to have regulatory agencies oppose the areas of science they refuse to accept, because they said politicians shouldn't vote on science. Now they argue the opposite.

This tactic shows science is second to the same old politics, this is not constructive health policy for the public good.