The days when environmental litigation groups like Earthjustice and Farmworker Justice had friendly voices in EPA and the White House seem like two years in the past. Because they are two years in the past. Where once environmental groups could write entire documents for the White House to repost in the name of the U.S., now they cry foul if organizations like Heartland even have email exchanges with EPA. Yet when Natural Resources Defense Council was writing policy for EPA - a move so distasteful the New York Times, which carries full-page ads for NRDC, called foul - they insisted they were doing valuable work for the public ghostwriting federal regulatory documents. 

EPA is no longer on the "reliable" list activists pass around. Agency head Scott Pruitt has instead called a halt to both "sue-and-settle" agreements and "secret science" that environmentalists had used to manipulate findings to their benefit.

And so lawyers are taking the really hostile approach, much different than the wink-wink 'pre-arrange a settlement so you can say the courts are making you do what we want' kind in the past. They are suing EPA for...not publishing new pesticide training materials fast enough.

Really, that's all it is. Though the work is done EPA has not placed it in the federal register. Okay. But that is not how environmental groups frame it. They claim agricultural workers and their families (somehow) are at risk of chemical poisoning. Why weren't they at risk from chemical poisoning in 2015, which is when the last administration's EPA began sitting on this? That's a mystery only lawyers can solve.

And you can be certain there is no science in this, it is all lawyers, despite their lofty names and pretenses about farm workers and the environment.  They claim there are thousands of "poisonings" a year among agricultural workers, but that is not true. There are a few actual poisonings, but most of them are in commercial nurseries, including the organic kind. And these lawyers insist they care about rural communities of color - the exact demographic they want to drive out of jobs and penalize worldwide with their anti-farming agenda.



The attorneys general of solidly Democratic states New York, Maryland and California filed a similar lawsuit yesterday. But they will have a hard time keeping up with Earthjustice, the puppet of Sierra Club. Those lawyers have already filed 85 lawsuits against the Trump Administration halfway through his second year.

Environmentalists can take solace in some good news. As long as Dr. Linda Birnbaum runs National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), anti-science activists will still have a prominent voice there.