The deal comes after drawn-out talks, with environmentalists wanting tough action and industry groups seeking to avoid laborious rules.

The rules affecting 30,000 chemicals still require EU assembly approval.

“We’re trying to ensure that the chemical substances in the medium and long-term will be controlled and will be replaced when they are dangerous,” said Socialist MEP Guido Sacconi.

The European assembly will vote on the deal on 13 December before member states formally accept the new rules, which should be phased in over time by 2018.

‘Burden of proof’

A system for registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals (REACH) will demand that firms provide lists of the chemicals they use and list any possible risks.

A newly-established agency in Finland will oversee the way the firms assess the chemicals they use.

“The most fundamental thing of all is that it reverses the burden of proof. Manufacturers and importers have to demonstrate that products they put on the market are safe,” said Chris Davies of the Liberal Democrats.

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Apart from the potential costs to industry and the complexity of the new law, REACH has also attracted concern because of the potential for a very significant increase in animal testing under the proposal. Animal tests on vertebrates are allowed only once per one substance, and where suitable alternatives can not be used. If a company pays for these tests, it must sell the rights to the results for a reasonable price. There are additional concerns that access to the necessary information may prove very costly for potential registrants needing to purchase this.

The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is a United States law, passed by the United States Congress in 1976, that regulates the introduction of new or already existing chemicals. It grandfathered most existing chemicals, in contrast to the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals legislation of the European Union. However, TSCA is the equivalent to REACH in the US.

The European Chemicals Agency has recently added 14 substances to the list of very high concern chemicals to undergo special health and safety scrutiny under the bloc’s chemical regulation REACH.  The total is now 29.

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There are currently tens of thousands of chemicals in commerce today, and U.S. EPA lacks important data on many of those substances. As Congress moves forward with reforming the Toxic Substances Control Act, several federal scientists and public health experts said lawmakers should give EPA the authority and resources to begin prioritizing by understanding which chemicals are found in people.

Biomonitoring, which tests blood and urine samples for chemicals, is one of the most effective ways of understanding which chemicals are actually ending up in people, said Henry Falk, acting director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has the largest national biomonitoring program.

“Biomonitoring thereby serves as one important tool in identifying and reducing or preventing exposures and potential health problems,” Falk said.

CDC uses biomonitoring for a variety of public health purposes, Falk said, including identifying sub-populations with higher exposure levels than average and tracking trends over time.

For example, CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is released every two years, has been measuring lead exposure since 1976. The agency was able to track that human blood lead levels declined in parallel with declining levels of lead in gasoline, which offered support for EPA’s regulations to reduce lead levels in gasoline.

“There’s no question that chemicals are essential to our modern lives … but when we use these products, the chemicals in them can end up in our bodies,” said Superfund, Toxics and Environmental Health Subcommittee Chairman Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.). “And when the chemicals used in flame retardants, plastics or rocket fuel show up in our children’s bodies, we have a potentially dangerous situation.”

Lautenberg is expected to introduce a TSCA reform bill soon. Several sources say the Senate and the House are trying to introduce similar versions of the bill around the same time. Across the Hill, the House Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), is meeting next week to discuss persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals.

EPW Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) cautioned that while biomonitoring is useful for tracking exposure levels, the data must be interpreted in context.

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The data in question came from a 1990 article written by Jones and Wei-Chyung Wang, a professor at the State University of New York, Albany. The article, published in the journal Nature, examined how much of the global warming measured recently has resulted from the spread of cities, which have higher temperatures than unpopulated areas.

Using data from meteorological stations in urbanizing China, the researchers concluded that the spread of cities had only a small effect on climate.

When pressed to reveal the locations of the study’s 84 meteorological stations, the researchers claimed not to have the information. British climate skeptic Doug Keenan accused the researchers of academic fraud when it was discovered that a majority of the weather stations were moved at some point over the course of testing, possibly undermining the data.

Some of Jones’ colleagues expressed concern about the validity of the data, the e-mails show, although the accusation was widely dismissed after its publication in Energy & Environment, a British journal largely known for publishing the work of climate change skeptics.

“I have always thought [Wang] was a rather sloppy scientist. I therefore would not be surprised if he screwed up here,” East Anglia climate professor Tom Wigley wrote to Jones in May. “Why, why, why did you and [Wang] not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it’s not too late?” (Fred Pearce, London Guardian, Feb. 1) – GN

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The animals, now housed at a joint federal-state quarantine compound in southern Montana’s Paradise Valley, are part of a state program geared toward placing disease-free animals on public or tribal lands.

Turner struck a deal with the state that will allow him to keep 75 percent of the bison offspring — an estimated 188 bison — in exchange for boarding the animals for five years. Montana would get an estimated 150 bison back in 2015.

Turner already owns about 50,000 bison, but this group of bison is valued for its pure gene pool.

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) had asked Turner to submit an offer for the bison last fall after an earlier plan to move them onto a Wyoming reservation fell through. The state has also turned down at least two American Indian reservations that wanted some or all of the bison.

“There were a lot of people that wanted [the bison] on public lands. We’re not ready,” said Montana wildlife chief David Risley. “The Turner option, all it does is buy us time to come up with a long-term solution” (AP/Billings Gazette, Feb. 2). – DFM

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A 2009 court order had mandated the shutdown of two of the plant’s turbines by 2011 and required the scrubber installation on a third turbine.

In return for being allowed to operate the third unit for three more years without the added cost of scrubber installation, NRG agreed to shutter the third unit in 2013 and focus on modernizing its newest turbine, which would be the only one operating after that date.

The old generating units withdraw thousands of gallons of cooling water — as well as fish and crab larvae — each day. The new unit operates with a cooling tower, so large volumes of water won’t need to be extracted daily from area waterways.

The closure of the three older generating units is also expected to improve the air quality in an area that one study concluded had a 30 percent higher incidence rate for lung cancer. Researchers still have reached no firm conclusions about the cause of the apparent cancer cluster.

The closures are “probably going to be one of the greatest improvements in the health of the Inland Bays in 50 years,” said Collin O’Mara, secretary of the state Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (Molly Murray, Wilmington News Journal, Feb. 2). – DFM

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Unfortunately, the blue crab population has been declining in recent years under the assault of viruses, bacteria and man-made contaminants. The signs of the attack often are subtle, so researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the College of Charleston (CofC) are at work trying to identify the clues that will finger specific, yet elusive, culprits.

Pathogens and pollutants impair the blue crab’s metabolic processes, the chemical reactions that produce energy for cells. These stresses should cause tell-tale changes in the levels of metabolites, small chemical compounds created during metabolism. Working at the Hollings Marine Laboratory (HML) in Charleston, S.C., the NIST/CofC research team is using a technology similar to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to identify and quantify the metabolites that increase in quantity under common environmental stresses to blue crabs — metabolites that could be used as biomarkers to identify the specific sources.

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For more than 20 years forest ecologist Geoffrey Parker has tracked the growth of 55 stands of mixed hardwood forest plots in Maryland. The plots range in size, and some are as large as 2 acres. Parker’s research is based at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, 26 miles east of the nation’s capital.

Parker’s tree censuses have revealed that the forest is packing on weight at a much faster rate than expected. He and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute postdoctoral fellow Sean McMahon discovered that, on average, the forest is growing an additional 2 tons per acre annually. That is the equivalent of a tree with a diameter of 2 feet sprouting up over a year.

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The United Nations plans to publish today a list of commitments by participating countries, which also include Australia, Indonesia, Canada, Japan and India. While the total number of participating countries has not yet been announced, it is expected to include at least 51 countries producing a substantial majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

While scientists say their promised reductions in emissions by 2020 are insufficient for the fulfillment of the accord’s goal to prevent global warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown hailed the accord as a “crucial first step.”

“For the first time, the world will see, collected together, strong mitigation commitments by countries representing more than 80% of global emissions,” Brown wrote in a letter to government officials in London.

Developing countries that had called for binding emissions reduction targets said the accord should be considered just the start of efforts to combat climate change.

“The Copenhagen Accord is a step forward, but all nations must commit to the strongest possible actions, and adopt a legal treaty, if we are to ensure our survival,” said John Silk, foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, in a statement last week (Alex Morales, Bloomberg, Feb. 1). – GN

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