Working With the Enemy

by Danielle Sacks, originally in Fast Company, December 19, 2007.

“To this day, they won't speak to me," says Adam Werbach. His clients--or rather, his old clients--fired him when word got out last year that he was doing work for Wal-Mart. Of course, many people make compromises to do business with the largest company in the world--accept lower profit margins, absorb relentless performance pressure. But for Werbach, 34, a lifelong environmentalist, the cost of working with Wal-Mart has been personal. Some of his old friends don't speak to him. His former colleagues think he's sold out. And then there are the threats. "I attended this event and someone came up to me," recalls Werbach, his discomfort still fresh. "He said, 'I wouldn't feel safe if I were you. People have gotten hurt.'" Werbach has stopped speaking in public without special security.

He has made a leap that is either visionary or naive, depending on your perspective. He's been a leader in the environmental world, president of the Sierra Club at just 23, author of a 1997 book Act Now, Apologize Later that called Wal-Mart "a new breed of toxin" that "could wreak havoc on a town." He was such an iconoclast, he'd publicly challenged old-line environmentalists in a speech in 2004.

But in signing on to Wal-Mart last year, he went too far, driving off even those nonprofits who still did business with his small consulting firm, Act Now. They didn't want the help of someone who would sell his services to the Behemoth of Bentonville.

Folks at the Sierra Club, which funds the watchdog Wal-Mart Watch, begged him to reconsider, and activists John Sellers and Barbara Dudley wrote an open letter headlined, "The Death of Integrity: In Working With Wal-Mart, Activist Adam Werbach Is Abandoning His Principles."
For Wal-Mart, winning over Werbach is a critical part of its battle to redefine itself as environmentally progressive. There are nagging doubts in many quarters about just how sincere that effort is--doubts magnified this summer when Wal-Mart postponed the release of its own long-awaited sustainability progress report. But, in fact, Werbach is hardly the only activist to see Wal-Mart as a potent partner for change. Environmental Defense has opened an office in Bentonville to work more effectively with the company, although the group is careful to take no money from the chain. Even environmental icon Amory Lovins now advises the company on its green policies. But none of that provides quite the same sheen of legitimacy as signing up the former Sierra Club golden boy.

The journey to Bentonville has been difficult, even painful, for Werbach. Yet now this activist who'd set foot in a Wal-Mart store exactly once in his first 30 years is bleeding Wal-Mart blue. "I wholeheartedly believe in what Wal-Mart's doing, which astounds me," he says. "Wal-Mart is expert at solving problems."

His new vision: to do nothing less than make Wal-Mart as well known for environmental sustainability as Target is for everyman design. And to do that in a way that's good for the business. "Our goal," he says, flopping into a retro orange chair in his Act Now office, "is to have Wall Street look at Wal-Mart's green performance, and say, 'Wow, do more of that.'"
Today, his firm operates out of new offices in a renovated pie factory in San Francisco's Mission District. The space has been retooled with eco-friendly carpeting, skylights, and a meditation room. In the last year, Werbach has hired three dozen new employees to help handle the Wal-Mart business, boosting Act Now's staff from 8 to 45. He's also pulling in other corporate clients, including General Mills, Sony BMG, and Procter & Gamble.

The Act Now team is running one of Wal-Mart's key environmental initiatives, a program Werbach himself helped design, which aims to teach the company's 1.3 million U.S. employees about sustainability. He says the company offers him the organizational leverage to make change rapidly and on a scale that the traditional environmental establishment just can't provide. The movement, he says, "is not willing to suggest solutions that are as big as the problems."
In the nonprofit world in which Werbach grew up, his conversion is not just unpopular, it's incomprehensible. Wade Rathke, who runs ACORN, a community-organizing group based in New Orleans, says he called Werbach to try to persuade him not to become a Wal-Mart contractor, but never heard back from him. "For you to believe that you and your little lonesome are changing something with a million-and-a-half employees, $350 billion of sales, well, there's a level of ego there that just is staggering," Rathke says. "It sounds like an Adam Sandler movie or something." He pauses. "I have no idea what Adam believes anymore."

Werbach woke up the morning of December 9, 2004, with the hangover of his life. The previous night, he had stood at a wooden lectern at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club to tell a packed room of 250 people, including the leaders of environmentalism's most influential organizations, that their movement was dead. He had become increasingly discouraged by a supposedly progressive movement that didn't know how to be progressive with its own ideas. Within the first five minutes of the hour-long, 31-page speech, he announced with the tone of someone reading last rites: "I am done calling myself an environmentalist."

In its effort to protect seal pups and redwood trees, he told his mentors, friends, and colleagues, the movement had forgotten human beings. What was needed, he said, was a new way of connecting sustainability to the aspirations of everyday people. "Make executive directors [of environmental groups] go to a red state and try to explain environmentalism to the average American. If they don't have a plan to activate the values we share [with] the majority of Americans, then they need to move on."

The next morning, Werbach was overwhelmed with the consequences of committing professional hari-kari. "I thought the speech would be cathartic," he says. "It wasn't." His phone wouldn't stop ringing, but the voices on the other end didn't want to discuss how they could reimagine environmentalism. They wanted to tell him how wrong he was. The board at Common Assets, an environmental startup he'd been running, promptly fired him, leaving Werbach, who had a newborn daughter, without his primary source of income. Even worse, he had ousted himself from the very life he had always dreamed of. "I just remember thinking, 'What am I going to do today, become a fireman?'"

Werbach had been drawn to environmental issues since elementary school. As a 7-year-old in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, he would check the daily smog reports before T-ball practice. By 13, he had persuaded his parents to let him open a checking account so he could become a "rainbow warrior" with Greenpeace. In 1990, as a high-school student, he walked into a campaign center working to pass "Big Green," the sweeping voter initiative in California that would have promoted everything from fuel economy to open space. Werbach recruited hundreds of students to the cause. The initiative was defeated, but the morning after, his recruits were asking their accidental leader what to do next. By the time Werbach had graduated from Brown University in 1995, he had created the Sierra Student Coalition, the first national student-run environmental organization; today, it has 30,000 members.

It was this dynamism that got him recruited in 1996 for the monumental task of changing the face of the Sierra Club, the nation's largest and oldest grassroots environmental organization. "When he was hired, people were probably expecting a scruffy kid with a beard and flip-flops," says Jon Coifman, national media director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "That's certainly not what they got. He was articulate, smart, and had a real fresh take on things." Werbach quickly realized he could use his youth to his advantage and questioned the Sierra Club's every habit. Instead of focusing on policy, he set out to engage the public. During his first year in office, he toured the country giving more than 200 speeches, trying to reach young people. By the end of his second term, the average age of a Sierra Club member had come down to 37, from 47. But he felt that he was wasting time managing internal battles. And, he admits, "I was trying to push a lot of change very fast, so I think there were a lot of people frustrated with me."

After his second term, Werbach moved on to more-entrepreneurial environmental efforts: starting Act Now, cofounding the Apollo Alliance to jump-start an alternative-energy economy, and picking up the Common Assets post. Restless and impatient, he was beginning to question not the goals but the methods of mainstream environmentalism. Then, in 2004, two colleagues, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, published a controversial essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." That led Werbach to phone the head of every major environmental group and ask one question: Have you achieved your goals? "They literally laughed at the absurdity of the question," he says. But he wasn't laughing. While he was in college, he says, "I helped create the largest desert park in the country, Death Valley, and I'll proudly take my daughter there. Meanwhile global warming is going to turn the entire country into a desert."

This realization seemed so urgent that he issued his manifesto at the Commonwealth Club. In the difficult months that followed, he recalls, he thought he knew what hitting bottom was like. Then Wal-Mart called. "It felt like proof that I was wrong."

The text of Werbach's controversial speech had taken on a life of its own, circulating furiously online. It ended up in the least likely of hands. Andy Ruben and his wife read it together on a flight from Arkansas to Chicago. A former Ernst & Young management consultant with no environmental background, Ruben was Wal-Mart's recently named vice president of sustainability.

When Werbach said yes to Wal-Mart, a colleague said, "I have no idea what Adam believes anymore."

"I was really moved by the guts it took to have that perspective," says Ruben, 34. Charged with designing an environmental push for the company, he was trying to talk to as many environmentalists as possible. He asked one of his consultants to see if Werbach would meet with him. Werbach's response: No thanks.

Ruben persisted, and Werbach finally agreed to meet in the spring of 2005. On one condition: "I remember people saying, 'Don't let them buy you lunch because once they do, you become tainted.'" He quickly learned that wouldn't be an issue--Wal-Mart never buys anybody lunch.
At San Francisco's Town Hall restaurant, Werbach insisted to Ruben that Wal-Mart's business model precluded it from being a sustainable company. "I wanted to talk about labor conditions," Werbach says. "If employees weren't happy with labor conditions and didn't have health care, you couldn't be a sustainable company." Ruben replied that he didn't believe Wal-Mart's labor practices were abusive. Says Werbach, "I didn't buy it."

He left the lunch suspicious that Wal-Mart wanted to use him as a PR fig leaf. "I thought I was being spun," he recalls. But he couldn't shrug off the audacity of Wal-Mart's ambitions. "Even if they did a hundredth of what [Ruben] was talking about, that would be good." He found himself thinking about how environmentalism has been aimed mostly at "people in big cities, coastal towns, and college towns. But Wal-Mart speaks to 90% of the American public every year."
Werbach had given Ruben a list of things to do if he really wanted to understand the landscape--check out Curitiba, Brazil's efficient transportation system; learn about San Francisco's solar program; meet with experts on carbon emissions; read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. "He followed up with everyone I suggested and read every book I told him to read," Werbach says.
He and Ruben continued to talk over the next several months. Early in 2006, Ruben invited Werbach to Bentonville for Wal-Mart's quarterly assessment of performance. When senior managers were told that improving sustainability would be factored into their evaluations and bonuses, he was floored. At that moment, he concluded that Wal-Mart was serious about making sustainability part of its daily business.

But he saw a major problem. Your customers, he told Ruben, don't buy things at Wal-Mart because they're recycled or use less energy. They shop for the lowest prices. Once Wal-Mart stocked green products, it would face the same problem environmentalists had struggled with for years: getting customers to buy the stuff. How could Wal-Mart make sustainability matter to its customers?

Then he and Ruben hit on an idea: Wal-Mart and Sam's Club's 1.3 million employees were the ideal focus group for the company's customers--and for most of America. If they could get the associates to care about sustainability, they would know how to reach the company's 127 million weekly customers in the United States And the employees could help spread the message. Ruben offered Werbach the opportunity to do a pilot project.

Werbach hesitated. He knew the fallout of signing on with Wal-Mart could be severe. But his wife, Lyn, CFO of Act Now, says Wal-Mart's potential was irresistible: "Imagine that struggle of knowing there's an opportunity that has unprecedented reach and not taking it." Werbach realized that as much as Wal-Mart could use him, he could use the company.

At the last minute, a wealthy supporter offered to fund his Wal-Mart work, so he wouldn't have the indignity of a Wal-Mart check. Werbach turned him down. He recognized that people respect advice more when they pay for it. For him, it was worth betting his reputation and his business on Wal-Mart only if he could get a seat at the table. "It seemed pretty clear that [by signing on] I would get a level of access that I would never get as an outsider."

Wal-Mart gave Werbach the lab to do what he'd exhorted his colleagues to do in the Commonwealth Club speech: make sustainability personal. The program he has designed for the largest employer in the country, in fact, is called the Personal Sustainability Project. The idea of PSP is simple. Each participant picks some part of his or her life that seems somehow "unsustainable" and develops a plan to fix it. The goal is to teach Wal-Marters what sustainability is, and to show them the power of changing even the smallest habit, like not printing a paper receipt at the ATM.

Since Werbach started testing his ideas last summer, he and Act Now's 12 field trainers have conducted 150 PSP sessions across the country, covering 4,000 U.S. stores. Each store in a given region sends two volunteers to a paid retreat, a daylong series of open, guided discussions that start with Werbach's stripped-down definition of sustainability: "having enough for now, while not harming the future."

The sessions are designed to encourage participants to discover for themselves how to apply the idea of sustainability to their own lives. For some, it's finding ways to preserve a precious bass-fishing spot; for others, it's realizing that buying things on credit reduces future spending power. Each employee comes up with a PSP, a single, repeatable action--biking to work, quitting smoking--that is good personally and for the wider world. When they return to their store, armed with guides and DVDs, they are supposed to recruit 10 volunteers apiece to help the rest of the staff develop their own PSPs.

The program is radical for Wal-Mart in two important ways: It's totally voluntary. And, unlike Wal-Mart's usual highly detailed procedures, it is free-form. Some stores have shrugged off the program altogether; others are so enthusiastic they have developed store-level PSPs and community-wide PSPs. The strategy is to spread PSP practices virally through the Wal-Mart ecosystem and beyond.

Wal-Mart would not allow Fast Company to interview employees, but according to Act Now, there's some evidence of progress. Shonda Godley, who works in Bentonville, decided to connect her PSP with her farmer grandfather's death from cancer, which she believes resulted from a lifetime around pesticides. She is taking her fourth-generation family farm organic. "On the surface, it sounds rather silly to say that when I choose organic foods, farmers can be healthier," she said in an in-house PSP magazine. "But we sustain organic farmers by purchasing their products; we know that they are not putting their health at risk to make a living."
And Werbach talks about 17-year Sam's Club associate Kim Nicholson, who challenged a senior manager to explain why a meal of pizza and soda in the company cafeteria cost $2, while salad and water cost more than $5. Within a week, Werbach says, the price of the healthy food was lowered in all Sam's Clubs.

Although Werbach's PSP method sounds a little hokey, it's rooted in positive psychology. The idea is to change behavior not, as he puts it, by the "blunt-force trauma scare tactic" that most activists use, but by getting people to change tiny behaviors--nanopractices. "For too long, environmentalists have been telling people they need to sacrifice," Werbach says. "But the great modern challenge is how to be happy. This is the missing link."

Although the PSP program is relatively new, it's being measured, like everything Wal-Mart does. According to weekly reports from the stores, roughly 40% of associates who have made a PSP are staying committed to it, Werbach says, and 12,000 employees have quit smoking.
The PSP effort baffles some of Werbach's former colleagues. "Someone with [Werbach's] kind of brain who has been called a wunderkind is now doing a hybrid between Jenny Craig and SmokEnders for Wal-Mart," says John Sellers, who heads an activist group called the Ruckus Society, a former Act Now client.

Werbach, of course, argues that issues like weight loss are among the most effective entry points for getting people to care about the environment. "People care about themselves first, so you have to start with what's important in their lives." It's Organizing 101: Meet people where they are. "If Wal-Mart doesn't fulfill its goals," Werbach says, "there will be a lot of very angry associates who are very much bought into this now."

A few environmentalists are starting to see value in Werbach's work. Hunter Lovins, cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and coauthor of the pioneering book Natural Capitalism, was so dubious of Wal-Mart's green conversion that she went to Bentonville in person to see CEO Lee Scott. She calls Werbach's Wal-Mart strategy "absolutely world-changing brilliant. By the time he's done, he'll have spoken to 1% of the U.S. workforce."

Werbach is eating in a vegan restaurant in San Francisco, just back from a Greenpeace International board meeting in Amsterdam. He's getting amped up about a "greenwashing attack" he wants to mount against 7-Up for claiming its flavors are "100% natural" in a recent TV campaign. "It's a total misuse of the term 'natural.' You're tricking people into thinking they should improve their lives with this thing that is natural and healthy--it's immoral," he says. "I'll go talk to them about it first. I'll tell them to fix it. If they don't? Then you attack."
When asked how Wal-Mart would feel about him exercising his activist self, the question catches him by surprise. "Who knows if Wal-Mart would like that?" he shrugs, as if not realizing how much shelf space 7-Up's parent, Cadbury Schweppes, has in every Wal-Mart store.
Werbach knows he's straddling two contradictory cultures. He is a complicated blend of creativity, idealism, and pragmatism; sometimes, he admits, that puts him at war with himself. He seems able to compartmentalize things that might otherwise be inconvenient--his irritation over 7-Up's ads versus the wishes of his largest client; his initial outrage over how Wal-Mart treats its employees versus the opportunity to leverage Wal-Mart to change the world.

"There's an interesting book called Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," he says. "I guess that's where I live, somewhere between all those places. I don't know whether it's irony or hypocrisy." (After 20 years as a vegetarian, Werbach has started eating meat again since joining forces with Wal-Mart. If he sees any irony in his rebirth as a carnivore, well, he lets that pass.)
There are many questions about Wal-Mart's commitment to sustainability. The CEO has announced bold, clear goals for the company: to produce zero waste; to use 100% renewable energy; to supply customers with sustainable products. The hurdles, though, are enormous. (See "How Green Is Wal-Mart? [1]") Two years ago, amid much fanfare, Wal-Mart opened two experimental energy-saving stores. This year, the company says it will open four "high efficiency" supercenters. Meanwhile, in the two years ending December 2007, Wal-Mart will have opened hundreds of conventional stores.

And for every success story, like the Wal-Mart in Brady, Texas, that has recycled 8,000 tires, doubled paper and aluminum recycling, and created community PSP teams that include the mayor and the city landfill manager, there's a story like the one in Santa Fe. We visited the New Mexico store that went through the PSP training in April; the associates we asked had never heard of PSPs. One of Werbach's staff acknowledged in an email that the Santa Fe store's management team didn't buy into the PSP training and never passed it on to the staff.

"I'm an insider with outsider tendencies," says Werbach. "I'm still trying to channel the outsider."

Some moments in the past year have been surreal for Werbach. One day in Bentonville, he was leaving Wal-Mart headquarters, walking to his parked car. "I looked back to Lee Scott's window, and he was waving me good-bye. It was the oddest experience, the CEO of the world's biggest company waving, kind of like, Come back, ya hear."

But for Werbach, the big surprise is how much he's learned from Wal-Mart. He riffs on the company's obsession with its core mission, its relentless tracking of results, its "correction of error" meetings. "In failure," he says, "you don't hide your head in shame, you actually get on the phone the next day and you talk about what went wrong." In Wal-Mart's culture, he has found what he thought was missing from the environmental establishment.

"Right now I'm an insider with outsider tendencies, but I'm still trying to channel the outsider," he says, washing down his hummus with coconut juice. "I don't think you can be both. I mean, we'll see. I'm going to try. I'm trying."

Court rules for Navy in dispute over sonar, whales

By Mark Sherman, Associated Press (November 12, 2009)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted restrictions on the Navy's use of sonar in training exercises off the California coast, a defeat for environmental groups who say the sonar can harm whales.

The court, in its first decision of the term, voted 5-4 that the Navy needs to conduct realistic training exercises to respond to potential threats by enemy submarines.

Environmental groups had persuaded lower federal courts in California to impose restrictions on sonar use in submarine-hunting exercises to protect whales and other marine mammals.

The Bush administration argued that there is little evidence of harm to marine life in more than 40 years of exercises off the California coast.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The court did not deal with the merits of the claims put forward by the environmental groups. It said, rather, that federal courts abused their discretion by ordering the Navy to limit sonar use in some cases and to turn it off altogether in others.

The overall public interest tips "strongly in favor of the Navy," Roberts wrote. He said the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine mammals.

"In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained anti-submarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet," the chief justice wrote.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the Navy's own assessment predicted substantial and irreparable harm to marine mammals from the service's exercises. She said that "this likely harm ... cannot be lightly dismissed, even in the face of an alleged risk to the effectiveness of the Navy's 14 training exercises."

Roberts pointed out that the federal appeals court decision restricting the Navy's sonar training acknowledged that the record contained no evidence marine mammals had been harmed.

The exercises have continued since the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in February that the Navy must limit sonar use when ships get close to marine mammals.

A species of whales called beaked whales is particularly susceptible to harm from sonar, which can cause them to strand themselves onshore.

FDA decision on safety of BPA 'flawed'

USA Today, Liz Szabo

Published October 31, 2008

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — A Food and Drug Administration advisory board voted today to say that the agency ignored critical evidence suggesting that a controversial plastic chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, could harm children.

The FDA's science board, a group of outside experts, voted unanimously to endorse a report that found major flaws in the agency's decision to declare BPA safe. The agency oversees the safety of food containers and is in charge of deciding the level of BPA to which people may be exposed without harm. The critique was written by a board subcommittee and released Wednesday.

Children are commonly exposed to BPA from plastic baby bottles, the linings of metal liquid formula cans and other consumer products. Tests have found the chemical in 93% of Americans.

The science board agreed with the finding that that the FDA was wrong to base its August decision that BPA is safe only on studies funded by the chemical industry. Excluded studies suggest that BPA, which acts like the hormone estrogen, could pose harm to children at levels at least 10 times lower than what the agency allows.

Excluding this evidence of harm "creates a false sense of security" about BPA, the report says, and "overlooks a wide range of potentially serious findings."

Many consumers and environmentalists at the meeting urged the FDA to act now to protect infants from BPA, even as it continues to evaluate research. "We only have one chance to get it right for a child born today and for the 4 million children who will be born this year," says Olga Naidenko with the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group.

One board member at the meeting agreed, saying the public appears hungry for advice from the government.

Larry Sasich, an associate professor of pharmacy at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine and the consumer representative on the advisory board, urged the board to tell the FDA to immediately inform the public about the risks of BPA. Instead, the board agreed to allow its members to express their wishes to the FDA commissioner individually.

"The point of the whole process is: Do we have a chemical out there that is potentially harmful to infants and small children?" Sasich asked. "There becomes a point in time when the science has to become policy. The system is running the risk of losing credibility with the public unless we take some definitive action that the public can understand."

A work in progress

In statement Wednesday, the FDA affirmed the safety of BPA: "Current levels of exposure to BPA through food packaging do not pose an immediate health risk to the general population, including infants and babies."

On Friday, FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach denied that the agency had done an inadequate job in setting a safety standard. He said that the FDA's August decision was a work in progress, and that the science board's input is a vital part of that ongoing process.

"We would not have asked them (the science board) to do this if we weren't open to listening and learning from this input and incorporating it into our decision-making," von Eschenbach says.

In a presentation to the science board, he said, "There's no shame in having one's hypothesis or previous tenants questioned or disproved. That's the purpose of science: to test hypotheses and theses appropriately and have a healthy debate about where the data do and do not lead us."

Von Eschenbach said the agency tries to include the latest research. But the agency is leery of changing regulations with every new study, a practice that could "rather harm than help the American public."

"Cutting-edge, discovery science is, by its very nature, in flux and requires critical evaluation," von Eschenbach said. "Science is always filled with controversy and evaluation, and we want it to be. But the doctrine of today may be refuted tomorrow.. .. We are a regulatory agency that must make public health decisions that are enforceable. .. that must endure."

Other regulatory bodies have taken more aggressive positions on BPA. Earlier this month, Canada declared BPA to be toxic and announced plans to ban it in baby bottles.

The National Toxicology Program, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, concluded last month that there is "some concern" that BPA alters development of the brain, prostate and behavior in children and fetuses.

A flawed report

In the report endorsed Friday, the FDA's science board said the agency erred in discounting research upon which the toxicology program based its conclusions. The FDA made other significant mistakes that lead it to underestimate BPA's potential dangers, the report says:

•When measuring the amount of BPA to which babies are exposed from liquid infant formula, for example, the FDA used data from more than a decade ago and sampled only 14 liquid formula cans, all from the Washington, D.C. area. It also based its exposure estimate on the average BPA level. That could allow children fed from cans with above-average BPA levels to receive far more of the chemical.

• The FDA also failed to consider the cumulative effect of being exposed to BPA from dozens of products, from sippy cups to medical devices. That fundamental error "severely limits the usefulness" of the agency's safety estimate.

At the advisory group's September meeting, experts testified that children with certain health problems are given only liquid formula, as are children in the federal government's Women, Infants and Children program for the poor.

• The FDA didn't consider that many parents heat baby bottles in the microwave and sterilize them with boiling water, which could cause the bottles to release far more BPA.

• The FDA report doesn't include recent studies, such as a "landmark" September report from the Journal of the American Medical Association linking BPA, for the first time, with diabetes and heart disease, says Martin Philbert, a University of Michigan professor who led the science board's BPA subcommittee. Another study published this month suggests BPA could make breast cancer patients less likely to benefit from chemotherapy.

• The industry-funded studies used by the FDA weren't designed to study newborns, whose bodies may process BPA very differently than adults, Philbert says. At the meeting, other science board members noted that the FDA draft doesn't consider others who might be especially vulnerable to BPA, such as pregnant women and breast cancer patients being treated with estrogen-suppressing drugs.

Consumers aren't waiting for FDA action

Critics have long contended that BPA can cause harm at extremely low doses. The Environmental Working Group, for example, says BPA could cause brain, behavior and prostate damage at levels 500 times lower than the FDA's proposed exposure limit.

"You cannot tell parents with a straight face that BPA is safe," said Sonya Lunder, a scientist with the group, in an interview before the meeting. "As a parent, it's outrageous to think that another generation is going to be born and subjected to these toxic exposures while this process works itself out."

An advocacy group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, believes BPA is too toxic to use in baby products at all. The group has formally asked the FDA to remove BPA from food and beverage containers.

Many businesses, consumers and lawmakers, however, aren't waiting for the FDA to act.

CVS, Safeway, Wal-Mart, Toys 'R'Us and others are phasing out BPA. Attorneys general from New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware have asked 11 companies to remove BPA from their bottles and formula cans. Most baby bottle makers now offer BPA-free alternates. And many formula makers are in the process of finding substitutes for BPA. Lawmakers in Congress have introduced legislation to ban the chemical in children's products.

Industry groups — including the American Chemistry Council, the North American Metal Packaging Alliance and the International Formula Council — noted at Friday's meeting that other regulatory agencies, including ones in Europe and Japan, have found BPA to be safe.

The formula council's Mardi Mountford said that manufacturers hope to introduce BPA alternatives as soon as chemical and container manufacturers can make them available.

Lunder notes that alternatives already exist, however, and that some companies now sell liquid formula in BPA-free plastic bottles. Powdered formula is also sold in packaging that has virtually no BPA, she says.

The subcommittee has attracted controversy itself.

Philbert refrained from voting because of concerns that his research center has accepted funding from the chemical industry.

More on BPA from Environmental Working Group:

• Infant Formula Makers and Canned Food Producers Called On To Remove BPA
  October 31, 2008
• EWG Comments on the FDA's Draft Assessment of Bisphenol A (BPA)
  September 12, 2008
• » Bisphenol A
  June 26, 2007
• Bisphenol A: Toxic Plastics Chemical in Canned Food
  March 5, 2007

Related News Coverage

• More Than Bottles: A BPA-Free Guide That Goes Past Bottle For Babies
  Examiner | November 10, 2008
• Researchers Raise Alarm After Chemical Leak Found In Common Plastic
  Globe and Mail | November 6, 2008
• Panel of Independent Scientists Rebukes FDA on BPA in baby Bottles
  Cleveland Plain Dealer | November 4, 2008
• SF Chron: Infant Formula Wars
  San Francisco Chronicle | November 4, 2008
• FDA Throwing BPA Panel Under the Bus
  Treehugger | November 3, 2008

Revealing comments on coal from Obama — and even more revealing comments from McCain

From Climate Progress:

The right wing has gone ballistic over a newly leaked tape of Obama talking about the impacts of a mandatory cap on carbon emissions. The leading conservative website, the Drudge Report, had (somewhat surprisingly) downplayed the issue yesterday but now has three “above the fold” links in red:

"Palin Unleashes New Attack Against Obama On Coal…Audio: Obama Tells Paper He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry…Official calls comments ‘unbelievable’…"

Let’s put aside for the moment how odd it is that this interview from January was leaked Sunday — far too late to have any impact whatsoever on the campaign. Obama’s remarks — and the reaction they have spawned — deserve attention because they tell you a lot about both candidates.

Let’s start with McCain’s amazing reponse in the Washington Post:
“My friends, you know what Senator Obama said about a year ago, he said he had not been a, quote, coal booster,” he said, as the crowd booed. “My friends, I’ve been a coal booster and it’s going to create jobs, and we’re going to export coal to other countries and we are going to create hundreds of thousands of jobs. That’s going to help restore the economy of the great state of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

What a sad journey it has been for John McCain. Once a principled supporter of regulatory action on climate change, now he is the number one cheerleader for increasing the production and consumption of the two most carbon-intensive fossil fuels, coal and oil. No wonder he has progressively backed away from support for action (see “Palin shocker: McCain won’t regulate greenhouse gas emissions“).

In fact, the grand total of US coal mine employment is about 80,000. McCain must be confusing 2008 with the last time the coal industry had hundreds of thousands of jobs — the 1950s. Even the Post felt compelled to add, “In practice, coal exports amount to a tiny fraction the coal produced in the U.S. According to the Energy Information Administration, only 2 percent of overall U.S. coal production was exported in 2007.”

The coal mining industry has become astonishingly productive and has shed several times the number of jobs that any climate regulation would. And that brings me to Obama’s very blunt remarks and why they are much more interesting for what they tell us about his understanding of the impact of serious climate regulations than for any political impact they could have — the whole audiotape is here:

"That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants are being built, they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted-down caps that are imposed every year. So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative energy approaches."

An inartful choice of words by Obama to be sure, but fundamentally his remarks reflect an accurate understanding of the impact — indeed, the goal — of serious climate regulations, if we ever get around to them. The right wing has tried to spin this as Obama saying will “bankrupt the coal industry.”

Ironically, only the coal industry (and its conservative allies) can bankrupt the coal industry, by continuing to stick its head in the ground and not support funding an aggressive effort to see if carbon capture and storage can work (see “Is coal with carbon capture and storage [CCS] a core climate solution?” and ” President Bush dropped the mismanaged ‘NeverGen’ clean coal project“).

Obama certainly understands the importance of seeing whether CCS can be viable, as the interview makes clear:

"But this notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion. Because the fact of the matter is, is that right now we are getting a lot of our energy from coal. And China is building a coal-powered plant once a week. So what we have to do then is figure out how can we use coal without emitting greenhouse gases and carbon. And how can we sequester that carbon and capture it. If we can’t, then we’re gonna still be working on alternatives."

Can’t argue with that.

From a political perspective, I am puzzled why this got leaked on Sunday, far too late in the campaign to have any impact whatsoever. If the person who had the tape thought it would have an impact — and wanted it to — they should’ve released it a week ago. If they didn’t want to have an impact, why release it now?

In any case, the world has changed dramatically from the 1950s. While the coal companies themselves are rich and profitable and influential, especially in conservative politics, the number of coal jobs has been shrinking at such a rate that I’m not even certain that the coal jobs issue is a serious political winner anymore. Wecertainly won’t find out in this campaign, but there is little doubt that this tape and the issue will resurface when the next administration begins the hard task of hammering out a serious cap and trade bill.