Scottish childminder numbers almost halve in a decade

The number of childminders in Scotland has almost halved in just over a decade.

Scottish Labour obtained the figures in response to a written question at Holyrood.

The number of childminders dropped from just over 6,200 in December 2012 to 3,530 in December 2022. The latest data shows the figure has dropped further.

The government said it valued the role of childminders and was working to recruit and retain staff.

As of December last year there were 3,225 people working in the profession.

Warning of crisis in Scottish childminding sector

Nurseries warn of closure risk without new funding

Call for financial support for childminders

Scottish Labour's children's spokesman Martin Whitfield said: "The consistent decline in the number of childminders operating in Scotland over the past decade is proof positive that the SNP has failed families in Scotland.

"These figures paint a worrying picture of the erosion of vital childcare services in our communities."

He said childminders played a crucial role in supporting families and providing flexible, high-quality care for young children.

"Dwindling numbers of childminders will have serious implications for parents seeking childcare options and for the early years development of our children," he said.

"It's time to draw a line under a decade of failure and act to support families."
'Important work'

The Scottish government's promise to provide 1,140 hours of free childcare has been rolled out over the past decade.

Appearing before a Holyrood committee last year, Scottish Childminding Association chief executive Graeme McAllister said local councils had been slow to integrate childminders into the 1,140 hours policy, warning there needed to be "urgent action" to stem the tide of closures in the sector.

A Scottish government spokesperson said: "The Scottish government values the important work that childminders provide in communities and is committed to supporting and growing the sector.

"We want to attract 1,000 new childminders to the workforce and are working with the Scottish Childminding Association on a programme of recruitment and retention work, to ensure that more families have access to the unique and flexible experience of childcare that childminders can offer. We expect this programme to launch in spring.

"Through this programme, we also want to help ensure childminders are better supported with their workloads and to safeguard the long term future of childminding in Scotland."

Brady Calling Gun Control Forces to Focus on National Shooting Sports Foundation After NRA Verdict

GUN CONTROL IS AN ISSUE IN NOVEMBER

By Michael Clements

March 17, 2024The Epoch Times

Attendees check out pistols on display at the National Shooting Sports Foundation's annual Shooting, Hunting, Outdoors Trade (SHOT) Show in Las Vegas, Nev., on Jan. 23, 2024. (Michael Clements/The Epoch Times)

A national gun control organization is taking responsibility for the NRA’s legal problems, setting its sights on a firearms industry trade organization, and calling on people to join its fight.

In a March 14 email, Brady—formerly The Brady Campaign—is soliciting signatures on a petition for Congress to pass more gun control laws to end the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF).

Neither Brady nor the NRA responded to emails requesting comments on this story.

Mark Oliva, Managing Director of Public Affairs for the NSSF, said he is not surprised by the email. He said Brady is only one of several groups assaulting Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

“I think, if anything, [the email] is a testament to the effectiveness of NSSF and our ability to advocate for our industry,” Mr. Oliva told The Epoch Times.

Mr. Oliva expects anti-gun groups to continue, and even intensify their attacks. The Brady email indicates he is correct.

“The National Shooting Sports Foundation … is the firearm industry’s biggest trade group … and, as the NRA crumbles in disgrace, they are poised to take on [the NRA’s] deadly ‘guns everywhere’ agenda,” the Brady email reads.

The NRA has had many public issues in the past several years. Allegations of corruption, infighting, and misuse of funds soured many former members of the organization that billed itself as “America’s oldest civil rights organization.”

As membership declined, the group’s political enemies found chinks in the NRA’s political armor.

Last February, a New York jury found Wayne LaPierre, former CEO and face of the NRA for decades, liable in a civil case. He must pay $4.3 million in damages for the mismanagement and misuse of charitable funds.

The verdict resulted from a civil lawsuit brought by the New York Attorney General’s Office, accusing Mr. LaPierre and the NRA of questionable financial and administration practices during his tenure from 2014 to 2022. Mr. LaPierre, who had resigned weeks before the verdict, and the NRA said the lawsuit was a political witch hunt meant to kill the NRA.

“A parade of NRA witnesses and independent experts established that the NRA was the victim of actions that were pursued in secrecy and not in the interests of the association—by former vendors and fiduciaries,” NRA counsel William A. Brewer III said.

The Brady email hailed the verdict as a result of its work and called on Brady supporters to turn their attention to the NSSF.

“Luckily, we at Brady know how to fight the NSSF because we’ve been fighting the NRA for years, and we’re seeing the disgraceful end of their organization play out because of our dedicated work. We may know their tricks, but we’re going to need all the support we can get if we’re going to overcome another extremist gun lobby group, and that’s why I’m reaching out today,” reads the email written under the name Kris Brown, President of Brady.

The email doesn’t specify how Brady assisted New York Attorney General Letitia James. But, it does provide a list of its complaints against the NSSF.

According to the email, the NSSF spends millions of dollars lobbying on behalf of the gun industry. The email says the NSSF opposes universal background checks, state laws to allow lawsuits against gunmakers whose products are used in the commission of a crime, and has branded President Joe Biden as “waging war on the Second Amendment.”

Mr. Oliva said the email contains tiny bits of truth while leaving out significant facts.

When it comes to background checks, he said groups like Brady are late to the party.

“I think it’s important for everyone to understand that the firearms industry was actually the progenitor. We came up with the point-of-sale background check system,” Mr. Oliva said.

According to Mr. Oliva, this resulted in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

He added that NSSF came up with the Fix-NICS plan after it was clear that not all states were sending relevant records to the FBI for NICS. This resulted in federal legislation to make the background check system truly keep guns out of the wrong hands, he said.

“Brady had nothing to do with that,” Mr. Oliva said.

Making a Right a Reality

As for the other points, Mr. Oliva said it boils down to the NSSF working on behalf of an industry that makes the Second Amendment more than a political ideology. He said he stands behind his work and the claims that the Biden Administration is working to stifle a Constitutional Right.

He pointed to the recently established White House Office for the Prevention of Gun Violence, staffed by long-time gun-control advocates, as proof of his claims.

He said the exercise of the Second Amendment begins at the gun store counter. He vowed to continue his work.

“You would not have the ability to keep and bear arms if you didn’t have the ability to approach the gun counter and buy one legally,” he said. “I’m not going to apologize, and NSSF will not apologize for our effectiveness.”

COMMENTARY

Facing three global crises, the American empire may be nearing final collapse

Joe Biden is already struggling to manage wars in Ukraine and Gaza, with China waiting for its moment

By ALFRED MCCOY
SALON
PUBLISHED MARCH 17, 2024 

Joe Biden | A view of damaged houses as Russia-Ukraine war continues in Dolyna, Ukraine on March 13, 2024.

 (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.

Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

Related

America in 2024: Blind, blundering Colossus on a downward slide

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.

Creeping disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S. and Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)

Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

In 1994, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Bill Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (1999); three onetime Soviet republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Barack Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

Between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach … [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the U.S. (even as Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the Times of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On Oct. 18, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichaean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s-length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul and Dakar, among other places.

Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world, and weakened his domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African Americans nationwide and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated ceasefire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force … that would jeopardize the security … of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the U.S. would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The sum of three crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.


ALFRED MCCOY  is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of "In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power." His new book is "To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change."

An attempt to ban all “forever chemicals” in Colorado failed. What will it take to finally get rid of PFAS?

New bill takes aim at harmful chemicals found in cookware, outdoor gear and even makeup

Water quality scientist Sarah Erickson collects samples from fish for PFAS testing at Fountain Creek Regional Park in Fountain, Colorado, on Sept. 9, 2020.

 (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)

By ELISE SCHMELZER | eschmelzer@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: March 17, 2024

First, Lisa Cutter removed the carpet from her downstairs level.

As she learned more about PFAS — also known as forever chemicals — she replaced her nonstick pans. Then she started buying dental floss that was free of the harmful chemicals that have become pervasive in modern life.

“The problem is that we can’t keep track of all these things as people,” said Cutter, a state senator from Jefferson County. “It’s too hard. They’re in too many things.”

Cutter and two fellow Democratic lawmakers are running a bill in the state legislature to ban the sale of some consumer products containing PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — including cookware, outdoor apparel, ski wax and artificial turf. Senate Bill 81’s first draft had also included a full ban on the chemicals beginning in 2032, but the full ban faced enough opposition that it was written out of the bill at its first committee hearing on Tuesday.

The challenges against the bill illustrate the difficulty of regulating PFAS, which have been used for decades to make commercial products waterproof, nonstick or stain resistant. The harmful chemicals are difficult to regulate because they are everywhere, lawmakers and experts said.

They’re used in thousands of consumer products, from skillets to lipstick to jackets coated in Gore-Tex. They’re in some food packaging as well as in rugs and rock-climbing ropes. And they’re used industrially in firefighting foam, hospital floors and microchips.

“The more we look for PFAS, the more we find,” said Gretchen Salter, strategic advisor with Safer States, an organization that works on policy to remove toxic chemicals. “That makes regulating PFAS really tricky, because it is in so many things.”

The chemicals are linked with a wide range of health problems, such as increased cancer risk and lower fertility. They’re also complicated and expensive to remove from water supplies — costs that water treatment companies say will eventually lead to more expensive rates for residents.

Some companies that use PFAS in their products say they would like to transition to a safer replacement but need more time to make that happen. Others say there is no effective replacement in their processes.

The amended bill passed the Senate’s Business, Labor and Technology Committee on a 5-2 party-line vote last week. Cutter said she still wants a complete ban. But she must walk a line between pushing for change and allowing reasonable accommodations for companies and industries.

“As much as I want PFAS to go away forever and forever, there are going to be some difficult pivots,” she said.

Exposure through air, water and food

PFAS is a shorthand term for thousands of different chemicals used in products and industrial processes around the world.

When products and materials containing PFAS are discarded in a landfill, the chemicals seep into drinking water supplies. When they’re incinerated, the chemicals remain in the air. They enter the body when people breathe air or drink water contaminated with PFAS; people can also be exposed by foods they eat — such as fish that swam in contaminated water or dairy products from livestock exposed to PFAS.

Once consumed, the chemicals stay in the body for months or years. Researchers don’t fully understand all the potential health effects. Still, the chemicals could lead to reduced fertility, developmental delays, increased risk of cancer, suppressed immune systems and hormonal changes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

“The chemicals were super-useful until we started looking at their toxicity,” Salter said. “But at what cost? That’s what everyone is asking now.”

Colorado lawmakers in 2022 passed a bipartisan bill that banned the sale of carpets, fabric treatments and food packing that contained PFAS, along with other restrictions. The legislation was a significant step forward in the national context, Salter said, because it applied to broad types of products instead of individual items.

But Cutter said she knew it wasn’t enough.

Her bill this year, SB24-081, would establish new deadlines for restrictions or bans:A ban starting July 1 on the installation of artificial turf that contains PFAS.

Starting Jan. 1, 2025, a ban on the sale of cleaning products, cookware, dental floss, menstruation products, ski wax and textiles that contain intentionally added PFAS.
By the same date, sellers must label outdoor apparel made with intentionally added PFAS.

Also at the start of 2025, firefighting foam containing PFAS, already banned in some cases, would no longer be allowed for fuel storage and distribution facilities as well as chemical plants.

Starting in 2028, a ban on the sale of outdoor apparel containing PFAS.

States increasingly are passing laws regulating PFAS, Salter said. The resulting patchwork isn’t consistent, but it sends a message.

“State action really does drive the market,” Salter said. “When enough states have acted, it does move the market.”

Pipes run with water through Plum Creek Water Purification Facility in Castle Rock on Wednesday, August 16, 2023. The facility started testing in 2021 for PFAS on a regular basis. 

(Rebecca Slezak/Special to The Denver Post)

Removing chemicals from water is costly

As Colorado lawmakers look at ways to reduce the sources of PFAS, water utilities are trying to clean up existing contamination.

More than 100 drinking water sources in Colorado already have potentially hazardous levels of PFAS, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment found in testing in 2020. Federal regulators are considering imposing stricter limits on drinking water contamination, and water treatment managers in the state warn that they likely will have to pass on the cost of removing the chemicals to residents.

Federal environmental regulators last year proposed new rules on the two most common PFAS chemicals. The proposed rules limit the amount of allowable PFAS in drinking water to 4 parts per trillion — equivalent to a drop of the chemicals in 125,000 barrels of water.

“If we can mitigate this at the source, that would probably be the best move forward,” said Libby Hauth, the wastewater treatment manager for Pueblo West Metropolitan District, during the bill’s hearing Tuesday.

Englewood-based South Platte Renew treats 20 million gallons of wastewater every day and is considering implementing reverse osmosis treatment to remove PFAS, said Dan DeLaughter, its data and regulatory programs manager. The treatment would cost $350 million to install, not including the cost of electricity to run the process or to dispose of the resulting brine, he said.

The company’s typical annual capital expenditures add up to $15 million, he said.

“There are no easy buttons with PFAS,” DeLaughter said.

The potential for higher water rates is one of the reasons Cutter is pursuing more regulation — especially as water supplies become stretched by drought that’s fueled by climate change.

“I’m not as concerned about corporate profits taking a ding, because should the taxpayers be on the hook for that?” Cutter said.
Overly broad and non-scientific?

Lawmakers heard from representatives of several industries Tuesday, and they asked for more time to sell through their existing stock of products facing bans. Burning or trashing products with PFAS is wasteful and doesn’t prevent the chemicals from entering the environment, they said.

“Products that can’t be sold don’t simply disappear,” said Shannon Fender, senior manager of state government affairs for Denver-based VF Corp., which owns outdoor apparel brands including The North Face, Vans and Smartwool.

Companies that use PFAS to manufacture semiconductors and electric vehicle wiring also asked for leniency because there are no substitutes for the chemicals in their processes.

“There are critical uses for PFAS that are going to be hard to replace with other chemicals — those will take more time,” said Timm Strathmann, a Colorado School of Mines professor who researches PFAS. “Then there are products where we already have viable alternatives.”

The American Chemistry Council, which represents the chemical manufacturing industry, went even further and argued that not all PFAS are harmful and should be regulated individually.

“SB-81’s overly broad and non-scientific approach undermines efforts to implement effective regulatory policies for PFAS. it will have far-reaching negative effects on the economy,” Shawn Swearingen, the council’s director of chemical products and technology, told lawmakers.

Cutter says she’s not interested in parsing harmful PFAS from those some say are not harmful. She’s also standing firm on the types of products she wants to be PFAS free but is open to negotiating timelines.

She wants to put companies on notice: Even if their products containing PFAS aren’t included in this round of legislation, they will be at some point.

“I don’t know what that date would be, but there’s got to be some sort of a ban eventually,” Cutter said. “They’re proven to be harmful to human health, there’s no question about that.”

Inside the U$ Movement to Ban Lab-Grown Meat

Across the nation, right-wing legislators have set their sights on the sale of protein cultured from animal cells.

“What’s the issue with ranching? What’s the issue with cattle? They fart and they burp and it causes too much methane.”

Wyatt Myskow

&
Lee Hedgepeth
MOTHER JONES 

Scientists work in a bioprocess lab at Eat Just in Alameda, CA making lab-grown meat. Jeff Chiu / AP

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees—those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers and meatpackers in each state.

State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a “war on our ranching” and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits.

Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane—a potent greenhouse gas that’s roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions.

For years, climate activists have been calling for more scrutiny and regulation of emissions from the agricultural sector and for nations to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products due to their climate impacts. Last year, over 150 countries pledged to voluntarily cut emissions from food and agriculture at the United Nations’ annual climate summit.

But the industry has avoided increased regulation and pushed back against efforts to decrease the consumption of meat, with help from local and state governments across the U.S.

Bills in Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Tennessee are just the latest legislation passed in statehouses across the U.S. that have targeted cell-cultured meat, which is produced by taking a sample of an animal’s muscle cells and growing them into edible products in a lab. Sixteen states—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming—have passed laws addressing the use of the word “meat” in such products’ packaging, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas, with some prohibiting cell-cultured, plant-based or insect-based food products from being labeled as meat. “Organizations like the FDA and the World Economic Forum, also Bill Gates and others, who have openly declared war on our ranching.”

“Cell-cultured meat products are so new that there’s not really a framework for how state and federal labeling will work together,” said Rusty Rumley, a senior staff attorney with the National Agricultural Law Center, resulting in no standardized requirements for how to label the products, though legislation has been proposed that could change that.

At the federal level, Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) introduced the Fair and Accurate Ingredient Representation on Labels Act of 2024, which would authorize the United States Department of Agriculture to regulate imitation meat products and restrict their sale if they are not properly labeled, and US Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) introduced a bill to ban schools from serving cell-cultured meat.

But while plant-based meat substitutes are widespread, cell-cultivated meats are not widely available, with none currently being sold in stores. Just last summer, federal agencies gave their first-ever approvals to two companies making cell-cultivated poultry products, which are appearing on restaurant menus. The meat substitutes have garnered the support of some significant investors, including billionaire Bill Gates, who has been the subject of attacks from supporters of some of the state legislation proposed.

“Let me start off by explaining why I drafted this bill,” said Rep. David Marshall, an Arizona Republican who proposed legislation to ban cell-cultured meat from being sold or produced in the state, during a hearing on the bill. “It’s because of organizations like the FDA and the World Economic Forum, also Bill Gates and others, who have openly declared war on our ranching.”“Many of our members call it Franken-meat. They want to know that they’re consuming real food from real farmers.”

In Alabama, an effort to ban lab-grown meat is winding its way through the State House in Montgomery.

There, state senators have already passed a bill that would make it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to three months in jail and a $500 fine, to sell, manufacture or distribute what the proposed legislation labels “cultivated food products.” An earlier version of the bill called lab-grown protein “meat,” but it was quickly revised by lawmakers. The bill passed out of committee and through the Senate without opposition from any members.

Now, the bill is headed toward a vote in the Alabama House of Representatives, where the body’s health committee recently held a public hearing on the issue. Rep. Danny Crawford, who is carrying the bill in the body, told fellow lawmakers during that hearing that he’s concerned about two issues: health risks and competition for Alabama farmers.

“Lab-grown meat or whatever you want to call it—we’re not sure all of the long-term problems with that,” he said. “And it does compete with our farming industry.”

Crawford said that legislators had heard from NASA, which expressed concern about the bill’s impact on programs to develop alternative proteins for astronauts. An amendment to the bill will address that problem, Crawford said, allowing an exemption for research purposes.

Opponents of the ban have said governments shouldn’t interfere with a nascent industry because of unfounded fears over safety concerns.

Pepin Tuma with the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank that works to advance alternative proteins in the food system, spoke at the hearing in opposition to the ban, though he said he’s a “proud meat eater.” The ban will not advance health or safety goals and would stifle innovation, he argued.

“This bill would treat cultivated meat differently than traditional meat without any actual basis in the science and any actual basis in health and safety regulations,” he said.

Tuma also took issue with Crawford’s claim that the potential health effects of meat alternatives justify regulation, arguing that other food products have serious long-term negative health impacts yet have not faced bans.

“There are plenty of foods that are not healthy for us that aren’t banned,” Tuma said. “The question is: Should government be the one to come in and tell us what we can or can’t eat?”

Justin Kolbeck, CEO of cultivated seafood company Wild Type, which is working to produce seafood alternatives, told lawmakers that a ban like the one proposed in Alabama would halt the company in its tracks.

“I’m not here to convince you all to buy our products,” he told the committee. “We have our work cut out for us as making seafood that is as delicious and affordable as the best wild-caught seafood is difficult. However, I am here to ask the government to not take away our freedom to decide what to feed ourselves and our families.”

Kolbeck also argued that the ban would advantage foreign businesses over American ones. Unlike beef and chicken, a vast majority of U.S. consumed seafood is imported, deepening U.S. reliance on foreign food products, he said

“This ban will create Chinese jobs at the expense of small American businesses like mine,” he said.

Even with the proposed amendment to allow research, Kolbeck said the ban could still have serious implications for NASA.

“The problem with cutting out only an exemption for research is that NASA is not going to be in the business of making food products,” Kolbeck said. “We need American companies to make these kinds of products to feed our astronauts, and this industry will die if states like Alabama make it illegal and a criminal misdemeanor for companies like mine to sell our products.”

Only one member of the public, Stephanie Durnin, co-director of an organization called Health Freedom Alabama, spoke in support of the ban.

According to its website, Health Freedom Alabama was founded to support the passage of a bill to ban so-called “vaccine passports” in the state.

“The meat supply of Alabama is complete, whole, real, true, natural. Our membership is very concerned about lab-grown meat,” she said. “Many of our members call it Franken-meat. They want to know that they’re consuming real food from real farmers.”“What’s the issue with ranching? What’s the issue with cattle? They fart and they burp and it causes too much methane.”

In Arizona, two bills related to the regulation of cell-cultured meat have passed through the State House of Representatives.

HB 2244 has had more bipartisan support, proposing to prohibit substitute meat products—like those grown in a lab or that are made of plants—from being labeled just as meat

Another bill, HB 2121, would go a step further by prohibiting residents from selling or producing cell-cultured meat in the state and allowing people and businesses harmed by its sale to sue for up to $100,000. The bill passed through the Arizona House of Representatives last month on a party-line vote, with Republicans in support and Democrats in opposition, and now awaits action in the state Senate.

Critics have said the bill would go too far in restricting what people and businesses can buy or sell. “People should have the right, if they choose to, to buy that here in Arizona,” said Rep. Keith Seaman, a Democrat, at the hearing.

Marshall, the legislator who introduced the bill, said he’s a free-market capitalist, but something must be done to protect the agricultural industry from others “seeking to eradicate ranching.”

“This act is necessary to protect this state’s sovereign interests, history, economy, and food heritage,” the legislators wrote at the bottom of the bill, which was co-sponsored by Reps. Selina Bliss, David Cook, John Gillette, and Laurin Hendrix.

Arizona school children for decades were taught the five Cs: Copper, Cotton, Citrus, Climate, and, of course, Cattle. At one point, the state had nearly two million head of cattle. That figure has now dropped by half, but cattle farms and ranches are still found throughout the state and generate millions of dollars in revenue.

Maintaining the viability of ranchers, supporters said, is a key aspect of HB 2121.

“What’s the issue with ranching? What’s the issue with cattle?” Marshall asked during a hearing for the bill. “They fart and they burp and it causes too much methane.”