ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH NEWS • June 21, 2020
Recent environmental history shows a pattern of powerful men saying regrettable things about the environment. Paul LePage: The gruff, burly former small-town mayor hit Peak Stupid the following year, when the Maine Legislature weighed a bill restricting the use of bisphenol-A (BPA), a plastics additive that mimics hormones and is linked to a wide array of health problems. LePage distilled a growing body of science that had already brought BPA restrictions in Canada, the European Union and eight U.S. states to this: "The only thing that I've heard is if you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards."