From the EPA Press Office

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued letters to portable fuel container (PFC or gas can) manufacturers encouraging them to add vents to gas cans to ensure safe and effective refueling. This announcement comes in response to years of complaints about slow, frustrating fuel flow from modern gas cans. With this reminder to manufacturers to incorporate self-closing vented designs, EPA wants to help make it easier and faster for Americans to refuel.

“Part of Powering the Great American Comeback means ensuring manufacturers have the clarity and encouragement to deliver products Americans want,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. “The confusion surrounding gas cans has been a frustration for years. We are proud to address this issue head on. Moving forward, Americans should have gas cans that are compliant, but most importantly, that are effective and consumer friendly.”

Today’s letter is part of EPA’s broader effort to address the issue of regulatory confusion and accurately communicate to make sure manufacturers and the public understand EPA’s requirements. This will clear the way for manufacturers and consumers to be able to produce and use gas cans that are safe, compliant, and consumer friendly.

Background

In 2007, EPA finalized a rule requiring PFC manufacturers to reduce evaporative emissions by sealing in gasoline vapors. These rules took effect in 2009 and specifically allow vents as long as they close automatically when not in use. Due to widespread confusion, many manufacturers stopped installing vents altogether.

In 2008, Congress passed the Children’s Gasoline Burn Prevention Act, requiring that gas cans be child-resistant, similar to a prescription bottle cap. These child resistance rules led to many of the spring-loaded, hard-to-use nozzles. This is enforced by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).

In 2020, Congress enacted the Portable Fuel Container Safety Act, also enforced by CPSC, which mandated flame mitigation devices in cans to prevent flashback ignition. This further complicated nozzle and spout designs.

EPA’s evaporative emissions standards were designed to protect public health without compromising usability.

From Legal Insurrection

States are also enacting MAHA agenda items, including Nebraska (which just secured a waiver to prohibit the purchase of soda and energy drinks with SNAP benefits).

Back in November, when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, I argued that he could be the most effective change agent President Donald Trump had appointed.

In an attempt to derail that nomination, The New York Times asserted Kennedy was wrong about the composition of Froot Loops, claiming that the Canadian and American versions were nearly identical. Subsequently, the Times was widely mocked, as the article also noted that the U.S. version contained artificial food colorings and preservatives that were, in fact, the substances actually being targeted by Kennedy.

He was wrong on the ingredient count, they are roughly the same. But the Canadian version does have natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.

Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Agenda” scored another win, as now “American Froot Loops” will soon have natural food colorings like the Canadian version.

WK Kellogg Co. will remove synthetic dyes from its cereals, including Froot Loops and Apple Jacks, by the end of 2027, joining a growing cohort of other US companies that have committed to eliminate colorants such as Red 40 and Yellow 5 from their foods.

The Battle Creek, Michigan-based company said it would remove the additives on its website on Friday. It had previously announced that it wouldn’t introduce new products with the dyes beginning in 2026 while also committing to eliminate the ingredients from its cereals served in schools by the 2026-2027 school year.

The cereal maker said 85% of its sales are in foods that don’t contain the dyes. Products with dyes include Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, and some variations of Rice Krispies.

Candy company Ferrero International SA announced earlier this month that it agreed to buy WK Kellogg for an enterprise value of $3.1 billion.

This victory comes hard on the heels of Coca-Cola agreeing to create a product line using American cane sugar. MAHA is moving companies rapidly toward making options available that are less processed and reliant on artificial ingredients.

Additionally, a couple of weeks ago, I reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recently voted to recommend removing thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative, from all flu vaccines. Kennedy has now-signed off on this recommendation.

“After more than two decades of delay, this action fulfills a long-overdue promise to protect our most vulnerable populations from unnecessary mercury exposure,” Kennedy said in the HHS announcement Wednesday. “Injecting any amount of mercury into children when safe, mercury-free alternatives exist defies common sense and public health responsibility. Today, we put safety first.”

Other recommendations from ACIP’s June meeting are currently under review, according to HHS.

However, MAHA isn’t limited to the Washington, D.C., area. States are enacting their own versions of the agenda.

In Oklahoma, RFK Jr. joined the signing of a pair of orders that will begin the process of pulling fluoride from the state’s water supply and blocking the purchase of soda using food stamps. In Louisiana, the health secretary was there when the state enacted a bill that forces food companies to put warnings on their products if they contain certain artificial food dyes, preservatives, or dozens of other additives.

These were just two stops on a nationwide tour that has also taken RFK Jr. to several other states—including Arizona, Utah, and West Virginia—that are pushing forward with his ideas, especially on food. In some cases, Kennedy has cheered from afar: “Texas is leading the way,” he posted on X last month, after the Lone Star State passed its own MAHA-style bill similar to Louisiana’s.

And Nebraska just became the first state to secure a federal waiver prohibiting the purchase of soda and energy drinks with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

The change, set to take effect on January 1, 2026, impacts approximately 152,000 Nebraskans receiving SNAP, previously known as food stamps.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins signed the first-ever waiver amending the definition of “food” for SNAP purchases in Nebraska, officially barring soda and energy drinks from being bought with program benefits.

SNAP benefits, also known as “food stamps,” are paid to low- and no-income households across the U.S. that would otherwise struggle to afford groceries. In 2024, the program reached some 155,000 people in Nebraska—8 percent of its population.

The decision marks a historic departure in SNAP administration. Several other states, all Republican-led, have submitted similar waivers.

At this point, it is clear that Kennedy’s MAHA movement has used a mix of regulatory action, public pressure, and grassroots campaigning to initiate some significant changes in food policy. It will be interesting to see if there are noticeable impacts on chronic disease or obesity rates over the course of Trump’s term.

From ClimateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

A flurry of mainstream media reports, from Bloomberg, The Guardian, Financial Times, and CNN, among other outlets, claim that climate change is causing rising food prices “worldwide,” based on a single new study. This is false. Bad weather has always impacted crop production, and there is no actual evidence that extreme weather is increasing. Globalization of media coverage is simply making it easier to hear about bad weather elsewhere in the world, meanwhile crop production and yields globally continue to set records – a fact the same media outlets largely ignore.

Focusing on the coverage by Bloomberg, in an article titled “How Climate Change Is Raising Your Grocery Bill,” Bloomberg writers report on a study from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the European Central Bank, which claims price jumps in certain food products are due to “extreme weather they say is linked to climate change.”

Bloomberg claims that consumers around the world “say they are feeling the effects of climate change on their grocery bills, making food unaffordable for some and posing a challenge for central bankers trying to tame inflation.” If true at all, this almost certainly the effect of media coverage like Bloomberg’s insisting that climate change is responsible, instead of observational evidence of crop production.

It is worth noting that the study uses the term “unprecedented” eight times in the mere four pages of content. To justify their use of the term unprecedented to describe global weather events in the last few years they reference ERA5 surface temperature data going back to 1940, and the standardized precipitation index from CRU going back to 1901. The reason why this is non-scientific and misleading will become clear when we go over the weather events they claim were so “unprecedented.”

Bloomberg discussed a few of the weather events mentioned in the study linking them to increases in the price for specific crops. They first highlighted increases in lettuce and vegetable prices in the United States, driven by droughts in California and Arizona, the former of which Bloomberg claims saw the “driest three-year period ever recorded.” Also mentioned was hurricane Ian. The problem, of course, is that California’s drought was anything but unprecedented. As discussed in the post “Mega-droughts and Mega-floods in the West All Occurred Well Before ‘climate change’ Was Blamed for Every Weather Event,”  historical data and proxies show that California has experienced far more widespread and severe periods of drought in the past, some of which lasted as long as two hundred years.

In Asia, Bloomberg says a heatwave impacted South Korean cabbage production. While UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data indicate that cabbage production has been slowly declining after a massive spike in the 1970s, yields have remained stable or increased since 2000. This suggests that economic considerations or political decisions made about the relative benefits of growing cabbage versus other crops that could be grown, or uses the land could be put too, rather than climate, are responsible for changes in production.

Australia also saw high lettuce costs due to flooding in the eastern part of the country in recent years, but the year Bloomberg and the study highlight, 2022, was not unprecedented as they implied. In fact, 2022 was only the sixth “wettest” year on available Australian rainfall records, the wettest year on record was in 1950.

Bloomberg goes on to explain how the study allegedly “found that heat, drought and floods were occurring at an increased intensity and frequency,” which is at odds with available data and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6^th assessment report, which though it claims an increase in extreme heat has been detected, finds no emergence of increased flooding or drought in the current historical period.

In short, Bloomberg, and the other mainstream media outlets hyping the BSC report, failed to do any fact checking, failed to examine crop trends, and illegitimately linked individual weather events to long-term climate change, despite such events being common in history and there being no discernable trend in an increase in such events amid the slight warming that has occurred in recent years. To be clear, weather is not climate and, despite what unscientific attribution studies claims, no specific weather event can be tied to long-term climate change.

In short, none of the weather events Bloomberg referred to as unprecedented was in fact unique or even rare historically.

Concerning the crops, BSC and the media focuses on the most, lettuce and cabbage, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that between 1993 and 2023 (the most recent 30-year period of climate change for which we have available data):

• Lettuce (and chicory – the FAO combines them) production grew approximately 112 percent;
• Lettuce and chicory yields increased by about 4 percent;
• Cabbage production expanded by nearly 75 percent;
• And cabbage yield grew by more than 37 percent. (see the graph below)

Bloomberg does briefly concede that other factors, like El Niño, a totally natural phenomenon, played a role in weather in 2023 and 2024, impacting certain crops. The outlet also begrudgingly admits that “food price shocks typically turn out to be short-term in nature, because high prices incentivize more production, which brings prices back down,” though they try to say that coffee and cattle are exceptions to this rule. Although Bloomberg reports that coffee futures are high, there is no evidence that climate change is actually damaging global coffee production, as explained in Climate Realism posts here, here, and here.

Bloomberg ends with a warning from the study authors, claiming that “slashing greenhouse gas emissions and containing global warming will be key to reducing food price inflation risks,” but this ignores another key aspect of food costs. They are also impacted by the cost to produce food, like when governments increase the price farmers pay for fossil fuel derived pesticides and fertilizers or try to restrict their use. Fossil fuel derived chemicals increase yields with less labor and using much less land. Take a look at Sri Lanka for a good example of what happens when climate action is prioritized over food production.

Never before has it been so easy for the media to report on various weather disasters and crop failures globally, and this certainly has an impact on peoples’ perceptions as well as the ability for studies to try to draw connections that aren’t really backed by data. This Bloomberg piece is nothing more than climate fearmongering; taking disconnected crop shortages from around the world from localized weather events and trying to blame them on climate change, when the truth is that there have always been crops failing somewhere in the world at any given time.