"When the EPA wants to set a pesticide standard, they have companies test the pesticide in rodents and measure what’s called the no observed effect level—the NOEL—which becomes the threshold. To extrapolate from rats to humans, they divide that NOEL by 100. But 100 wasn’t good enough to protect kids, so they had to divide it by 1,000. But in the mid-’90s, after the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act, the pesticide industry found a way around that: Instead of testing pesticides in rodents, they began testing them in humans—usually very poor people. For 15 years they have been paying these so-called volunteers a couple of thousand dollars to swallow the pesticide and see what happens. Then they just divide the figure where damage is first observed, the NOEL, by 100. And the EPA has been accepting these data over the protests of a lot of people, turning a blind eye to the third tenfold safety factor for children and not enforcing the law." - Sanjeev Singh

"When the towers collapsed, 2 million tons of dust containing concrete, asbestos, glass, lead, and carcinogens rained down on Lower Manhattan. Yet less than a week later, the EPA said it was safe to work there and breathe the air. What is your perspective on this? [EPA director] Christine Todd Whitman’s statement that the air in Manhattan was safe to breathe was stupid and ill considered because she was making a very strong assertion with almost no data ...... We realized only later that concentrations of dust in the air were so high that they overwhelmed all the normal defenses of the human respiratory tract, and people inhaled ounces of dust into their trachea or their bronchi." - Sanjeev Singh