“I lost my son, my only child. And here is Maylia, who didn’t have a mother. So, it’s like, I’m childless, she’s motherless, and we’re in this situation together, but against each other.”

— Carrie Harrison, whose son Jack McDonough died of an overdose after another teenager, Maylia Sotelo, sold him fentanyl. 

Last year, an investigation by ProPublica and The Guardian revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency had calculated that one of the chemicals intended to serve as jet fuel was expected to cause cancer in 1 in 4 people exposed over their lifetime.

The risk from another of the plastic-based chemicals, an additive to marine fuel, was more than 1 million times higher than the agency usually considers acceptable — so high that everyone exposed continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer, according to a document obtained through a public records request. The EPA had failed to note the sky-high cancer risk from the marine fuel additive in the agency’s document approving the chemical’s production. When ProPublica asked why, the EPA said it had “inadvertently” omitted it.

This week, we reported that the EPA is planning to withdraw and reconsider its approval for Chevron to produce 18 plastic-based fuels, including some that an internal agency assessment found are highly likely to cause cancer.