When the Federal Communications Commission reaffirmed 25-year-old human health exposure guidelines for wireless radiofrequency (RF) radiation, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t buy it. In a stinging rebuke, An August Court held that the FCC demonstrated “a complete failure to respond to comments” submitted by Environmental Health Trust (EHT) and numerous other experts demonstrating harm from current levels of microwave radiation from wireless devices and infrastructure, especially for children and the environment.

Despite this stunning reprimand of the FCC for failing to update its standards, California’s harried legislators have just passed bills effectively turning every streetlamp into a 5G antenna and banning local controls over where, when and these two-way microwave radiating devices are deployed. The buck stops on the desk of newly-affirmed Governor Newsom who can and must veto these questionable statutes. Rather than overriding local control and bringing wireless radiation closer to humans than ever before, the Governor can insist, as has the reviewing Court, that it’s time for a reset.

For years, the courts have accorded federal regulatory agencies extraordinary deference, assuming competence lays behind their actions. In this instance, the judges balked. The Court determined that the FCC had utterly failed in its most basic duty to take a serious hard look at thousands of pages of expert evidence submitted since 2013 when the agency had asked the public to comment on safety guidelines originally issued in 1996. As the lawsuit brought by EHT and Children’s Health Defense noted, by peremptorily closing its 2013 inquiry in 2019, the FCC assumed that 20th-century guidelines could safely be applied to 21st-century technology.

Read the full op-ed HERE

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