"Everyone knows someone"

During a NPR story about Congress sending TSCA reform to the White House, a statement by an Environmental Defense Fund scientist, Richard Denison, is probably tendentious:

And I think that's because these issues touch everyone because they deal with our health. Everyone knows someone who got cancer at an early age or who wasn't able to conceive a child. And chemical exposures are increasingly linked to those problems, so I think what everybody felt it was time to upgrade this law.

In an irritable moment, I'll usually make an unfair generalization that 'the environmentalist is the natural enemy of the chemist.'* To suggest that childhood cancers and modern infertility issues are caused by "increasingly linked to" chemical exposure in the environment is a statement that 1) I suspect doesn't have much causal backing in the literature and 2) a strong accusation that will stick in the hearts and minds of the public. As long as folks like Dr. Denison keep making these statements, I'll keep thinking I'm mostly right.

[I would really like to know how Dr. Denison got invited onto NPR in the role of someone who was more or less an explanatory expert, as opposed to a subject matter expert who practices advocacy. If I ever go on a media program to talk about the STEM shortage myth, I will make my priors known immediately. ("Chemjobber is an industrial chemist, a blogger, and a skeptic of the position that America needs more scientists and engineers.") (I guess that announcing that he works for the Environmental Defense Fund is good enough for NPR.)]

*Update: I should probably narrow that to "synthetic** chemist."
**Defined broadly, as in "those who make new molecules/formulations"