The floss I use apparently has PFAS in it (Oral B Glude). Many paper straws contain it. Nonstick pans. Food wrappers designed to avoid grease. Water resistant clothing, cleaning products, candy wrappers. I used to drink out of plastic bottles and plastic glasses.
We need to do a better job of regulating what is allowed to be sold to consumers. We're likely going to see a a whole host of rare medical conditions become common when my generation gets older. Not to mention that on top of destroying human health we're destroying the planet too. I don't know what to do about any of this but I feel powerless to make an impact.
The problem is we're effectively using the public as a guinea pig. Then when lots of issues are detected, the specific chemicals used are banned. Then industry quickly replaces it with a very similar compound(see e.g Bisphenol A being replaced with Bisphenol S and F in "BPA free plastics" even though it's not known that they are safer) which is likely to have similar problems, but not proven to yet, kicking the can down the road.
Some possible regulations come to mind. For instance, maybe a ban or very strict regulations on the widespread use of compounds like PFAS that have no known biological or other natural path of degradation. Because it's become very clear that such compounds are inevitably going to end up spread all over global ecosystems.
Edit: So I did some more research. Not only are BPS and BPF not known to be safer, they are already known to have many of the same problems as BPA. To make things worse BPS and possibly BPF are even less degradable than BPA. So they may even be worse. This is not even a little surprising. Their structure is identical except for the linkage between the phenol groups. From pharmacology it's well known that highly similar structures tend to have similar pharmacodynamic properties. So they're not even remotely likely to have been good replacements before the growing mountain of evidence to the contrary appeared. Clearly this blatantly irresponsible behaviour from industry needs to be stopped.
Along with banning the chemicals, the corporation could be “murdered”. Like a death sentence for a corp. They would cease to exist in that country. I’m sure this would make them think much harder about the effects of their actions.
CEO's love spouting that they have all the responsibility, so chuck them in jail for 50 years. They do so much more damage to the society than even murderers, it's time for some fucking accountability.
If I own 0.001% of a company which has to do 100 years of jailtime, it doesn't make sense to pay the overhead costs of jailing me for eight hours. Maybe I should do community service related to the harms my company caused or something like that instead.
It wasn’t obvious in retrospect, but I was being completely sarcastic. Anyone holding a managed retirement account or a mutual fund could be held liable.
Maybe limit culpability to SEC Form 3 filers - easier to prove sufficient leverage and potential motive if not for criminal matters, then at least civil matters.
The equivalent action is simply a fine such that the assets are gone.
It's pointless to dissolve a corporation, as new ones can be formed. A corporation is just a formal name and structure we give to a group of people working together.
Currently though, the relationship between the fine and the profitability of the transgression seems wrong. The fines seem to be too low to be an effective deterrent. In addition, white collar crime is punished far too leniently, given their often outsized societal effects.
It might be pointless to do so, however you could also make it illegal for the existing employees to continue to work in the respective industry. It would prove to be a huge incentive to ensuring best practice.
Aha, but you have one out. You could burn the trademark and lock it up for 10 years, and potentially, let all IP owners from the time of infraction causing the corporate death sentence go fallow (so any company that acquired such IP after the infraction would have a worthless piece of paper).
Limited liability sets up an incentive structure in some industries to create business with negative environmental externalities. They use the limitations of liability as a stop loss measure while converting environmental harms into profit. Simply make environmental liability unlimited.
I sort of like this line of reasoning. Though in penal contexts I'm against the death penalty and favour a rehabilitation based approach. So maybe if the government seized control the corporation for a time, to rehabilitate it?
I wouldn't. It may be simplistic but I think that the judiciary applying firm measures designed to protect the public and the biosphere, is the best approach.
I tend to agree. But I could see scenarios where "corporate jail" might be an option in extreme circumstances. I.e where the corp is too integral to the public to leave to whatever power games result from shaking up the company theough fines and sending executives to jail(which we should do far more of by the way...).
It also depends though. Which government? I would have far lower credence in trusting the US government with this compared to some European governments that came out of a healthier democracy than the US. But that also goes for the regulations necessary for your less radical approach.
> So maybe if the government seized control the corporation for a time, to rehabilitate it?
I could see that working in some areas, like military suppliers. Most of the time though it'd be bad to give the government any opportunity to generate profit from law enforcement actions. It could incentivize terrible behavior.
It’s not like consumers don’t benefit from these chemicals
Sure I could buy all metal products but I still don’t because I still like plastic and I’m well aware that it’s destroying the world, but plastic enables my current lifestyle and I currently enjoy my current lifestyle
…As well as billions of other people.
It’s not an issue of “companies being bad.” It’s because we all love our current way of life and no one really wants to stop the companies because most of us still want the products
Corporations need to focus on being efficient, and doing what they do best within the rules. Government should concern itself with doing its best to continue a healthy, happy nation. Regulation does not always need to be complex, and it should put public interest ahead of corporate agency.
Economists might favour something like a progressive tax on untested chemicals in consumer products. The less safety testing you do, the more expensive they will be to use.
Because you put your finger on the sociological problem at hand here. It's just cheaper to do the wrong thing right now. I always think that capitalism has this evolutionary nature where inevitably the biggest coroporations will be the ones that are maximally unethical within(or just enough outside that lawyers can handle it) the confines of the law. And you don't have to look far to find evidence of that. I think regulations need to be designed more with this evolutionary model in mind. It seems lost on most politicians currently.
The problem with such taxes are that the proposed tax amounts are never actually high enough to account for the damage done. Should the tax be equivalent to the amount required to reverse the damage? This is assuming the damage is going to or can be repaired.
For carbon emissions, I think the case for a tax is fairly clear, since we _can't_ just outright ban emissions, the harm is 100% known, and we can even estimate the cost of reversing the emissions through carbon capture.
For these chemicals, it seems much less clear. The uncertainty is so great I don't think I could estimate an appropriate tax rate. The danger is that the alternatives presented are a ban, and a low tax that wouldn't solve the problem. Vested interests would push for the second option and present the problem as solved.
Making corporations more accountable for external costs is maybe the great challenge of our time. I think markets and capitalism are necessary. I can't help but think there must be some more fundamental selective pressure that can be applied that will lead to corporations that take externalised cost into account being more successful over time. I have no suggestions. I'm not sure anyone does. But I can't quite get it out my mind lately. I even caught myself considering going off to study evolutionary economics. The 25 year old me would stare at me in incredulity upon hearing this. I feel like the social sciences have a ways to go still before being able to answer questions like this.
Corporations are people and how dare you threaten peoples' agencies like that! You wouldn't propose that of a human group, so why do it to non-human persons??
I actually like that corporations want to be considered people - that means they are not above the law, no matter the size, therefore if they cause harm to people(s), and it is intentional/illegal it is entirely within the right of government to stop them.
Regulation works when experts really do have the answer.
But the problem here is that we just don't know. We know about a few worrisome problems and signs, but we don't have a clear picture like we do with lead or asbestos.
We could switch from "allow by default" to "deny by default", but I'm not even sure that would help. Often problems are hard to find even once its widespread.
We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists.
I think the right answer is more funding for long-term rigorous studies. That way we know.
> We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists.
Why don't we want to foster this? If some compound is unknown, it seems prudent to assume its a risk until proven otherwise. Then you can calculate whether or not the possible miniscule or nonexistent benefit is worth the potentially miniscule or catastrophic downside.
Some might respond that this would hamper progress, but really it would just hamper sales. You can continue to learn things without testing on the general public. And if you can't, then maybe that's no excuse to test it in prod.
We actually do have an example of a category that is regulated as “deny by default” in the US but not elsewhere!
Sunscreen is regulated by the FDA unlike all other cosmetic products, and is considered a cosmetic in Korea, Japan, Canada and Asia. The end result is that there are a lot of new sunscreen formulations no one wants to put through the FDA process despite several attempts at simplification by the FDA and Congress; a new sunscreen chemical hasn’t been approved since the turn of the century.
The problem is that the already approved 15 or so chemicals either have side effects of their own, or have bad cosmetic properties (bad texture, bad mixing, leaves white color on skin, etc.). We may actually be exposing people to more risk from skin cancer due to the lack of products that people actually want to apply to their skin daily.
> Sunscreen is regulated by the FDA unlike all other cosmetic products
Sunscreen is not a cosmetic product, the intended effect of the product is not cosmetic. It makes perfect sense to regulate sunscreen as a drug. I'm really glad if they aren't letting people in the US lather up their faces with sunscreen lotions that can't demonstrate themselves to be "generally recognized as safe and effective". People are using sunscreen more than ever these days.
If the products were so good that everyone would buy them over our tired old sunscreen formulas, and if they don't poison people or the planet, then someone will take the time and pay the money to meet that standard and they will make back their investment very quickly as they put every other sunscreen company in the US out of business. If no one has done that yet and you are so confident in these new sunscreens why not take a shot yourself?
> the intended effect of the product is not cosmetic
I mean, what is the working definition of "cosmetic"? Toothpaste and moisturizer are considered cosmetic by the FDA even though they certainly have health applications.
> they will make back their investment very quickly
> Return on investment. The testing FDA requested is extensive, would cost millions of dollars, or take several years to conduct, according to sponsor representatives. Some stakeholders and sponsor representatives said that sponsors are currently working to develop newer sunscreen ingredients and are therefore reluctant to invest in the testing FDA requested for the older ingredients covered by the pending applications.
So it's unclear that this process is worth it when the foreign cosmetics companies can just sell to the other 7.6B people not covered by these requirements, and the products might no longer be manufactured by the time they are approved for use in the US. Also, no ingredient has successfully made it through in the past 22 years, so it's not clear that spending all that money will actually result in actually being able to sell the ingredient.
In addition, according to the same GAO report, the FDA requires animal testing. It is a really big movement right now in consumer cosmetics that the consumers who are paying for premium products also want cruelty-free products, so the required FDA testing may actually make the products unmarketable.
> if they don't poison people or the planet
To be clear, the approved ingredients don't necessarily do this either. Only two ingredients of the approved 16 are deemed to be GRASE (generally recognized as safe & effective) by the FDA. Two are just not safe, and the remaining 12 do not have enough data. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/understanding-over-counter-medicin...
I get the avoision factor, but what do we have to go on to know the safety of the other country’s products if they’re more loosely regulated?
It’s not like the FDA requires studies to be done in USA, so it’s hard(er) to argue that this is a case of regulatory capture.
It sounds like the evidence base for the non-FDA products isn’t there beyond “people in blank have used it and we can confirm they didn’t immediately die but otherwise we don’t really know”.
Meanwhile, I can’t just import a European car and register it, even though it has met almost entirely overlapping safety standards.
The difference is that we certainly have approved new car safety features in the US in the last 22 years, not all of which were domestic in origin. How many regulatory categories can we speak of that have not allowed any new entries in that time frame?
In that time frame some of these ingredients like bemotrizinol have been available to hundreds of millions of people. If there was a risk of something like thalidomide babies here, it would’ve been observable by now.
"Chemicals" is far too ill- defined a term. Even if you define it as a substance that doesn't occur in significant amounts in nature (therefore our bodies have had no chance to adapt to) arguably most chemicals produced (esp. medications) have benefits that easily make the risks/downsides worth it, particularly as there are usually ways of mitigating those risks (which we absolutely need to do more of).
It'd be great if we could use ML and super sophisticated simulators to determine ahead of time whether a particular chemical might have unexpected negative side effects were they to reach a certain level of saturation in our environment, and once such technology is available I'd be fully in support of it being mandatory.
Does it fully degrade in soil and/or seawater in a reasonable time. If it does not, are the components that remain high-molecular-weight polymers or are they small molecules?
What happens to it in a mammal body? Does it accumulate or is it excreted or otherwise eliminated?
Does it contain harmful elements (which inherently cannot degrade)?
Does aging or UV exposure change the answer to #1?
Does it contain contaminants that are problematic as above?
By these standards, PFOA would massively fail. PTFE might pass by itself but might fail the contaminant test. Historical industrial discharges from fluorochemical plants would fail.
If those tests can be done within a reasonable timeframe and cost then sure, they should be mandatory. But there's still a question of whether the benefits outweigh any downsides.
There's been a number of hypotheses floating about that many of the industrial chemicals permeating our environment might be partly responsible for declining fertility - if true, how do you judge whether that's necessarily a bad thing in a world where we're already overstretching our planet's ability to sustain our lifestyles?
You’re scope creeping unnecessarily - even if we’re beyond carrying capacity for the planet the answer is not let ‘er rip with industrial chemicals. Better to address the issues separately, so you can make sure there are fewer unintended consequences. Also, if industrial chemicals are causing declining birth rates in humans don’t you think they’re doing that to other animals too? And that may be contributing to making the whole planet less livable?
Absolutely, but the research to determine these things is slow and expensive. We still don't have a clear picture around fertility after decades of study, and that's just one example. Banning things until we have conclusive evidence they're 100% safe isn't feasible, that's my only point.
And just to be clear I'm not the least bit in the laissez-faire camp of "allow anything and let the market decide what's safe" either. Regulation is critical, but it has limits and we (as in taxpayer-funded research facilities etc.) should be regularly reexamining whether the benefits outweigh the downsides for all industrially produced chemical substances.
I'd agree on such a ban.
But how expensive is it to determine that a small molecule is bio accumulating?
And how much time/money do we need to spend on testing?
It's not the pure economic harm I'm worried about. Such a molecule might well be a key part of a genuine solution to reducing GHG emissions.
Overpopulation is a larger problem than most people seem to realize because they aren't usually thinking about anything more than how many bodies can be crammed into a given area. Once you start thinking about how many people a given area can sustainably support all the space we seem to have matters a lot less. I'm all for working to address overpopulation, but clearly there's a huge problem with choosing to murder or poison massive numbers of other people to "help".
When populations reach the point where they start genuinely thinking being dead or never being born is better than contributing to the problem they stop having kids, and start looking at suicide. Maybe you're at that point already, and if you made the choice to die in order to help, or by way of example, I wouldn't fault you for it, but your feelings on the matter should never become someone else's problem and it should never justify the actions of someone causing, or allowing someone to cause, large numbers of people to suffer.
Not sure how you got any of that from my message.
I'm not even suggesting we should keep using particular chemicals even if they're known to be linked to infertility, only that if said chemicals have a particular benefit, maybe the disadvantage of slightly decreased fertility is worthwhile (as it is that link hasn't been firmly established even after decades of research).
People don't need to decide if the "disadvantage" of being unknowingly poisoned until fertility is impaired is "worth it". Anyone who feels that they are too fertile can have themselves sterilized without the harm to the environment caused by these chemicals and anybody who hasn't made that choice for themselves should never have to worry about being poisoned either. That means nobody should get to decide it's worth it for them to keep using the chemicals if that means everyone else gets poisoned against their will. There's really no big moral dilemma here.
> arguably most chemicals produced (esp. medications) have benefits that easily make the risks/downsides worth it
Without some heavy qualification, this seems unlikely to be true.
Maybe if you restrict it to things that have successfully gone through some sort of heavy trials, but even then there are plenty of things that get through with a tiny upside (like the recent alzheimers drug that made headlines). And most things don't make it through trials.
If you open it up to any concoction that humans have discovered or whipped up in a lab, hoo boy.
Edit: my running definition here would be any kind of compound that we've isolated and attempted to sell.
1. Have profound misunderstanding of what is a "chemical"
2. have profound Ignorance of how very very few things in life are "provably knowingly completely safe"
It's not that we would "eliminate a few bad chemicals" with that approach, it's that we would eliminate virtually everything. And let's not start with "let's use natural stuff" and get into silly argument as to how do you define it and how do you prove it safe (as people are also profoundly ignorant on what is "natural" or how provably safe it is).
Everything will kill you. You will die. Note that I am not advocating nihilistic approach of "anything goes" / rampant markets / zero oversight, but I'm also not advocating nihilistic approach of "nothing goes". Human body and interactions are mind numbingly complex and I don't know how you demonstrate, conclusively, anything without testing in prod or even then, for given value of "conclusively". I doubt we would leave apples for sale if we tried to decompose them and prove all compounds within it conclusively safe.
The things that have been around for generations and we haven't yet discovered deal breaking issues in should obviously get a pass (unless something is eventually found of course).
When a company comes out with a flashy new product that has a novel use of a compound, we should be skeptical by default, especially if it is something that eventually makes its way onto or into our bodies somehow.
I'm not asking for complete safety. I'm just suggesting that we don't presume "safe enough" by default.
Apples are fine. When you do some novel shit to that apple before it gets to me, no thanks, I'll wait and see. Whatever the benefit is, its probably not for my sake (it's probably good for margins though), and if it is it's probably not that much better than a plain old apple.
The problem is that (a) you can't prove something safe, you can merely fail to find harm; and (b) literally everything is a chemical, often it already exists in some form and is used for some purposes, and we reuse it for something else at a larger scale... at large enough scales basically anything is dangerous.
If they occur in nature, esp. in food, our bodies have had time to adapt to them, so that's a distraction. But even restricted to "man-made chemicals" (that can get into our bloodstream and interact with our cellular biology) it's still an enormous class of substances that it's silly to treat as dangerous-until- proven-otherwise - our scientific understanding is a little more advanced than that.
That's not a distraction at all. There are plenty of naturally-occuring chemicals in plants that are deadly poisons to humans. Some of them are even naturally present at low levels in food we eat, such as cyanide in some fruits.
And yes, if manufacturers were creating unnatural quantities of those and polluting the environment with them in a way our bodies couldn't handle, they'd need to be regulated too (some probably are). But the chemicals that naturally occur in food we've been eating for 10s or 100s of 1000s of years aren't the issue here.
This is probably not a great reading of what you wrote, so I'm happy to be corrected, but this is what I get from your comment: humanity has discovered or invented beneficial uses for some compounds (like for example some of the vaccines that have been developed throughout history), so therefore we should presume the safety of every other novel use of a compound that comes along.
There are lots of things that can be detected rather simply in a lab though. Like running a bioassay to ascertain activity at various receptors. Bisphenol A for instance has interactions with several hormone receptors. A single in vitro study is enough to label BPA as biologically active and therefore a potential risk.
Similarly, some PFAS compounds are now known to interact with certain receptors involved in lipid metabolism. So it can also be determined as biologically active in vitro.
There's just so much more that can be done about this on the regulatory side than is done currently.
There's a middle ground. You can permit novel substances but if it is discovered to be harmful then the burden of proof is inverted for the family of related chemicals. Like not only narcotics but also chemical analogues (even those that haven't been designed yet) are banned
And BPF, both of which are now known to have similar problems.
It's not like the companies developing these chemicals don't know that they're likely to have the same activity. It's just pharmacology. Similar structures tend to have similar activity.
I definitely second GPs suggestion of having the burden of proof reversed like that. It would greatly reduce the work required by researchers, too.
Interestingly, BPA was actually known to have estrogenergic properties in the 30s shortly after it was first isolated, and was first researched as a potential estrogen replacement. With the right regulation this could have been caught close to a century ago...
The fact that we are commenting in a thread about a report on something that has an implied "this is bad for people" suggests experts know, to a good enough degree, about certain things that should be regulated better.
It implies that some people think it's bad, but not necessarily that they're right. It's not like every science article shared here is accurate or reflects scientific consensus.
There's no heuristic shortcut for actually learning about the subject. Without doing the homework, all we can say is that it seems plausible that there might be a problem.
Given that these compounds are mass produced and spread all over the globe at an industrial scale, I think the plausibility of a problem should be sufficient for holding back. Especially when the compound is known to be non-degradable. Then we know, if there is a problem, we're gonna be stuck with it for a long time. Even more reason for extreme caution.
It's reason for concern but not enough to make a convincing case. This is still trying to take a logical shortcut to avoid actually learning specifics about the problem.
But if you don't learn anything then you're just another person saying their opinion on the Internet, like the rest of us.
My point is, I don't like this defeatist attitude of "well there's no way to know, so we should just do more of the same". Just because it's a very hard problem doesn't mean there isn't a lot more we could do. And a lot of the chemicals causing problems today could have been ruled out with far less effort than haphazardly testing it on the whole world population.
I don't see why so many people these days need to reduce everything to this type of false dichotomy.
And it's also a question of how much concern is enough? I would argue that currently the threshold is set far, far too high.
Right. I'm a pretty bad example because I obsessively investigate further. I can't help it. I see something, I need to understand it. It's my curse in life.
“Oh it’ll probably be fine” is just not good enough any more. We’ve destroyed and irreparably harmed huge swaths of nature in a vanishingly short period of time due to this attitude. It has failed again, and again, and again. If we keep this up, we really will destroy ourselves and the habitability of the planet. The consequences are just so dire now that the notion that we should just roll the dice is frankly absurd. If we don’t know it’s safe, assume it’s not. Perfect? No. Better than the alternative? Yes.
Cognitive dissonance regarding this is completely crazy right now. As far as I can tell, most people will acknowledge that there is a big crisis looming ahead by now (some even that we're already in the midst of it) but the mere thought of the tiniest bit of action to deal with that crisis is met with steadfast resistance, even things that don't affect them all that much individually. You'd expect a lot of popular demand for political action to at least soften the crash, but at least where I live (southern Germany) I don't perceive any such demand. What concerns are voiced are always strictly in the abstract. Please do save the environment, but definitely not in my backyard, or village, or district, or anywhere else, thank you very much.
Yet the changes are really obvious by now. I've been on a hike in the northern Alps a few days ago. I know the mountain quite well, and it should be teeming with life this time of the year, insects, birds, but it was eerily quiet across the whole altitude range. The river in my hometown should carry yearly floodwaters from snowmelt, but this year there was not a hint of a flood. The all-time temperature record was shattered (again), though. Forest fires in areas that never saw any just decades ago. Clean windshields in mid-August. Either no rainfall for months, or several 1000-year floods, nothing in between. Silence where there have been annoyingly loud crickets and frogs since forever.
I guess we're running a deeply, deeply dangerous experiment on the biosphere and I'm not convinced anymore that it's going to be fine. I have a feeling it's going to be very, very much not fine at all.
You're right we're not completely certain, but I think it would be prudent to immediately cut back on all PFAS except scenarios where no viable alternative exists since they are so hard to remove from the environment. As nice as non-stick PFAS pans are, they need to go for now until we know more.
> It’s very difficult (if not impossible) to prove chemicals are safe.
Yes, but it's certainly possible to rule out entire classes of harms by asking the right questions before putting a product on the market. Maybe 100% safe is impossible but 99% is still a pretty low bar/standard when it comes to health/pollution risks.
The problem is in the current situation, corporations push toxic products on everyone that they either know to be toxic or really don't want to find out. Then we wait for people to get sick and die, then finally after it becomes a too big scandal for corporate PR and government regulators to pretend they didn't see, they start to maybe study the problem and issue guidelines.
This timeline is so broken and we see the same thing in the medical world where substances we'd known to be harmful for years/decades kept on being marketed and prescribed to unknowing patients. I personally have no faith in governments (who created or benefited from these abuses), but if you're a believer in regulations, the bare minimum they can do is publish 100% of toxicity claims/studies without any delay from submission (public inbox).
This could help in that whistleblowers are often coming forward with such claims (such as the EDF nuclear whistleblower lately) but it's hard for them to find a platform, and for the public to get informed.
One aspect we have, is defense materials being mass-produced for potentially large-scale warfare, then really raking in the bucks when a consumer application can be found. That way everybody wants some, not just soldiers. And if it's consumable, so much better since that calls for continuous mass-production. And where's it all going to end up? What part of the environment? Well, that's diferent for different materials.
Sometimes a material itself is highly disruptive, other times it's the vast quantities that end up being mass-produced.
Even then the risk of an unforseen toxic outcome has always been underestimated.
Since it will be practically impossible to remove PFAs from the planet's surface and atmosphere short of hoping it will all eventually wash out and gets buried in sediments (but will it, ever?), when so much is at stake at our very existential foundations, I believe we should forego the immediate wide-scale application of novel compounds unless they have plausibly be shown to be safe. Yes, that can prove to be very difficult but somehow I feel having one less formula for making anti-stick pans or, historically, having to use a slightly more expensive antiknock agent are small prices to pay if it keeps the air and the water free from chemicals that cause troubles for decades if not centuries for uncounted numbers of people and animals.
There's always some risk left no matter the rigor of testing. Shouldn't keep us from doing our best.
Sure, but if your chemical can enter the hydrosphere and never break down, we should maybe study it for a long long long time before applying it to everything.
And yet it's potentially very easy to prove something is unsafe, or likely to have unforeseen effects. In vitro bioassays, animal testing. Lots of the chemicals causing problems today could have fairly easily been screened out this way. Just because epistemologically it's impossible to ever know for sure something is safe, that's not a justification for going ahead with almost no testing at all.
Nothing in science can be "proven". Proof only exists in mathematics and logic. You can't prove something is safe, but you can provide evidence that it is unsafe. And generally the best evidence for something being unsafe is unfortunately only available after something is in widespread use because then the links to cancer, birth defects, or whatever can be found. There are lesser forms of evidence based on testing on animals and cell lines than can be done before the widespread use, but these have a lot of both false positives and false negatives.
Exactly! The burden of proof to prove that something is harmful somehow landed on the public, which allowed harmful things to continue to be in use for years (decades!) while things were litigated and all manner of disinformation was pushed out by industry. This should never have been allowed to be the case.
Slightly off topic: The recent movie starring Mark Ruffalo, Dark Water, is excellent. It covers PFAS and one lawyer’s fight to bring it to light. Very similar to the excellent “A Civil Action” starring John Travolta in the 90s or early 2000s (obligatory: the book is far better than the movie).
If I could make one change I would require more thorough scrutiny for any product that we know is going to persist in the environment for a long time. The half life of your new plastic is 10 years due to UV degradation? Great you can use that only moderate safety studies. The half life of your new waterproof coating is 100 years? Let's do some pretty serious studies. Half life of this gasoline additive is basically forever? Um, maybe don't use that.
> Regulation works when experts really do have the answer.
I think there are other significant factors to consider as well.
In the US at least I think regulation, in our current day, has failed in many areas due to 1) the slowing down of decision makers to become informed and make decisions (see congress for stagnation in passing legal regulations) 2) industries or large industry players have waged effective influence campaigns in mainstream and scientific communities to push a friendly agenda or inject uncertainty which has nock on affects when it comes to funding (see pesticides like neonics and glyphosates, oil and gas companies with respect to global warming and plastic recycling, tobaco companies and smoking causing cancer, …), and 3) a certain degree of capture in regulatory agencies by industry (industry players later work for the regulatory agency or the reverse, as well as other tactics). 4) the politicization of regulation (not sure how much this can be helped though).
It’s a mess.
> We could switch from "allow by default" to "deny by default", but I'm not even sure that would help.
There may be a middle ground here. As a chemic becomes more widely used that could trigger required enhanced testing by a regulatory agency as well as research grants looking into their safety.
And as a chemical becomes ever more widely used rigorous long-term studies could be required.
I’m not sure what the right long term answer is but I can’t help but think there is some fundamental mismatch of top down regulation by regulatory bodies in a market based system where companies are innovating and also creating these harms / negative externalities.
In the former regulators are slow, reactionary, and often substantial harm must have already occurred for a regulation to be passed. The latter is a dynamic and fast moving system where companies are ruled by a fitness function which is often myopic and locally greedy.
It seems introducing another market for regulation could offer a solution by using one dynamic system to regulate another. Carbon credits is an example of this. However two or more interacting systems will make things much harder to reason about and may have their own significant flaws if not designed well (for example trees are planted but then die earlier than expected or are later harvested after the carbon credits have been sold).
While emerging evidence should be used to change guidelines, we should not be at the mercy of corporations wishing to increase their profit margins with unknown chemicals.
You don't have to work with what you have only just invented and don't understand.
You're talking about bottles and pans. We have managed with bottles and pans for a thousand years before pfas.
What? I'm saying we now know it's super harmful and should work with that knowledge to regulate against it, without waiting for all experts to agree and all studies to show.
> But the problem here is that we just don't know.
Many of these things we don't know are because it would be unethical to do the experiment to give some people PFAS and some people no PFAS and see if the PFAS group get more diseases.
Instead, we allow PFAS to be used indiscriminately, and then afterwards regret it.
Experimentation of potentially harmful things on people should be allowed if the alternative is giving the same potentially harmful thing to everybody with no experimentation done.
The fireproofing chemical sprayed on fabrics for sheets upholstery etc since the 1970s in the US is and has been a known forever chemical but also very profitable so the mfr basically used the tobacco industry strategy for 20+ years at which point its in everyone's bodies for the rest of their lives. [1]
The book was published over a decade ago, so news travels slowly sometimes, even to regulators.
People, people. Why do you all expect regulation to work in the presence of corruption?
All regulations break down with high enough stakes. We are in this mess right now, because we made the mistake of thinking that regulations will be good enough to stop it.
I think we should study the effects of materials well before jumping ship to production and consumption. The industry is guilty for rushing this and for the lack of knowledge pretends there’s no proof of effects on human health. They could always use something that is not (yet) banned but also not well tested in the first place. The regulators ‘regulate’ within the framework but if the framework is bad is complete different thing. The industry has bigger pockets so it can almost always put the consumer’s interest at the bottom of their priorities. Till we fix this imballance we’re likely to suffer again and again in different ways in the future. To me the return to simpler times really means simply consume less and if we all did that and coupled it with strong repairability movements and proper recycling we’d all benefit from this as well as the environment.
Exactly. Low-tech and repairability are the only way forward for humanity... all other scenarios end up in painful dreadful collapse. But our tyrannical overlords are ideologically opposed to this conclusion because it's a path of degrowth and sharing economy which is fundamentally contradictory to capitalist doctrine and interests.
It's not considered "unsafe" until there's enough sponsored scientific studies. Until there's enough ontological awareness, funding, time, & inclination for these studies, it's considered "safe". Welcome to public perception through the lens of Positivism.
Regulators were forcing its use and regulation was one of the main drivers of the PFAS industry. California forced furniture makers to spray new furniture with PFAS based flame retardants for years. As of just this year, 2022, in California, even though they are no longer required, PFAS are still allowed in furniture until 2024.
Consumer products are only part of the problem. PFAS are emitted from industry, like from farms and smoke stacks, straight into the atmosphere where they deposit and precipitate back down onto everything.
That's one of the main issues here: you don't avoid it just by avoiding the consumer goods in your post.
Which, as bad as it is in general, shouldn't be that much of a problem since it is not in direct contact with water flow, being used to seal the joints.
> Which, as bad as it is in general, shouldn't be that much of a problem since it is not in direct contact with water flow, being used to seal the joints.
have you ever taken apart half of those joints?
people love going overboard with the tape, when the threads are overloaded guess where the excess gets squished?
Yeah, there is generally no PTFE in the middle of anyone's PEX or copper system. Thread sealant only goes on threads, and PEX systems are crimped together and copper systems are (generally) soldered together. Threaded fittings are expensive and so they're avoided when possible.
But, either system will have often have PTFE at any terminations where transitioning to other fixtures via threaded fittings. [0] And occasionally there are brass fittings in the middle of these systems which are threaded and those will use PTFE as well.
My understanding is that polyethylene is one of the most benign plastics with respect to leaching, and that PEX should be even more benign than normal polyethylene because of the crosslinking.
I could be mistaken but I believe PEX has been the dominant type of pipe used in new water systems over the last 15 years or so. There’s not really any plumbers tape involved with the various types of fittings that are used with those pipes.
can you point me at an authoritative source that says PTFE is bad and not inert in humans (unless you reach a temperature of 500F or so)? All I ever see are "holistic medicine" and food babe level sites saying it.
Is that one so bad in its end use? I would imagine production byproducts would be the bigger issue for plumbing tape, which is effectively solid and used in non-abrasive applications.
The PTFE itself is really an inert polymer that is harmless to the water flowing through. It will not get into your water or break down through decay, those were considered superior properties. It takes a lot more heat to decompose PTFE than it does regular plastics, but once that's happening the vapors are a lot more toxic. But these are not the kind of plumbing fittings for welding or soldering.
Chemically, ethylene is the gaseous hydrocarbon monomer that is polymerized to make the common polyethylene plastic, like so many milk jugs and other items needing a cheap plastic are made of.
Tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) is the fluorocarbon monomer which is the fluorinated analog of the common ethylene. It's really rough and wants to spontaneously react with itself (or any number of other things) to form a bit of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) polymer with somewhat explosive force under not-fully-predictable conditions. So nobody really wants to handle TFE.
Instead extensive research at places like 3M and DuPont came up with a number of different alternative starting molecules that were less self-reactive but could still be coerced into forming PTFE as a final product.
The PTFE was intended be a forever plastic like no other, but a variety of fluorinated starting materials and byproducts were also obtained some of which had interesting properties themselves. For instance some acidic PFAS compounds are not very inert on their own, one end of the molecule will firmly bond to some natural products like canvas or leather, which largely neutralizes their further reactivity. So after that those molecules aren't going anywhere until degradation of the substrate occurs. And the other end of the molcules possess the perfluorinated inert feature, forming an invisible coating which repels water like people had never seen.
So it's all this other stuff, and the final degradation products (of those PFAS that have a decomposition pathway), that ends up in the environent eventually, many with a physical propery of self-dispersal. OTOH the PTFE is a solid plastic and just sits there permanently inert, no decomposition pathway, with little tendency for further environmental spread unless incinerated or microscopically pulverized, which disperses it as a byproduct gas, or very tough microplastic, respectively.
The FDA retroactively banned PFOA residue from PTFE coated stents and guidewires. So you would have had people with PFOA contamination during endivascular surgery prior to that.
PFOA-free PTFE guidewires suffer higher risk of delamination, i.e. flaking of the ptfe coating which becone an embulus in your bloodstream.
The FDA does an amazing job at keeping us safe but the more evidence we have about the effects of novel substances the more I am biased to applying a cautionary principle.
In my pipe fixtures at home I will stick to hemp to seal the threads. If in the future I happen to need a stent, then I'll worry about it when I cross that bridge. :)
Hemp is being used by Humans since the Neolithic, we have been eating, wearing, and building houses with it for more than 10 centuries. If it really was unsafe the data would have revealed it a long time ago.
Synthesized fluoropolymers have been around for about 60 years with an overall poor track record for Health and Safety.
If we apply a moderate cautionary principle towards novelty and also consider the minor life quality improvements that these 3M innovations bring (fluoropolymers only make things slightly less incovenient they are not ground breaking in my life), then it really is a no brainer decision.
That’s the traditional way of sealing joints. No chemicals, just hemp and your own saliva (you usually don’t have running water nearby when doing plumbing).
Why is it so in vogue to be a doomer? Malthus, the original doomer, was wrong on just about all of his predictions. Most likely, we're wrong too. I mean, the planet survived like half a dozen mass extinction events, what makes you think it won't survive another one?
I just don't understand the "woe is me" nihilistic narrative so many intelligent people are deeply fond of. Recycle, turn off the lights, vote with your conscience. Get a wife, make some kids, live a happy life, try to make a positive difference in the world. It's not hard.
Let's not be "doomers", but let's not ignore emerging risks of catastrophic outcomes, either.
Playing Russian Roulette a few times and getting away with it doesn't make it safe.
And plenty of stuff that would have been really bad has been stopped by diligent response by people and governments considering those risks.
If we keep making the same mistakes and exposing consumers to toxic things, and lacing the entire environment with them... maybe there's some processes that need to improve instead of just shrugging and saying "well, that's how we do it 'round here!"
At the time, many of the people who brought legitimate concerns to light were dismissed as alarmist.
History is full of instances of people not taking concerns seriously because “I’ve done things this way for years and I’m not dead yet”, only to find out a 30 years later, that in fact, it was something that causes a chronic disease.
The "safety regulators" required spraying furniture and other products with PFAS in the name of flame retardants. If anything, it was the regulators that helped cause this mess.
It's not hard to look at everything we have and do and see how fragile it all is. It feels harder and harder to acquire the "things" necessary to feel successful, and once you get them, and see how easy it is to lose, it's not weird to think people might feel extremely vulnerable.
It also doesn't help that most popular cinematic futurism is post-apocalyptic now. I remember RedLetterMedia pointing to the success of Independence Day as the turning point and I can see some validity in that.
Yup, the truth is that there are a host of things that are going to make all of our lives slightly shorter. Our doom is that we’re not living absolutely optimum length or quality lives… but the real doom is that some people spend their long lives terrified of losing the last few percent and spread the fear instead of focusing on what makes life worth living.
There is an amount of attention appropriate to give risks, but many people really overdo it and turn it into a kind of religion and obsession.
The only thing I've done in line with the absolute pessimism of my beliefs about the future is stop paying into my pension (for now). I still plan to have kids, gods willing.
It's one thing to worry about the planet and the animals, and people dying directly due to climate events (floods and storms, heatwaves and drought) etc. I am far, far more worried about what we will do to each other when the 3 billion of us who are vulnerable to climate change want to move somewhere else.
Because for people who don't have their heads buried in the sand it can be very difficult to fully enjoy one's privileged position in the world without failing to recognize the vast socioeconomic disparity that got them there in the first place, and thusly be deeply frustrated when one's impact on the problem seems so inconsequential.
non stick pans use ptfe not pfoa, this has been a scare tactic by "holistic nutritionists" on the internet for ages. If your non-stick is from a name brand and less than 10 years old, they haven't used PFOA (or PFAs) in ages. Don't toss your stuff out.
To all the chemical engineers:
(And computer engineers for that matter)
Your time is coming. The rest of the hard engineering disciplines have had their failures and now we have licenses and accountability.
The amount of damage one bridge can do is limited, but the amount of destruction caused by endocrine disrupting chemicals and authoritarian enabling surveillance tools is unlimited.
The civil engineer will be held to account for his failures. Hopefully, soon, the same will be true for the likes of your professions
I agree that some more pubic accountability for chemical engineers and programmers would be great, but I hate the hostile, anti-intellectual "us good, chemists bad" vibe with which you say it. There's no need to threaten people.
There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession.
> the hostile, anti-intellectual "us good, chemists bad" vibe with which you say it.
I personally didn't get that from the parent comment. It's just really weird (from an outsider/alien perspective) that in many sectors of the corporate mafia like in the chemical/IT industry obvious and sometimes intentional malicious schemes (which result in actual deaths) are either rewarded or ignored... when in many other branches harmless errors can get you kicked from your job (eg. in restaurants/shops).
It's not contempt to point that out. If you believe in the idea that there should be a social contract by which we are bound, the social contract must apply to everyone fairly. So why does it often not apply to cops, judges, landlords and some sectors of the engineering community?
> There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession.
True, but like in every other profession, it's very hard to make money if you're really trying to make the world better, and i do mean any money (as in find a job at all).
lol, ok. sure, whatever. as a ChemE, we have already made so much progress on making plants blow up less, spilling toxic chemicals into waterways, stopping destroying the ozone, make food safer, ....
you maybe need to go talk to chemists who make this. ChemE just mass produce what the chemist makes. but the chemist just makes what the business needs and the business you makes what the consumer wants.
so oh wait, this is on you for being an irresponsible consumer. don't buy it and we won't make it.
also, north America and the west have already done impressive reforms contrary to Asia which really needs to learn environmentalism
Great, love that for you. When your company is ruining the world you should take a stand.
> ... irresponsible consumer...
No. Won't accept that shirking of responsibility. Consumers expect that the product isn't poison. We expect that planes fly and cars don't explode. It isn't reasonable to say that consumers want nonstick poison. They were sold a product that was "better" than the alternatives. They believed that would include not being poison.
No argument here. But the state is not one entity.
Licensing for many professions is bullshit. Licensing for engineering requires mentorship and certification by non-government societies in the US. They determine the amount of rigor to join their group and hold the status as a professional engineer.
Everything after that is just registration, which confirms you have evidence of the the prior
Chemists have nothing directly to do with toxicity and environmental effects either, they design and/or select chemicals to do a job. (The engineers make the aforementioned chemicals in bulk/cheaply/efficiently. Not that they never screw up, but the implied dereliction of ethical behavior you are insinuating doesn't exist and is frankly insulting.
So yes, it is a valid analogy. Just as it would be equally valid [read: not valid at all] to damn the software engineering profession for the sins of AutoDesk, or whomever your villain du jour is.
If you do this work then you are intelligent enough to determine something about the chemicals you are mass producing. If nothing is known about them, should you be making them? There is your dilemma, I suppose. Claiming ignorance as a shield against accountability is a pretty weak stance. Just doing what you're told doesn't go over well either, if we can use history as a guide.
My statement is intended to denounce those among you that have no concern with what their work will wrought in the world. If you can stand behind your actions then you aren't the target.
Side note: most of software is written by hacks (read: google copypasters) that don't deserve the title engineer and do a disservice to actual programmers. No one cares about Autodesk other than Architects. The concern is Palantir, Facebook, Google, Cellebright, NSO Group
Related, there was a pretty significant discovery of long term release of these chemicals that contaminated the water supply of a county in upstate NY.
Alot of money and research is exploring the topic, not surprisingly, guidance changes as knowledge gets refined.
The EPA’s new recommendation is still not low enough. You realize there is a some cause to panic right? We can’t fish in our streams and rivers, can’t drink rainwater, can’t raise domestic animals without them being full of heavy metals etc. We’ve ruined the basics and this isn’t hyperbole anymore.
We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful. Leaded gasoline, CFCs, microplastics, pesticides collapsing insect populations etc. And it can take decades to fully understand those impacts. When the stakes are literally, "all rainwater on the planet is unsafe", should we ask -- would society be better off if we were much more conservative about demonstrating the long-term safety of new substances before scaling up their use?
Also, I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this: Will literally the whole planet be able to pursue lawsuits against 3M and peers for making our rainwater 'unsafe'?
> We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation
up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was
really harmful.
You missed the problematic last step.
We take technical innovations to a societal scale, discover a really
harmful effect, and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all
about it.
It's expected that harms, especially through complex side-effects take
time to emerge. We can't see the future, nor can we exhaustively test
everything in advance.
The problem comes with the response. A certain amount of market
inertia is to be expected. Recalling and replacing products is expensive.
But what is absolutely inexcusable, and ripe for immediate radical
global action to address [1], is the disgraceful, blatantly criminal
behaviour of large corporations who move to suppress science, discredit
researchers, silence critics and bury bad news.
Many problems concerning at-scale blow-back turn out to have been known
about decades in advance of their impact.
This is nonsense. We have solved a ton of environmental problems in my lifetime. When I was a kid, there were legitimate worries about the ozone layer -- we banned CFCs and now it's a non-issue. Acid rain is vastly mitigated. Before I was born, we cleaned up America's rivers. And we've dropped per capita carbon emissions in the US by about 40% so far from its high in the 70s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon#History
"CFC known to be an issue in 1974." What followed was a slow walk of bans that is still progressing.
And it was fought. "In 1986 DuPont, with new patents in hand, reversed its previous stance and publicly condemned CFCs."
There's plenty of non-compliance with the bans: "In 2018 public attention was drawn to the issue, that at an unknown place in east Asia an estimated amount of 13,000 metric tons annually of CFCs have been produced since about 2012 in violation of the protocol."
So, I state that while CFCs are mostly banned right now. They're still an issue, and it took far too long to regulate. It is seriously not nonsense.
> and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all about it.
That's nonsense. There's a world of difference between "we do nothing about environmental problems," and "I think some particular action should've taken five less years go do," and when you retreat to that position it's a different point entirely.
As to whether it took "too long" to regulate CFCs, what's your measure for that? Is it just vibes? If we had started the process of banning CFCs five years earlier, what's your assertion for the harm mitigated compared to the factual?
The 'do bugger all about it' wasn't aimed at society. It was aimed at internal company reports. PFAS was known to be harmful by DuPoint but they kept making it. Nicotine and tobacco industry. Global warming and oil industry.
What I honestly don’t understand is what the individual employees of these companies think. I’d love to see a documentary with interviews of a wide swath of employees (different levels within the companies) and how they rationalized this aggregate behaviour. Do they not have children and grandchildren? Do they think they don’t breathe the same air and drink the same water?
Certainly some, probably low level employees, didn’t feel they had the luxury of questioning their company’s ethics and looking for work elsewhere, but what about all the more senior people who presumably sat in boardrooms and spun ways to continue pouring shit into the environment with reckless abandon? What am I missing?
Fictionalised, quite accurately perhaps, Michael Cristofer as Phillip
Price and Bruce Altman playing Terry Colby in Sam Esmail's "Mr Robot"
both do an outstanding job of capturing the shrugging banality of evil
at genocidal scale. The feeling I got from that (Esmail is a first
class writer) was of those inside accounts of the Nuremberg trials
with Eichmann laughing
The banality of evil is that murdering a million people is just
something you do on a nondescript Wednesday afternoon over wine and
canapés while everyone is watching the clock to get out to the golf
course.
There is no "rationalisation". No moustache twisting or maniacal
laughter. No drama. No thought at all. It is the "amorality", the
total absence of moral thought that is horrifying beyond anything
Colonel Kurtz could conjure up at the dark end of the river.
> they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones,
their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel
like it is significantly more difficult to explain,
I will check that out, but one point: I don’t see the Nazi atrocities as good comparables. Those examples are people doing horrible things to other people. In the current instances of people at major corporations poisoning the air, water, and land, they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones, their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel like it is significantly more difficult to explain, as it can’t be rationalized as crimes being done to some demonized group that isn’t seen as deserving of protection. How can self-harm (and harm to your own loved ones) be moralized in the same manner that Nazis felt their acts to be moral?
It’s not that we haven’t solved some major environmental problems; it’s that we haven’t solved all of them. In the U.S. we are also in a political environment where one party absolutely does not care. Republicans have gone from creating the EPA under Nixon and using cap and trade under Reagan to now considering environmental mitigation a leftist plot to destroy America. Dropping per capita carbon consumption is not the relevant thing to look at. When it comes to pollution and environmental effects the total amount is what matters. If x tons of a chemical causes a problem then talking about per capita values is meaningless.
The other party puts forward a figleaf of caring to appease its climate-minded constituents, while actively doing the doing the dirty work in the interests of some of the largest polluters on this planet.
Sure. If the political center of the U.S. shifted leftward to what it was back in the 70s then maybe the left leaning party would push for more tangible policies.
In my mind, part of the problem is that both parties are pandering to a base with nonsensical policies. One party wants to do nothing because that is popular. The other party is apparently allergic to economically-based policies like cap-and-trade or a revenue neutral tax and instead wants to throw money at the problem. Neither approach is particularly effective.
(At least one side is willing to acknowledge that the problem exists. That’s worth something but maybe not very much.)
It's not the parties, it's the people. In Washington state some environmental groups fought against a revenue-neutral carbon reduction plan because it didn't give them a slush fund. A couple years later they got an initiative which involved teaching carbon and sending them the money -- surprise, voted down too. Been six years IIRC since we could have had a tax on carbon.
Democrats have proposed cap and trade for carbon and indeed supported this when it came to acid rain. I think your view about both parties pushing absurd positions on this topic is incorrect.
Hardly nonsense considering the speed of implementing new things far exceeds the research and attempts to scale back once harm has been identified. Private interests are far more powerful and well funded than the few scientists sounding alarms and attenpting to caution people. There were warnings about greenhouse gases causing climate change at least as far back as 1912, yet despite this the car and oil industries pushed forward against ethanol fuel, electric powered vehicles, public transportation, etc to spread and strengthen an automobile-centered norm of going about, which we take for granted as the way to get around and turning away from that is far more unlikely today than it would have been in 1912 if the science had been heeded and changes had been made. This is the norm of industries vs science, and it is present in almost every facet of our lives. Additionally, the issue with the ozone layer is still very much not a non-issue.
I think gp was arguing against the idea that there was a "problematic last step" where society does nothing about problems once they are discovered - not against the idea that innovation can bring unforeseen problems.
I don't think there was anything remotely close to a scientific consensus, or even a respected minority view, that fossil fuels would cause dangerous global warming in 1912, but correct me if I am wrong.
This one might be a tough nut to crack. The carbon-fluoride bonds present in these chemicals require much more energy to break than what is found in nature, e.g. as heat and sunlight. These chemicals simply do not degrade, and due to their surfactant properties, they are almost impossible to contain once spread to the environment.
We have no way of getting rid of these chemicals except possibly to spread more chemicals, which then would need to break apart only those specific molecules AND capture their fluoride ions in some inert matrix to prevent them from forming other compounds as well as directly affecting the environment and our bodies.
We’re pretty much SOL and the only thing we can do is STOP using fluoride chemicals permanently, which we can’t entirely do, because things like uranium enrichment are dependent on teflon.
We could ban halogens unless its impossible to substitute. PVC can be replaced with polyurethane or polyethylene. Hydrocarbon refrigerants instead of HCFCs or pentafluoroethane. If a tiny bit of teflon is needed for uranium enrichment, so be it.
Ozone damaging refrigerants are still a huge issue. China has been releasing a lot of them. We dumped all the DDT in the ocean. This stuff isn't solved at all. Things don't go away, there's no magic wand to disappear all our horrible choices...
>EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2]
Okay, but isn't "corporate death penalty" equivalent to a fine that exceeds the value of the company? If we're having trouble fining companies for even 1% of their market value, then demanding a 100% fine seems a bit premature. The whole situation feel like people wanting to reduce wealth inequality by demanding a communist revolution, rather than something more reasonable like higher tax brackets.
I don't necessarily agree with the "corporate death penalty" (for the
same reasons I don't sanction individual death penalty - that
organisations like individuals are not necessarily coherent and
unified systems with clear intent and culpability) It's potentially a
vast destruction of wealth unrelated to the crime.
BUT: It's a good example of radical action that's needed right
now, so that's why I put it out there. The one thing that I
vehemently disagree with you about is that it's in any way
"premature". We are in the last seconds before midnight, and we ought
to have the will put anything remotely effective on the table,
before the crazies do, because they will soon have the will, the
means, and the moral justification to go way beyond mere "corporate
death penalties".
I feel like just when we start to realize we're destroying things with our chemical creations - before things can get fixed the conversation evolves to salving all of climate change.
Can't we just finish stopping the C8/CFC/Pesticide/whatever before we try to stop everything all at once with some nebulous, all-inclusive climate change plan that mostly causes people to only focus on oil use?
…the comment was suggesting not dealing with it, at least until earlier-identified problems had been dealt with, so it’s not clear what you’re responding to.
100% this. The climate change debate takes up wayyyyyyy too much political oxygen and leaves little room for tackling a lot more lower hanging fruit. I actually think society's efforts to fight climate change have been a net negative for the environment, not to mention that many corporations have "green washed" their pollution by feigning being climate change warriors. This narrative needs to end and real progress on environmental pollutants needs to return. Hopefully sanity can prevail.
Climate change is no longer about the environment, and that is why we see so much movement now.
I would argue PFAS isn't about damaging the environment either. It's about human health. Same goes for CFCs.
It is getting problematic that 'being green' these days can either be caring about the environment and biodiversity like green-peace. Or it can mean 'doing whatever is needed to stop climate change and keep harmful (to humans) chemicals out of the environment'.
Those are actually two very different thought processes with different people who support them. Sharing the term is not working out very well.
If we spend all the oxygen on climate change and yet we are pretty much falling at tackling it, then I think there is way too little "oxygen" dedicated to not destroying the planet.
Strange to target society's efforts to fight climate change for consuming the political oxygen, rather than those fighting tooth and nail to keep pumping out CO2.
It is the biggest environmental threat facing civilisation, but if only the climate warriors would give up in the face of powerful vested interests and economic intertia, perhaps they'd have time to plant a few wildflowers? /s
> Can't we just finish stopping the C8/CFC/Pesticide/whatever
Most of this comes down to figuring out what's harmful and regulating it. We can't outlaw "chemicals". And, of course, there's the whole cooperation in other jurisdictions problem, which affects the next point...
> some nebulous, all-inclusive climate change plan that mostly causes people to only focus on oil use?
Look, uh, the climate change thing is bad. Really bad. And avoiding burning stuff is really hard. We can live without PFAS and glyphosate if we decide we really should. Avoiding burning stuff for energy is really hard.
The chemical harms are complicated: there are some that are long-standing risks, but most of our concerns do not raise to the level of something that screws up climate, agriculture, etc, for centuries.
We could ban halogens from construction and food industries though with a very short list of known safe exceptions (table salt, hypochlorite). Maybe we give up a tiny bit of convenience -- oh no, I can't leave tomato sauce in my pot overnight without washing, and I have to pay slightly more for longer-lasting fiberglass windows instead of junk vinyl -- but so be it.
I feel like just when we start to realize we're destroying things with our chemical creations ...
FWIW, this was understood quite a long time ago. Consider that the EPA "SuperFund"[1] program began in 1980. And it's not like that was the first time anybody understood that some chemicals have very harmful impacts "in the wild."
The ecological damage from unchecked climate change is by far the largest amount of damage. I'm not sure why we should give it a pass and only focus on smaller amounts of damage.
Because then the conversation will just be dominated on focusing on a smaller issue, with a similar impasse. Just because a bully gets outraged when somebody stands up to them is not a reason to stop standing up to them, and the same folks opposing environmental protection will fight just as hard on other issues.
No, we have to immediately enact a huge number of measures globally for which we don't know the longterm impact and not worry about these things that make life more convenient if only minimally
The solution to climate change and all these crises is a vastly reduced human population living in small agrarian communities with preindustrial lifestyles. We keep having these environmental crises because technological civilization was a mistake.
It was only a "mistake" if the word is stripped of its normal meaning since it was inevitable. It may lead to our downfall, but it was then an inevitable downfall. That said, it's not at all obvious that this is the case yet.
What the hell are you talking about??? Technological civilization arouse because our ancestors living in "small agrarian communities" were tired of living in a nightmare in which their children died like flies and the starved to death periodically every time the climate farted.
I'm tired on hearing entitled little sh1ts like you that have lived incredibly pampered lives and don't have a clue of what is like to have to live without a refrigerator, hvac or modern medicine.
> Technological civilization arouse because our ancestors living in "small agrarian communities" were tired of living in a nightmare in which their children died like flies and the starved to death periodically every time the climate farted.
This is what Daniel Quinn calls "living in the hands of the gods". We are not really fit to do anything else. Humans have survived for hundreds of thousands of years living off what the land provides them in its natural course. Civilization will probably not make it much past ten thousand years, if that.
So tell me again which is the bigger nightmare: living and dying according to the whims of nature, being one small part in a society that adapts and harmonizes to nature; or the death of billions, and the extermination of considerable amounts of other life, all because we wanted to rule in place of the gods and never learned not to shit where we eat.
If you go by that logic we are only fit to live in tropical savannahs in Africa where modern humans originated.
What I find supremely arrogant, though, is any Westerner who, while living in comfort and safety amidst high technology, proposes that everyone in the world should just be content with not having the comforts they are currently using (including some, like vaccines and modern medicine, which arguably have vastly less negative effects than PFAS and burning fossil fuels).
Anyone actually serious about this philosophy should try as much as possible to make their lifestyles like what they want for everyone. It probably wouldn't convince everyone, but it would certainly earn them a lot more respect.
I have yet to hear an approach to this that isn't terribly inhumane.
Agreed that the end result sounds like a positive one (on just environmental terms), but there's a tremendous amount of complexity and unintended consequences involved.
My country alone is already below the rate of replacement. Questions quickly arise around who gets to decide who the people are that are allowed to breed. I can't think of a more contentious subject. It's also such an invasion of personal freedom. I don't have answers here, but this is an incredibly hard thing to do at all (outside of China), and it's not clear it can be done ethically at all.
Environmentalism never turns into death cults.
Fanaticism did not drive 3M to create PFAS nor DuPont to create DDT, nor did fanaticism drive them to continue its use.
Three is absolutely a Malthusian segment of the environmental movement, that would like for there to be far fewer (or no) people at all. I assume that's what they meant by "death cults" above.
If you're going to deny its existence outright, do you have something to back up that claim?
The fact that corporations have willfully committed these actions over the years, and lobbied to continue doing so doesn't mean that there isn't some concerning elements of the environmental movement. It's not a black and white situation.
Your reply is a strawman and factually untrue, as I was responding specifically to someone who called for the massive reduction in human population — justifying that with environmentalism.
Ironically, you’re the one engaged in fallacies while gaslighting.
You act as if calling for an end to half the humans on this planet is a horror. Posioning all of the humans on this planet is a horror. Filling the ocean with plastic is a horror. People going around talking about topics like white extinction and promoting natalism whilst we've sabotaged fundamental planetary mechanics is a horror. Walking blindfolded into the future and betting on some god to save us, or at least there being some heaven for us to retreat to, as if we deserve it, or just hoping for the best whilst everything falls apart around us is a horror. Believing in the myth of infinite growth is a horror.
Reducing the human population isn't a horror, it's a mercy, and not just for us. It buys us time to try and resolve the dysfunction of our species.
We are talking about potentially giving every new child an eventual death sentence with inevitable liver cancer here, and if that's what this shit does to people, take a beat and think about what it'll do to the things we eat.
> You act as if calling for an end to half the humans on this planet is a horror.
> Reducing the human population isn't a horror, it's a mercy, and not just for us.
This is a horror on par with Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China — and why I called it a “death cult”.
> We are talking about potentially giving every new child an eventual death sentence with inevitable liver cancer here
…so your solution is to definitely abuse humans so badly they don’t breed?
That doesn’t make sense: why is potential cancer worse than definitely ruining the reproductive health of the population?
Your cure sounds worse than the disease.
> It buys us time to try and resolve the dysfunction of our species.
The only dysfunction I see is people like yourself trying to repeat the worst horrors of human history because this time fanatic authoritarianism won’t end in tragedy.
I do think that the human population is too much, but so is dangerous chemicals in the environment. But, additionally to that is harmfulness to nonhuman environment (animals/plants) as well as human, and also harmfulness earning money at the expense of everything else in this world.
>would society be better off if we were much more conservative about demonstrating the long-term safety of new substances before scaling up their use?
How?
Why limit it to substances? Social media is unsafe
What point in time were we only using safe substances so we can use that list of substances as the baseline and then somehow only allow new substances to be used when their long term safety has been demonstrated somehow?
Yes, we should take new chemicals and study them for a significant time frame prior to extensive global use. The bar can be set higher.
Don't conflate social science with hard science.
Social media is great at steering populations, generating useful propaganda and generating useful profiles of individuals....
Why would governments want to restrict that?
It would be good to have an objective measure of unsafe.
E.g. is the radioactive dust we are all exposed to from global coal plants unsafe? High levels of pm 2.5 from steel plants making your vehicles and roads? Low cost subsidized sugar making half the population obese?
We all die in the end, trying to balance where to act is a hard problem because time is zero sum.
That's the very core of the issue, not knowing what is unsafe.
It's not that the concentration of these chemicals increases past what we thought was safe, what changed was our knowledge of his dangerous they are, making current levels unsafe.
Any notion for "objectively" deciding these things has to account for unknown information, which means assigning subjective risk to these unknowns. I don't find an "objective" framework a coherent concept because of that. Ignorance of the world must be confronted head on and taken into account, and those that do not incorporate that risk directly into their cognitive models will perform worse at achieving their goals.
How do we determine the long term safety without first scaling it up? All of these things many seem innocent in a lab setting and it is only once they reach a critical point that the issues arise.
Usually if something is being eroded you check what chemicals the erosion releases. If you cook on a pan and you don't analyze the contents of the fumes you are totally responsible
The problem isn't that no one knew what's in the fumes and that those chemicals are being eaten/inhaled. It's that in laboratory testing they never showed any impact on humans - but scale it to few billion people and then you notice increased liver cancer rates.
The only good thing is that making non stick pans with this stuff has already been banned in US and EU for a good while.
In a lot of cases the harm was known up-front, but then a handful of people in charge of the profits decided to scale up to “all of society” anyway. Cigarettes, leaded fuel, and fossil fuels are all in this category.
No individual manager at any corporation involved in this has a KPI that says: “Terminate the entire category of industry on which our profits are based.”
This is the problem, and governments these days are just an extension of the same broken system.
Chasing after profits will lead humanity off the edge of a cliff.
To be clear, the US political party that starts with a D has been actively spreading awareness and working to ban the substances you mentioned since the at least the 1960s, while the party that starts with an R will never stop being in denial about their dangers.
But we're all guilty of buying products created with those substances and driving cars so.. the fault lies with each of us on an individual level.
What breaks my heart is that the people with all of the money and power actively prevent the rest of us from inventing better solutions. They've created an entire economy around dead end service jobs instead of automation, to keep us distracted and disillusioned so we can never catch a breather and disrupt their meal ticket.
If it were up to me (it will never be up to me), I'd work towards creating open source alternatives for all resources necessary for life. I'd make a wiki of everything people work for (food, water, housing, incidentals) and make each one sustainable and as close to free as possible. Money would be optional and used for aspirations beyond necessity.
It would be kind of a Jetsons solarpunk future where a backyard robotic hydroponic garden grows all non-animal macronutrients. Eggs and kefir would largely replace meat. The house would be made of 3D printed hempcrete and recycled materials. Power and HVAC would come from free (7 year amortized) photovoltaics and passive solar-thermal heat pumps connected to the buried irrigation system.
This stuff is honestly so easy that I can only blame conspiracy for lack of adoption. Or maybe extreme laziness. Whatever the reason is, it's defeatist.
So I'm trying to deprogram myself and incorporate these solutions into my own life. So far I've only succeeded in buying a used electric car though. It's just too hard to save the $10,000 to fix each problem one by one, so I pay out more than that to be a consumer and stay trapped in the matrix. Where are the loans for these solutions? Where's the political will?
Thing is, it won't even be possible to demonstrate that unsafety on a low scale. I think we should just accept the risk. It will happen once in a while. We will adapt.
meanwhile when new stuff is rolled out anyone questioning the safety or efficacy or theorizing about potential dangers is demonized as a quack, people are so compartmentalized that they can’t see that humans are still flawed and make mistakes, somehow current year everything is a godsend break through, it’s marketing bullshit and corruption
> I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this
Since it was considered to be perfectly safe when they used it, and they stopped 20 years ago (presumably when they discovered it was unsafe), I don’t think there’s any legal ground to stand on.
They made money on something that turned out to cause damage. It's only fair that they give back the money they've made to mitigate the damage they caused. It doesn't matter that it was considered safe back then.
The COVID vaccine isn't a radical new class of treatment; it's a vaccine - something which physicians have been giving on the regular for about 250 years. The oldest treatment in modern medicine. We understand their side effect profiles very well at this point.
But even if you don't buy that argument, even if you believe that a new RNA vaccine potentially has a radically different risk profile than all previous ones: When the cost calculus is a known risk of many people dying now versus a nebulous potential risk of an unknown number of people maybe or maybe not having adverse effects of an unknowable sort later, is it really that contentious of a decision?
We didn't have a 20 year trial period for the Polio or Smallpox or HPV or even Chicken pox vaccines before rolling them out. So why are so many people who were quiet about these other vaccines before now singling out the deployment of the COVID vaccine as an abomination?
> The oldest treatment in modern medicine. We understand their side effect profiles very well at this point.
Every vaccines contains a multitude of different things apart from the active ingredient, and each of them can have a vastly different safety profile, and when you take a vaccine, you are putting everything together in your body.
So the core techinique of vaccines, being employed for so long, does not actually prove the safety of vaccines in general. In fact, it cannot be proven generally, because as I said earler, each vaccines can contain vastly different make up.
In my understanding from having read the literature over time, the RNA vaccine was, as far as I can tell at least, sloppy thinking. Someone thought that setting up a permanent factory in the body for spike proteins was a bright idea. Suddenly the virus evolves (as we knew they do rapidly and constantly) and now people who got the original vaccine are apparently having worse immune responses because the body is trained on the wrong thing and still making classic spike proteins. Plus, you don't want the spike protein in your body anyway as apparently that's not a great thing to have around?
Disclosure: I am vaccinated, for what it's worth, with the Novavax (Nuvaxovid), which is in my understanding just a one time dose of spike proteins and an adjuvant, to train the body to fight the virus.
I may have a wrong understanding, but, if I'm right, I'm honestly puzzled why people ever thought the RNA vaccines were worth the time because it doesn't seem like the right mechanism to choose.
-edit-
If I am wrong on those points, I would appreciate links to literature clarifying them. I'm not advocating an anti-vaccination position.
> I may have a wrong understanding, but, if I'm right, I'm honestly puzzled why people ever thought the RNA vaccines were worth the time because it doesn't seem like the right mechanism to choose.
Because none of that is actually happening, and RNA vaccines aren't causing the kind of problems the hysterical moon-howlers are coming up with. Admittedly they're a relatively new technology, having only been in use for about 50 years as opposed to attenuated viruses which have been in use for about 250 years.
So, which part?
The debatable claims are: 1) that RNA vaccines tell the body to make spike proteins and it will do this indefinitely, 2) the spike protein is not an indefinitely relevant marker by which to eliminate COVID, particularly as it evolves and 3) spike proteins aren't great to have around in the body, (yes I've heard they get cleaned up fairly promptly via mechanisms)
I'm not saying it's nanomachines or anything, and I'm not making a fuss about how long they've been around; I didn't mention it. I got vaccinated. I'm on the team. But if these planks of my understanding aren't sound I'm interested.
Fundamentally, I want to understand how these things work. The protein based vaccine is uncomplicated, I understand the basics of the mechnism, the RNA one leaves lingering questions that I can't source answers to. I'm an educated professional, and I've read some papers and watched a lot of the news on the matter on here and other platforms, and that hasn't settled my questions.
I'll start with a breakdown of how RNA vaccines work.
They deliver an mRNA sequence into your body. mRNA is a relatively short-lived form of RNA that is transcribed into protein a handful of times before being degraded by endonucleases [1, 2].
As you said, the mRNA in the COVID vaccine encodes the spike protein. When your body's cells encounter it, they produce the spike protein. Every cell in the body presents some of the proteins that it creates on its cell surface in a structure called the major histocompatibility complex I (MHC I). This is the body's built in QA system: immune cells scan these proteins to check if any of your cells have been infected with a virus and are producing viral proteins [3].
When your body's white blood cells encounter spike proteins on the MHC I, an immune response is triggered [3]. This is a very long series of cascading steps, but the important part for us is that it leads to the creation of memory B cells, which are long lived cells that produce antibodies to the offending viral protein [4].
While your body is mounting this response, you develop a fever. Usually 24 - 48 hours after the vaccination. A fever is a sign that your immune system is revving up. As the mRNA degrades and the spike protein is cleared out, the immune system winds back down and the fever dissipates.
But the memory B cells stick around. The next time your body encounters the spike protein, the antibodies produced by memory B cells latch onto the protein and start a chemical reaction that triggers a fast-tracked immune response.
> the body is trained on the wrong thing and still making classic spike proteins... Plus, you don't want the spike protein in your body anyway as apparently that's not a great thing to have around?
No, it is not. The production is only transient. mRNA is a very short lived substance. (See my explanation above.)
It's easy to prove: If you did still have spike protein, you would continue to have fevers. Fever = fulminant immune response [5]. As I said earlier, that's the entire point of a vaccination: to kick start the immune response if even a small amount of the spike protein is detected and reduce the lag time in which the virus could continue to invade cells in your body while your immune system is still revving up [6].
> Suddenly the virus evolves (as we knew they do rapidly and constantly) and now people who got the original vaccine are apparently having worse immune responses because the body is trained on the wrong thing
Well this isn't wrong exactly. But I would say it's a weird way of summarizing the situation.
Why do people get the common cold year after year? Because they have memory cells for last year's strain, not this year's. You could argue that the body wasted resources maintaining those memory cells. But that's just how immunity works. It's not a design flaw of RNA vaccines.
> I'm honestly puzzled why people ever thought the RNA vaccines were worth the time because it doesn't seem like the right mechanism to choose.
RNA vaccines are actually an amazing jump forward in vaccine technology, on the level of the jump from vacuum tubes to transistors in computers [7, 8].
Before RNA vaccines, every vaccine was a bespoke creation. You had to study the virus, find a way to alter its genes so that it's either dead (called an inactivated form) or too weak to cause a serious infection (called an attenuated form), but also still similar enough to the original virus to elicit the same immune response (cross-immunogenicity).
There weren't any good modeling tools for this. It was total trial and error. You had to create the virus, test it on an in vitro or live (i.e. animal) model and see what happened. The iteration time was very slow.
RNA vaccines are a game changer:
1. They allow you to isolate concerns: You can deliver just a chunk of the virus and not the whole thing. No more fiddling around trying to hit the balance between attenuation and cross-immunogenicity because you don't have to care about the biology of the overall virus and how all its components interact [7, 8].
2. They are reprogrammable: You can deliver any RNA sequence you want and thereby manufacture virtually any viral protein you want. If the virus mutates, you can alter the RNA sequence in the vaccine to match without having to rebuild the vaccine from step one [7, 8].
3. They are easily mass produced: It's a lot easier to replicate RNA by PCR than it is to culture a virus [9].
This has big ramifications for turn-around times for developing a new vaccine or refining an existing one. It is honestly a blessing that the technology matured now, as we become increasingly global. It may end up being essential if the next pandemic involves a virus with lethality on the order of smallpox.
> I would appreciate links to literature clarifying them
Most of this is covered in Bio 101 or Immunology 101 college courses, so any introductory text should cover it. Give me a bit of time and I'll try to dig up some specific links for you.
EDIT: Here you go. Citations are provided inline. If you want a general overview, I recommend [6] and [7].
Thank you for the earnest follow-up. I'll read the links, but the key part I was missing was about the mRNA degradation, which folds the rest of my post like a deck-chair. I wish that governments posted a write up similar to this in addition to simple advice guaranteeing safety, as I feel I've seen various partial perspectives on the matter and not assembled the correct whole as a result.
> Once the body creates that spike protein using the mRNA instructions, the body quickly breaks down those mRNA strands and they dissipate within a few hours or days after injection. The mRNA never enters the nucleus of any cell (where the DNA is located), it doesn’t affect any genetic material in the body, and the mRNA strands are removed from the body through everyday cellular processes.
> The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work by introducing mRNA (messenger RNA) into your muscle cells. The cells make copies of the spike protein and the mRNA is quickly degraded (within a few days). The cell breaks the mRNA up into small harmless pieces. mRNA is very fragile; that's one reason why mRNA vaccines must be so carefully preserved at very low temperatures.
You can follow the links for fuller explanations.
If you want to see hard data, I'm also aware of two studies that investigate how long the spike-protein lingers after vaccination:
Doesn't really inspire confidence in these results, right? I mean, first you cited a claim that said "few hours", and then the expirimental evidence shows at least 5 days, and another one says 10, and may be the next study that looks closer will find that it ll last at least 30 days...
But hey that is ok, because that is how "science" "progresses" duh, right?
EDIT: Oh, and it seems that CDC removed the claim that "The mRNA and the spike protein do not last long in the body" from its pages..
The first source I quoted said a "a few hours or days," but I guess that wasn't convenient for you, so you clipped it.
The numbers 5 and 10 are means. "A few hours or days" represents a range. If you look at the first study, there were several participants who never had detectable spike protein, even when they first checked on day 1 after vaccination. So the spike protein cleared in less than a day for a large chunk of people (i.e. "hours").
As for which study I would trust more, the first study (that reported the shorter period had four times the number of patients). But I guess that is also not convenient for your narrative.
So what? You did say "few hours", right? I am only pointing out the ambiguity in your claims.
>there were several participants who never had detectable spike protein, even when they first checked on day 1 after vaccination.
Look that is fine. But saying "hours or days" is as good as saying we don't have a clue how long the thing lasts in the body. Because, we know that the spike protien itself has toxic effects.
Also I see that you ignored the bit about CDC modifying the statement about this. Not convenient for your narrative?
Mainly for those in high-risk groups such as older obese people.
I got it 1.5 years ago, it sucked for a week at home, and I got better. A couple months ago I got blood test which shows I still have good level of antibodies. Even the CDC has moved on, so continuing to call this an "existential threat" may indicate an addiction to fear.
It wasn't an existential threat. It could kill ten times the numbers it has and it wouldn't be. You could at least be charitable and use terminology like "possible existential threat", "potential existential threat" or similar.
There was a now-deleted reply to this that made a great point: Is it possible vaccines could be included in your list?
The answer to that is no, it is impossible for any vaccine to be included in that list, which gives rise to the more general point: modern scientific studies are so heavily agenda-polluted, that skepticism and conservative adoption are prohibited. That a handful of short-term (<100 years) studies are sufficient for rolling out unprecedented technologies to the entire world. That an absence of evidence of long-term effects is taken to mean evidence of absence.
Whether it be DDT, GMO's, or PFAS, if the science to date can't detect harm, then there of course cannot possibly be harm - throw caution to the wind and roll it out 100% the world over, from Antarctica to Tibet.
PFAS accumulates in animals and plants, so if all rainwater is unsafe to drink, I would guess most of the world’s food will be unsafe to eat soon, if not already.
Luckily, ‘unsafe’ here, for now, means a relatively small increase in the risk to get some diseases.
⇒ Apart from trying to buy less stuff that contains these chemicals, I think it’s not worthwhile to worry about the health impacts on our individual lives, as it’s an as good as unavoidable risk now (eating only food grown using melting ice caps or millennia old aquifers would work, but has other disadvantages. Filtering PFAS out of all water used in agriculture seems infeasible)
They are referring to crossing these thresholds (from Fed 87-118):
> EPA’s health advisories, which identify the
concentration of chemicals in drinking
water at or below which adverse health
effects are not anticipated to occur, are:
0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOA,
0.02 ppt for PFOS, 10 ppt for GenX
chemicals, and 2,000 ppt for PFBS.
Health advisories are non-regulatory
and reflect EPA’s assessment of the best
available peer-reviewed science.
0.004 ppt is also more commonly known as the number zero. It's probably just the currently best limit of detection for PFOA in water.
For anyone interested in this topic, I recommend season 41 of the podcast American Scandal, which depicts the DuPont cover-up of C8 dumping and how it was discovered. Great narration.
PFAS is almost like optimizing for paperclips scenario. Except we did ourselves( for a little convenience). Micro plastics too. Both permeate every human in existence and now I guess is in rain water. I'm rural and get water from a well, pretty sure That's not even safe.
I drink mostly bottled tea or soda but that's usually in plastic which has bpa... There's really no getting away from this shit unless you literally carbonate or maybe your own organic teas using highly filtered water and maybe live in a bubble that catches and filters unhealthy particles.
I have two toddlers and I'm saddened they have to face this world. I honestly feel the last decent decade to be a kid was the 90s. I grew up in the 80s graduated in 98, and maybe it's just nostalgia but it just feels like the world is much darker and less safe.
I mean we could run all over town when I was 7, no worries.
We'd be dropped off at the swimming pool, or video arcade, etc... Or just ride our bikes exploring.
Now that's child abuse. I'm glad my kids are safe in their child harness but I'm also glad I only had to worry about seat belts as a kid, after 3 or so. Now it's like 8 or older...
And don't get me started on how weak Halloween is compared to the glorious 80s. Beggars night was an entire community affair, now there is no community anywhere that really gives af.
I'm reminded of the Queen song "is this the world we created" or when the children cry by white lion... Two excellent songs that sum up the world we're leaving our kids... It's beyond sad.
PFAS always remind me about how we as a species knew about the toxicity of lead for very long, yet still decided to blast it all over the environment for decades [0]
Also makes me wonder how much similar hubris exists with other topics; Afaik to this day there is still no medical scientific consensus weather damage from radiation is actually cumulative or not.
By now we have myriads of other compounding factors, particularly for cancer, that make it increasingly difficult to filter the actual signal, of what causes these issues, from all the environmental "noise" we keep creating by changing our one and only habitat in such massive, and lasting, ways.
I feel like we are talking past the sale here. Is rainwater actually unsafe to drink, or did someone just change a number in a spreadsheet? After I learned about how residential radon was determined to be the “second biggest cause of lung cancer” I stopped immediately trusting these things.
> After I learned about how residential radon was determined to be the “second biggest cause of lung cancer” I stopped immediately trusting these things.
> I just don’t think the science that led to its installation is rigorous. It’s a basement not a coal mine.
Can you explain this thinking? What you've said so far sounds like an argument from incredulity, not backed up by anything.
Radon testing is fairly straight-forward, the nuclear science behind it is all rigorous and well understood; radon gas decays into radioactive "radon daughters" that, not being gases, settle as dust in places where there is poor airflow. You can test for radon in a building by either sampling the air in the building, or by leaving a filter there for a while and then testing the filter for radon's daughters. If you do this testing, you find that radon is prevalent in some areas and a non-issue in many others. Do you think this testing was never done, or the results mistaken for some reason?
> “second biggest cause of lung cancer”
Maybe you're incredulous because you heard this claim out of context? Smoking is said to be the cause of 80-90% of lung cancers; the "second biggest cause" is just the scraps, under 20%.
We don’t know that the amounts of radon found in residential environments is harmful because it’s never been studied. The claims about the number of deaths caused are arrived at by starting with something we do have knowledge about - the massive amounts of radon in coal mines and it’s effects on miners - and then drawing a straight line on a graph, assuming there’s no threshold where radon risk drops to zero, and computing what share of lung cancer deaths would result from that model.
You're wrong, radon isn't only found in coal mines. Testing has revealed that in some parts of the world there are very high radon levels in basements. This isn't true everywhere, it depends on local geological conditions. The mutagenic qualities of these radioactive isotopes is settled science.
If the research in PFAS is at all like the article posted yesterday which did multiple statistical tests without doing the appropriate correction, I am not convinced that PFAS are all that harmful.
Because PFAS are so widespread and they have been around so long, if they were really bad we would be seeing massive issues. However, we are not.
Likely they do cause some harm if you have enough statistical power, but likely below the threshold that we live with (for example birth control, going to the beach, driving a car, red meat, and maybe even cooking itself).
>Likely they do cause some harm if you have enough statistical power, but likely below the threshold that we live with (for example birth control, going to the beach, driving a car, red meat, and maybe even cooking itself).
Isn't the entire reason these things are unsafe that they bioaccumulate over long periods of small dose exposure?
| and they have been around so long, if they were really bad we would be seeing massive issues. However, we are not.
1. They really haven't "been around so long". Not even a single human lifetime.
2. Plenty of other things cause cancer, endocrine disruption etc. Red meat and the beach are here to stay, but why should I be ok with some unaccountable corporation dumping additional pollutants into my environment?
But, by all means, continue to avoid a rational, cautious mode of decision making. It's probably not that harmful in my opinion.
And look at table 3.
They are testing 6 different types of PFAS, and only 1 is statistically significant.
They need to be using the Bonferroni Correction because they are checking multiple hypothesis. To do that, you divide the required p-value (0.05) by the number of tests (6). If you do the Bonferroni Correction, none of the PFAS is statistically significant.
In the text they mention an FDR correction. In which case you typically don’t use 0.05 as the threshold. Bonferroni isn’t the only way to do that correction, but it a valid method (depending on the pvalue distribution). But with only 6 tests, it’s not really that critical. I usually only think of multiple testing correction in the context of thousands of tests.
Given your comment I was expecting something like 5 patients per group. But they had 50 cases and 50 controls. In this context, an uncorrected pvalue of 0.02 is pretty solid.
If the water is unsafe (although there can be different level of being "unsafe"), then I would expect this would be bad for anyone (animals (including humans and nonhumans), plants; some might be more impacted than others). But even if it is only partially unsafe still it should still be reduced and eliminated to make it not unsafe like that. I do not know how to fix, other than possibly to reduce adding more PFAS, but maybe there is some. I do not know if lawsuits are the way to do it, but even if it is, it will not alone be the way to be done, I think. Stop making such chemicals which are potentially unsafe, don't do things bad just so that you can earn too much money (they say love of money is the root of all evil, and I think so; that is what they see anywhere), etc.
Quick update for everyone .... life is lethal and we will all die ... but our addiction to technology since the industrial revolution is adding to the cumulative toxins we are ingesting into our bodies.
Before the 1930's we were able to live lives without plastic, now, we have plastic in our lungs and blood because of technological progress and convenience. The very things that were designed to help us are now responsible for quickening our demise.
Why don't things change? Because everyone is too addicted to this modern lifestyle and will not do what is necessary to reduce plastics and contaminents in our life.
Just look in your house, how much you have of these contaminating technologies....if you feel so stongly about it, try to eliminate all but the most essential.
So let me get this straight, they’re excited because some government agency divided the ‘allowable’ levels of these chemicals by 40 million, and now the values (which are still the same) are too high.
…Wut?
Like, I get that the values are still ‘bad’, but there must be a different way to present that.
I’d also like specifics on exactly how bad ‘bad’ is, because these agencies tend to present their 0.5% increase of lifetime risk of cancer as something exceptional, when you can also get such a thing from, say, eating too much cheese.
> some government agency divided the ‘allowable’ levels of these chemicals by 40 million
That's one way to put it, yes. Another way is that recent scientific studies have shown these chemicals are way more harmful than we once thought. Should we not adjust recommendations accordingly? Seems rather obvious and undeserving of a "Wut?".
There's a difference in increasing your lifetime risk of cancer 0.5% by eating too much cheese compared to atmospheric levels of PFAS. I can choose to not eat too much cheese, and in fact I don't, for that same reason. I can't choose to stop breathing in or drinking PFAS in the environment.
I don't know about you but 0.5% increase in lifetime risk of cancer is not something I'm comfortable taking on, and it's not fair that I don't have any say in the matter.
Global trends are difficult to accurately capture as we’ve seen with Covid. Most countries don’t have the infrastructure to get accurate and good statistics from.
From the graphs it seems it's not increasing but decreasing. Population is getting higher so number of cancers is getting higher too but rate is decreasing (first graph).
Public campaigning and awareness. We need to know what consumer products contain PFAs and the likes. It's perverse this exists so close to our food chain.
These companies have our govnement officials in their pockets but they live on the same planet. They have no conscious even for themselves or their children.
It's pretty common for the Arctic and the Antarctic to have higher levels of such contamination as water cycles upwards/downwards from the Equator, compounds as it moves along, and then gets trapped in the ice.
about 10 years ago the EPA had a mandate to reduce use by 95% before 2011(?) and eliminate it by 2025(?). I may have the dates slightly wrong. went through the process on tens of thousands of SKUs. so far so good.
The reason I am conflicted is our vendors got rid of PFOA but replaced it with something similar to it but not the same.
Effectively, we now have 2 "forever" chemicals in the environment. rinse repeat.
I don't know what the answer is unless we make a conscious decision to forego the performance benefits these chemicals provide to our products. waterproof shoes and sofas, dental floss, med dev, etc.
Sometimes I wonder if we are rolling dice with synthetic substances life never had contact in billions years since it's origins until one of them gives us a Children of Men scenario.
Fast and loose with definitions is what gets us to a place where no one believes anything anymore. I’m pretty sure that if one was stuck in a forest somewhere and drank only rainwater for a whole month, they’d come out just fine.
Sure, smoke cigarettes for a month and you probably won't be dead from stage 4 lung cancer at the end of those ~30 days.
Adulterating our entire ecology with hyperpersistent, novel, toxicologically dubious chemicals is bad. This should be self-explanatory and completely obvious. The benefits of PFAS and friends do not outweigh the downsides.
This is an exaggeration, of course. The EPA guideline of 70 ppt for PFAS is probably just too low compared to other standards. For example, a Canadian guideline suggests an MAC of 200 ppt for PFOA, and 600 ppt for PFOS. These are the most common PFAS. Also, these are based on a lifetime exposure, and short term exposure to these amounts is probably not particularly harmful.
Additionally, even in the US, the guidelines by the individual states vary between 13 to 1000 ppt. [2]
The scary thing for me is that it's in the rain, so it'll be in crops, water reservoirs, trickling into the water table and into drinking supply. We have to stop this right now.
Some things absolutely distill over, it’s not magic, but depends on (to simplify) the boiling point of the substance compared to the boiling point of water.
For example it is not possible to completely separate ethanol and water with distillation.
A quick internet search seems to indicate PF* can be separated with distillation.
a form of distillation with virtually no isolation, compartmentalization, and unlimited precursor conditions, which pours into a huge mass of possibly dirty air and debris.
PFAS components do end up in the atmosphere from the manufacturing process, which is how it precipitates (droplets nucleate around the airborne particles).
Same story with any particulate emissions, like soot, dust, tires, etc.
Citation? I tried googling and couldn't find anything to confirm that.
When I searched on half-life, the results that came up mostly seemed to discuss the half-life in the body, not the half-life in an environmental sink such as the ocean.
It's an interesting article from 2004; might not be reading it right but seems like this one from 2020 is less optimistic about hydroxyl radicals (OH) breaking down PFOA in the atmosphere. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31978654/
Your same link notes that the majority of PFOA is not broken down in the atmosphere and points to "wet and dry deposition" mostly, which sounds like it's being dropped down to Earth remaining as PFOA.
> It's an interesting article from 2004; might not be reading it right but seems like this one from 2020 is less optimistic about hydroxyl radicals (OH) breaking down PFOA in the atmosphere. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31978654/
That's an interesting paper. If so, multiply the atmospheric time by 2-4.
> Your same link notes that the majority of PFOA is not broken down in the atmosphere and points to "wet and dry deposition" mostly, which sounds like it's being dropped down to Earth remaining as PFOA.
Yes. That doesn't affect the "half life" here.
In the end, not much PFOA ends up in the atmosphere in the first place, and most precipitates out to less convenient places where it lives longer. Of the stuff resident in the atmosphere, it does break down on human timescales, at least...
Guidelines for all of these things individually seem to ignore the likely unstudied possibility that they have synergistic effects. Or even just additive effects because many of them are so similar to each other.
I don’t know what to tell you. Is this one of those billion/trillion differences again? In that case the EPA values are definitely off by a factor of 1000 when compared to SI units, so maybe rainwater is then only some hundreds to some thousands of times over the limit.
Technically speaking, ppt/ppb/ppm should be used for dimensionless quantities, but the convention used here is kinda contrary to that. The argument for the convention is something like this: 1 L ~= 1kg of water, so 10^-12kg of something per 1 L of water can be considered as dimensionless, since the kg and the L cancel out.
Oh, interesting! I'd never heard of the short/long scale thing before.
You could argue that it's still wrong though, in the sense that the website is in English, and currently the short scale is used in all main Anglosphere countries. [1]
P.S. I just realized that even the short/long scale thing doesn't explain the endmemo.com claim. It's probably just a mistake. In the short scale, a trillion is 10^12, while in the long scale it's 10^18. So, if we were to use the long scale, 1 ppt would a smaller unit by a a factor of 10^-6 (not 10^-3), and equal to 1 fg/L (femto is the SI prefix for 10^-15, while nano is for 10^-9).
In other words, 1 ng/L = 1,000,000 part per long scale trillion.
Please don't take HN in high-indignation/low-information directions, or post snarky one-liners.
It dumbs down discussion, as well taking it off topic and turning it nasty. Important topics deserve better than that. Unimportant topics too, actually.
Funny as stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick' and way healthier. The war on fats caused substantial damage to the health and environment
> stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick'
Except it isn’t. Try letting melted cheese, or pretty much any starch (pasta, rice, oatmeal, etc) sit in stainless for a while and then see how non-stick it is. It will glue itself to stainless but on non-stick it will slide right off.
I’m not arguing in favor of non-stick, and avoid it when possible, but we can’t also be making inaccurate claims either.
Cast iron and stainless are so completely different that this comment doesn’t belong in this thread.
Also, cast iron, even when seasoned, would still stick quite a bit in the above scenario (and I can’t imagine any scenario where I’d want to cook starches like that in cast iron).
I don't think "the war on fats" is to blame for the rise of PFAS-based nonstick pans. Have you actually tried using both? A world of a difference
Also, vegetable oils are incredibly high in omega-6's which compete with omega-3's for the same enzymes. In general the literature suggests we should be consuming about a 4:1 ratio for Omega-3's to Omega-6 fatty acids. Corn-based oil, for example, has a 1:60 ratio
I think avoiding excessive vegetable oil intake is still a good idea
The nonstick pans today still have PFAS. They removed PFOA but there are hundreds of similar chemicals that they can use instead, which reason would dictate are just as toxic but which so happen to have not been safety tested yet
Interesting: this sounds like BPA-free plastics -- a lot of these have BPB and BPS which animal and cell-line studies have found just as concerning, but hey you can slap a "BPA-free" sticker on them!
It's a complex issue and I'm not here to advocate one solution or another. However, there is important information that the public ought to be aware of
It's very hard for me to reconcile scary headlines like this with the fact that living conditions for many people now are definitely far better than they were 1000 or even 100 years ago. The relative risks of different things may change over time but ultimately I think we are better off for all the positives these chemicals have given our lives. If anything, this sort of environmental alarmism is going to just increase the anti-science sentiment, the effects of which are already saw some effects of in the pandemic. After all, it's not a huge leap from "these chemicals are bad" to "these vaccines are bad".
Indeed and look above many just believe the catchy and misleading headline as truth. If it's not catchy the public doesn't care much for it yet when it is they do and are more then not they're being misled even lied too.
About fifty years ago I stayed in an old hotel called the Compleat Angler [0] on the desert island of Bimini, where the indoor plumbing was fed by collected rainwater. The Bahamas was still a British Crown colony at the time.
I'll never forget washing my hair in the water closet, and with a rainwater rinse, having a better hair day than I ever had on the mainland.
We need to do a better job of regulating what is allowed to be sold to consumers. We're likely going to see a a whole host of rare medical conditions become common when my generation gets older. Not to mention that on top of destroying human health we're destroying the planet too. I don't know what to do about any of this but I feel powerless to make an impact.