I just saw this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9mrbIxeBE and it sounded like an interesting topic to bring on HN. I didn't know about the "Cancer Alley" in Louisiana, but I figure most countries have their own alleys of death. I live in Italy and Taranto is notorious for this reason. The city was home to one of biggest steel producers in Europe. The local economy revolved around the steel plant, but people from the sorrounding neighbourhoods have suffered from abnormally high rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses for decades. After a trial which shed light on the environmental disaster, the government seized the plant in 2012. Long story short, its fate has been in a limbo since then.
Although not quite as drastic, same with the IJmuiden region in Noord-Holland (originally Koninklijke Hoogovens, "Royal Furnaces" -- just as royal as Shell) [0]:
> Due to exposure to particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide emitted from the Tata Steel site, Wijk aan Zee residents have a life expectancy that is 2.5 months lower on average
> approximately 4% of the future cases of lung cancer in Wijk aan Zee will be attributable to the current emissions of particulate matter
> around 3% of future [asthma] cases will be associated with the current emissions
And currently, also DuPunt/Chemours in Dordrecht [1]:
> Chemours, which spun off from its legal predecessor Dupont (DD.N), opens new tab in 2015 to regroup the latter's performance chemical business, complied with its permit before July 1984 but that after that it should have better informed the towns surrounding its chemical plant in the city of Dordrecht
And separately, there is an investigation against the local government because then-DuPont was tacitly allowed to exceed the amount of pollution granted by their permit.
I would expect that mining, leather-producing and dye-producing areas may very well have seen similar types of toxic waste leading to negative health outcomes even before large scale industrialization. And the areas downstream.
Here's an example of a mine that has had toxic runoff likely for millenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Tinto_(river) at least partly due to human mining activity. I would expect that people living downstream of the mine would have negative health outcomes, possibly without being aware.
Before the industrial revolution, the primary way to refine gold from diffuse ore was to dissolve the gold in mercury, separate the amalgam, and then boil out the mercury to leave the gold behind. In large-scale mining, this resulted in local air pollution levels that were horrifying even when compared to the worst unmitigated industrial revolution era sites. Entire communities would get mercury poisoning from the air they breathed.
Somewhat related, True Detective season 1 is set in this area. Reading this article made me realize that the the cinematography is very effective in using the pollution as a metaphor for social decay. Some stills:
One of my friends were in St. Judes in Memphis for cancer treatment. I was there visiting multiple times and would talk to lots of other families whose children were getting treatment and I was stunned by the large percentage who were from New Orleans or Baton Rouge and many with fathers who mentioned they worked at a chemical plant. My friend had stage IV cancer, St. Judes did an amazing job they are still in remission after this initial treatment in the 1990s.
Strange seeing not just my state, but my hometown, rising on HN. Sad, too.
Related: For those interested in point-and-click / text-based games, check out the game NORCO, which is about the city Norco (named for the refinery that graces its skyline), a suburb of New Orleans. It's actually an extremely accurate representation of the socioeconomics of the area (which is painful to admit), and has some truly gorgeous pixel art.
While an interesting read, where is the data? You even look at the sources on the wikipedia page and it says [citation needed].
Cancer isn't evenly distributed across the countries (i.e. every city of 1M has 100 colon cancer cases), and clustering would be expected even from random distribution. Then layer on top things like genetic makeup of the population, smoking rates, diet, etc, etc, etc and you end up in a situation where confounding factors can make it really hard to tease out causes, especially if the effect is small in size.
I'm not saying there aren't higher rates of cancer in this area or that industrial pollution can't contribute to cancer rates, but this wikipedia article seems like nothing but a bunch of talk.
California has its own version of this in the north east Bay Area- with a high density of refineries blowing directly downwind into dense poor communities. Chevron owns and pays for the local newspaper covering that area, which spreads misinformation about the health risks to the community.
It amazes me you have this dense urban area with ultra strict vehicle emissions rules, where low income people struggle to get their cars to pass, and yet you have these refineries down the street flaring regularly and sending up massive plumes of black soot.
Socal has a lot of places that are damned from a refinery like this too. El Segundo, Wilmington, Torrance, Signal Hill, but also and anywhere downwind of LAX or the Port of LA/LB, plus other industrial centers, or really anywhere because they pull oil from all over the place. Beverly Center mall for example has oil wells hidden on site. Same with Beverly hills highschool. It's probably at least a few million people I'd guess in areas with air quality affected by industry and especially the petroleum industry.
It's amazing how all you hear are crickets on the issue from Sacramento, while the state's own university researchers routinely publish on the issue to deaf ears. I guess it just goes to show where the money and true priorities lie among the legislature.
The Santa Susanna Field Lab had at least one nuclear reactor (built without containment) blow up. They also dumped toxic chemicals and waste often. In the hills between LA and Ventura counties.
Story was buried for decades. Lots of folks in Simi Valley have died of cancer.
> Beverly Center mall for example has oil wells hidden on site
That's fascinating to read about. It sounds like all the drilling for that oil field happens from that one location now? They use angled bores to draw from different parts of the field.
There are a few more sites in west LA alone they pull from. Some fields are still pretty large though, like the Inglewood Oil Field (1). Many are idle though and apparently 2/3 of idle wells leak and cause health issues in California.
I'm not sure what you are talking about? I was generalizing for people not familiar with the area, and lumping together the entire "North East Bay" which includes all of the Bay Area refineries. West/North Richmond, Rodeo, Martinez, and Benicia all would be crazy expensive regions if it weren't for the massive health issues with living in those areas.
What came first, the refinery or the people? It was the refinery in most (all?) of those cases in north east Bay Area. People chose to get more bang for their buck and live near an oil refinery (but doesn't excuse any misinformation about the risks), like people move next to railroad tracks and then complain about the noise and want them to stop blowing horns.
Still I agree with you that there should be almost zero tolerance for any emissions and an "oopsie" every year should be met with a fine of a year's profits every year then.
The refineries were there first, well before these areas were populated at all. I don't think that should give them a forever license to massively pollute. Back when they were built, and started to become populated the health risks were unknown... the people living there now mostly grew up there, and there was never a conscious choice to move somewhere dangerous.
In the case of Richmond, the poor black communities directly downstream of the plant are mostly descended from the workers brought in to build liberty ships during World War II. This was during a time when black people were legally restricted from getting decent jobs other than these temporary wartime exceptions, so moving to this place was their only opportunity to get a decent job. They lacked the legal freedom to make a choice about where to live in the sense you are implying, because of racist laws.
As a society, it is time to look at phasing these refineries out entirely, rather than relocating them. We already have the technology to do transportation in other ways, and it's already much cheaper when you count all of the health and environmental externalities. Already, 50% of diesel fuel in California is from renewable biomass, so you don't need an electric car for non-petroleum transportation. One of the north bay refineries was shut down a few years back, and converted to a renewable diesel plant.
> Louisiana Chemical Association President Greg Bowser responded to President Biden's remarks on the region, refuting claims that residents of the industrial corridor have a higher risk of developing cancer in multiple articles.
I don't doubt his sincerity...but this illustrates how far people are willing to go to keep power. It is sad to think that a person would ignore evidence that their business kills people to protect profit. This is why we need strong regulatory bodies.
> "It is sad to think that a person would ignore evidence that their business kills people to protect profit."
Saudi Arabia has pledged to bring down their fossil fuel emissions, publicly launching the "Saudi Green Initiative" in 2022, signing the Paris Climate agreement, endorsing the UN's climate goals.
They've also seen that there's a "risk" of reduced oil demand around the world and quietly setup the "Oil-demand Sustainability Program" to "artificially stimulate demand in some key markets", (promote combustion engine cars and aircraft travel in Africa and South East Asia) and their energy minister wants them to be "the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out".
They have a 46 point plan to promote oil, spanning 17 government entities, including things like investing in roads and airports, making sure ICE (gas/diesel) engines are low-cost and competitive potentially a JV with a car OEM to make a low-cost ICE car, supporting low-cost airlines, restarting development of supersonic aircraft because they use so much fuel, establishing local ICE car part manufacturing facilities which will have an oil uplift, accelerate deployment of last-mile delivery and ride-hailing apps in underserved markets and "ensure the deployment of an ICE-fleet", "support the deployment of bus transportation across developing countries to capture the increasing diesel demand", support research to make marine Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) scrubbers cheaper than switching to LNG or biofuels and promote regulations that allow continued use of HFO, etc. etc.
You should doubt it. This guy knows exactly what's going on but chooses to lie blatantly for profit. Same applies to oil execs, tobacco execs, fast food industry execs, US health insurance execs, chemical industry execs and many others. They know exactly that they are damaging the environment and/or killing millions of people but they prefer profit. And somehow we as a society let them get away with it.
You're not really expected to provide context when posting to HN. If something's interesting, it's interesting. I think of the Wikipedia articles as implicit "TIL" posts.
It seems like lowest effort submission possible to me. It's not really related to tech news at all. There's no recent news or changes. The op didn't post anything about why they found it interesting. The conversation happening here is sparse and not interesting. Aside from the fact that I've had comments downvoted for "being low effort" in the past. People can find anything interesting but not everything is a good submission to HN.
Comments are different from posts. The comment needs to have content to be valuable. With a post, you don't need to add any editorial; it's the thing being posted itself that needs to be interesting - but not to everyone.
If no one finds it interesting, people won't vote for it, and it'll never reach the homepage. But given that people did vote for it, obviously a number did find it interesting.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
West Virginia is an odd case with the same chewy nougat center as racism: the exploitation of labor and resources, and the extreme punishment of anyone who fights back, or who even simply truth-tells (hence GP being flagged), up to and including multi-generational blood libel becoming ingrained in the culture, enabling all kinds of long-lived atrocities.
As for GP, one might expect his case to be bolstered if you had examples of his contention. And, well, gentrification exists. Should probably be unflagged and discussed civilly.
You mean other than those parishes in Cancer Alley where there are white majorities and the primary source of household income are the chemical plants, you mean?
Because I grew up in St. Charles Parish, which is 71% white, in the shadow of the Monsanto plant that makes the world's Roundup, down the road from a Dow plant, and across the river from Motiva, Shell, and Exxon refineries where you can see them light up the night sky with flares to burn off their excess gases.
Yup. The entire area is full of white folks with barely high school educations who are living a fantasy life by making great money through a lot of overtime at chemical refineries. Take away the refineries and you've got nothing left to sustain any of that economy. The entire metro New Orleans system would collapse within years outside of a few tourist traps and the ports.
So to return to reality here, it seems that numerous commenters have indicated that this may be another case where "racism" has been substituted as a proxy for some kind of socio-economic injustice.
It's always easier to play the race card than to tackle even more intractable issues that may be caught up in "the cost of doing business".
> I don't know what the average is supposed to be, but I think 6/60 (10%), is a wee bit high.
The going estimate is that Americans have a 40% chance of getting cancer in their lifetimes [1] so it really depends on the age distribution of the sample. For an older group, 10% might not be that high.
Well, it's certainly "fuzzy" enough, that folks can say "We don't have any proof!".
I will say that New York is the best damn place on Earth to get cancer treatment. I've seen many, many people fight cancer, since I moved here, but only a few have died.
Another confounding variable could be demography as well. Depending on what town you pick in Long Island you might end up with a population that is predominantly of a group that might hold elevated risk for whatever reason. E.G. among women there is significantly elevated risk of breast cancer if you have some Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.
Recently I've been fascinated at some of the long-term space missions that various space agency plan.
Some of these missions span multiple decades simply because of the nature of space travel.
A burning question in my mind: how does one get motivated to work on something that they'll probably not even live to see come to fruition/failure? Personally, I wouldn't be, unless if there was some pay involved.
Dealing with climate change is like this. Humans, I think are basically unable to align behind initiatives that do not affect us immediately.
I am a parent. I would like to set up my child for success. But being brutally honest, it's hard for me to even think of what going "above and beyond" means in this respect. I would do everything a normal good parent would do. But then what?
Nobody is paying people to use less plastic or stop polluting etc. So few are incentivized to do anything above and beyond the normal. Superficial things like not using plastic - sure no problem. Keeping a 5 year old phone or wearing worn out shoes - I'll have trouble with these.
> A burning question in my mind: how does one get motivated to work on something that they'll probably not even live to see come to fruition/failure? Personally, I wouldn't be, unless if there was some pay involved.
"The wise man plants a tree whose shade only his grandchildren will enjoy."
Some humans are capable of great compassion for the people who will come after us. That is the impetus to create a better world for our children's children (even those of us who don't even have children).
Compassion. Concern for the well-being of the people who will inherit the world when we are gone. Empathy combined with a sense of duty. Some people have those qualities innately. Many people don't.
I'm confused to why there is also a french name. I get that it was french at one point but it was 200 years ago, and afaik very little people in the area still speak french
I'm from the area, so I feel I might be qualified to give you an answer. The short story is that some people here do still speak dialects of French [1]. The number of native speakers is rapidly declining (and will soon diminish completely), but many residents of Louisiana have grandparents or other family members who did grow up speaking it exclusively (or more commonly now, grew up speaking it with their exclusively-French-speaking parents/grandparents).
There are probably several reasons that it has held on for so long here, but predominantly it's because of multiple waves of influx of French-speakers (from when Louisiana was owned by the French, then from people of the Acadia region of Canada who were forced out of their region and migrated here in the mid-18th century) combined with persistent poverty resulting in poor education and low travel into and out of Louisiana (so not a lot of mixing with the rest of the US).
