[HN Gopher] It's raining PFAS: rainwater is unsafe to drink even...
___________________________________________________________________
It's raining PFAS: rainwater is unsafe to drink even in Antarctica
and Tibet
Author : nabla9
Score : 398 points
Date : 2022-08-13 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.su.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.su.se)
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Can companies that benefit from PFAS, even in the old days, be
| held accountable? Heck even you have to keep your tax records for
| 7 years.
|
| It makes me so angry some people benefiting at the expense of
| millions of others, under regulatory nose.
| rasz wrote:
| Of course not.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground...
| zzo38computer wrote:
| 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.
| ironmagma wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-scandal/id143...
|
| There is also a less dramatic version in book form, called
| Exposure by Robert Bilott, the attorney who prosecuted DuPont.
| leobg wrote:
| Also great: The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare (The
| New York Times). And the movie, "Dark Waters".
| Qem wrote:
| 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.
| boksiora wrote:
| Now this is concerning
| CommanderData wrote:
| 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.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| 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.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I'm just over 3000 miles from Antarctica, and I've been living
| off rainwater for the past 10 months. No ill-effects so far.
| jkic47 wrote:
| 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.
| Someone wrote:
| 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)
| jszymborski wrote:
| This isn't necessarily true for aquaponic/hydroponic crops, but
| I'm not sure how much of a percentage of food supply that makes
| up.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| FelixVega1 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Cancer sucks.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Sometimes we find out we were wrong about the safety of a
| substance.
|
| Radium used to be sold in patent medicine tinctures because it
| wasn't considered dangerous. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor
| perrygeo wrote:
| > 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?".
|
| How bad is bad? Check out how they calculate the HA values
| here:
| https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/technical...
| kybernetyk wrote:
| Yeah, and that's why you should drink commercially packaged water
| instead.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| 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.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Are you one of the folks that doesn't have kitchen ventilation
| because, after all, how harmful can a little gas be?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| No. I even have a radon mitigation system. I just don't think
| the science that led to its installation is rigorous. It's a
| basement not a coal mine.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _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%.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You have a good point. It's hard because radon dramatically
| boosts the risks for people who smoke or have other risk
| factors.
|
| But since remediation is now part of the way of doing
| things, ironically nobody has an incentive to learn more.
| p1esk wrote:
| _Is rainwater actually unsafe to drink, or did someone just
| change a number in a spreadsheet?_
|
| Both can be true.
| draw_down wrote:
| daenz wrote:
| We know _for sure_ one is true. The other is still TBD.
| Publications should be more forthcoming about that.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| No surprice as to why the amounts of PFAS in the enviroment are
| not decreasing, when more of it is pushed into it. And have for
| years.
|
| https://illinoisnewsroom.org/pfas-can-still-be-incinerated-i...
|
| https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/pentago...
|
| https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2020/department-of-defen...
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/company-linked-to-toxic-forever...
| suby wrote:
| 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.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Another example people miss is plumber's tape. That tape is
| effectively all PTFE.
|
| Literary every plumbing system in the last 20 years or more has
| all your water inlets lathered in PTFE along every joint of the
| pipework.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| 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.
| mh- wrote:
| Connecting the pipes, no. but connecting fixtures to those
| pipes, yes. Showerheads, faucets, etc. will all be screwed
| on and sealed with PTFE.
| bonzini wrote:
| I have seen plumbers that are still using hemp.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| That's exactly what I did with all my faucets.
|
| Call me paranoid but I've taken them apart remove all the
| mangled PTFE tape and sealed the thread with hemp.
| zbrozek wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| serf wrote:
| > 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?
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Just use crimped fittings or hemp.
| nousermane wrote:
| Or copper pipes soldered with lead-free/SAC. Those are
| rather pricey though.
| kube-system wrote:
| Fun fact:
|
| Between 1986 and 2011, lead free plumbing can contain up
| to 8% lead per EPA standards. After 2011, lead free
| plumbing may now only contain 0.25% lead.
| zionic wrote:
| For copper you want to use ProPress, it's completely
| solderless
| jefftk wrote:
| That's not correct. Neither PEX nor copper use tape, and
| that's been the vast majority of new water piping for 20+
| years.
|
| In connections that do use tape, like old galvanized steel
| pipe, the tape is entirely within the joints, because it's a
| lubricant.
|
| (Just checked with my uncle who's a plumber)
| zionic wrote:
| >PEX
|
| Yeah, rather than just the joints now the entire pipe is
| leeching toxic compounds
| jefftk wrote:
| What does PEX leech?
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://terrylove.com/images/homeowner/lee_01.jpg
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dvt wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| 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.
| bonzini wrote:
| "The planet will be fine. The _people_ are fucked! " said a
| wise man.
| teddyh wrote:
| (It was George Carlin.)
| matsemann wrote:
| kube-system wrote:
| The "doomers" who were right are what we call "modern health
| and safety regulation". All that stuff is written in blood.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It wasn't doomsayers spreading that, it was people shining
| the light on "this is how it is and it's disgusting".
|
| More _Kitchen Nightmares_ less "The end is near!"
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Some alarmists being right in the past does not validate
| all future alarmists.
| kube-system wrote:
| I agree. Likewise, some alarmists being wrong in the past
| does not invalidate all future "alarmists".
| Zamicol wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| I'm not blaming anyone. Just pointing out that we don't
| know something is bad until we know it's bad.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Why is it so in vogue to be a doomer?
|
| 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!"
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| rwnspace wrote:
| 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.
| maguirre wrote:
| This is awful. That's the only floss I can use that doesn't
| disintegrate between my teeth. Where does one go to find pfas
| content in items like these?
| p1mrx wrote:
| Listerine Ultraclean floss is made of PEBAX:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyether_block_amide
| jeffdubin wrote:
| Is this good or bad? I can't tell if that's a safe
| alternative or another potentially problematic one, and the
| Wikipedia entry doesn't mention safety.
| p1mrx wrote:
| PEBAX is not obviously bad, but I don't know whether it's
| good.
| williamscales wrote:
| This[1] has been a useful resource for me. It has lists of
| PFAS chemicals and products.
|
| [1]: https://pfascentral.org/data-hub/
| nimos wrote:
| FWIW Tom's of Maine Naturally Waxed Antiplaque Flat Dental
| Floss works well for me. Pretty thick though.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| I use a water flosser, my teeth also like ripping floss.
| maguirre wrote:
| Which one works for you?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| theropost wrote:
| 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.
| nebulousthree wrote:
| 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??
| theropost wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I know you're being sarcastic here. But man it depresses
| me how many people seem to unironically think this way.
| moonchrome wrote:
| I don't get the satire - you would propose the same
| regulation for individuals ? Don't see anything
| corporation specific about the comment.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| efnx wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| 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.
|
| The way to destroy means is to seize assets.
| TheMightyLlama wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| karmanyaahm wrote:
| I think by seize assets GP means a fine of 100% of the
| net worth of the company
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Or alternatively walking back the ,,limited" liability.
| Would probably kill all innovation though
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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?
| Zamicol wrote:
| 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.
| ijidak wrote:
| > I feel powerless to make an impact.
|
| Sadly, we are.
|
| This system is broken beyond repair.
|
| I'm not holding my breath for humans to fix this.
|
| I have my money on an alternative.
| coding123 wrote:
| What is your alt?
| CommanderData wrote:
| Every once in a comment has the mentality of, "it's not
| going affect me because I have reverse osmosis 9000, just
| get one and problem solved".
|
| These people live life with heads in the sand while the
| world burns. They won't wake up even once their torso is
| rotisserie.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| This. This is what regulation is for and should be doing.
|
| Trying to keep track of what is safe and isn't is basically
| impossible for an individual.
|
| I tried for years to avoid PFAS and friends, only to discover
| my sofa was covered in it.
|
| What's the point.
| anjel wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] Slow Death By Rubber Duck https://www.amazon.com/Slow-
| Death-Rubber-Duck-Everyday/dp/15...
| chmod600 wrote:
| 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.
| pirate787 wrote:
| precautionary principle is the answer. industry must have
| the burden to prove something is safe before using it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Induction usually works, so we think it will work
| tomorrow. But that in turn is... uh oh!
| master_crab wrote:
| It's very difficult (if not impossible) to prove
| chemicals are safe. All regulatory bodies can really do
| is prove that something is not safe.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > 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.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| 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.
| washbrain wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| ksidudwbw wrote:
| If it binds to hormone receptors it's pretty brain dead
| easy
| voisin wrote:
| 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).
| na85 wrote:
| >We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad"
| attitude more than it already exists.
|
| I dunno, I kinda think we do want to foster that.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > 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.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| the8472 wrote:
| 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
| gmac wrote:
| Yes! That would catch firms touting "BPA-free" plastics
| that instead contain the chemically very similar BPS, for
| example.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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...
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| There are some suspected and known harms certain enough to
| be published by the EPA https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-
| current-understanding-human-hea...
|
| 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.
| jahewson wrote:
| "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.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > 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.
| chmod600 wrote:
| 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.
| jen729w wrote:
| I knocked up this site a bunch of years ago. I should
| probably update it now that I have half a clue how to do
| that.
|
| https://isitchemicalfree.com/
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Thalidomide was fairly straightforward because missing
| limbs are unusual and immediately obvious, among other
| issues with those exposed.
|
| History of usage doesn't make something safer than the
| tested options. And a lot of potential issues aren't
| immediately obvious.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| We already have too many people who won't get life-saving
| vaccines that will protect others because of "chemicals",
| and that was before covid.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| 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.
|
| Thats not what you mean, right?
| google234123 wrote:
| Just wait until you learn about all the chemicals in a
| banana https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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.
| makomk wrote:
| 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.
| wizofaus wrote:
| True, but regulating the use of those in human industry
| is far less of an issue.
| wizofaus wrote:
| "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.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| amluto wrote:
| There are some basic tests that could be done:
|
| 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.
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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?
| npunt wrote:
| 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?
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>Why don't we want to foster this?
|
| Because already people
|
| 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.
| kurthr wrote:
| People are made of chemicals... and they are bad... so
| should we remove the chemicals from them?
|
| I mean it's snark, but it's as legitimate as "if we
| evolved from apes, why are there still apes" and you hear
| that all the time.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Yup.
|
| I ask people to point at something not made out of
| chemicals.
|
| 5% of time there's enlightenment.
|
| 95% of the time I get a testy "you know what I mean", to
| which 70% of the time I manage not to respond with "yes,
| but do _you_?? "
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Ok, I should clarify.
|
| 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.
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| > 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).
| intrepidhero wrote:
| 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.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Experts never have "the answer". Science changes over time
| - see the article and how guidelines for what's OK grew
| stricter.
|
| You work with what you have right now.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| I disagree with your stance.
|
| 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.
| esoterica wrote:
| They used to put lead in everything. Just because it's
| traditional doesn't mean it's safe.
| twistedpair wrote:
| This is why I switched to silk floss. Just search for it on
| your favorite Bezos emporium.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Waxed seems almost as good too.
| [deleted]
| specialist wrote:
| > _floss I use apparently has PFAS_
|
| I too had no idea. Pisses me off.
|
| After trying a handful of alternatives, I settled on bamboo
| floss.
|
| For all I know, bamboo floss contains arsenic and midi-
| chlorians.
|
| > _...whole host of rare medical conditions become common when
| my generation gets older._
|
| You mean like how leaded gasoline caused populate wide
| cognitive and behavioral problems?
| briantakita wrote:
| 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.
| CommanderData wrote:
| Exactly. We need to stop playing and sounding the other
| side constantly.
|
| There is enough evidence to suggest it's unsafe.
| mizzao wrote:
| The "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) safety guideline from
| the FDA seems like it should be renamed
|
| "we don't have statistically significant evidence this will
| kill you yet, but we're also not looking very hard for it"
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| s/to consumers//
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| 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.
| tartoran wrote:
| 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.
| southerntofu wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Regarding the floss, the study doesn't seem to have been
| corroborated. Instead I found this:
| https://www.ada.org/publications/ada-news/2022/february/ada-...
| rocqua wrote:
| I was recently in the market for high end rainproof hiking
| gear, and most brands are only offering PFAS free rainproof
| coatings.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Well either it does not contain PFAS but used PFAS in the
| manufacturing process thus harming the environment anyway.
|
| Or it used some other long fluoropolymer with a similar
| biological effect as PTFE but can claim to be "PTFE free"
| because on paper no PTFE was used.
| egman_ekki wrote:
| Fjallraven reportedly uses wax instead of PFAS.
|
| https://www.fjallraven.com/ca/en-ca/customer-service/care-
| re...
| Sakos wrote:
| I'd say this is the biggest issue with PFAS and PFAS-likes.
| PTFE-free doesn't mean anything useful.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The thing to beware is X-free! Products often contain a
| slightly different X with similar risks.
| dsq wrote:
| 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.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| 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.
| dimensionc132 wrote:
| 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.
| superchroma wrote:
| Not far enough. If people feel strongly about it, they need to
| be writing to manufacturers and politicians, demanding change.
| dimensionc132 wrote:
| agreed
| game-of-throws wrote:
| The world is being destroyed, but at least for a few beautiful
| moments our nonstick pans were a few cents cheaper
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Nonstick pans are a negligible source of PFAS compared to
| various plastic products. For example some paper bowls are 25%
| PFAS.
| bushbaba wrote:
| 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
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Funny as stainless/high carbon steel with butter is
| perfectly 'non stick' and way healthier.
|
| I bet that the butter itself is worse for your health than
| the minuscule PFAS you are getting from your pan.
| orev wrote:
| > 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.
| superchroma wrote:
| Well, there is also the method of seasoning cast iron
| cookware.
| orev wrote:
| 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).
| culi wrote:
| 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
| dang wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Thanks, Monsanto!
| austinprete wrote:
| As He died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap
| --- Leonard Cohen
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Think my unrealized stock gains are safe to drink?
| hammock wrote:
| 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
| madars wrote:
| 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!
| hammock wrote:
| Yes it's quite similar
| permo-w wrote:
| what do you think the feasibility of making the laws a
| whitelist rather than a blacklist would be? they did it with
| drugs in the UK
| hammock wrote:
| 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
| permo-w wrote:
| I'm not asking you to advocate
| croes wrote:
| Maybe capitalism has some serious side effects
| missedthecue wrote:
| Thank god my preferred economic model doesn't use chemicals
| croes wrote:
| It's not about the use of chemicals as such but the
| necessity of consumption for the sake of consumption.
| peteradio wrote:
| Why not use the real title? Your title indicates a meaning that
| is not there in the original.
| andsoitis wrote:
| The exact title is "It's raining PFAS: even in Antarctica and
| on the Tibetan plateau rainwater is unsafe to drink".
|
| How is the meaning different? The plateau bit?
| paul7986 wrote:
| 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.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| If I get a reverse osmosis water filter, will that eliminate the
| PFAS?
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| It will filter about 95%.
| chinathrow wrote:
| We are fucking us sideways and have no plans to stop doing so.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| rasz wrote:
| >The civil engineer will be held to account for his failures.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Universi...
|
| search jail : 0 found
| salawat wrote:
| I'm totally okay with this to be honest. I've been waiting on
| it.
|
| I'm tired of software companies that just go hire another
| shmuck.
| gruez wrote:
| >The civil engineer will be held to account for his failures.
| Hopefully, soon, the same will be true for the likes of your
| professions
|
| So some mid level manager/engineer gets to be the fall guy and
| all the executives gets away scot free?
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Try to engage the situation. Executives are all the same.
| They are looking to sell something.
|
| Engineers make the world. Be accountable to yourself and your
| fellow man. We can deny the CEOs of the world our knowledge
| thereisnospork wrote:
| What is it, exactly, that you think chemical engineers do?
| Blaming them is like blaming the plumbers' union for Flint
| Michigan's drinking water.
| sneak wrote:
| The state that benefits from authoritarian surveillance is the
| same state that issues professional licenses.
| skrebbel wrote:
| 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.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > 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).
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| >have had their failures and now we have licenses and
| accountability.
|
| Read it. We made those engineers accountable and should have
| done the same for the others.
|
| Please review what it means to make a threat, as nothing
| stated is remotely a "threat". Sounds weakly middle
| management, BTW.
|
| It is a notice that soon there will be accountability.
|
| If you are an engineer making the world a better place, then
| there won't be much to account for will there?
| [deleted]
| abeppu wrote:
| 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'?
| irrational wrote:
| 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.
| HidyBush wrote:
| 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
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| Leaded gasoline and a few others seemed really unsafe at the
| time of introduction.
| xchaotic wrote:
| Exactly - lead was known to cause harm since well late
| Roman times I guess.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| 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?
| canadiantim wrote:
| 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.
| exyi wrote:
| 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.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| 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
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| No, unfortunately multiple bad things can be happening at
| once, and FIFO isn't a great way of dealing with that.
| nfhshy68 wrote:
| Dealing with it with FIFO is better than not dealing with
| it.
|
| Yet we have a few billion people on the earth. I think we
| can spare a few thinking about other problems.
| mlyle wrote:
| > 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.
| coryrc wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| feanaro wrote:
| 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.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| How do you assess "too much" when it comes to human
| population?
| coryrc wrote:
| Most megafauna being endangered.
| epistasis wrote:
| I like that criteria! But it's less affected by total
| population than it is on the distribution of people.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| xbar wrote:
| 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.
|
| Your strawmen need work.
| switchbak wrote:
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| > Your strawmen need work.
|
| 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.
| superchroma wrote:
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy.
|
| > 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.
| superchroma wrote:
| Fanatic natalism and capitalism already created tragedy.
| We're talking cure now and nobody ever likes how the
| medicine tastes.
|
| That said, the only person invoking death camps and
| gulags here is you.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I didn't hear a call for killing people. People die
| without any extra help. We should just stop having so
| many babies.
| switchbak wrote:
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| justbored123 wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| > 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.
| mathlover2 wrote:
| > We are not really fit to do anything else.
|
| 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.
| worldshit wrote:
| agree agree agree. but it's completely unrealistic to hope
| that humans will do what must be done on their own...
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| 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
|
| /every s
| mindcrime wrote:
| _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."
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund
| anovikov wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| Our rulers typically solve the lawsuits thing by limiting
| liability through statute. They did it with tobacco and they
| did it with vaccines
| arcticbull wrote:
| Guns too with the PLCAA
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://goodmenproject.com/the-good-life/the-corporate-
| death...
|
| EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death
| penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2]
|
| [2] https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/08/its-time-
| bring...
| imglorp wrote:
| I'm encouraged that we have made sweeping changes in the past
| and altered the course of a disaster. Two examples are
| atmospheric CFCs and DDT.
|
| Agreed it's harder now with increased misinformation,
| corporate capture, and failed political systems.
| gruez wrote:
| >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.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > 100% fine seems a bit premature.
|
| 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".
| aetherson wrote:
| 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.
| syzar wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
| syzar wrote:
| 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.
| amluto wrote:
| 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.)
| syzar wrote:
| 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.
| coryrc wrote:
| 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.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| 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.
| coryrc wrote:
| 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.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| 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.
| aetherson wrote:
| I was responding to a poster who said:
|
| > 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?
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| voisin wrote:
| 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?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > how they rationalized this aggregate behaviour.
|
| 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 canapes 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.
| voisin wrote:
| 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?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > 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,
|
| Excellent points, well worth thinking about more.
| fritztastic wrote:
| 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| superchroma wrote:
| 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...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Non-issue? The hole in the ozone layer still exists today.
| [deleted]
| coryrc wrote:
| We're still using refrigerants with halogens when
| completely benign, more-efficient, and low GWP hydrocarbons
| are right there!
| luxuryballs wrote:
| 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
| zackmorris wrote:
| 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?
| nso wrote:
| Has microplastics been proven unsafe?
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Yes. Yes it has.
| missedthecue wrote:
| What harm does it cause
| dash2 wrote:
| It's always helpful to post a link to back your claims up.
| Presumably if gp is asking, it's because they couldn't find
| a credible source by Googling.
| ta8645 wrote:
| Calavar wrote:
| 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?
| superchroma wrote:
| 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.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Someone thought that setting up a permanent factory in
| the body for spike proteins
|
| That is absolutely not the case.
|
| mRNA has a very limited lifespan in the body. It does not
| become a "permanent factory".
| Calavar wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_a
| nd_Gene...
|
| [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4710634/
|
| [3] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/hst-176-cellular-and-
| molecular-i...
|
| [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK27158/
|
| [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4786079/
|
| [6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8619084/
|
| [7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/
|
| [8] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00019-w
|
| [9] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7987532/
| superchroma wrote:
| 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.
| Calavar wrote:
| I'm glad I could be of help
|
| There are some write ups out there:
|
| https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/covid-19-vaccine-long-
| ter...
|
| > 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.
|
| https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/where-mrna-vaccines-
| and-sp...
|
| > 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:
|
| This one says five days:
| https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/74/4/715/6279075
|
| And this one says ten:
| https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/17/5857/htm
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > 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.
| superchroma wrote:
| 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.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > that RNA vaccines tell the body to make spike proteins
|
| Correct.
|
| > and it will do this indefinitely
|
| Incorrect.
| miles wrote:
| ta8645 wrote:
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Uhm, how exactly is or was COVID-19 an existential threat
| (to humanity)?
| superchroma wrote:
| 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.
| landemva wrote:
| > existential threat
|
| 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.
| dwighttk wrote:
| >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?
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Is this even a real point?
|
| 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?
| antioppressor wrote:
| No need, metaobeyverse is coming, and everything will be new
| and shiny there. Virtual cities don't need maintenance.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > 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.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| you think lawmakers are letting their highest-paying
| constituents expose themselves to that accountability?
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| 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.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I recommend the paper "Precautionary Principle" by Nassim Taleb
| and co-authors
|
| It does a great job presenting your argument in mathematical
| format as well as rebutting usual criticisms you may encounter
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| >Leaded gasoline, CFCs, microplastics, pesticides
|
| Cigarettes, sugar, asbestos, hydrogenated vegetable oil,
| "clean" diesel cars...
| [deleted]
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| 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.
| rasz wrote:
| But I can ski a little faster, McDonald's burger didnt seep thru
| the wrapper and my disposable umbrella is excellent!
| purple_ferret wrote:
| 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.
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| 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]
|
| [1]:
| https://www.canada.ca/en/services/health/publications/health...
|
| [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-018-0099-9
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| The guideline is 0.02 ppt for PFOS and 0.004 ppt for PFOA.
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| I think you have the units, the number of the zeroes, and and
| the actual figures wrong. Each ug/L is 1,000 ppt (part per
| trillion, i.e. ng/L).
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| No.
|
| 1 ug/L = 1,000,000 ppt
|
| 1 ng/L = 1,000 ppt
|
| You can find the figures here:
|
| https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/questions-and-answers-drinking-
| wate...
|
| Rain water and ocean spray already exceed these limits by
| hundreds of thousands to several million times.
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| > 1 ng/L = 1,000 ppt
|
| I don't think so. See here (the green box in the upper
| right corner of page 2): https://www.epa.gov/sites/defaul
| t/files/2015-09/documents/ep...
|
| > nanograms per liter (ng/L) = parts per trillion (ppt)
|
| Or alternatively:
| https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/circ1133/conversion-
| factors.html
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=1+ng%2FL+in+parts+per+tri
| lli...
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| I think it's just that Google's instant answer is scraped
| from endmemo.com, and that website has it wrong.
|
| If you check the second search result (https://www.llojib
| we.org/drm/environmental/content/concentra...), it also
| corroborates what I'm saying:
|
| > 1 nanogram/liter (ng/l) = 1 ppt
|
| 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.
| justbored123 wrote:
| jcrben wrote:
| Since PFAS never really breaks down and we're still creating
| it, is a 200 ppt inevitable at some point?
| superchroma wrote:
| 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.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > You can't use techniques like distillation to remove PFAS
|
| Can we get a citation on this? I'm not a chemical engineer,
| but distillation seems like a pretty good way to get rid of
| virtually everything.
| superchroma wrote:
| I'm sorry, I had it wrong. I've checked my facts. It
| works. This is actually a relief for me.
| loosescrews wrote:
| Rain is a form of distillation.
| superchroma wrote:
| This is a good point. I don't know what to think now. I
| presume 3M isn't spraying this stuff into the air as an
| aerosol.
| tadfisher wrote:
| 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.
| serf wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| Most of the PFAS do break down -- a half life of a few years.
| It's mostly PFOA that's of grave concern.
| jcrben wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| > the results that came up mostly seemed to discuss the
| half-life in the body
|
| Yah, there's a lot of data on "serum" or "elimination"
| half lives.
|
| What you care about is "atmospheric", "aqueous abiotic",
| and "aqueous biotic" half lives.
|
| So, e.g. for PFOA, atmospheric half lives are about 130
| days... https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/jp036343b
|
| I can't come up with a link to share for PFOA in aqueous
| solutions, but it looks like 90-150 years.
| jcrben wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| > 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...
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| I'd settle for 0 ppt.
| southerntofu wrote:
| I'd settle for what's already here and it's too late, but
| stop this industrial madness right now without further delay.
| Panoramix wrote:
| What short term exposure? if it's in the rain in Antarctica
| then you can bet it's in your water, vegetables: it's likely a
| lifelong exposure.
| bergenty wrote:
| Research suggests even the EPA recommendation is too high.
| koheripbal wrote:
| How can we have a guideline for ALL PFAS? They are all
| completely different molecules with different Hazzard levels -
| likely many safe.
|
| These generalizations make conversations about them useless.
| superchroma wrote:
| There is insufficient evidence for "likely many safe". You
| can't just start throwing that around.
| djbusby wrote:
| Which generalization should we change ? The "they aren't
| safe" or the "likely many safe" one?
| daenz wrote:
| Related, in June 2022, the EPA changed its guidelines, which is
| directly triggering this news cycle about all water being unsafe
| to drink.
|
| In other words, the sky is not falling, we've just adjusted the
| definition of where the sky starts.
|
| https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pf...
| bergenty wrote:
| 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.
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| More like we were being overly optimistic about where the sky
| starts for years.
| [deleted]
| rasz wrote:
| Just like there was no reason to panic about leaded gasoline
| pre 1996.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Or the sky has already fell and no one has noticed yet because
| our sky-watchers told us it was fine
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| 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).
| edgyquant wrote:
| Interesting thought, can you talk more about the methods and
| their flaws? Also what's the article you're referring to?
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The discussion is
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32438368#32442794
|
| Here is my comment:
|
| This is actually very poor statistics. Take a look at the
| actual study:
|
| https://www.jhep-
| reports.eu/article/S2589-5559(22)00122-7/fu...
|
| 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.
|
| Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/
|
| Thus the real conclusion is that the study did not find any
| statistically significant link between 'forever chemicals'
| and liver cancer.
| mbreese wrote:
| 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.
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| >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?
| landemva wrote:
| I am interested in where/if this bioaccumulates, like mercury
| does in marine life.
| defterGoose wrote:
| | 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.
| pm90 wrote:
| Why haven't we seen higher incidence of cancer in global
| populations if its leached into all global water supplies?
| azinman2 wrote:
| But it is increasing over time:
| https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/
|
| 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.
| missedthecue wrote:
| And as people die from other curable illnesses less and less,
| cancer incidences increase and increase.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Have there been a set of cures in the last 20 years that
| would explain this curve? Would love to see the data.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Who says we havent? PFAS have been in use for +50years.
| s5300 wrote:
| Most of the global population doesn't have access to cancer
| screenings/health treatment. Come on.
| permo-w wrote:
| that would be almost impossible to control for
| [deleted]
| acd wrote:
| Lets stop using PFAS if its raining down on us.
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