The floss I use apparently has PFAS in it (Oral B Glude). Many paper straws contain it. Nonstick pans. Food wrappers designed to avoid grease. Water resistant clothing, cleaning products, candy wrappers. I used to drink out of plastic bottles and plastic glasses.
We need to do a better job of regulating what is allowed to be sold to consumers. We're likely going to see a a whole host of rare medical conditions become common when my generation gets older. Not to mention that on top of destroying human health we're destroying the planet too. I don't know what to do about any of this but I feel powerless to make an impact.
The problem is we're effectively using the public as a guinea pig. Then when lots of issues are detected, the specific chemicals used are banned. Then industry quickly replaces it with a very similar compound(see e.g Bisphenol A being replaced with Bisphenol S and F in "BPA free plastics" even though it's not known that they are safer) which is likely to have similar problems, but not proven to yet, kicking the can down the road.
Some possible regulations come to mind. For instance, maybe a ban or very strict regulations on the widespread use of compounds like PFAS that have no known biological or other natural path of degradation. Because it's become very clear that such compounds are inevitably going to end up spread all over global ecosystems.
Edit: So I did some more research. Not only are BPS and BPF not known to be safer, they are already known to have many of the same problems as BPA. To make things worse BPS and possibly BPF are even less degradable than BPA. So they may even be worse. This is not even a little surprising. Their structure is identical except for the linkage between the phenol groups. From pharmacology it's well known that highly similar structures tend to have similar pharmacodynamic properties. So they're not even remotely likely to have been good replacements before the growing mountain of evidence to the contrary appeared. Clearly this blatantly irresponsible behaviour from industry needs to be stopped.
Along with banning the chemicals, the corporation could be “murdered”. Like a death sentence for a corp. They would cease to exist in that country. I’m sure this would make them think much harder about the effects of their actions.
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.
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.
The fireproofing chemical sprayed on fabrics for sheets upholstery etc since the 1970s in the US is and has been a known forever chemical but also very profitable so the mfr basically used the tobacco industry strategy for 20+ years at which point its in everyone's bodies for the rest of their lives. [1]
The book was published over a decade ago, so news travels slowly sometimes, even to regulators.
People, people. Why do you all expect regulation to work in the presence of corruption?
All regulations break down with high enough stakes. We are in this mess right now, because we made the mistake of thinking that regulations will be good enough to stop it.
I think we should study the effects of materials well before jumping ship to production and consumption. The industry is guilty for rushing this and for the lack of knowledge pretends there’s no proof of effects on human health. They could always use something that is not (yet) banned but also not well tested in the first place. The regulators ‘regulate’ within the framework but if the framework is bad is complete different thing. The industry has bigger pockets so it can almost always put the consumer’s interest at the bottom of their priorities. Till we fix this imballance we’re likely to suffer again and again in different ways in the future. To me the return to simpler times really means simply consume less and if we all did that and coupled it with strong repairability movements and proper recycling we’d all benefit from this as well as the environment.
Exactly. Low-tech and repairability are the only way forward for humanity... all other scenarios end up in painful dreadful collapse. But our tyrannical overlords are ideologically opposed to this conclusion because it's a path of degrowth and sharing economy which is fundamentally contradictory to capitalist doctrine and interests.
It's not considered "unsafe" until there's enough sponsored scientific studies. Until there's enough ontological awareness, funding, time, & inclination for these studies, it's considered "safe". Welcome to public perception through the lens of Positivism.
Regulators were forcing its use and regulation was one of the main drivers of the PFAS industry. California forced furniture makers to spray new furniture with PFAS based flame retardants for years. As of just this year, 2022, in California, even though they are no longer required, PFAS are still allowed in furniture until 2024.
Consumer products are only part of the problem. PFAS are emitted from industry, like from farms and smoke stacks, straight into the atmosphere where they deposit and precipitate back down onto everything.
That's one of the main issues here: you don't avoid it just by avoiding the consumer goods in your post.
Which, as bad as it is in general, shouldn't be that much of a problem since it is not in direct contact with water flow, being used to seal the joints.
I could be mistaken but I believe PEX has been the dominant type of pipe used in new water systems over the last 15 years or so. There’s not really any plumbers tape involved with the various types of fittings that are used with those pipes.
can you point me at an authoritative source that says PTFE is bad and not inert in humans (unless you reach a temperature of 500F or so)? All I ever see are "holistic medicine" and food babe level sites saying it.
Is that one so bad in its end use? I would imagine production byproducts would be the bigger issue for plumbing tape, which is effectively solid and used in non-abrasive applications.
Why is it so in vogue to be a doomer? Malthus, the original doomer, was wrong on just about all of his predictions. Most likely, we're wrong too. I mean, the planet survived like half a dozen mass extinction events, what makes you think it won't survive another one?
I just don't understand the "woe is me" nihilistic narrative so many intelligent people are deeply fond of. Recycle, turn off the lights, vote with your conscience. Get a wife, make some kids, live a happy life, try to make a positive difference in the world. It's not hard.
Let's not be "doomers", but let's not ignore emerging risks of catastrophic outcomes, either.
Playing Russian Roulette a few times and getting away with it doesn't make it safe.
And plenty of stuff that would have been really bad has been stopped by diligent response by people and governments considering those risks.
If we keep making the same mistakes and exposing consumers to toxic things, and lacing the entire environment with them... maybe there's some processes that need to improve instead of just shrugging and saying "well, that's how we do it 'round here!"
It's not hard to look at everything we have and do and see how fragile it all is. It feels harder and harder to acquire the "things" necessary to feel successful, and once you get them, and see how easy it is to lose, it's not weird to think people might feel extremely vulnerable.
It also doesn't help that most popular cinematic futurism is post-apocalyptic now. I remember RedLetterMedia pointing to the success of Independence Day as the turning point and I can see some validity in that.
Yup, the truth is that there are a host of things that are going to make all of our lives slightly shorter. Our doom is that we’re not living absolutely optimum length or quality lives… but the real doom is that some people spend their long lives terrified of losing the last few percent and spread the fear instead of focusing on what makes life worth living.
There is an amount of attention appropriate to give risks, but many people really overdo it and turn it into a kind of religion and obsession.
The only thing I've done in line with the absolute pessimism of my beliefs about the future is stop paying into my pension (for now). I still plan to have kids, gods willing.
It's one thing to worry about the planet and the animals, and people dying directly due to climate events (floods and storms, heatwaves and drought) etc. I am far, far more worried about what we will do to each other when the 3 billion of us who are vulnerable to climate change want to move somewhere else.
Because for people who don't have their heads buried in the sand it can be very difficult to fully enjoy one's privileged position in the world without failing to recognize the vast socioeconomic disparity that got them there in the first place, and thusly be deeply frustrated when one's impact on the problem seems so inconsequential.
non stick pans use ptfe not pfoa, this has been a scare tactic by "holistic nutritionists" on the internet for ages. If your non-stick is from a name brand and less than 10 years old, they haven't used PFOA (or PFAs) in ages. Don't toss your stuff out.
To all the chemical engineers:
(And computer engineers for that matter)
Your time is coming. The rest of the hard engineering disciplines have had their failures and now we have licenses and accountability.
The amount of damage one bridge can do is limited, but the amount of destruction caused by endocrine disrupting chemicals and authoritarian enabling surveillance tools is unlimited.
The civil engineer will be held to account for his failures. Hopefully, soon, the same will be true for the likes of your professions
I agree that some more pubic accountability for chemical engineers and programmers would be great, but I hate the hostile, anti-intellectual "us good, chemists bad" vibe with which you say it. There's no need to threaten people.
There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession.
> the hostile, anti-intellectual "us good, chemists bad" vibe with which you say it.
I personally didn't get that from the parent comment. It's just really weird (from an outsider/alien perspective) that in many sectors of the corporate mafia like in the chemical/IT industry obvious and sometimes intentional malicious schemes (which result in actual deaths) are either rewarded or ignored... when in many other branches harmless errors can get you kicked from your job (eg. in restaurants/shops).
It's not contempt to point that out. If you believe in the idea that there should be a social contract by which we are bound, the social contract must apply to everyone fairly. So why does it often not apply to cops, judges, landlords and some sectors of the engineering community?
> There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession.
True, but like in every other profession, it's very hard to make money if you're really trying to make the world better, and i do mean any money (as in find a job at all).
lol, ok. sure, whatever. as a ChemE, we have already made so much progress on making plants blow up less, spilling toxic chemicals into waterways, stopping destroying the ozone, make food safer, ....
you maybe need to go talk to chemists who make this. ChemE just mass produce what the chemist makes. but the chemist just makes what the business needs and the business you makes what the consumer wants.
so oh wait, this is on you for being an irresponsible consumer. don't buy it and we won't make it.
also, north America and the west have already done impressive reforms contrary to Asia which really needs to learn environmentalism
Great, love that for you. When your company is ruining the world you should take a stand.
> ... irresponsible consumer...
No. Won't accept that shirking of responsibility. Consumers expect that the product isn't poison. We expect that planes fly and cars don't explode. It isn't reasonable to say that consumers want nonstick poison. They were sold a product that was "better" than the alternatives. They believed that would include not being poison.
No argument here. But the state is not one entity.
Licensing for many professions is bullshit. Licensing for engineering requires mentorship and certification by non-government societies in the US. They determine the amount of rigor to join their group and hold the status as a professional engineer.
Everything after that is just registration, which confirms you have evidence of the the prior
Related, there was a pretty significant discovery of long term release of these chemicals that contaminated the water supply of a county in upstate NY.
Alot of money and research is exploring the topic, not surprisingly, guidance changes as knowledge gets refined.
The EPA’s new recommendation is still not low enough. You realize there is a some cause to panic right? We can’t fish in our streams and rivers, can’t drink rainwater, can’t raise domestic animals without them being full of heavy metals etc. We’ve ruined the basics and this isn’t hyperbole anymore.
We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful. Leaded gasoline, CFCs, microplastics, pesticides collapsing insect populations etc. And it can take decades to fully understand those impacts. When the stakes are literally, "all rainwater on the planet is unsafe", should we ask -- would society be better off if we were much more conservative about demonstrating the long-term safety of new substances before scaling up their use?
Also, I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this: Will literally the whole planet be able to pursue lawsuits against 3M and peers for making our rainwater 'unsafe'?
> We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation
up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was
really harmful.
You missed the problematic last step.
We take technical innovations to a societal scale, discover a really
harmful effect, and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all
about it.
It's expected that harms, especially through complex side-effects take
time to emerge. We can't see the future, nor can we exhaustively test
everything in advance.
The problem comes with the response. A certain amount of market
inertia is to be expected. Recalling and replacing products is expensive.
But what is absolutely inexcusable, and ripe for immediate radical
global action to address [1], is the disgraceful, blatantly criminal
behaviour of large corporations who move to suppress science, discredit
researchers, silence critics and bury bad news.
Many problems concerning at-scale blow-back turn out to have been known
about decades in advance of their impact.
This is nonsense. We have solved a ton of environmental problems in my lifetime. When I was a kid, there were legitimate worries about the ozone layer -- we banned CFCs and now it's a non-issue. Acid rain is vastly mitigated. Before I was born, we cleaned up America's rivers. And we've dropped per capita carbon emissions in the US by about 40% so far from its high in the 70s.
>EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2]
Okay, but isn't "corporate death penalty" equivalent to a fine that exceeds the value of the company? If we're having trouble fining companies for even 1% of their market value, then demanding a 100% fine seems a bit premature. The whole situation feel like people wanting to reduce wealth inequality by demanding a communist revolution, rather than something more reasonable like higher tax brackets.
I 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?
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.
> 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.
I feel like just when we start to realize we're destroying things with our chemical creations ...
FWIW, this was understood quite a long time ago. Consider that the EPA "SuperFund"[1] program began in 1980. And it's not like that was the first time anybody understood that some chemicals have very harmful impacts "in the wild."
The ecological damage from unchecked climate change is by far the largest amount of damage. I'm not sure why we should give it a pass and only focus on smaller amounts of damage.
Because then the conversation will just be dominated on focusing on a smaller issue, with a similar impasse. Just because a bully gets outraged when somebody stands up to them is not a reason to stop standing up to them, and the same folks opposing environmental protection will fight just as hard on other issues.
No, we have to immediately enact a huge number of measures globally for which we don't know the longterm impact and not worry about these things that make life more convenient if only minimally
The solution to climate change and all these crises is a vastly reduced human population living in small agrarian communities with preindustrial lifestyles. We keep having these environmental crises because technological civilization was a mistake.
>would society be better off if we were much more conservative about demonstrating the long-term safety of new substances before scaling up their use?
How?
Why limit it to substances? Social media is unsafe
What point in time were we only using safe substances so we can use that list of substances as the baseline and then somehow only allow new substances to be used when their long term safety has been demonstrated somehow?
Yes, we should take new chemicals and study them for a significant time frame prior to extensive global use. The bar can be set higher.
Don't conflate social science with hard science.
Social media is great at steering populations, generating useful propaganda and generating useful profiles of individuals....
Why would governments want to restrict that?
It would be good to have an objective measure of unsafe.
E.g. is the radioactive dust we are all exposed to from global coal plants unsafe? High levels of pm 2.5 from steel plants making your vehicles and roads? Low cost subsidized sugar making half the population obese?
We all die in the end, trying to balance where to act is a hard problem because time is zero sum.
That's the very core of the issue, not knowing what is unsafe.
It's not that the concentration of these chemicals increases past what we thought was safe, what changed was our knowledge of his dangerous they are, making current levels unsafe.
Any notion for "objectively" deciding these things has to account for unknown information, which means assigning subjective risk to these unknowns. I don't find an "objective" framework a coherent concept because of that. Ignorance of the world must be confronted head on and taken into account, and those that do not incorporate that risk directly into their cognitive models will perform worse at achieving their goals.
How do we determine the long term safety without first scaling it up? All of these things many seem innocent in a lab setting and it is only once they reach a critical point that the issues arise.
Usually if something is being eroded you check what chemicals the erosion releases. If you cook on a pan and you don't analyze the contents of the fumes you are totally responsible
In a lot of cases the harm was known up-front, but then a handful of people in charge of the profits decided to scale up to “all of society” anyway. Cigarettes, leaded fuel, and fossil fuels are all in this category.
No individual manager at any corporation involved in this has a KPI that says: “Terminate the entire category of industry on which our profits are based.”
This is the problem, and governments these days are just an extension of the same broken system.
Chasing after profits will lead humanity off the edge of a cliff.
To be clear, the US political party that starts with a D has been actively spreading awareness and working to ban the substances you mentioned since the at least the 1960s, while the party that starts with an R will never stop being in denial about their dangers.
But we're all guilty of buying products created with those substances and driving cars so.. the fault lies with each of us on an individual level.
What breaks my heart is that the people with all of the money and power actively prevent the rest of us from inventing better solutions. They've created an entire economy around dead end service jobs instead of automation, to keep us distracted and disillusioned so we can never catch a breather and disrupt their meal ticket.
If it were up to me (it will never be up to me), I'd work towards creating open source alternatives for all resources necessary for life. I'd make a wiki of everything people work for (food, water, housing, incidentals) and make each one sustainable and as close to free as possible. Money would be optional and used for aspirations beyond necessity.
It would be kind of a Jetsons solarpunk future where a backyard robotic hydroponic garden grows all non-animal macronutrients. Eggs and kefir would largely replace meat. The house would be made of 3D printed hempcrete and recycled materials. Power and HVAC would come from free (7 year amortized) photovoltaics and passive solar-thermal heat pumps connected to the buried irrigation system.
This stuff is honestly so easy that I can only blame conspiracy for lack of adoption. Or maybe extreme laziness. Whatever the reason is, it's defeatist.
So I'm trying to deprogram myself and incorporate these solutions into my own life. So far I've only succeeded in buying a used electric car though. It's just too hard to save the $10,000 to fix each problem one by one, so I pay out more than that to be a consumer and stay trapped in the matrix. Where are the loans for these solutions? Where's the political will?
Thing is, it won't even be possible to demonstrate that unsafety on a low scale. I think we should just accept the risk. It will happen once in a while. We will adapt.
meanwhile when new stuff is rolled out anyone questioning the safety or efficacy or theorizing about potential dangers is demonized as a quack, people are so compartmentalized that they can’t see that humans are still flawed and make mistakes, somehow current year everything is a godsend break through, it’s marketing bullshit and corruption
> I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this
Since it was considered to be perfectly safe when they used it, and they stopped 20 years ago (presumably when they discovered it was unsafe), I don’t think there’s any legal ground to stand on.
They made money on something that turned out to cause damage. It's only fair that they give back the money they've made to mitigate the damage they caused. It doesn't matter that it was considered safe back then.
There was a now-deleted reply to this that made a great point: Is it possible vaccines could be included in your list?
The answer to that is no, it is impossible for any vaccine to be included in that list, which gives rise to the more general point: modern scientific studies are so heavily agenda-polluted, that skepticism and conservative adoption are prohibited. That a handful of short-term (<100 years) studies are sufficient for rolling out unprecedented technologies to the entire world. That an absence of evidence of long-term effects is taken to mean evidence of absence.
Whether it be DDT, GMO's, or PFAS, if the science to date can't detect harm, then there of course cannot possibly be harm - throw caution to the wind and roll it out 100% the world over, from Antarctica to Tibet.
PFAS accumulates in animals and plants, so if all rainwater is unsafe to drink, I would guess most of the world’s food will be unsafe to eat soon, if not already.
Luckily, ‘unsafe’ here, for now, means a relatively small increase in the risk to get some diseases.
⇒ Apart from trying to buy less stuff that contains these chemicals, I think it’s not worthwhile to worry about the health impacts on our individual lives, as it’s an as good as unavoidable risk now (eating only food grown using melting ice caps or millennia old aquifers would work, but has other disadvantages. Filtering PFAS out of all water used in agriculture seems infeasible)
They are referring to crossing these thresholds (from Fed 87-118):
> EPA’s health advisories, which identify the
concentration of chemicals in drinking
water at or below which adverse health
effects are not anticipated to occur, are:
0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOA,
0.02 ppt for PFOS, 10 ppt for GenX
chemicals, and 2,000 ppt for PFBS.
Health advisories are non-regulatory
and reflect EPA’s assessment of the best
available peer-reviewed science.
0.004 ppt is also more commonly known as the number zero. It's probably just the currently best limit of detection for PFOA in water.
For anyone interested in this topic, I recommend season 41 of the podcast American Scandal, which depicts the DuPont cover-up of C8 dumping and how it was discovered. Great narration.
PFAS is almost like optimizing for paperclips scenario. Except we did ourselves( for a little convenience). Micro plastics too. Both permeate every human in existence and now I guess is in rain water. I'm rural and get water from a well, pretty sure That's not even safe.
I drink mostly bottled tea or soda but that's usually in plastic which has bpa... There's really no getting away from this shit unless you literally carbonate or maybe your own organic teas using highly filtered water and maybe live in a bubble that catches and filters unhealthy particles.
I have two toddlers and I'm saddened they have to face this world. I honestly feel the last decent decade to be a kid was the 90s. I grew up in the 80s graduated in 98, and maybe it's just nostalgia but it just feels like the world is much darker and less safe.
I mean we could run all over town when I was 7, no worries.
We'd be dropped off at the swimming pool, or video arcade, etc... Or just ride our bikes exploring.
Now that's child abuse. I'm glad my kids are safe in their child harness but I'm also glad I only had to worry about seat belts as a kid, after 3 or so. Now it's like 8 or older...
And don't get me started on how weak Halloween is compared to the glorious 80s. Beggars night was an entire community affair, now there is no community anywhere that really gives af.
I'm reminded of the Queen song "is this the world we created" or when the children cry by white lion... Two excellent songs that sum up the world we're leaving our kids... It's beyond sad.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
People, people. Why do you all expect regulation to work in the presence of corruption?
All regulations break down with high enough stakes. We are in this mess right now, because we made the mistake of thinking that regulations will be good enough to stop it.
I 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?
That's one of the main issues here: you don't avoid it just by avoiding the consumer goods in your post.
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.
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)
Deleted Comment
[1]: https://pfascentral.org/data-hub/
"we don't have statistically significant evidence this will kill you yet, but we're also not looking very hard for it"
I just don't understand the "woe is me" nihilistic narrative so many intelligent people are deeply fond of. Recycle, turn off the lights, vote with your conscience. Get a wife, make some kids, live a happy life, try to make a positive difference in the world. It's not hard.
Let's not be "doomers", but let's not ignore emerging risks of catastrophic outcomes, either.
Playing Russian Roulette a few times and getting away with it doesn't make it safe.
And plenty of stuff that would have been really bad has been stopped by diligent response by people and governments considering those risks.
If we keep making the same mistakes and exposing consumers to toxic things, and lacing the entire environment with them... maybe there's some processes that need to improve instead of just shrugging and saying "well, that's how we do it 'round here!"
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
Following a plant-based diet and trying alternative modes of transit to the car make a pretty great impact!
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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
There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession.
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).
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?
you maybe need to go talk to chemists who make this. ChemE just mass produce what the chemist makes. but the chemist just makes what the business needs and the business you makes what the consumer wants.
so oh wait, this is on you for being an irresponsible consumer. don't buy it and we won't make it.
also, north America and the west have already done impressive reforms contrary to Asia which really needs to learn environmentalism
Great, love that for you. When your company is ruining the world you should take a stand.
> ... irresponsible consumer...
No. Won't accept that shirking of responsibility. Consumers expect that the product isn't poison. We expect that planes fly and cars don't explode. It isn't reasonable to say that consumers want nonstick poison. They were sold a product that was "better" than the alternatives. They believed that would include not being poison.
So some mid level manager/engineer gets to be the fall guy and all the executives gets away scot free?
Engineers make the world. Be accountable to yourself and your fellow man. We can deny the CEOs of the world our knowledge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Universi...
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I'm tired of software companies that just go hire another shmuck.
Licensing for many professions is bullshit. Licensing for engineering requires mentorship and certification by non-government societies in the US. They determine the amount of rigor to join their group and hold the status as a professional engineer.
Everything after that is just registration, which confirms you have evidence of the the prior
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But I will add that professional chemist licensing should be required and revocable
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...
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Alot of money and research is exploring the topic, not surprisingly, guidance changes as knowledge gets refined.
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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'?
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...
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.
Agreed it's harder now with increased misinformation, corporate capture, and failed political systems.
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?
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.
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
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.
/every s
How? Why limit it to substances? Social media is unsafe What point in time were we only using safe substances so we can use that list of substances as the baseline and then somehow only allow new substances to be used when their long term safety has been demonstrated somehow?
Yes, we should take new chemicals and study them for a significant time frame prior to extensive global use. The bar can be set higher.
Don't conflate social science with hard science.
Social media is great at steering populations, generating useful propaganda and generating useful profiles of individuals.... Why would governments want to restrict that?
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.
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.
It does a great job presenting your argument in mathematical format as well as rebutting usual criticisms you may encounter
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.
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?
Cigarettes, sugar, asbestos, hydrogenated vegetable oil, "clean" diesel cars...
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.
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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.
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)
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/04/ewg-forever-c...
> 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.
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.
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.