>PFOS—perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—is referred to as a forever chemical, because it accumulates in soil, rivers, and drinking water and is almost impossible to get rid of. She had about 300 micrograms of it per liter in her blood, more than 60 times the level recommended as safe today by the European Union.
Almost impossible, but not impossible. It has been found that giving blood (and then throwing that blood away) significant reduces PFOS levels. Not that I'm defending 3M or any of this. My favorite rivers where I fish turned out to be full of PFOS due to a leaking 3M waste dump and this was only announced in 2021. So I spent some time looking for solutions.
After reading the series "A Chemical Hunger" by the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, I'm pretty convinced that chemical contamination is a global-warming level threat to humanity. The authors talk about the evidence that chemicals released into the environment by human activity (such as PFAS) are causing obesity, and they present compelling evidence that this is plausible. They are also working on research to confirm this hypothesis.
But regardless of whether obesity is caused primarily by environmental contamination, chemical contamination is a huge risk for a few reasons:
-Once in the environment, chemical contaminants can react in unforeseen ways, creating new chemicals that we will have no idea how to monitor for.
-Health data prior to industrialization is not good and is confounded by poor medical practices, so we may think we've "solved" chemical contamination when in fact we haven't (e.g. maybe heart disease would go away if it weren't for some chemical that we started using in 1910 but we can't tell because everyone was dying of dysentery).
-The solution, in some most cases, may mean giving up significant technological advances, especially polymers and heavy metals extracted from the ground.
When my mother moved in and we went on daily walks, she lost a pound a week for a year. Her entirely sedentary lifestyle (and that of most Americans I know) is a major factor for her obesity. Standing is now considered exercise it has gotten so bad.
But people will blame anything instead of taking action, so…
If the chemical contamination hypothesis were true, one would expect obesity to correlate with/lag industrial activity/contamination. I'm not sure that this is true. Obesity in Europe didn't start going up until the early 2000s, when Europe was transitioning to a more service-based economy. In Korea it has become a problem in the last 5 years (again, as the country deindustrializes), and in China it seems to be mostly a problem of the wealthy rather than a problem of the poor factory worker (and the factory worker is presumably exposed to more industrial contaminants).
That said, I have not yet read the SMTM piece, or looked at SMTM's data.
Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after.
If your purpose in life is to maximize the number of days you live, I guess you do you, but it doesn’t seem like a very high quality life to me.
We take risks, we accept them, there’s middle ground between ignoring risks and obsessing over them. The toll from worrying about things can be much worse than the things you’re trying to avoid.
You know what causes obesity? Availability of food. You didn’t evolve in an environment where calories are essentially free so your motivations and feedback behaviors aren’t tuned to make good decisions when it comes to food. Sure there are probably secondary effects from all sorts of things, but it comes down to food not being scarce like it evolved to expect.
Paying attention to environmental risks makes sense, but only to a certain extent. You’re probably still going to live a long life, and the secret to a good one probably isn’t going to be found in avoiding the next scary chemical of the day.
3M PFAS has poisoned the Westerschelde estuary here in the Netherlands and Belgium to the point where you can no longer eat fish from there, and the only thing 3M has done about it is complain to anyone who will listen that they unfairly haven’t been allowed to reopen their plant.
Nothing will change until there are prison sentences, and the very deliberate system of shielding managers and corporations from responsibility is changed.
It was known for decades that Asbestos and cigarettes causes lung cancer, that adding lead to gasoline is a terrible idea, that burning oil warms the atmosphere. The truth was suppressed through intimidation, lawsuits and bribes. Regulatory agencies are corrupted by the revolving door system. You cannot trust these organisations.
I mean NO2 from diesel exhaust is provably reducing longevity i.e. killing people sooner, still no prison sentences happened for any of the heads in VW. [0]
There are lots of countries with lots of governance models, yet none as far as I know would have proactively banned any of those things early on.
I suspect that means there is a flip side we aren't seeing. It means there is a huge disadvantage to banning some probably harmful chemical. For example, if you were a small island and you banned imports of everything containing any PFAS, you'd end up in the technological stone age - there are no PFAS-free iPhones, food, paper, or shoes. So, unless you have your own shoe factory, your people will have to go barefoot...
I totally agree with you, but it should be noted that not all kinds of asbestos are harmful. One safe type is used today in apartment building with no measurable consequences.
What they really need is a system that puts the fear of God into them. Simply prohibiting chemicals after we've found them to be dangerous is unhelpful, and regulating them before we've found them dangerous is impossible.
Why not have a serious system based on punishment instead, after the fact? For example-
"If a company is found to be responsible for a material environmental disaster, whoever was employed by that company during the relevant period shall be sentenced to life in prison and a fine of 100% of their net worth. No liability should apply for occupations which can be conclusively demonstrated to be unrelated to the activities of the firm, such as janitors or security guards.
The statute of limitations shall equal the duration of life of the concerned natural persons or the victims, whichever is longer."
This would cause people to self-regulate, based on whatever informal information they hear ("3M is doing really dodgy stuff, I wouldn't work there if I were you"), rather than having to wait for regulation. It would be much better suited, and would allow for the government to scrap other bothersome regulation.
It would be an interesting future historical study to see what caused more harm:
-Manufacturing the best firefighting chemistry (e.g. military purchases for missile warehouses, resorts, apartments, etc.)
-Using the chemistry to actually fight fires
It might be a case where sometimes second best should have been the way to go, but it’s hard to know beforehand I imagine, especially in safety scenarios where people are laser focused on optimizing for that.
> In fact, in the case of the V-2, more than twice as many Allied prisoners died outfitting the factory and producing it than did Allied civilians and soldiers hit by it in rocket attacks.
At this point, we have an over abundance [edit: of evidence] that when we as humans do new science in pursuit of good, we tend to overlook the negative aspects. Chemical companies spend a fortune on development of the new chemical and rush it to market to recoup investments. We never spend enough time looking at the down side of these new chemicals even though we have all of the information we currently have that shows these chemicals tend to not do so well in the environment. We also have abundance of examples where these companies knew the dangers and hid them in order to make their money. Yet with all of this information, nothing is done to prevent the release of these chemicals without 3rd party testing.
The citizens being affected have very little recourse.
We had some scandals here in Sweden also - mostly around military airports (perhaps normal airports also) that practice with putting out burning airplanes.
Yeah, never buy a house near a military base, especially one active during WW2 or later. If you do, don’t consume groundwater.
The military’s approach to dealing with waste in that era was essentially “dump it over there” or “burn it with fire”. Airbases are particularlye bad as the crap they spray on the wings for de-icing and the firefighting foam. Is everywhere and often is nasty stuff.
I've been kicking around an idea I've been tentatively calling
"techno-conservatism". The tl;dr: "Like Amish, not Luddites." It's
becoming more and more clear that each of our technologies has
trade-offs, and the uncritical acceptance of those trade-offs has lead us
to poison ourselves and the world in several fairly significant ways.
This would seem to me to make a more considered and conservative
relationship with our technology imperative.
There are movements like the "Slow Food" movement, and of course the
Amish are famously conservative in their acceptance and use of modern
technology.
The general idea is to start with a simple and ecologically harmonious
low-tech (but sophisticated!) lifestyle and then add essential technology
(in a kind of "progressive enhancement", eh?) to increase QoL (Quality of
Life) without, y'know, poisoning anything.
I like that idea. But because of the way these chemicals get everywhere, we need pretty much everyone on board. That won’t change unless we change incentives and negative externalities are felt by the actors that decide to use the chemicals. How do we do that? Same question for nuclear war, fossil fuels, and any other tragedy of the commons type situation.
As long as tech owners openly state that humanity should be reduced in quantity, it is pretty clear that they don't care, at best, if not contrary (create harmful tech on purpose).
superkuh|3 years ago
Almost impossible, but not impossible. It has been found that giving blood (and then throwing that blood away) significant reduces PFOS levels. Not that I'm defending 3M or any of this. My favorite rivers where I fish turned out to be full of PFOS due to a leaking 3M waste dump and this was only announced in 2021. So I spent some time looking for solutions.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://www.aabb.org/news-resources/news/article/2022/04/26/...
Cerium|3 years ago
DoingIsLearning|3 years ago
RobertRoberts|3 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting
elil17|3 years ago
But regardless of whether obesity is caused primarily by environmental contamination, chemical contamination is a huge risk for a few reasons:
-Once in the environment, chemical contaminants can react in unforeseen ways, creating new chemicals that we will have no idea how to monitor for.
-Health data prior to industrialization is not good and is confounded by poor medical practices, so we may think we've "solved" chemical contamination when in fact we haven't (e.g. maybe heart disease would go away if it weren't for some chemical that we started using in 1910 but we can't tell because everyone was dying of dysentery).
-The solution, in some most cases, may mean giving up significant technological advances, especially polymers and heavy metals extracted from the ground.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
mensetmanusman|3 years ago
But people will blame anything instead of taking action, so…
ravel-bar-foo|3 years ago
That said, I have not yet read the SMTM piece, or looked at SMTM's data.
colechristensen|3 years ago
Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after.
If your purpose in life is to maximize the number of days you live, I guess you do you, but it doesn’t seem like a very high quality life to me.
We take risks, we accept them, there’s middle ground between ignoring risks and obsessing over them. The toll from worrying about things can be much worse than the things you’re trying to avoid.
You know what causes obesity? Availability of food. You didn’t evolve in an environment where calories are essentially free so your motivations and feedback behaviors aren’t tuned to make good decisions when it comes to food. Sure there are probably secondary effects from all sorts of things, but it comes down to food not being scarce like it evolved to expect.
Paying attention to environmental risks makes sense, but only to a certain extent. You’re probably still going to live a long life, and the secret to a good one probably isn’t going to be found in avoiding the next scary chemical of the day.
synu|3 years ago
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/05/health-body-says-avoid...
MrBuddyCasino|3 years ago
It was known for decades that Asbestos and cigarettes causes lung cancer, that adding lead to gasoline is a terrible idea, that burning oil warms the atmosphere. The truth was suppressed through intimidation, lawsuits and bribes. Regulatory agencies are corrupted by the revolving door system. You cannot trust these organisations.
DoingIsLearning|3 years ago
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
goodpoint|3 years ago
What's worse is that for demanding accountability for such crimes you get called "environmental extremist" or something similar.
londons_explore|3 years ago
I suspect that means there is a flip side we aren't seeing. It means there is a huge disadvantage to banning some probably harmful chemical. For example, if you were a small island and you banned imports of everything containing any PFAS, you'd end up in the technological stone age - there are no PFAS-free iPhones, food, paper, or shoes. So, unless you have your own shoe factory, your people will have to go barefoot...
IYasha|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
heartbeats|3 years ago
Why not have a serious system based on punishment instead, after the fact? For example-
"If a company is found to be responsible for a material environmental disaster, whoever was employed by that company during the relevant period shall be sentenced to life in prison and a fine of 100% of their net worth. No liability should apply for occupations which can be conclusively demonstrated to be unrelated to the activities of the firm, such as janitors or security guards.
The statute of limitations shall equal the duration of life of the concerned natural persons or the victims, whichever is longer."
This would cause people to self-regulate, based on whatever informal information they hear ("3M is doing really dodgy stuff, I wouldn't work there if I were you"), rather than having to wait for regulation. It would be much better suited, and would allow for the government to scrap other bothersome regulation.
mensetmanusman|3 years ago
-Manufacturing the best firefighting chemistry (e.g. military purchases for missile warehouses, resorts, apartments, etc.) -Using the chemistry to actually fight fires
It might be a case where sometimes second best should have been the way to go, but it’s hard to know beforehand I imagine, especially in safety scenarios where people are laser focused on optimizing for that.
dmos62|3 years ago
> In fact, in the case of the V-2, more than twice as many Allied prisoners died outfitting the factory and producing it than did Allied civilians and soldiers hit by it in rocket attacks.
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/wonder-weapons-...
dylan604|3 years ago
The citizens being affected have very little recourse.
staffanj|3 years ago
Spooky23|3 years ago
The military’s approach to dealing with waste in that era was essentially “dump it over there” or “burn it with fire”. Airbases are particularlye bad as the crap they spray on the wings for de-icing and the firefighting foam. Is everywhere and often is nasty stuff.
timst4|3 years ago
pmarreck|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
zxspectrum1982|3 years ago
fomine3|3 years ago
carapace|3 years ago
I've been kicking around an idea I've been tentatively calling "techno-conservatism". The tl;dr: "Like Amish, not Luddites." It's becoming more and more clear that each of our technologies has trade-offs, and the uncritical acceptance of those trade-offs has lead us to poison ourselves and the world in several fairly significant ways. This would seem to me to make a more considered and conservative relationship with our technology imperative.
There are movements like the "Slow Food" movement, and of course the Amish are famously conservative in their acceptance and use of modern technology.
The general idea is to start with a simple and ecologically harmonious low-tech (but sophisticated!) lifestyle and then add essential technology (in a kind of "progressive enhancement", eh?) to increase QoL (Quality of Life) without, y'know, poisoning anything.
doitLP|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
IYasha|3 years ago
forgotmypw17|3 years ago
cr1895|3 years ago
pdw|3 years ago
jessaustin|3 years ago
mdp2021|3 years ago