[cryoshon]

We know that these chemicals are terrible for human, animal, and plant health. There isn't a debate.

We know which companies are responsible for polluting. They've been doing it for years, knowing the damages in greater and greater detail all along the way.

Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup as well as the likely-tremendous costs of damage to people's health and the ecosystem? And why aren't these chemicals banned? At what point does the government do anything about widespread problems like this? We don't get much of anything in the way of protection from bad domestic actors (in this case, polluters) for our tax dollars.

It's getting quite tiring to live in a country where the rules seem to be "anarchy for thee, and profits for me".

[duped]

> Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup as well as the likely-tremendous costs of damage to people's health and the ecosystem

We are (1), but to be frank the "payment" isn't enough. We need criminal liability for executives and board members. Apparently there's not enough incentive not to destroy public health for generations.

> At what point does the government do anything about widespread problems like this?

When they stop being corrupt.

(1) https://www.wqad.com/article/news/local/public-safety/3m-con...

[tivert]

>> Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup as well as the likely-tremendous costs of damage to people's health and the ecosystem

> We are (1), but to be frank the "payment" isn't enough. We need criminal liability for executives and board members. Apparently there's not enough incentive not to destroy public health for generations.

Criminal liability for decision-makers is the way to go, along with some plan that wipes out the shareholders but otherwise doesn't destroy or cripple the company as a going concern. The company itself isn't guilty, and it has lots of innocent stakeholders (e.g. customers, lower-level employees) who would be harmed if it was damaged.

[bushbaba]

Payment won’t dissuade. What will is getting a conviction of murder with life in jail for every single employee aware of the impacts and complicit. Yes that’s 1000s of lives ruined. But that single act will tell everyone else to fess up or risk similar punishment. Including the lower peons who’d be happy to cut a deal for amnesty.

[lizardking]

> When they stop being corrupt.

So never, probably.

[activiation]

> We need criminal liability for executives and board members.

Stock holders too

[concordDance]

> We know that these chemicals are terrible for human, animal, and plant health. There isn't a debate.

A statement with neither nuance (no distinguishing the types of chemicals) nor precision (no quantification), either false (because we do not actually know for certain that all of them cause noticeable quality of life decrease even at tapwater concentrations) or trivial and meaningless (e.g. enough of any substance will harm health).

Here's the article:

> High concentrations of some PFAS may lead to adverse health risks in people, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Research is still ongoing to better understand the potential health effects of PFAS exposure over long periods of time.

Simply saying "There isn't a debate." doesn't make a statement true. It's certainly true that some of these chemicals have good evidence for harming human health at concentrations people could actually encounter them in. It's not true that we know this for all of them, nor what concentrations cause issues.

Your post reads like a call to action, rather than a curious and considered analysis. The propagation of these types of posts makes hackernews a worse place as more and more people use it to proselytise rather than explore, discuss and learn.

If you wished to actually contribute you could cite some form of meta study giving a breakdown of the health effects of the various chemicals at certain concentrations.

[AlanSE]

Not trying to be the troll, but this debate is missing the obvious retort.

> Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup

Because then the manufacturing goes to China. It doesn't get cleaner, it might actually get worse. The pollution goes somewhere else. Economic anxiety (which is politically explosive, see 2016 election) goes up domestically.

What we need is effective regulation, not bureaucratic us-versus-them regulation. We need more engineering spending and less legal spending. And as a consequence, yes, we need fewer choices in consumer products and higher prices, and we need consumer safety laws that prevent offshoring from undermining all of that.

[bob-09]

> What we need is effective regulation, not bureaucratic us-versus-them regulation.

That's easy to say and everyone would agree we need "effective" regulation, but I think the profit-driven corporations that continue to pollute and use a portion of their profits to pay lobbyists and influence public discourse in order to discourage regulation will always take a "us-versus-them" approach.

[rngname22]

What are you talking about? You can ban the sale of products containing PFAS, not just their local manufacture.

If you wanted, you could levy fines like 5-10% of gross annual revenue for any company or marketplace or retailer found distributing product containing PFAS.

You don't have to agree it's feasible or worth it, but it's possible.

[BartjeD]

This isn't a new problem.

The standard legal remedy is distributor liability, for importing unsafe products. This has been part of EU regulation for more than 30 years

[malfist]

Sorry, but this attitude is too defeatist to accomplish anything.

We can try something, even if it doesn't work, we can still try it. Ban those chemicals. If they want to move manufacturing to china to use illegal pollutants, let them. That's a huge cost to them and no guarantee china will let them keep doing it.

"It's not illegal in another country" isn't a reason for us to keep it legal. We can lead the way.

[mc32]

Also, what are viable alternatives? It seems like a game of whack a mole. Ban one chemical, use a new one, years later new one is worse.

We could go back to pre plastics, enjoy less sterile things along with more disease, etc. someone’s gotta make the calculus.

[lend000]

> We know that these chemicals are terrible for human, animal, and plant health. There isn't a debate.

Is that really true? My understanding is that studies show that people with the highest levels of PFAS have increased risk of liver disease. Exactly how much PFAS exposure results in significant risk is still unclear, considering a decent chunk of people eat food from PFAS lined food wrappers, cook in PFAS coated cookware, rub their teeth with PFAS coated dental floss, drink PFAS contaminated water, and touch PFAS coated clothing and other surfaces on a daily basis and do not have any obvious resulting problems.

I'm not saying I disagree that there's a problem, and I personally try to reduce my exposure, but clearly the ratio of usefulness to toxicity is a lot better than with other substances, which have been more tightly controlled in recent history, such as lead and asbestos, and that's why the response has been less urgent. Even now, after decades of study, it isn't clear exactly what the effects are and how likely it is to affect people based on their daily habits.

[jwagenet]

> And why aren't these chemicals banned?

Not saying they shouldn’t be, but a problem is companies will just move on the the next, likely bad, similar chemical until it is also banned. I’ve seen suggestions to require chemicals to be proven not dangerous before widespread use, but this seems untenable. Perhaps the best solution is not to ban the chemicals themselves, but to obligate containment of waste, regardless of if it’s “bad”.

[smallerfish]

That's supposedly what the EU requires - https://chemicalsinourlife.echa.europa.eu/how-are-chemicals-...

I know they have issues with PFAS, but I'm unclear whether that's just because they were grandfathered in, or enforcement is lax, or both.

[losteric]

Why would a robust testing process prove to be untenable? We have a fairly high bar in medicine. For all it's flaws on the care and payment side, the medical research process seems robust without shortage of innovation.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

> We know that these chemicals are terrible for human, animal, and plant health. There isn't a debate.

Of course there is a debate. How bad are they? Has anyone died from them? How do we how know much compensation people deserve? If they are so terrible then why has it taken so long to pin that down?

[sp332]

[Edit: sorry, I was confused here]

[multiplegeorges]

The wikipedia page has detailed discussion and many references for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...

[cwkoss]

The companies don't have nearly enough assets to pay for clean up.

Would be more just to seize them and auction them off for enough funds to do 1-5% cleanup, but that would probably be an uphill battle politically.

[nomel]

> Would be more just to seize them and auction them off for enough funds to do 1-5% cleanup

A good portion of the companies behind superfund sites, in the US no longer exist, or are the US government.

At this point, subsidized reverse osmosis systems would probably be cheaper than cleaning up the mess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites

[autoexec]

> Would be more just to seize them and auction them off for enough funds to do 1-5% cleanup, but that would probably be an uphill battle politically.

I'm guessing that if the American public saw the government actually hold a company and its shareholders accountable for knowingly poisoning their children it'd be massively popular politically. Lobbyists would have it.

[Brusco_RF]

Any genuinely terrible idea should be an uphill battle politically.

Do you know how much you, personally, benefit from modern material science? Do you think our nation could even operate with out Bayer, Dupont, 3M and the likes?

[jlmorton]

We need something like Betteridge's Law of Headlines for the phrase "There isn't a debate."

Needless to say, when someone claims there is no debate, there is in fact a debate.