Scientists cut the tolerable intake of PFAs by 99.9%
Chemical companies are pretty much never the protagonists. Stories about green revolutions feeding lots of people or whatever are good tries at making the chemical company the good guy. But there will always be something impeachable about whatever it is that DuPont and 3M do.<p>It sort of doesn&#x27;t matter what the specifics of the toxicity are, which people will litigate here endlessly. So for once, consider that talking about the specifics of the toxicity is, fundamentally, co-opted by the antagonists of this scenario, because it sows confusion. Making it a science problem is attractive, but that line of problem solving is certainly perceived by the public to have long been hijacked by moneyed interests.<p>Because if PFAs really caused cancer, or vaccines really caused autism, or pornography really caused massive amounts of violence against women or whatever--if it was really a hair on fire problem, we&#x27;d know. Air pollution really causes lung cancer, and it&#x27;s seemingly invisible, but the hair on fire problem <i>does</i> exist there: visit Delhi. There, it&#x27;s visible.<p>In the United States, a lot of low hanging fruit has been addressed. So the kind of faucets-on-fire urgency that we saw with fracking is actually very rare nowadays. Yet we have a legacy environmental movement oriented too strongly around finding issues like that, that are capable of communicating only about issues like that. Ecoterrorism, class action lawsuits, big urban protests, reactionary political campaigns--it&#x27;s great for getting rid of air pollution and visible disasters like that, but it&#x27;s ineffective for stuff that&#x27;s just a bunch of boring science.<p>We&#x27;ll eventually figure out how to litigate environmental problems. It won&#x27;t at all resemble this preposterous adversarial trial and torts system. Goodnight to environmental lawyers, on both sides, despite their intentions. To keep this on topic for this forum, the person who figures out how to save the environment will definitely <i>not</i> be some grad student or $500k&#x2F;year 50 y.o. industry MEng trying to make patentable inventions to get funded by VCs. People chasing the dollars <i>are</i> the environmental problem, after all.<p>The people caught up in details of economics, law and scientific toxicity will just go away (i.e. technocrats) from this problem. We kind of already know that DuPont and 3M are guilty parties in something here. It won&#x27;t be important to normal people what precisely corporate polluters are guilty of, because a normal person will <i>never</i> be on the wrong side of that justice equation.