I did some more looking around. Oral MTBE is a carcinogen at levels above 200mg/kg/day in rats. When inhaled it has acute toxic effects before it has carcinogen

I did some more looking around. Oral MTBE is a carcinogen at levels above 200mg/kg/day in rats. When inhaled it has acute toxic effects before it has carcinogenic effects. MTBE tastes bad enough to render drinking water unpalatable at levels around 10ug/l. So you basically can't drink enough to give yourself cancer. Calling it a persistent pollutant is perfectly fine. It's bad enough to make entire aquifers taste bad until you put in the hardware to clean it out. What it isn't is a problematic carcinogen. "Because of the intense odor (and taste) of MTBE, humans will not tolerate either air or water concentrations sufficient to produce the cytotoxic precursors required to promote cellular proliferation." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1997.tb01274.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1997.... > Arsenic has medicinal uses, too. Not for its macroscopic physical properties it doesn't. > I'll swing by the house later to drop some in the water inlet of your house. Just be sure to stick to things like the EPA exposure limits and so on. > That wasn't the case fifteen years ago. Mandating something, then hoping we come up with an inexpensive way to clean up the mess later probably isn't a good long-term plan. That's fair. > You mean do my research such that my conclusions match yours? Or did you just have a nice, cold glass of Uncalled-for-Snark(tm) with your breakfast this morning? I'll admit that a little bit of it is snark. I find that the kind of person that's most vulnerable to misleading science is also pretty vulnerable to snark. But, no, I really did mean that you needed to do more research.