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Chemical companies are pretty much never the protagonists. Stories about green revolutions feeding lots of people or whatever are good tries at making the chemi

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. It sort of doesn'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. 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'd know. Air pollution really causes lung cancer, and it's seemingly invisible, but the hair on fire problem does exist there: visit Delhi. There, it's visible. 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's great for getting rid of air pollution and visible disasters like that, but it's ineffective for stuff that's just a bunch of boring science. We'll eventually figure out how to litigate environmental problems. It won'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 not be some grad student or $500k/year 50 y.o. industry MEng trying to make patentable inventions to get funded by VCs. People chasing the dollars are the environmental problem, after all. 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't be important to normal people what precisely corporate polluters are guilty of, because a normal person will never be on the wrong side of that justice equation.

pathseeker 8y ago
>because a normal person will never be on the wrong side of that justice equation. If someone uses a hammer to kill their spouse, the hammer manufacturer definitely is not on the wrong side of the justice equation and the person is.
- doctorpangloss 8y ago
  The torts system is almost certainly co-opting the criminal justice system, not the other way around. It's precisely because of some law needing to be fair to hammer manufacturers, who literally no one cares about, that gun manufacturers, which pretty much everyone does care about, can do shitty things in this country. You're thinking in terms of law, and I'm talking about a court of public opinion. And even if you litter (pretty much the worst a normal person can do in the court of public opinion re: pollution), we don't need years to litigate that in a court of law. And yet, it took five years to litigate the BP Horizon spill, even though there's camera footage showing oil coming out of their derrick in real time. What was there to litigate there? Who really cares whether it's $18.7 billion, or $187 billion, or $1.8 billion, other than the BP chairman? Who really cares what they think, in the court of public opinion? No normal person is ever going to have $18.7 billion to lose, nor will ever have the capability of doing the kind of environmental damage BP's bad oil platform did. So why allow environmental law to even adjudicate the matter, over years, which has never once, ever, delivered maximum justice to the public? Why compromise on our values and the environment, constantly, to protect some essentially unproven economic logic that BP, or DuPoint, or whoever, generate more value for some community somewhere in "jobs" or whatever than the damage they did by polluting? The primary normative question in that case: Should we just shut down BP? We didn't need 5 years of negotiations to resolve that, we didn't need any more evidence or calculations. Someone in the justice department, in an afternoon, made the determination that BP won't be closed, and then a complex legal strategy was pursued, by both sides, for five years, to generate the illusion of justice to execute on that determination. Pollution cases act like criminal cases, and they shouldn't be! The whole problem is reductive, slow, storied, legalistic reasoning, and reductive, unproven economic aphorisms.
  - 8y ago

pathseeker 8y ago

>because a normal person will never be on the wrong side of that justice equation. If someone uses a hammer to kill their spouse, the hammer manufacturer definitely is not on the wrong side of the justice equation and the person is.

doctorpangloss 8y ago
The torts system is almost certainly co-opting the criminal justice system, not the other way around. It's precisely because of some law needing to be fair to hammer manufacturers, who literally no one cares about, that gun manufacturers, which pretty much everyone does care about, can do shitty things in this country. You're thinking in terms of law, and I'm talking about a court of public opinion. And even if you litter (pretty much the worst a normal person can do in the court of public opinion re: pollution), we don't need years to litigate that in a court of law. And yet, it took five years to litigate the BP Horizon spill, even though there's camera footage showing oil coming out of their derrick in real time. What was there to litigate there? Who really cares whether it's $18.7 billion, or $187 billion, or $1.8 billion, other than the BP chairman? Who really cares what they think, in the court of public opinion? No normal person is ever going to have $18.7 billion to lose, nor will ever have the capability of doing the kind of environmental damage BP's bad oil platform did. So why allow environmental law to even adjudicate the matter, over years, which has never once, ever, delivered maximum justice to the public? Why compromise on our values and the environment, constantly, to protect some essentially unproven economic logic that BP, or DuPoint, or whoever, generate more value for some community somewhere in "jobs" or whatever than the damage they did by polluting? The primary normative question in that case: Should we just shut down BP? We didn't need 5 years of negotiations to resolve that, we didn't need any more evidence or calculations. Someone in the justice department, in an afternoon, made the determination that BP won't be closed, and then a complex legal strategy was pursued, by both sides, for five years, to generate the illusion of justice to execute on that determination. Pollution cases act like criminal cases, and they shouldn't be! The whole problem is reductive, slow, storied, legalistic reasoning, and reductive, unproven economic aphorisms.
- 8y ago