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It’s raining PFAS: rainwater is unsafe to drink even in Antarctica and Tibet
- game-of-throws 4y agoThe world is being destroyed, but at least for a few beautiful moments our nonstick pans were a few cents cheaper
- sudosysgen 4y agoNonstick pans are a negligible source of PFAS compared to various plastic products. For example some paper bowls are 25% PFAS.
- LadyCailin 4y agoThink my unrealized stock gains are safe to drink?
- hammock 4y agoThe nonstick pans today still have PFAS. They removed PFOA but there are hundreds of similar chemicals that they can use instead, which reason would dictate are just as toxic but which so happen to have not been safety tested yet
- madars 4y agoInteresting: this sounds like BPA-free plastics -- a lot of these have BPB and BPS which animal and cell-line studies have found just as concerning, but hey you can slap a "BPA-free" sticker on them!
- hammock 4y agoYes it's quite similar
- permo-w 4y agowhat do you think the feasibility of making the laws a whitelist rather than a blacklist would be? they did it with drugs in the UK
- bushbaba 4y agoFunny as stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick' and way healthier. The war on fats caused substantial damage to the health and environment
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago> Funny as stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick' and way healthier. I bet that the butter itself is worse for your health than the minuscule PFAS you are getting from your pan.
- orev 4y ago> stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick' Except it isn’t. Try letting melted cheese, or pretty much any starch (pasta, rice, oatmeal, etc) sit in stainless for a while and then see how non-stick it is. It will glue itself to stainless but on non-stick it will slide right off. I’m not arguing in favor of non-stick, and avoid it when possible, but we can’t also be making inaccurate claims either.
- superchroma 4y agoWell, there is also the method of seasoning cast iron cookware.
- orev 4y agoCast iron and stainless are so completely different that this comment doesn’t belong in this thread. Also, cast iron, even when seasoned, would still stick quite a bit in the above scenario (and I can’t imagine any scenario where I’d want to cook starches like that in cast iron).
- culi 4y agoI don't think "the war on fats" is to blame for the rise of PFAS-based nonstick pans. Have you actually tried using both? A world of a difference Also, vegetable oils are incredibly high in omega-6's which compete with omega-3's for the same enzymes. In general the literature suggests we should be consuming about a 4:1 ratio for Omega-3's to Omega-6 fatty acids. Corn-based oil, for example, has a 1:60 ratio I think avoiding excessive vegetable oil intake is still a good idea
- lizardactivist 4y agoThanks, Monsanto!
- austinprete 4y agoAs He died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap —- Leonard Cohen
- croes 4y agoMaybe capitalism has some serious side effects
- missedthecue 4y agoThank god my preferred economic model doesn't use chemicals
- croes 4y agoIt's not about the use of chemicals as such but the necessity of consumption for the sake of consumption.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't take HN in high-indignation/low-information directions, or post snarky one-liners. It dumbs down discussion, as well taking it off topic and turning it nasty. Important topics deserve better than that. Unimportant topics too, actually. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- peteradio 4y agoWhy not use the real title? Your title indicates a meaning that is not there in the original.
- andsoitis 4y agoThe exact title is “It’s raining PFAS: even in Antarctica and on the Tibetan plateau rainwater is unsafe to drink”. How is the meaning different? The plateau bit?
- paul7986 4y agoIndeed and look above many just believe the catchy and misleading headline as truth. If it's not catchy the public doesn't care much for it yet when it is they do and are more then not they're being misled even lied too.
- abeppu 4y agoWe keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful. Leaded gasoline, CFCs, microplastics, pesticides collapsing insect populations etc. And it can take decades to fully understand those impacts. When the stakes are literally, "all rainwater on the planet is unsafe", should we ask -- would society be better off if we were much more conservative about demonstrating the long-term safety of new substances before scaling up their use? Also, I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this: Will literally the whole planet be able to pursue lawsuits against 3M and peers for making our rainwater 'unsafe'?
- anovikov 4y agoThing is, it won't even be possible to demonstrate that unsafety on a low scale. I think we should just accept the risk. It will happen once in a while. We will adapt.
- hammock 4y agoOur rulers typically solve the lawsuits thing by limiting liability through statute. They did it with tobacco and they did it with vaccines
- arcticbull 4y agoGuns too with the PLCAA
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- irrational 4y agoHow do we determine the long term safety without first scaling it up? All of these things many seem innocent in a lab setting and it is only once they reach a critical point that the issues arise.
- HidyBush 4y agoUsually if something is being eroded you check what chemicals the erosion releases. If you cook on a pan and you don't analyze the contents of the fumes you are totally responsible
- formerly_proven 4y agoThey are referring to crossing these thresholds (from Fed 87-118): > EPA’s health advisories, which identify the concentration of chemicals in drinking water at or below which adverse health effects are not anticipated to occur, are: 0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOA, 0.02 ppt for PFOS, 10 ppt for GenX chemicals, and 2,000 ppt for PFBS. Health advisories are non-regulatory and reflect EPA’s assessment of the best available peer-reviewed science. 0.004 ppt is also more commonly known as the number zero. It's probably just the currently best limit of detection for PFOA in water.
- daenz 4y agoRelated, in June 2022, the EPA changed its guidelines, which is directly triggering this news cycle about all water being unsafe to drink. In other words, the sky is not falling, we've just adjusted the definition of where the sky starts. https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pfoa-and-pfos https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pf...
- 7sidedmarble 4y agoMore like we were being overly optimistic about where the sky starts for years.
- Spooky23 4y agoRelated, there was a pretty significant discovery of long term release of these chemicals that contaminated the water supply of a county in upstate NY. Alot of money and research is exploring the topic, not surprisingly, guidance changes as knowledge gets refined.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- peanut_worm 4y agoOr the sky has already fell and no one has noticed yet because our sky-watchers told us it was fine
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bergenty 4y agoThe EPA’s new recommendation is still not low enough. You realize there is a some cause to panic right? We can’t fish in our streams and rivers, can’t drink rainwater, can’t raise domestic animals without them being full of heavy metals etc. We’ve ruined the basics and this isn’t hyperbole anymore.
- rasz 4y agoJust like there was no reason to panic about leaded gasoline pre 1996.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoIf the research in PFAS is at all like the article posted yesterday which did multiple statistical tests without doing the appropriate correction, I am not convinced that PFAS are all that harmful. Because PFAS are so widespread and they have been around so long, if they were really bad we would be seeing massive issues. However, we are not. Likely they do cause some harm if you have enough statistical power, but likely below the threshold that we live with (for example birth control, going to the beach, driving a car, red meat, and maybe even cooking itself).
- 7sidedmarble 4y ago>Likely they do cause some harm if you have enough statistical power, but likely below the threshold that we live with (for example birth control, going to the beach, driving a car, red meat, and maybe even cooking itself). Isn't the entire reason these things are unsafe that they bioaccumulate over long periods of small dose exposure?
- landemva 4y agoI am interested in where/if this bioaccumulates, like mercury does in marine life.
- defterGoose 4y ago| and they have been around so long, if they were really bad we would be seeing massive issues. However, we are not. 1. They really haven't "been around so long". Not even a single human lifetime. 2. Plenty of other things cause cancer, endocrine disruption etc. Red meat and the beach are here to stay, but why should I be ok with some unaccountable corporation dumping additional pollutants into my environment? But, by all means, continue to avoid a rational, cautious mode of decision making. It's probably not that harmful in my opinion.
- edgyquant 4y agoInteresting thought, can you talk more about the methods and their flaws? Also what’s the article you’re referring to?
- pm90 4y agoWhy haven’t we seen higher incidence of cancer in global populations if its leached into all global water supplies?
- RF_Savage 4y agoWho says we havent? PFAS have been in use for +50years.
- s5300 4y agoMost of the global population doesn’t have access to cancer screenings/health treatment. Come on.
- permo-w 4y agothat would be almost impossible to control for
- azinman2 4y agoBut it is increasing over time: https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ Global trends are difficult to accurately capture as we’ve seen with Covid. Most countries don’t have the infrastructure to get accurate and good statistics from.
- missedthecue 4y agoAnd as people die from other curable illnesses less and less, cancer incidences increase and increase.
- azinman2 4y agoHave there been a set of cures in the last 20 years that would explain this curve? Would love to see the data.
- lossolo 4y agoFrom the graphs it seems it's not increasing but decreasing. Population is getting higher so number of cancers is getting higher too but rate is decreasing (first graph).
- nsxwolf 4y agoI feel like we are talking past the sale here. Is rainwater actually unsafe to drink, or did someone just change a number in a spreadsheet? After I learned about how residential radon was determined to be the “second biggest cause of lung cancer” I stopped immediately trusting these things.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoAre you one of the folks that doesn't have kitchen ventilation because, after all, how harmful can a little gas be?
- nsxwolf 4y agoNo. I even have a radon mitigation system. I just don’t think the science that led to its installation is rigorous. It’s a basement not a coal mine.
- Spooky23 4y agoYou have a good point. It’s hard because radon dramatically boosts the risks for people who smoke or have other risk factors. But since remediation is now part of the way of doing things, ironically nobody has an incentive to learn more.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> After I learned about how residential radon was determined to be the “second biggest cause of lung cancer” I stopped immediately trusting these things. > I just don’t think the science that led to its installation is rigorous. It’s a basement not a coal mine. Can you explain this thinking? What you've said so far sounds like an argument from incredulity, not backed up by anything. Radon testing is fairly straight-forward, the nuclear science behind it is all rigorous and well understood; radon gas decays into radioactive "radon daughters" that, not being gases, settle as dust in places where there is poor airflow. You can test for radon in a building by either sampling the air in the building, or by leaving a filter there for a while and then testing the filter for radon's daughters. If you do this testing, you find that radon is prevalent in some areas and a non-issue in many others. Do you think this testing was never done, or the results mistaken for some reason? > “second biggest cause of lung cancer” Maybe you're incredulous because you heard this claim out of context? Smoking is said to be the cause of 80-90% of lung cancers; the "second biggest cause" is just the scraps, under 20%.
- kybernetyk 4y agoYeah, and that’s why you should drink commercially packaged water instead.
- RF_Savage 4y agoNo surprice as to why the amounts of PFAS in the enviroment are not decreasing, when more of it is pushed into it. And have for years. https://illinoisnewsroom.org/pfas-can-still-be-incinerated-in-illinois/ https://illinoisnewsroom.org/pfas-can-still-be-incinerated-i... https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/pentagon-temporarily-halts-forever-chemicals-incineration https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/pentago... https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2020/department-of-defense-illegally-burning-stockpiles-of-toxic-forever-chemicals https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2020/department-of-defen... https://www.wsj.com/articles/company-linked-to-toxic-forever-chemicals-loses-defense-contract-11592520413 https://www.wsj.com/articles/company-linked-to-toxic-forever...
- suby 4y agoThe floss I use apparently has PFAS in it (Oral B Glude). Many paper straws contain it. Nonstick pans. Food wrappers designed to avoid grease. Water resistant clothing, cleaning products, candy wrappers. I used to drink out of plastic bottles and plastic glasses. We need to do a better job of regulating what is allowed to be sold to consumers. We're likely going to see a a whole host of rare medical conditions become common when my generation gets older. Not to mention that on top of destroying human health we're destroying the planet too. I don't know what to do about any of this but I feel powerless to make an impact.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoThis. This is what regulation is for and should be doing. Trying to keep track of what is safe and isn't is basically impossible for an individual. I tried for years to avoid PFAS and friends, only to discover my sofa was covered in it. What's the point.
- chmod600 4y agoRegulation works when experts really do have the answer. But the problem here is that we just don't know. We know about a few worrisome problems and signs, but we don't have a clear picture like we do with lead or asbestos. We could switch from "allow by default" to "deny by default", but I'm not even sure that would help. Often problems are hard to find even once its widespread. We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists. I think the right answer is more funding for long-term rigorous studies. That way we know.
- xboxnolifes 4y agoThe fact that we are commenting in a thread about a report on something that has an implied "this is bad for people" suggests experts know, to a good enough degree, about certain things that should be regulated better.
- skybrian 4y ago
- twobitshifter 4y agoIf I get a reverse osmosis water filter, will that eliminate the PFAS?
- anonuser123456 4y agoIt will filter about 95%.
- amelius 4y agoSo, use multiple filters in series, I suppose.
- purple_ferret 4y agoIt's pretty common for the Arctic and the Antarctic to have higher levels of such contamination as water cycles upwards/downwards from the Equator, compounds as it moves along, and then gets trapped in the ice.
- cato_the_elder 4y agoThis is an exaggeration, of course. The EPA guideline of 70 ppt for PFAS is probably just too low compared to other standards. For example, a Canadian guideline suggests an MAC of 200 ppt for PFOA, and 600 ppt for PFOS. These are the most common PFAS. Also, these are based on a lifetime exposure, and short term exposure to these amounts is probably not particularly harmful. Additionally, even in the US, the guidelines by the individual states vary between 13 to 1000 ppt. [2] [1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/services/health/publications/healthy-living/water-talk-drinking-water-screening-values-perfluoroalkylated-substances.html https://www.canada.ca/en/services/health/publications/health... [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-018-0099-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-018-0099-9
- koheripbal 4y agoHow can we have a guideline for ALL PFAS? They are all completely different molecules with different Hazzard levels - likely many safe. These generalizations make conversations about them useless.
- superchroma 4y agoThere is insufficient evidence for "likely many safe". You can't just start throwing that around.
- koheripbal 4y agoThe burden of evidence is demonstrating that they are each unsafe. Lumping a hundred chemicals under a label and then claiming that any time ANY of them are found that they are harmful, is dishonest.
- djbusby 4y agoWhich generalization should we change ? The "they aren't safe" or the "likely many safe" one?
- eurasiantiger 4y agoThe guideline is 0.02 ppt for PFOS and 0.004 ppt for PFOA.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Qem 4y agoSometimes I wonder if we are rolling dice with synthetic substances life never had contact in billions years since it's origins until one of them gives us a Children of Men scenario.
- zzo38computer 4y agoIf the water is unsafe (although there can be different level of being "unsafe"), then I would expect this would be bad for anyone (animals (including humans and nonhumans), plants; some might be more impacted than others). But even if it is only partially unsafe still it should still be reduced and eliminated to make it not unsafe like that. I do not know how to fix, other than possibly to reduce adding more PFAS, but maybe there is some. I do not know if lawsuits are the way to do it, but even if it is, it will not alone be the way to be done, I think. Stop making such chemicals which are potentially unsafe, don't do things bad just so that you can earn too much money (they say love of money is the root of all evil, and I think so; that is what they see anywhere), etc.
- jkic47 4y agoabout 10 years ago the EPA had a mandate to reduce use by 95% before 2011(?) and eliminate it by 2025(?). I may have the dates slightly wrong. went through the process on tens of thousands of SKUs. so far so good. The reason I am conflicted is our vendors got rid of PFOA but replaced it with something similar to it but not the same. Effectively, we now have 2 "forever" chemicals in the environment. rinse repeat. I don't know what the answer is unless we make a conscious decision to forego the performance benefits these chemicals provide to our products. waterproof shoes and sofas, dental floss, med dev, etc.
- Aeolun 4y agoSo let me get this straight, they’re excited because some government agency divided the ‘allowable’ levels of these chemicals by 40 million, and now the values (which are still the same) are too high. …Wut? Like, I get that the values are still ‘bad’, but there must be a different way to present that. I’d also like specifics on exactly how bad ‘bad’ is, because these agencies tend to present their 0.5% increase of lifetime risk of cancer as something exceptional, when you can also get such a thing from, say, eating too much cheese.
- perrygeo 4y ago> some government agency divided the ‘allowable’ levels of these chemicals by 40 million That's one way to put it, yes. Another way is that recent scientific studies have shown these chemicals are way more harmful than we once thought. Should we not adjust recommendations accordingly? Seems rather obvious and undeserving of a "Wut?". How bad is bad? Check out how they calculate the HA values here: https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/technical-factsheet-four-PFAS.pdf https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/technical...
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoSometimes we find out we were wrong about the safety of a substance. Radium used to be sold in patent medicine tinctures because it wasn't considered dangerous. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor
- FelixVega1 4y agoThere's a difference in increasing your lifetime risk of cancer 0.5% by eating too much cheese compared to atmospheric levels of PFAS. I can choose to not eat too much cheese, and in fact I don't, for that same reason. I can't choose to stop breathing in or drinking PFAS in the environment. I don't know about you but 0.5% increase in lifetime risk of cancer is not something I'm comfortable taking on, and it's not fair that I don't have any say in the matter. Cancer sucks.
- Aeolun 4y ago
- dimensionc132 4y agoQuick update for everyone .... life is lethal and we will all die ... but our addiction to technology since the industrial revolution is adding to the cumulative toxins we are ingesting into our bodies. Before the 1930's we were able to live lives without plastic, now, we have plastic in our lungs and blood because of technological progress and convenience. The very things that were designed to help us are now responsible for quickening our demise. Why don't things change? Because everyone is too addicted to this modern lifestyle and will not do what is necessary to reduce plastics and contaminents in our life. Just look in your house, how much you have of these contaminating technologies....if you feel so stongly about it, try to eliminate all but the most essential.
- superchroma 4y agoNot far enough. If people feel strongly about it, they need to be writing to manufacturers and politicians, demanding change.
- dimensionc132 4y agoagreed
- chinathrow 4y agoWe are fucking us sideways and have no plans to stop doing so.
- Someone 4y agoPFAS accumulates in animals and plants, so if all rainwater is unsafe to drink, I would guess most of the world’s food will be unsafe to eat soon, if not already. Luckily, ‘unsafe’ here, for now, means a relatively small increase in the risk to get some diseases. ⇒ Apart from trying to buy less stuff that contains these chemicals, I think it’s not worthwhile to worry about the health impacts on our individual lives, as it’s an as good as unavoidable risk now (eating only food grown using melting ice caps or millennia old aquifers would work, but has other disadvantages. Filtering PFAS out of all water used in agriculture seems infeasible)
- jszymborski 4y agoThis isn't necessarily true for aquaponic/hydroponic crops, but I'm not sure how much of a percentage of food supply that makes up.
- chaisch 4y agoJust wait until you find out that PFAS is already being spread on crops from the common practice of using sewage "sludge" as a fertilizer. https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/04/ewg-forever-chemicals-may-taint-nearly-20-million-cropland-acres https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/04/ewg-forever-c...
- upsidesinclude 4y agoTo all the chemical engineers: (And computer engineers for that matter) Your time is coming. The rest of the hard engineering disciplines have had their failures and now we have licenses and accountability. The amount of damage one bridge can do is limited, but the amount of destruction caused by endocrine disrupting chemicals and authoritarian enabling surveillance tools is unlimited. The civil engineer will be held to account for his failures. Hopefully, soon, the same will be true for the likes of your professions
- skrebbel 4y agoI agree that some more pubic accountability for chemical engineers and programmers would be great, but I hate the hostile, anti-intellectual "us good, chemists bad" vibe with which you say it. There's no need to threaten people. There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession.
- southerntofu 4y ago> the hostile, anti-intellectual "us good, chemists bad" vibe with which you say it. I personally didn't get that from the parent comment. It's just really weird (from an outsider/alien perspective) that in many sectors of the corporate mafia like in the chemical/IT industry obvious and sometimes intentional malicious schemes (which result in actual deaths) are either rewarded or ignored... when in many other branches harmless errors can get you kicked from your job (eg. in restaurants/shops). It's not contempt to point that out. If you believe in the idea that there should be a social contract by which we are bound, the social contract must apply to everyone fairly. So why does it often not apply to cops, judges, landlords and some sectors of the engineering community? > There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession. True, but like in every other profession, it's very hard to make money if you're really trying to make the world better, and i do mean any money (as in find a job at all).
- upsidesinclude 4y ago>have had their failures and now we have licenses and accountability. Read it. We made those engineers accountable and should have done the same for the others. Please review what it means to make a threat, as nothing stated is remotely a "threat". Sounds weakly middle management, BTW. It is a notice that soon there will be accountability. If you are an engineer making the world a better place, then there won't be much to account for will there?
- acd 4y agoLets stop using PFAS if its raining down on us.
- dsq 4y agoFast and loose with definitions is what gets us to a place where no one believes anything anymore. I’m pretty sure that if one was stuck in a forest somewhere and drank only rainwater for a whole month, they’d come out just fine.
- isoprophlex 4y agoSure, smoke cigarettes for a month and you probably won't be dead from stage 4 lung cancer at the end of those ~30 days. Adulterating our entire ecology with hyperpersistent, novel, toxicologically dubious chemicals is bad. This should be self-explanatory and completely obvious. The benefits of PFAS and friends do not outweigh the downsides.
- wiradikusuma 4y agoCan companies that benefit from PFAS, even in the old days, be held accountable? Heck even you have to keep your tax records for 7 years. It makes me so angry some people benefiting at the expense of millions of others, under regulatory nose.
- rasz 4y agoOf course not. https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground/ https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground...
- wiradikusuma 4y agoReally depressing.
- ironmagma 4y agoFor anyone interested in this topic, I recommend season 41 of the podcast American Scandal, which depicts the DuPont cover-up of C8 dumping and how it was discovered. Great narration. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-scandal/id1435516849?i=1000569588171 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-scandal/id143... There is also a less dramatic version in book form, called Exposure by Robert Bilott, the attorney who prosecuted DuPont.
- leobg 4y agoAlso great: The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare (The New York Times). And the movie, “Dark Waters”.
- CommanderData 4y agoPublic campaigning and awareness. We need to know what consumer products contain PFAs and the likes. It's perverse this exists so close to our food chain. These companies have our govnement officials in their pockets but they live on the same planet. They have no conscious even for themselves or their children.
- gremlinsinc 4y agoPFAS is almost like optimizing for paperclips scenario. Except we did ourselves( for a little convenience). Micro plastics too. Both permeate every human in existence and now I guess is in rain water. I'm rural and get water from a well, pretty sure That's not even safe. I drink mostly bottled tea or soda but that's usually in plastic which has bpa... There's really no getting away from this shit unless you literally carbonate or maybe your own organic teas using highly filtered water and maybe live in a bubble that catches and filters unhealthy particles. I have two toddlers and I'm saddened they have to face this world. I honestly feel the last decent decade to be a kid was the 90s. I grew up in the 80s graduated in 98, and maybe it's just nostalgia but it just feels like the world is much darker and less safe. I mean we could run all over town when I was 7, no worries. We'd be dropped off at the swimming pool, or video arcade, etc... Or just ride our bikes exploring. Now that's child abuse. I'm glad my kids are safe in their child harness but I'm also glad I only had to worry about seat belts as a kid, after 3 or so. Now it's like 8 or older... And don't get me started on how weak Halloween is compared to the glorious 80s. Beggars night was an entire community affair, now there is no community anywhere that really gives af. I'm reminded of the Queen song "is this the world we created" or when the children cry by white lion... Two excellent songs that sum up the world we're leaving our kids... It's beyond sad.
- rasz 4y agoBut I can ski a little faster, McDonald's burger didnt seep thru the wrapper and my disposable umbrella is excellent!
- boksiora 4y agoNow this is concerning
- LAC-Tech 4y agoI'm just over 3000 miles from Antarctica, and I've been living off rainwater for the past 10 months. No ill-effects so far.
- fuzzfactor 4y agoAbout fifty years ago I stayed in an old hotel called the Compleat Angler [0] on the desert island of Bimini, where the indoor plumbing was fed by collected rainwater. The Bahamas was still a British Crown colony at the time. I'll never forget washing my hair in the water closet, and with a rainwater rinse, having a better hair day than I ever had on the mainland. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compleat_Angler_Hotel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compleat_Angler_Hotel
- ratsmack 4y agoIt's not just one chemical we're talking about here, as there is over 9,000 variations of PFAS chemicals[1] identified to date. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/pfas/default.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/pfas/default.html
- freeflight 4y agoPFAS always remind me about how we as a species knew about the toxicity of lead for very long, yet still decided to blast it all over the environment for decades [0] Also makes me wonder how much similar hubris exists with other topics; Afaik to this day there is still no medical scientific consensus weather damage from radiation is actually cumulative or not. By now we have myriads of other compounding factors, particularly for cancer, that make it increasingly difficult to filter the actual signal, of what causes these issues, from all the environmental "noise" we keep creating by changing our one and only habitat in such massive, and lasting, ways. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#History
- userbinator 4y agoIt's very hard for me to reconcile scary headlines like this with the fact that living conditions for many people now are definitely far better than they were 1000 or even 100 years ago. The relative risks of different things may change over time but ultimately I think we are better off for all the positives these chemicals have given our lives. If anything, this sort of environmental alarmism is going to just increase the anti-science sentiment, the effects of which are already saw some effects of in the pandemic. After all, it's not a huge leap from "these chemicals are bad" to "these vaccines are bad".
- greyhair 4y agoThis is how microbial life ends in a petri dish. Either by consuming all the nutrients, or so polluting the dish with their metabolic waste that they can no longer survive.