12 ms·

Regulation 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

Regulation 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 ago
The 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
  It implies that some people think it's bad, but not necessarily that they're right. It's not like every science article shared here is accurate or reflects scientific consensus. There's no heuristic shortcut for actually learning about the subject. Without doing the homework, all we can say is that it seems plausible that there might be a problem.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Given that these compounds are mass produced and spread all over the globe at an industrial scale, I think the plausibility of a problem should be sufficient for holding back. Especially when the compound is known to be non-degradable. Then we know, if there is a problem, we're gonna be stuck with it for a long time. Even more reason for extreme caution.
    - skybrian 4y ago
      It's reason for concern but not enough to make a convincing case. This is still trying to take a logical shortcut to avoid actually learning specifics about the problem. But if you don't learn anything then you're just another person saying their opinion on the Internet, like the rest of us.
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
        My point is, I don't like this defeatist attitude of "well there's no way to know, so we should just do more of the same". Just because it's a very hard problem doesn't mean there isn't a lot more we could do. And a lot of the chemicals causing problems today could have been ruled out with far less effort than haphazardly testing it on the whole world population. I don't see why so many people these days need to reduce everything to this type of false dichotomy. And it's also a question of how much concern is enough? I would argue that currently the threshold is set far, far too high.
        skybrian 4y ago
        I never said there's no way to know. What I'm saying is that those of us who haven't studied should be humble about how much we know. It's a choice we make all the time. For anything you read about, are you curious enough to investigate it further, or are you going to let it go by?
        mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
        Right. I'm a pretty bad example because I obsessively investigate further. I can't help it. I see something, I need to understand it. It's my curse in life.
underdeserver 4y ago
Experts never have "the answer". Science changes over time - see the article and how guidelines for what's OK grew stricter. You work with what you have right now.
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  I disagree with your stance. While emerging evidence should be used to change guidelines, we should not be at the mercy of corporations wishing to increase their profit margins with unknown chemicals. You don't have to work with what you have only just invented and don't understand. You're talking about bottles and pans. We have managed with bottles and pans for a thousand years before pfas.
  - esoterica 4y ago
    They used to put lead in everything. Just because it’s traditional doesn’t mean it’s safe.
    - upsidesinclude 4y ago
      No one said traditional. Time tested would be a better phrase for what I've described. Cast iron, steel, glass, ceramic We have thousands of years of evidence that these things are safe Edit: traditional? That's not even what that means anyway. Old?
  - underdeserver 4y ago
    What? I'm saying we now know it's super harmful and should work with that knowledge to regulate against it, without waiting for all experts to agree and all studies to show.
    - upsidesinclude 4y ago
      That does not come across from the other post, but yes that seems fair
pirate787 4y ago
precautionary principle is the answer. industry must have the burden to prove something is safe before using it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
- master_crab 4y ago
  It’s very difficult (if not impossible) to prove chemicals are safe. All regulatory bodies can really do is prove that something is not safe.
  - southerntofu 4y ago
    > It’s very difficult (if not impossible) to prove chemicals are safe. Yes, but it's certainly possible to rule out entire classes of harms by asking the right questions before putting a product on the market. Maybe 100% safe is impossible but 99% is still a pretty low bar/standard when it comes to health/pollution risks. The problem is in the current situation, corporations push toxic products on everyone that they either know to be toxic or really don't want to find out. Then we wait for people to get sick and die, then finally after it becomes a too big scandal for corporate PR and government regulators to pretend they didn't see, they start to maybe study the problem and issue guidelines. This timeline is so broken and we see the same thing in the medical world where substances we'd known to be harmful for years/decades kept on being marketed and prescribed to unknowing patients. I personally have no faith in governments (who created or benefited from these abuses), but if you're a believer in regulations, the bare minimum they can do is publish 100% of toxicity claims/studies without any delay from submission (public inbox). This could help in that whistleblowers are often coming forward with such claims (such as the EDF nuclear whistleblower lately) but it's hard for them to find a platform, and for the public to get informed.
    - fuzzfactor 4y ago
      >corporations push toxic products on everyone One aspect we have, is defense materials being mass-produced for potentially large-scale warfare, then really raking in the bucks when a consumer application can be found. That way everybody wants some, not just soldiers. And if it's consumable, so much better since that calls for continuous mass-production. And where's it all going to end up? What part of the environment? Well, that's diferent for different materials. Sometimes a material itself is highly disruptive, other times it's the vast quantities that end up being mass-produced. Even then the risk of an unforseen toxic outcome has always been underestimated.
na85 4y ago
>We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists. I dunno, I kinda think we do want to foster that.
ifyoubuildit 4y ago
> We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists. Why don't we want to foster this? If some compound is unknown, it seems prudent to assume its a risk until proven otherwise. Then you can calculate whether or not the possible miniscule or nonexistent benefit is worth the potentially miniscule or catastrophic downside. Some might respond that this would hamper progress, but really it would just hamper sales. You can continue to learn things without testing on the general public. And if you can't, then maybe that's no excuse to test it in prod.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  We already have too many people who won't get life-saving vaccines that will protect others because of "chemicals", and that was before covid.
  - ifyoubuildit 4y ago
    This is probably not a great reading of what you wrote, so I'm happy to be corrected, but this is what I get from your comment: humanity has discovered or invented beneficial uses for some compounds (like for example some of the vaccines that have been developed throughout history), so therefore we should presume the safety of every other novel use of a compound that comes along. Thats not what you mean, right?
    - Tao3300 4y ago
      You must be replying to the wrong comment, because I didn't say anything like that. Next time trust your instinct that you got it wrong.
- google234123 4y ago
  Just wait until you learn about all the chemicals in a banana https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png
  - 4y ago
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
There are lots of things that can be detected rather simply in a lab though. Like running a bioassay to ascertain activity at various receptors. Bisphenol A for instance has interactions with several hormone receptors. A single in vitro study is enough to label BPA as biologically active and therefore a potential risk. Similarly, some PFAS compounds are now known to interact with certain receptors involved in lipid metabolism. So it can also be determined as biologically active in vitro. There's just so much more that can be done about this on the regulatory side than is done currently.
the8472 4y ago
There's a middle ground. You can permit novel substances but if it is discovered to be harmful then the burden of proof is inverted for the family of related chemicals. Like not only narcotics but also chemical analogues (even those that haven't been designed yet) are banned
- gmac 4y ago
  Yes! That would catch firms touting “BPA-free” plastics that instead contain the chemically very similar BPS, for example.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    And BPF, both of which are now known to have similar problems. It's not like the companies developing these chemicals don't know that they're likely to have the same activity. It's just pharmacology. Similar structures tend to have similar activity. I definitely second GPs suggestion of having the burden of proof reversed like that. It would greatly reduce the work required by researchers, too. Interestingly, BPA was actually known to have estrogenergic properties in the 30s shortly after it was first isolated, and was first researched as a potential estrogen replacement. With the right regulation this could have been caught close to a century ago...
slaymaker1907 4y ago
There are some suspected and known harms certain enough to be published by the EPA https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-health-and-environmental-risks-pfas https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea... You're right we're not completely certain, but I think it would be prudent to immediately cut back on all PFAS except scenarios where no viable alternative exists since they are so hard to remove from the environment. As nice as non-stick PFAS pans are, they need to go for now until we know more.
intrepidhero 4y ago
If I could make one change I would require more thorough scrutiny for any product that we know is going to persist in the environment for a long time. The half life of your new plastic is 10 years due to UV degradation? Great you can use that only moderate safety studies. The half life of your new waterproof coating is 100 years? Let's do some pretty serious studies. Half life of this gasoline additive is basically forever? Um, maybe don't use that.
londons_explore 4y ago
> But the problem here is that we just don't know. Many of these things we don't know are because it would be unethical to do the experiment to give some people PFAS and some people no PFAS and see if the PFAS group get more diseases. Instead, we allow PFAS to be used indiscriminately, and then afterwards regret it. Experimentation of potentially harmful things on people should be allowed if the alternative is giving the same potentially harmful thing to everybody with no experimentation done.
jahewson 4y ago
“Oh it’ll probably be fine” is just not good enough any more. We’ve destroyed and irreparably harmed huge swaths of nature in a vanishingly short period of time due to this attitude. It has failed again, and again, and again. If we keep this up, we really will destroy ourselves and the habitability of the planet. The consequences are just so dire now that the notion that we should just roll the dice is frankly absurd. If we don’t know it’s safe, assume it’s not. Perfect? No. Better than the alternative? Yes.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  Cognitive dissonance regarding this is completely crazy right now. As far as I can tell, most people will acknowledge that there is a big crisis looming ahead by now (some even that we're already in the midst of it) but the mere thought of the tiniest bit of action to deal with that crisis is met with steadfast resistance, even things that don't affect them all that much individually. You'd expect a lot of popular demand for political action to at least soften the crash, but at least where I live (southern Germany) I don't perceive any such demand. What concerns are voiced are always strictly in the abstract. Please do save the environment, but definitely not in my backyard, or village, or district, or anywhere else, thank you very much. Yet the changes are really obvious by now. I've been on a hike in the northern Alps a few days ago. I know the mountain quite well, and it should be teeming with life this time of the year, insects, birds, but it was eerily quiet across the whole altitude range. The river in my hometown should carry yearly floodwaters from snowmelt, but this year there was not a hint of a flood. The all-time temperature record was shattered (again), though. Forest fires in areas that never saw any just decades ago. Clean windshields in mid-August. Either no rainfall for months, or several 1000-year floods, nothing in between. Silence where there have been annoyingly loud crickets and frogs since forever. I guess we're running a deeply, deeply dangerous experiment on the biosphere and I'm not convinced anymore that it's going to be fine. I have a feeling it's going to be very, very much not fine at all.
mikeiz404 4y ago
> Regulation works when experts really do have the answer. I think there are other significant factors to consider as well. In the US at least I think regulation, in our current day, has failed in many areas due to 1) the slowing down of decision makers to become informed and make decisions (see congress for stagnation in passing legal regulations) 2) industries or large industry players have waged effective influence campaigns in mainstream and scientific communities to push a friendly agenda or inject uncertainty which has nock on affects when it comes to funding (see pesticides like neonics and glyphosates, oil and gas companies with respect to global warming and plastic recycling, tobaco companies and smoking causing cancer, …), and 3) a certain degree of capture in regulatory agencies by industry (industry players later work for the regulatory agency or the reverse, as well as other tactics). 4) the politicization of regulation (not sure how much this can be helped though). It’s a mess. > We could switch from "allow by default" to "deny by default", but I'm not even sure that would help. There may be a middle ground here. As a chemic becomes more widely used that could trigger required enhanced testing by a regulatory agency as well as research grants looking into their safety. And as a chemical becomes ever more widely used rigorous long-term studies could be required. I’m not sure what the right long term answer is but I can’t help but think there is some fundamental mismatch of top down regulation by regulatory bodies in a market based system where companies are innovating and also creating these harms / negative externalities. In the former regulators are slow, reactionary, and often substantial harm must have already occurred for a regulation to be passed. The latter is a dynamic and fast moving system where companies are ruled by a fitness function which is often myopic and locally greedy. It seems introducing another market for regulation could offer a solution by using one dynamic system to regulate another. Carbon credits is an example of this. However two or more interacting systems will make things much harder to reason about and may have their own significant flaws if not designed well (for example trees are planted but then die earlier than expected or are later harvested after the carbon credits have been sold).

xboxnolifes 4y ago

The 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
It implies that some people think it's bad, but not necessarily that they're right. It's not like every science article shared here is accurate or reflects scientific consensus. There's no heuristic shortcut for actually learning about the subject. Without doing the homework, all we can say is that it seems plausible that there might be a problem.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Given that these compounds are mass produced and spread all over the globe at an industrial scale, I think the plausibility of a problem should be sufficient for holding back. Especially when the compound is known to be non-degradable. Then we know, if there is a problem, we're gonna be stuck with it for a long time. Even more reason for extreme caution.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    It's reason for concern but not enough to make a convincing case. This is still trying to take a logical shortcut to avoid actually learning specifics about the problem. But if you don't learn anything then you're just another person saying their opinion on the Internet, like the rest of us.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      My point is, I don't like this defeatist attitude of "well there's no way to know, so we should just do more of the same". Just because it's a very hard problem doesn't mean there isn't a lot more we could do. And a lot of the chemicals causing problems today could have been ruled out with far less effort than haphazardly testing it on the whole world population. I don't see why so many people these days need to reduce everything to this type of false dichotomy. And it's also a question of how much concern is enough? I would argue that currently the threshold is set far, far too high.
      - skybrian 4y ago
        I never said there's no way to know. What I'm saying is that those of us who haven't studied should be humble about how much we know. It's a choice we make all the time. For anything you read about, are you curious enough to investigate it further, or are you going to let it go by?
        mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
        Right. I'm a pretty bad example because I obsessively investigate further. I can't help it. I see something, I need to understand it. It's my curse in life.

underdeserver 4y ago

Experts never have "the answer". Science changes over time - see the article and how guidelines for what's OK grew stricter. You work with what you have right now.

upsidesinclude 4y ago
I disagree with your stance. While emerging evidence should be used to change guidelines, we should not be at the mercy of corporations wishing to increase their profit margins with unknown chemicals. You don't have to work with what you have only just invented and don't understand. You're talking about bottles and pans. We have managed with bottles and pans for a thousand years before pfas.
- esoterica 4y ago
  They used to put lead in everything. Just because it’s traditional doesn’t mean it’s safe.
  - upsidesinclude 4y ago
    No one said traditional. Time tested would be a better phrase for what I've described. Cast iron, steel, glass, ceramic We have thousands of years of evidence that these things are safe Edit: traditional? That's not even what that means anyway. Old?
- underdeserver 4y ago
  What? I'm saying we now know it's super harmful and should work with that knowledge to regulate against it, without waiting for all experts to agree and all studies to show.
  - upsidesinclude 4y ago
    That does not come across from the other post, but yes that seems fair

pirate787 4y ago

precautionary principle is the answer. industry must have the burden to prove something is safe before using it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

master_crab 4y ago
It’s very difficult (if not impossible) to prove chemicals are safe. All regulatory bodies can really do is prove that something is not safe.
- southerntofu 4y ago
  > It’s very difficult (if not impossible) to prove chemicals are safe. Yes, but it's certainly possible to rule out entire classes of harms by asking the right questions before putting a product on the market. Maybe 100% safe is impossible but 99% is still a pretty low bar/standard when it comes to health/pollution risks. The problem is in the current situation, corporations push toxic products on everyone that they either know to be toxic or really don't want to find out. Then we wait for people to get sick and die, then finally after it becomes a too big scandal for corporate PR and government regulators to pretend they didn't see, they start to maybe study the problem and issue guidelines. This timeline is so broken and we see the same thing in the medical world where substances we'd known to be harmful for years/decades kept on being marketed and prescribed to unknowing patients. I personally have no faith in governments (who created or benefited from these abuses), but if you're a believer in regulations, the bare minimum they can do is publish 100% of toxicity claims/studies without any delay from submission (public inbox). This could help in that whistleblowers are often coming forward with such claims (such as the EDF nuclear whistleblower lately) but it's hard for them to find a platform, and for the public to get informed.
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    >corporations push toxic products on everyone One aspect we have, is defense materials being mass-produced for potentially large-scale warfare, then really raking in the bucks when a consumer application can be found. That way everybody wants some, not just soldiers. And if it's consumable, so much better since that calls for continuous mass-production. And where's it all going to end up? What part of the environment? Well, that's diferent for different materials. Sometimes a material itself is highly disruptive, other times it's the vast quantities that end up being mass-produced. Even then the risk of an unforseen toxic outcome has always been underestimated.

na85 4y ago

>We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists. I dunno, I kinda think we do want to foster that.

ifyoubuildit 4y ago

> We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists. Why don't we want to foster this? If some compound is unknown, it seems prudent to assume its a risk until proven otherwise. Then you can calculate whether or not the possible miniscule or nonexistent benefit is worth the potentially miniscule or catastrophic downside. Some might respond that this would hamper progress, but really it would just hamper sales. You can continue to learn things without testing on the general public. And if you can't, then maybe that's no excuse to test it in prod.

Tao3300 4y ago
We already have too many people who won't get life-saving vaccines that will protect others because of "chemicals", and that was before covid.
- ifyoubuildit 4y ago
  This is probably not a great reading of what you wrote, so I'm happy to be corrected, but this is what I get from your comment: humanity has discovered or invented beneficial uses for some compounds (like for example some of the vaccines that have been developed throughout history), so therefore we should presume the safety of every other novel use of a compound that comes along. Thats not what you mean, right?
  - Tao3300 4y ago
    You must be replying to the wrong comment, because I didn't say anything like that. Next time trust your instinct that you got it wrong.
google234123 4y ago
Just wait until you learn about all the chemicals in a banana https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png
- 4y ago

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

There are lots of things that can be detected rather simply in a lab though. Like running a bioassay to ascertain activity at various receptors. Bisphenol A for instance has interactions with several hormone receptors. A single in vitro study is enough to label BPA as biologically active and therefore a potential risk. Similarly, some PFAS compounds are now known to interact with certain receptors involved in lipid metabolism. So it can also be determined as biologically active in vitro. There's just so much more that can be done about this on the regulatory side than is done currently.

the8472 4y ago

There's a middle ground. You can permit novel substances but if it is discovered to be harmful then the burden of proof is inverted for the family of related chemicals. Like not only narcotics but also chemical analogues (even those that haven't been designed yet) are banned

gmac 4y ago
Yes! That would catch firms touting “BPA-free” plastics that instead contain the chemically very similar BPS, for example.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  And BPF, both of which are now known to have similar problems. It's not like the companies developing these chemicals don't know that they're likely to have the same activity. It's just pharmacology. Similar structures tend to have similar activity. I definitely second GPs suggestion of having the burden of proof reversed like that. It would greatly reduce the work required by researchers, too. Interestingly, BPA was actually known to have estrogenergic properties in the 30s shortly after it was first isolated, and was first researched as a potential estrogen replacement. With the right regulation this could have been caught close to a century ago...

slaymaker1907 4y ago

There are some suspected and known harms certain enough to be published by the EPA https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-health-and-environmental-risks-pfas https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea... You're right we're not completely certain, but I think it would be prudent to immediately cut back on all PFAS except scenarios where no viable alternative exists since they are so hard to remove from the environment. As nice as non-stick PFAS pans are, they need to go for now until we know more.

intrepidhero 4y ago

If I could make one change I would require more thorough scrutiny for any product that we know is going to persist in the environment for a long time. The half life of your new plastic is 10 years due to UV degradation? Great you can use that only moderate safety studies. The half life of your new waterproof coating is 100 years? Let's do some pretty serious studies. Half life of this gasoline additive is basically forever? Um, maybe don't use that.

londons_explore 4y ago

> But the problem here is that we just don't know. Many of these things we don't know are because it would be unethical to do the experiment to give some people PFAS and some people no PFAS and see if the PFAS group get more diseases. Instead, we allow PFAS to be used indiscriminately, and then afterwards regret it. Experimentation of potentially harmful things on people should be allowed if the alternative is giving the same potentially harmful thing to everybody with no experimentation done.

jahewson 4y ago

“Oh it’ll probably be fine” is just not good enough any more. We’ve destroyed and irreparably harmed huge swaths of nature in a vanishingly short period of time due to this attitude. It has failed again, and again, and again. If we keep this up, we really will destroy ourselves and the habitability of the planet. The consequences are just so dire now that the notion that we should just roll the dice is frankly absurd. If we don’t know it’s safe, assume it’s not. Perfect? No. Better than the alternative? Yes.

dividedbyzero 4y ago
Cognitive dissonance regarding this is completely crazy right now. As far as I can tell, most people will acknowledge that there is a big crisis looming ahead by now (some even that we're already in the midst of it) but the mere thought of the tiniest bit of action to deal with that crisis is met with steadfast resistance, even things that don't affect them all that much individually. You'd expect a lot of popular demand for political action to at least soften the crash, but at least where I live (southern Germany) I don't perceive any such demand. What concerns are voiced are always strictly in the abstract. Please do save the environment, but definitely not in my backyard, or village, or district, or anywhere else, thank you very much. Yet the changes are really obvious by now. I've been on a hike in the northern Alps a few days ago. I know the mountain quite well, and it should be teeming with life this time of the year, insects, birds, but it was eerily quiet across the whole altitude range. The river in my hometown should carry yearly floodwaters from snowmelt, but this year there was not a hint of a flood. The all-time temperature record was shattered (again), though. Forest fires in areas that never saw any just decades ago. Clean windshields in mid-August. Either no rainfall for months, or several 1000-year floods, nothing in between. Silence where there have been annoyingly loud crickets and frogs since forever. I guess we're running a deeply, deeply dangerous experiment on the biosphere and I'm not convinced anymore that it's going to be fine. I have a feeling it's going to be very, very much not fine at all.

mikeiz404 4y ago

> Regulation works when experts really do have the answer. I think there are other significant factors to consider as well. In the US at least I think regulation, in our current day, has failed in many areas due to 1) the slowing down of decision makers to become informed and make decisions (see congress for stagnation in passing legal regulations) 2) industries or large industry players have waged effective influence campaigns in mainstream and scientific communities to push a friendly agenda or inject uncertainty which has nock on affects when it comes to funding (see pesticides like neonics and glyphosates, oil and gas companies with respect to global warming and plastic recycling, tobaco companies and smoking causing cancer, …), and 3) a certain degree of capture in regulatory agencies by industry (industry players later work for the regulatory agency or the reverse, as well as other tactics). 4) the politicization of regulation (not sure how much this can be helped though). It’s a mess. > We could switch from "allow by default" to "deny by default", but I'm not even sure that would help. There may be a middle ground here. As a chemic becomes more widely used that could trigger required enhanced testing by a regulatory agency as well as research grants looking into their safety. And as a chemical becomes ever more widely used rigorous long-term studies could be required. I’m not sure what the right long term answer is but I can’t help but think there is some fundamental mismatch of top down regulation by regulatory bodies in a market based system where companies are innovating and also creating these harms / negative externalities. In the former regulators are slow, reactionary, and often substantial harm must have already occurred for a regulation to be passed. The latter is a dynamic and fast moving system where companies are ruled by a fitness function which is often myopic and locally greedy. It seems introducing another market for regulation could offer a solution by using one dynamic system to regulate another. Carbon credits is an example of this. However two or more interacting systems will make things much harder to reason about and may have their own significant flaws if not designed well (for example trees are planted but then die earlier than expected or are later harvested after the carbon credits have been sold).