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“Not only did we measure significant concentrations of PFAS in these containers, we can estimate the PFAS that were leaching off creating a direct path of expos

“Not only did we measure significant concentrations of PFAS in these containers, we can estimate the PFAS that were leaching off creating a direct path of exposure,” said study coauthor Graham Peaslee, PhD, professor of physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Notre Dame.” I’m glad the EPA tried but have to wonder why congress can’t do their jobs.

jqpabc123 2y ago
[flagged]
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > why congress can’t do their jobs. > Maybe because the primary interest of half the elected representatives is to make sure it doesn't. They're subversives pushing for a fascist dictatorship. I don't think it is that simple or a helpful analysis. Moreover, there's also a paradox there - we are talking about banning something here, which would be the outcome of either the-majority-have-ruled or a decree by a "dictator".
- freedomben 2y ago
  > They're subversives pushing for a fascist dictatorship. Like you, I used too feel like one side had bad faith motives and just wanted to break stuff and hurt people. It was a really miserable outlook to have. Fortunately through life, I ended up meeting a lot of people and being exposed to a lot of political and philosophical diversity, and I learned that it isn't true at all. There are some small number who do want to destroy things, but even they mostly only want that to get to a better place in the long term, (and they see the collapse or destruction as necessary and inevitable to get there). I encourage you to meet people on the other side and really get to know them. It probably won't change your political opinions, but it will correct an erroneous pessimism about people's motives. The world becomes a much better place when you stop operating in defense mode and operate in discovery mode instead, so it's definitely worth it.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    This is so spot-on and applies to both sides. There should be school trips to both Texas and San Francisco.
  - chankstein38 2y ago
    I think you're missing the point that it's not grandma down the street that's got the bad faith motives. You can make as many politically opposing friends as you want that isn't going to prove that the people paid 6 figure salaries while still being paid insane amounts through lobbying are making sound logical decisions based on what's best for the people.
    - freedomben 2y ago
      Thanks that's fair criticism. There's definitely a big difference between Grandma down the street and John congressman the political animal. Though even among politicians I've found the same patterns. There are a higher percentage of partisans than in the general population, but they still have the same underlying motives. In my experience they tend to be more jaded, and tend to overly trust others or under trust based on the color of jersey they are wearing, but they mostly have good motives* *Excepting corrupt people, which motives don't matter because their selfishness takes priority
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    [flagged]
- malfist 2y ago
  Please be specific, who are the subversives pushing for fascist dictatorship?
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Project 2025 and everyone still supporting Trump, for starters. Don't be obtuse. Mitch McConnell openly stated that their goal during Obama's presidency was to prevent him from doing anything. Meanwhile, during Trump's presidency, democrats spent the whole time compromising to get things done, to keep the government open when they could, to keep things alive. Fucks sake, the ACA itself is one big compromise, it's an explicitly republican designed system! But no, we are supposed to play pretend and "both sides" bullshit that democrats are somehow just awful, meanwhile the republicans bitch about border security for months, and democrats come out with a BIPARTISAN border security bill, in what is absolutely a PR defeat for them, to admit that the border could use more effort and money and security, which it does, and then that bill gets absolutely shut down, explicitly because the republicans did not want biden to get "a win". So the border is a huge issue for millions of Americans, they cry and cry and cry that they are suffering and are just about to call in the National Guard because it's an absolute army of illegals coming across the border they say, but when Biden offers them a gimmy to fix it, to provide them everything they've asked for, they'd rather just continue suffering. They are actively removing basic women's rights. But that's not "a facist dictatorship" if someone specifically saying they will be a dictator for a day if they are elected is elected!
bwestergard 2y ago
They did their job, in this case, by giving the EPA authority to hire scientific experts to evaluate the evidence and promulgate rules.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  SCOTUS may be poised to wipe out that authority. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-chevron-deference-oral-arguments-federal-regulations/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-chevron-deference...
  - harywilke 2y ago
    The natural outcome of the non delegation theory is that every member of congress needs to work at the mint printing money as that power can not be delegated to anyone else, federal prisons must close because there is no way we have enough representatives to run them.
- roamerz 2y ago
  Yes Congress did give the EPA authority to evaluate the evidence and promulgate rules but they did not give them the authority to violate the law. This is but the latest example of of the EPA being correctly guardrailed by the courts. I only wished that the courts could directly penalize the person at the EPA who knowingly exceeded their authority. Admittedly it was for a worthy cause but they or the Congress needs to remedy this through lawful channels. “does not count as a significant new use since Inhance has been using this process since 1983”
PaulHoule 2y ago
If you learn to see the world the way capital sees it, it makes some sense. If you tell a chemical company that it can't make X but it doesn't have a factory to make X, they are not going to be so sore about it. If they've borrowed from the bank to make a factory that makes X and then you tell them they have to shut it down they are going to be a lot more upset. The EPA can't discharge their bank loan, for one thing. In the case of CFCs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon there was a ban on the most wasteful uses of CFC, but the main effect was that people quit building new CFC factories, it took almost two decades to shut those factories down.
- loa_in_ 2y ago
  But why can't they just fail for making a bad bet like the rest of us?
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    In the case of CFCs the dangers were hypothetical in the 1970s. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1980s that the ozone hole was documented and the chemistry of how it happens really understood. (I was doing a student project analyzing satellite observations of chemical species in the atmosphere around this time.) It is also telling that the aerosol spray can ban was in 1978 and Dupont’s patents for CFCs ran out in 1979. Dupont was a CFC advocate up until 1986 when they had patents for HCFCs, at that point they thought a ban was a great idea. We’ve been through a regulatory treadmill since then where now the first generation of HCFCs are known to be powerful global warming gases and those are getting banned so these are being replaced by newer patented substances. Asthma inhalers that would have been cheap have been expensive because they’ve either getting filled with new F-gases or are dry power inhalers, either way they are still under patent.
    - parineum 2y ago
      Someone has to be the advocate for the thing the government is trying to regulate/ban, we have an adversarial court/justice/law system in this country. Of course the party with the most to lose is going to be the one on the side of against it and of course that party is going to stop advocating when they no longer have that interest. It's a good thing that people with something to lose can influence the government and make their voices heard. It's the job of the regulators to take that information and correctly weigh it against the interests of the people they represent. The problem is and has always been the regulators. You're painting Dupont as the bad guy for advocating for themselves while giving a pass (passively) to the people who are supposed to be advocating for us.
HumblyTossed 2y ago
> I’m glad the EPA tried but have to wonder why congress can’t do their jobs. There is a certain large percentage of the population who vote in people who actively want to eliminate all oversight/regulations. How do you do that? Make the regulators look like they're not doing their jobs and say, "See? We just need to get rid of it all! They're wasting YOUR tax dollars!"
- codexb 2y ago
  We have a process for banning chemicals. It requires a cost/benefit analysis, which the EPA did not do here.
jfengel 2y ago
Congress can't do much of anything. Their ability to pass anything more important than naming a post office is essentially nil. They can't even perform the basic operation of keeping the government open, except by heroic last-minute effort. Congress' rules were designed to protect minority opinions, and they're easily taken advantage of to prevent anything from happening at all. A fair number of Congresspeople were elected with the specific goal of locking Congress up, and they're pretty effective at it.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Don't be hand wavey though, there's only one political party doing this bullshit, and they've been open about their strategy and goal since at least Obama, and possibly even as far back as Newt Gringrich. And they seemed to have no problem "getting things done" when the task was to ram through a supreme court justice right before an election after spending a year saying you cannot approve a supreme court justice "during an election year"
- wobbly_bush 2y ago
  In Parliamentary system this is somewhat equivalent to "hung parliament" and usually results in re-elections. Governments must prove minimum support to pass legislations before they can claim to be "in charge"
  - jfengel 2y ago
    We deliberately designed it this way, to prevent one party from having too much control. Instead, we have no control. The legislature is effectively useless. The executive branch continues on, under not-always-clear authority. The judicial branch can easily throw a wrench into that authority, often more for political reasons than legalistic ones. It's really, really bad.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
They did, they made the EPA.

jqpabc123 2y ago

[flagged]

andsoitis 2y ago
> why congress can’t do their jobs. > Maybe because the primary interest of half the elected representatives is to make sure it doesn't. They're subversives pushing for a fascist dictatorship. I don't think it is that simple or a helpful analysis. Moreover, there's also a paradox there - we are talking about banning something here, which would be the outcome of either the-majority-have-ruled or a decree by a "dictator".
freedomben 2y ago
> They're subversives pushing for a fascist dictatorship. Like you, I used too feel like one side had bad faith motives and just wanted to break stuff and hurt people. It was a really miserable outlook to have. Fortunately through life, I ended up meeting a lot of people and being exposed to a lot of political and philosophical diversity, and I learned that it isn't true at all. There are some small number who do want to destroy things, but even they mostly only want that to get to a better place in the long term, (and they see the collapse or destruction as necessary and inevitable to get there). I encourage you to meet people on the other side and really get to know them. It probably won't change your political opinions, but it will correct an erroneous pessimism about people's motives. The world becomes a much better place when you stop operating in defense mode and operate in discovery mode instead, so it's definitely worth it.
- FredPret 2y ago
  This is so spot-on and applies to both sides. There should be school trips to both Texas and San Francisco.
- chankstein38 2y ago
  I think you're missing the point that it's not grandma down the street that's got the bad faith motives. You can make as many politically opposing friends as you want that isn't going to prove that the people paid 6 figure salaries while still being paid insane amounts through lobbying are making sound logical decisions based on what's best for the people.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Thanks that's fair criticism. There's definitely a big difference between Grandma down the street and John congressman the political animal. Though even among politicians I've found the same patterns. There are a higher percentage of partisans than in the general population, but they still have the same underlying motives. In my experience they tend to be more jaded, and tend to overly trust others or under trust based on the color of jersey they are wearing, but they mostly have good motives* *Excepting corrupt people, which motives don't matter because their selfishness takes priority
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  [flagged]
malfist 2y ago
Please be specific, who are the subversives pushing for fascist dictatorship?
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Project 2025 and everyone still supporting Trump, for starters. Don't be obtuse. Mitch McConnell openly stated that their goal during Obama's presidency was to prevent him from doing anything. Meanwhile, during Trump's presidency, democrats spent the whole time compromising to get things done, to keep the government open when they could, to keep things alive. Fucks sake, the ACA itself is one big compromise, it's an explicitly republican designed system! But no, we are supposed to play pretend and "both sides" bullshit that democrats are somehow just awful, meanwhile the republicans bitch about border security for months, and democrats come out with a BIPARTISAN border security bill, in what is absolutely a PR defeat for them, to admit that the border could use more effort and money and security, which it does, and then that bill gets absolutely shut down, explicitly because the republicans did not want biden to get "a win". So the border is a huge issue for millions of Americans, they cry and cry and cry that they are suffering and are just about to call in the National Guard because it's an absolute army of illegals coming across the border they say, but when Biden offers them a gimmy to fix it, to provide them everything they've asked for, they'd rather just continue suffering. They are actively removing basic women's rights. But that's not "a facist dictatorship" if someone specifically saying they will be a dictator for a day if they are elected is elected!

bwestergard 2y ago

They did their job, in this case, by giving the EPA authority to hire scientific experts to evaluate the evidence and promulgate rules.

ceejayoz 2y ago
SCOTUS may be poised to wipe out that authority. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-chevron-deference-oral-arguments-federal-regulations/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-chevron-deference...
- harywilke 2y ago
  The natural outcome of the non delegation theory is that every member of congress needs to work at the mint printing money as that power can not be delegated to anyone else, federal prisons must close because there is no way we have enough representatives to run them.
roamerz 2y ago
Yes Congress did give the EPA authority to evaluate the evidence and promulgate rules but they did not give them the authority to violate the law. This is but the latest example of of the EPA being correctly guardrailed by the courts. I only wished that the courts could directly penalize the person at the EPA who knowingly exceeded their authority. Admittedly it was for a worthy cause but they or the Congress needs to remedy this through lawful channels. “does not count as a significant new use since Inhance has been using this process since 1983”

PaulHoule 2y ago

If you learn to see the world the way capital sees it, it makes some sense. If you tell a chemical company that it can't make X but it doesn't have a factory to make X, they are not going to be so sore about it. If they've borrowed from the bank to make a factory that makes X and then you tell them they have to shut it down they are going to be a lot more upset. The EPA can't discharge their bank loan, for one thing. In the case of CFCs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon there was a ban on the most wasteful uses of CFC, but the main effect was that people quit building new CFC factories, it took almost two decades to shut those factories down.

loa_in_ 2y ago
But why can't they just fail for making a bad bet like the rest of us?
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  In the case of CFCs the dangers were hypothetical in the 1970s. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1980s that the ozone hole was documented and the chemistry of how it happens really understood. (I was doing a student project analyzing satellite observations of chemical species in the atmosphere around this time.) It is also telling that the aerosol spray can ban was in 1978 and Dupont’s patents for CFCs ran out in 1979. Dupont was a CFC advocate up until 1986 when they had patents for HCFCs, at that point they thought a ban was a great idea. We’ve been through a regulatory treadmill since then where now the first generation of HCFCs are known to be powerful global warming gases and those are getting banned so these are being replaced by newer patented substances. Asthma inhalers that would have been cheap have been expensive because they’ve either getting filled with new F-gases or are dry power inhalers, either way they are still under patent.
  - parineum 2y ago
    Someone has to be the advocate for the thing the government is trying to regulate/ban, we have an adversarial court/justice/law system in this country. Of course the party with the most to lose is going to be the one on the side of against it and of course that party is going to stop advocating when they no longer have that interest. It's a good thing that people with something to lose can influence the government and make their voices heard. It's the job of the regulators to take that information and correctly weigh it against the interests of the people they represent. The problem is and has always been the regulators. You're painting Dupont as the bad guy for advocating for themselves while giving a pass (passively) to the people who are supposed to be advocating for us.

HumblyTossed 2y ago

> I’m glad the EPA tried but have to wonder why congress can’t do their jobs. There is a certain large percentage of the population who vote in people who actively want to eliminate all oversight/regulations. How do you do that? Make the regulators look like they're not doing their jobs and say, "See? We just need to get rid of it all! They're wasting YOUR tax dollars!"

codexb 2y ago
We have a process for banning chemicals. It requires a cost/benefit analysis, which the EPA did not do here.

jfengel 2y ago

Congress can't do much of anything. Their ability to pass anything more important than naming a post office is essentially nil. They can't even perform the basic operation of keeping the government open, except by heroic last-minute effort. Congress' rules were designed to protect minority opinions, and they're easily taken advantage of to prevent anything from happening at all. A fair number of Congresspeople were elected with the specific goal of locking Congress up, and they're pretty effective at it.

mrguyorama 2y ago
Don't be hand wavey though, there's only one political party doing this bullshit, and they've been open about their strategy and goal since at least Obama, and possibly even as far back as Newt Gringrich. And they seemed to have no problem "getting things done" when the task was to ram through a supreme court justice right before an election after spending a year saying you cannot approve a supreme court justice "during an election year"
wobbly_bush 2y ago
In Parliamentary system this is somewhat equivalent to "hung parliament" and usually results in re-elections. Governments must prove minimum support to pass legislations before they can claim to be "in charge"
- jfengel 2y ago
  We deliberately designed it this way, to prevent one party from having too much control. Instead, we have no control. The legislature is effectively useless. The executive branch continues on, under not-always-clear authority. The judicial branch can easily throw a wrench into that authority, often more for political reasons than legalistic ones. It's really, really bad.

BobaFloutist 2y ago

They did, they made the EPA.