If you want more context on PFAS, I recommend this Veritasium video [0]. It expanded on my usual thought of "PFAS = bad," explaining why non-stick cookware is probably fine while other forms of PFAS are problematic. The video also covers the environmental damage caused by PFAS manufacturing.
The extremely toxic PFOA and PFOS are byproducts of manufacturing Teflon. After decades, we have managed to just barely regulate it. We don't know if these newer compounds will ultimately have similar effects. DuPont had reason to believe these original compounds were harmful, but they suppressed that fact in favor of profit. "Probably fine" is not acceptable, considering we can't meaningfully clean the stuff up.
"Teflon" ski wax (fluoro-wax) contains PFOA impurities, which is that same problematic chemical. It's expensive to remove so most manufacturers don't bother.
Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong or at least incomplete. I empathise, it’s hard to make definitive statements like that, but maybe at some point it’s better not to if you’re not sure and more about entertainment than anything else.
Why leave off “or incomplete” when people can see it directly above what you misquoted? But sure, plenty of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779199. You can search on Google for Veritasium wrong (or misleading, incomplete, etc.) if you’d like more examples.
It's not like this is going unnoticed either, though.
The International Ski Federation (FIS) now bans fluorinated wax in all their competitions, and this wax is explicitly called out alongside cookware in much of the legislation that's going around in places like CA/CO for PFAS bans.
You forgot rain. Maybe one day people will remember we're just sharing one small planet, the air, the water, the food supplies, ... all the shit you dump/burn ends up in your food or water eventually
That article's only citation is a review paper, and it doesn't answer my question or substantiate your claim. It only covers how much PFAS is found in rainwater, and not how it got there.
The sources cited includes https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2020.116685, which is paywalled, but the snippet of the conclusion that is shown indicates that a possible major cause is industrial emissions:
> As local sources were determined to be significant, the results imply that local action can have an impact on PFAS contamination in precipitation. A three-way ANOVA model determined that functional group, chain length, and location were significant predictors of PFAS concentrations
If you can get the full text I'd be very interested in reading about it.
Sure, its probably at its highest concentrations right where its being manufactured or used heavily, but in the end its migrating just about everywhere.
> n Figure 1B, the levels of PFOS in rainwater are shown to often exceed the US EPA drinking water health advisory for PFOS, except for two studies conducted in remote regions (in Tibet and Antarctica).
I don't think there are a lot of industrial emissions in Antarctica.
But still a lot of things do, pesticides following the rain cycles is a good example. We're killing the biodiversity and ourselves with it. We already almost entirely rely on synthetically amending fields with petrol byproducts to feed ourselves, tomorrow we might have to manually pollinate crops when insects won't be enough to do the job.
PFAS are a problem, co2 is a problem, but we have dozens of other very big problems that are partially, if not entirely, obscured
> Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process. Thus, the Haber process [enabled] the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.
Future archaeologists will wonder that we first fouled our nest from edge to edge with lead in gasoline, and then there's that radioactive layer, and following immediately after the forever chemicals layer.
Not saying it's a good approach to solving the problem, but surely you'd want to do the filtering at the water utility level. It would be a lot more cost effective that way.
It probably can't be effectively filtered at utility scale. There are only a small number of effective filtration methods and they basically coalesce to either distillation or reverse osmosis, neither of which is effective at utility scale. The other side of that is that both methods concentrate contaminates when removing them, and distillation puts some contaminates into the air, which means neither is a panacea even at residential scale.
The largest reverse osmosis plant in the world produces 165MGD of water, which is less than is required for any of the top 10 largest US cities, while primarily being used purely for desalination (SWRO). At the levels of filtration and membrane size required for removal of PFAS, it would nearly be impossible to cost effectively filter 200MGD+ of water for a major city.
That the way the parent comment is written evokes fear unnecessarily.
There are no definite provable effects of exposure of PFAS - in fact our current knowledge of them is so bad that if you use google and find a list of effects on the body from exposure of PFAS the list is endless and full of things that are unrelated, which is obviously impossible and nonsense.
I don't think most people understand that the damage from PFAS is generational and cumulative. You can isolate zebrafish, expose the first generation, and you'll see abnormalities generations later even those those fish were never exposed. That is their legacy - it's civilization-level harm.
I've been struggling to understand why people care more about Gaza, Ukraine, BLM, or trans bathrooms than issues like PFAS proliferation and ultimately came to the conclusion that people really just don't care about hypothetical future generations as much as the present. You can point and say "look, this action doesn't affect you much and just makes a 0.01% difference, but it will effect 100,000 future generations of life on this planet and can never be reversed" and people will still say "wow that's sad, but there are people starving in Country A" and be much more concerned.
A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa. Think of that the next time you start a conversation.
Short term changes in Gaza/Ukraine/PFAS proliferation will all have very little effect on the current daily lives of most Americans.
But those same short terms changes in all of the above will have massive changes in the future of most Americans.
E.g., if public pressure had prevented the U.S. from invading Iraq on March 20th, 2003, not much would have changed for Americans on March 21st, 2003. But by the end of the war, that would be over $1 trillion that would have been spent differently by the U.S. government. You apparently like statistical estimates-- tell me how much of that $1 trillion you estimate would have gone to research grants for PFAS proliferation risks and/or alternative technologies over a 20-year period.
And that's just the opportunity cost. With Gaza and Ukraine there is further escalation of weapons use and drone tech, damage to the Chernobyl sarcophagus, potential use of tactical nukes, endless appetite for incorporating AI into war and mass surveillance... the list goes on and on.
It just cannot be overstated how wrong it is to blithely assume that focus on current events is somehow short term thinking while armchair quarterbacking PFAS proliferation 100,000 generations into the future is somehow more consequential and erudite.
If we’re taking about hypothetical effects on hypothetical generations of life that can never be reversed, anything you can worry about probably meets that threshold and so picking any given thing is arbitrary. Gaza and the Ukraine conflicts are the results of choices made by the generation before, which are in turn the result of choices made by the generation before that, which in turn are… and so on. Consider Gaza on its own. You could probably trace a pretty clear line from this conflict back to decisions made in the earliest records we have of Judaism. How many generations and people has that impacted? How many of these chemicals you’re specifically worried about are the consequences of actions taken in this and the prior conflicts? The total global impact of the decision of one Jewish sect to crucify the leader of another sect is probably conceivably larger than anything PFAS have done or even will do for quite a long while considering we’re still dealing with the consequences of that decision even now.
People do care about climate change and lots of other long term things.
People care about things that there are campaigns about, that get media coverage. They also avoid thinking about things that they think cannot be changed. These are correlated: if there is a campaign to change something people think it cannot be changed.
Well, people do care about PFAS, global warming, environmental degradation...it's just htey've decided the solution is _depopulation_. They're fighting over the very carrying capacity of an earth that no ones going to fix.
So, like, you realy think israel, russia, america, china, india are all flirting heavily with fascism because of their religion, nationalism, isolationism? Or is it more likely they're trying to isolate themselves from humanity to reduce the overall social costs.
Biollionaires out there building their bunkers, and here we are...
It's disheartening if you do care about long-term issues, but perhaps these are all long-term issues.
In a way, I think people tend to fight for causes they are exposed to and think their voices are on the right side of History. I'm appalled that Belgians are out protesting for Gaza (which is also important) but don't care one iota for what 3M did to half the ground water of the country — and how Belgian politicians and the EPP looked the other way. We're being slowly poisoned over here, but it's the war over there, you have nothing to do with, that matters the most. Right.
We are facing the dismantling of social protections, climate change, corrupt governments, and so on, perhaps people pick the one issue that feels remote enough yet meaningful to fight for.
But someone has to care about Gaza as well, I suppose. It would be far more useful to their lives if people fought for local causes.
I could be wrong but I think the parent comment's point isn't that no one cares, but that the scale of the issue—today and spanning far into the future—isn't presently regarded by people in a proportional manner.
So, people care, but not as much as it seems like they should.
The parent also used the phrase "care more"; they aren't saying people don't care at all, so they acknowledge that people can care about more than one thing at a time.
I would encourage every single person reading this to have your water tested for PFAs.
Several years ago now an executive friend at WLGore, yes the very place that created it, gave me some information in passing. It was the kind of information in hearing from one someone you know that makes one pause for a moment in hearing it but then when one considers time against the statement it became less alarming in that moment. Now years of time have passed since that conversation occurred and the statements have manifested into reality.
I live literally down stream from WLGore and they have been dumping the toxins in the waterway for decades. Our local jurisdictions have been talking on PFAs for a few years now and in January of this year my time was up on my friends statement made years prior. I spent months doing research and in April I had our water tested. The EPA recommends 4 part per trillion is "safe" but in reality my conversation with medical professionals state NO amount of consumption is safe. My water test came back at 70 parts per trillion and I immediately purchased the special filtering needed to remove PFAs and installed it on our existing water filtering within days. I have also bought a whole house PFA filter that I intend to install in the coming weeks yet our water we drink, cook, and make ice with has been clean for months now as the post drinking system PFA filter test reflected <1 part per trillion.
No matter your wealth no one can purchase time, the only way to obtain more time is with your health.
Test your water because what you cannot see matters most!
The only way to escape PFAS is to go to a different planet. 3M and Dow have poisoned the entire world. It's shocking how much effort and money I have had to invest to try to mitigate this problem as much as possible in my own home, not because the alternatives are expensive, but because of how pervasive PFAS use is and how it contaminates everything. Every single decision-maker involved should have been jailed.
There's the PFAS blood cleaning startup but is unvalidated and also we'll all just get more replacement exposure from routine activities of living soooo imo almost feels futile regardless: https://www.wired.com/story/this-startup-promises-to-clean-y...
> What have you done in your own home? I’d be curious to know.
I've gotten rid of anything in my kitchen that I can that contains PFAS or is produced with PFAS or PFOAs. I use cast iron or stainless steel cookware, glass and silicone only for things that cannot be made of stainless steel. I've more or less eliminated plastics as much as possible from the kitchen. Unfortunately, I can't necessarily do that with food packaging, but even there when I have an option I will change brands or stores to buy things without plastic packaging, or paper packaging coated in PFAS/Teflon. Similarly to avoid PFAS and other chemicals in the production of plastics, as well as microplastics, I almost exclusively buy clothing made entirely from natural fibers.
Beyond that, I have a whole home water filtration system, and after that whole home filtration system I additionally run an undersink 5-stage RO system, both of which are NSF/ANSI certified (53 for the filter system and 58 for the RO system) to remove PFAS and PFOAs. I also go out of my way to find and buy products that don't contain added PFAS, because unfortunately PFAS are in many basic everyday household products like dishwasher detergent, rinse aid, laundry detergent, fabric softener,
and the like. If you dig into this you will be disturbed at how many things have PFAS intentionally added to them, and then you will be even more disturbed to find out how many things contain PFAS incidentally, mostly due to contaminated water supplies.
Even with all of this effort, and more I'm not detailing in this comment, I am exposed to PFAS in the food supply and water supply daily, and in a myriad of other ways. It's impossible to avoid, even with a major budget and being extremely conscious of this issue. There is no way to get away from it. The entire world is contaminated. I don't even know how much my mitigations have any helpful effect towards my health, because it's so difficult to mitigate.
How do you deal with running electricity through the house? This is not meant to be a fully serious question, but I'm replacing old wires in my home currently and it doesn't escape my attention that PFAS added to the insulation makes the new wiring easier to use and possibly safer from a fire perspective. I'm not certain about this but pulling cloth wrapper wires out of the ceiling makes me think where such chemicals have been used. I know I buy precrimped jumper wires with a teflon coating for work. I'm certain some people strip them with a heated tool. And I certainly melted some insulation while soldering them as a teenager.
I've never owned a house old enough to be rewired, my previous house was built in 1992, the current house was built in 2017. That said, as far as I am aware, SIMpull does not contain PFAS, which is the slippery coating on Romex wiring. I don't know what the off-brand companies do, though.
For data cabling, which I did install myself in both houses, I looked up material safety data sheets (MSDS) for any products I purchased before buying them. The wiring I used also does not contain any PFAS in its insulation.
Interesting, I haven't looked at the datasheets but I assumed there were some PFAS used in the coatings. That is good to know. The problem I see is that the material properties of PFAS are so useful and desireable, so they are used in so many different contexts.
Let's compare to Purdue and the Sacklers, shall we?
Purdue owns a huge piece of the responsibility for the opioid epidemic. They created OxyContin and lied about it's addictiveness. They are probably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at this point. The Sacklers were heavily involved in all aspects of this and became billionaires because of it.
Nobody has been criminally charged. The government tried to give them a Jeffrey Epstein level pass by essentially allowing them to pay a few billion dollars over 20 years, which essentially amounted to interest off their ill-gotten gains. Last I heard an appeals court said no, you can't do that and release liability. This really was a slap on the wrist.
Now compare this to what China does [1][2][3].
Remember how all those people went to jail for mortgage fraud after 2008? Oh wait... And now? We just sell pardons [4]. This sort of thing used to cause a scandal (eg [5]).
I agree there can be better accountability but China is not a shining example of anti-corruption, there it is used to destroy your political enemies and to increase your political power. Here the issue is probably that the political parties shield their rich donors.
>Nobody has been criminally charged. The government tried to give them a Jeffrey Epstein level pass by essentially allowing them to pay a few billion dollars over 20 years
Doesn't that settlement only cover civil claims? It doesn't grant them immunity over any criminal claims. It's more correct to say that they didn't bother prosecuting them criminally (possibly because it's hard to do so), and got a civil settlement instead because the evidentiary standards are lower.
> which essentially amounted to interest off their ill-gotten gains.
They offered to pay $6B of $11B gains. Maybe you think they should have been fined $100 trillion or whatever for all the harm they caused, but that money doesn't exist, and moreover it's unclear whether a long drawn out legal battle would result in more money than the settlement they offered.
> Doesn't that settlement only cover civil claims?
Yes, but criminal actions over the Sacklers personally while (IMHO) completely justified are incredibly unlikely. Forme, every Sackler involved in Purdue should die penniless in a prison cell.
The big gift of the settlement (which is why I called it an Epstein like deal) was that the bankruptcy court discharged any personal liability from the Sacklers despite it being Purdue in bankruptcy. This was so egregious that even this Supreme Court said "no" (and, weirdly, the 3 liberal Justices were completely fine with it, which is bonkers).
Companies routinely try this thing where, when they're facing significant liability, try to restructure the company such that the assets are in one company and the liabilities are in the other and there are rents or payments or royalties paid from the liabilit company to the asset company. This has, as far as I know, never worked, meaning bankruptcy courts have rejected this as a liability shield. Yet they keep trying and they will probably succeed at some point. The sacklers did this with Purdue too.
It's interesting that bankruptcy courts have rejected this restructuring to avoid liabilities (correctly) yet it's completely fine to avoid tax liabilities. Yes, I'm looking at your, tech companies with Irish subsidiaries who own the IP.
> try to restructure the company such that the assets are in one company and the liabilities are in the other and there are rents or payments or royalties paid from the liabilit company to the asset company.
Is DuPont spinning off Chemours an example of this?
> They offered to pay $6B of $11B gains. Maybe you think they should have been fined $100 trillion or whatever for all the harm they caused, but that money doesn't exist, and moreover it's unclear whether a long drawn out legal battle would result in more money than the settlement they offered.
Paying $6B out of $11B earned from literally killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Meanwhile Alex Jones receives a $1.5B judgement (against ~$10 mil in assets) for just harassing people that were killed?
Even involuntary manslaughter comes with years of jail time. Recklessly killing a single human being. Willfully destroying thousands? Nah, just give us some of the money you earned and we're square.
How does this make sense? This is an extreme injustice no matter how you look at it. The Sacklers deserve far, far worse.
>Meanwhile Alex Jones receives a $1.5B judgement (against ~$10 mil in assets)
You answered your own question. $10M doesn't buy a lot of lawyering. $11B Does. Moreover Alex Jones was dumb and did his misdeeds in a way that makes it a slam dunk to sue him in court. The linked article above mentions why suing the Sacklers is much tougher:
>How are you going to get the Sacklers to give up all their money? You could sue them, sure, of course. The entity that is most obvious liable for the opioid crisis is Purdue, the company, which is very bankrupt, but you can probably find some causes of action to sue the Sacklers. For one thing, some Sacklers were executives or board members of Purdue, so you could sue them personally for their own actions running Purdue. (But not all of them were.) For another thing, there are arguments under the bankruptcy code that they should not have been able to extract $11 billion from the company while it was facing all this opioid liability, that the dividends they got were “fraudulent transfers” and can be clawed back by the company.
>There are problems with all of this. There are a lot of Sacklers. They can hire good lawyers. Some of them live abroad. Much of their money is in trusts that a US court might not be able to get access to. If you sued all of them, it would be expensive and time-consuming and you might not get much money. You might! And you might at least make life very unpleasant for them, which has its own virtues.
Finally, the supreme court votes show how divided the justices were. Contrary to the popular expectation that Republicans are pro-business, they were actually the ones voting against the settlement. The justices voting against the settlement were Trump, HW Bush, W Bush, Trump, and Biden appointees; justices voting for the settlement were Trump, W Bush, Obama, and Obama appointees.
3M knowingly poisoned every single person in the world for decades.
Let them burn, and salt the earth where they fall. These fuckers don’t deserve a second chance.
How could they have done it better? Acknowledge the science when the problem was discovered in the 70s, publish the findings, let the scientific community study the problem and let people make informed decisions about the dangers. Had they done that PFAs might still be in use in very controlled circumstances. They certainly wouldn’t be used as waterproofing on our paper plates.
If we can have a murder investigation and assign partial blame for people that are just there while the crime is being committed, why cant we do it for something that harms the entire human race?
Just because we don't have a great framework for something today doesn't mean we should not have it, just that incentives have been against it up to this point.
>If we can have a murder investigation and assign partial blame for people that are just there while the crime is being committed, why cant we do it for something that harms the entire human race?
Check the bank balance of the people being convicted for being present when a crime is committed.
Compare it to the bank balance of the people who harm the entire human race.
Yeah, see my second sentence - throwing up your hands and claiming inaction isn't the way to solve anything. Saying "but the billionaires don't want it!!" sure, let me pre-give up so its super easy for them to keep winning.
A recent article in The Atlantic said that one scientist would know it's harmful to humans and another would know it's in all human blood and 3M made sure they'd never meet.
So the scientist who knew it was harmful didn't know it was everywhere and the scientist who knew it was everywhere didn't know it was harmful.
Point is that it's possible to silo scientists in this way so they can't see the big picture.
They are endocrine disruptors. The levels are not subclinical.
> Hormones work at very small doses (part per billion ranges). Endocrine disruption can thereby also occur from low-dose exposure to exogenous hormones or hormonally active chemicals such as bisphenol A. [...] Furthermore, since endogenous hormones are already present in the body in biologically active concentrations, additional exposure to relatively small amounts of exogenous hormonally active substances can disrupt the proper functioning of the body's endocrine system. Thus, an endocrine disruptor can elicit adverse effects at much lower doses than a toxicity, acting through a different mechanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor
> Between 2016 and 2022, the agency worked off an advisory health limit of 70 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOS and PFOA, two compounds commonly produced and used for decades. Last year, after science showed virtually no level of exposure to drinking water is safe, the EPA set non-enforceable “advisory health limits” of 0.02 ppt and 0.004 ppt for PFOA and PFOS, respectively.
> The new legal limits for PFOS and PFOA is 4 ppt each, levels that science shows are still dangerous to drink. Public health advocates say the discrepancy is likely the result of industry pressure on the EPA and an inability of PFAS tests that regulators use to check water for the chemicals at levels as low as 0.02 ppt. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry...
without Limited Liability Companies, a civil matter as simple as a copyright lawsuit could permenently bankrupt a small business and take the owners house and all their assets.
I don't agree with companies wantonly externalizing their costs onto the environment or the populace such as Dow or 3M poisoning the entire planet. Criminal liability never goes away for serious crimes, whether sole-proprietership, LLC, or Corp. We need to actually start jailing people though
If you are a part owner of a restaurant that's an LLC, and the restaurant engages in wage theft, which is rampant in that business, in many states the corporate veil can be pierced to recover stolen wages. "Limited" doesn't mean "none."
No flushing is necessary; it is conceptually fading on the internet whether the state acknowledges it or not.
It'll be great if some solemn elder-statesmen step up and read the writing on the wall instead of throwing more tantrums, but I think it's beyond obvious now that the internet will not abide copyright.
Clearly the system by which "grandma" owns a small part of a criminal organization is flawed.
Whether criminal liability needs to flow to individual owners I don't know, but I'm sure someone has done the thinking here about how to make this less insane.
Large shareholders are very different than grandma owning a few shares or even a few hundred shares. If criminal risk was priced into the stock, our society would look very different.
I’m sure they’ll get off legally (just donate to the sitting president) but for the people affected by their practices they will be hard pressed to turn their legacy around.
I think it is incorrect to blame this on a currently corrupt president.
Counter-hypothesis: This is a systemic issue. Decisionmakers and shareholders that cause harm face very little consequences if their behavior does not violate the letter of the law.
Compare the leaded gas debacle: US lead industry suppressed knowledge about harmful effects, and even directly targeted researchers with smear-campaigns and lawfare for decades, but faced no real legal consequences once everything came to light.
This sounds bleak, but I'm pretty sure that any improvement (more justice/corporate responsibility) would at least not be free: It would also have chilling effects on research/innovation from perceived legal risk and higher costs (because the customer always pays in the end, which also applies to indirectly legally prescribed risk mitigation).
It is plausible to me that the public is "close to correct" in its current stance, and I would at least not dismiss that notion out of hand!
The public is driven by convenience, and it's extremely convenient to prefer believing purported long-term harms are fake news, when that belief enables enjoying practically every other short-term convenience available to them
So, what is anyone gonna do about? Do YOU want to sacrifice your life to play supermario bros against the Managers and CEOs responsible for that? Are they even alive anymore?
If you want more context on PFAS, I recommend this Veritasium video [0]. It expanded on my usual thought of "PFAS = bad," explaining why non-stick cookware is probably fine while other forms of PFAS are problematic. The video also covers the environmental damage caused by PFAS manufacturing.
[0]: https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY
The extremely toxic PFOA and PFOS are byproducts of manufacturing Teflon. After decades, we have managed to just barely regulate it. We don't know if these newer compounds will ultimately have similar effects. DuPont had reason to believe these original compounds were harmful, but they suppressed that fact in favor of profit. "Probably fine" is not acceptable, considering we can't meaningfully clean the stuff up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_related_to_...
skiers have been putting teflon wax on their skis for decades now
it's in the snow, ground, and water-supply
forever
According to the linked Veritasium video, Teflon is not directly problematic, it’s the chemicals used to manufacture Teflon that are the problem.
"Teflon" ski wax (fluoro-wax) contains PFOA impurities, which is that same problematic chemical. It's expensive to remove so most manufacturers don't bother.
https://skiracing.com/future-without-fluoros-a-complete-guid...
It’s also applied to skis by heating it, which breaks down the polymers.
Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong or at least incomplete. I empathise, it’s hard to make definitive statements like that, but maybe at some point it’s better not to if you’re not sure and more about entertainment than anything else.
That’s a bold statement to make that “Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong”. Can you list some of these many wrong statements that they make?
Why leave off “or incomplete” when people can see it directly above what you misquoted? But sure, plenty of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779199. You can search on Google for Veritasium wrong (or misleading, incomplete, etc.) if you’d like more examples.
It's not like this is going unnoticed either, though.
The International Ski Federation (FIS) now bans fluorinated wax in all their competitions, and this wax is explicitly called out alongside cookware in much of the legislation that's going around in places like CA/CO for PFAS bans.
You forgot rain. Maybe one day people will remember we're just sharing one small planet, the air, the water, the food supplies, ... all the shit you dump/burn ends up in your food or water eventually
What is the physical process that leads to PFAS ending up in the rain?
The planetary hydrological cycle.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069
Oh snap that was some good "the expert" energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Why cant we have parallel lines that intersect. Geometry.
That article's only citation is a review paper, and it doesn't answer my question or substantiate your claim. It only covers how much PFAS is found in rainwater, and not how it got there.
The sources cited includes https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2020.116685, which is paywalled, but the snippet of the conclusion that is shown indicates that a possible major cause is industrial emissions:
> As local sources were determined to be significant, the results imply that local action can have an impact on PFAS contamination in precipitation. A three-way ANOVA model determined that functional group, chain length, and location were significant predictors of PFAS concentrations
If you can get the full text I'd be very interested in reading about it.
Sure, its probably at its highest concentrations right where its being manufactured or used heavily, but in the end its migrating just about everywhere.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
> n Figure 1B, the levels of PFOS in rainwater are shown to often exceed the US EPA drinking water health advisory for PFOS, except for two studies conducted in remote regions (in Tibet and Antarctica).
I don't think there are a lot of industrial emissions in Antarctica.
There's a journal paper (i.e. already reviewed and accepted) linked at the bottom:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
That paper alone has 61 references. There are plenty of papers to go read.
> all the shit you dump/burn ends up in your food or water eventually
but most that shit doesn't survive the journey intact, being out in the elements and bombarded by the sun isn't kind to most things
hence the focus on "forever chemicals"
But still a lot of things do, pesticides following the rain cycles is a good example. We're killing the biodiversity and ourselves with it. We already almost entirely rely on synthetically amending fields with petrol byproducts to feed ourselves, tomorrow we might have to manually pollinate crops when insects won't be enough to do the job.
PFAS are a problem, co2 is a problem, but we have dozens of other very big problems that are partially, if not entirely, obscured
https://usrtk.org/healthwire/banned-pesticides-found-in-clou...
> We already almost entirely rely on synthetically amending fields with petrol byproducts to feed ourselves
elaborate please
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
> Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process. Thus, the Haber process [enabled] the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.
I assume that means we have to use fertilizer to ensure we can produce enough food crop.
Future archaeologists will wonder that we first fouled our nest from edge to edge with lead in gasoline, and then there's that radioactive layer, and following immediately after the forever chemicals layer.
The anthropocene, aka the petroradiata layer
But you can filter out PFAS from water...
you can filter anything out of water...you're just arguing end users should bare the cost of billion dollar corporations doing whatever they want.
The filtration at the levels we're talking about would add thousands of dollars to every household everywhere, all at once.
Talk about something that just is a bit more than, "but you can filter it".
Not saying it's a good approach to solving the problem, but surely you'd want to do the filtering at the water utility level. It would be a lot more cost effective that way.
It probably can't be effectively filtered at utility scale. There are only a small number of effective filtration methods and they basically coalesce to either distillation or reverse osmosis, neither of which is effective at utility scale. The other side of that is that both methods concentrate contaminates when removing them, and distillation puts some contaminates into the air, which means neither is a panacea even at residential scale.
The largest reverse osmosis plant in the world produces 165MGD of water, which is less than is required for any of the top 10 largest US cities, while primarily being used purely for desalination (SWRO). At the levels of filtration and membrane size required for removal of PFAS, it would nearly be impossible to cost effectively filter 200MGD+ of water for a major city.
Okay so how are you going to filter all the water in every water shed, pond, lake, estuary, etc?
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curious what point you're highlighting here
That the way the parent comment is written evokes fear unnecessarily.
There are no definite provable effects of exposure of PFAS - in fact our current knowledge of them is so bad that if you use google and find a list of effects on the body from exposure of PFAS the list is endless and full of things that are unrelated, which is obviously impossible and nonsense.
They just seem like facts to me. If the reader reacts with fear, that's because they interpreted those facts as things that induce fear.
Most people have an irrational fear of one or many things, that doesn’t mean those fears have to be entertained.
The media loves to instil fear to get clicks.
I don't think most people understand that the damage from PFAS is generational and cumulative. You can isolate zebrafish, expose the first generation, and you'll see abnormalities generations later even those those fish were never exposed. That is their legacy - it's civilization-level harm.
I've been struggling to understand why people care more about Gaza, Ukraine, BLM, or trans bathrooms than issues like PFAS proliferation and ultimately came to the conclusion that people really just don't care about hypothetical future generations as much as the present. You can point and say "look, this action doesn't affect you much and just makes a 0.01% difference, but it will effect 100,000 future generations of life on this planet and can never be reversed" and people will still say "wow that's sad, but there are people starving in Country A" and be much more concerned.
I guess it's us that are the weird ones.
A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa. Think of that the next time you start a conversation.
- Dale Carnegie
Your argument doesn't make much sense.
Short term changes in Gaza/Ukraine/PFAS proliferation will all have very little effect on the current daily lives of most Americans.
But those same short terms changes in all of the above will have massive changes in the future of most Americans.
E.g., if public pressure had prevented the U.S. from invading Iraq on March 20th, 2003, not much would have changed for Americans on March 21st, 2003. But by the end of the war, that would be over $1 trillion that would have been spent differently by the U.S. government. You apparently like statistical estimates-- tell me how much of that $1 trillion you estimate would have gone to research grants for PFAS proliferation risks and/or alternative technologies over a 20-year period.
And that's just the opportunity cost. With Gaza and Ukraine there is further escalation of weapons use and drone tech, damage to the Chernobyl sarcophagus, potential use of tactical nukes, endless appetite for incorporating AI into war and mass surveillance... the list goes on and on.
It just cannot be overstated how wrong it is to blithely assume that focus on current events is somehow short term thinking while armchair quarterbacking PFAS proliferation 100,000 generations into the future is somehow more consequential and erudite.
Edit: change "stated" to "overstated" (hehe)
If we’re taking about hypothetical effects on hypothetical generations of life that can never be reversed, anything you can worry about probably meets that threshold and so picking any given thing is arbitrary. Gaza and the Ukraine conflicts are the results of choices made by the generation before, which are in turn the result of choices made by the generation before that, which in turn are… and so on. Consider Gaza on its own. You could probably trace a pretty clear line from this conflict back to decisions made in the earliest records we have of Judaism. How many generations and people has that impacted? How many of these chemicals you’re specifically worried about are the consequences of actions taken in this and the prior conflicts? The total global impact of the decision of one Jewish sect to crucify the leader of another sect is probably conceivably larger than anything PFAS have done or even will do for quite a long while considering we’re still dealing with the consequences of that decision even now.
People do care about climate change and lots of other long term things.
People care about things that there are campaigns about, that get media coverage. They also avoid thinking about things that they think cannot be changed. These are correlated: if there is a campaign to change something people think it cannot be changed.
Well, people do care about PFAS, global warming, environmental degradation...it's just htey've decided the solution is _depopulation_. They're fighting over the very carrying capacity of an earth that no ones going to fix.
So, like, you realy think israel, russia, america, china, india are all flirting heavily with fascism because of their religion, nationalism, isolationism? Or is it more likely they're trying to isolate themselves from humanity to reduce the overall social costs.
Biollionaires out there building their bunkers, and here we are...
If someone isn't aware of the dangers of something that's not the same as not caring.
It's disheartening if you do care about long-term issues, but perhaps these are all long-term issues.
In a way, I think people tend to fight for causes they are exposed to and think their voices are on the right side of History. I'm appalled that Belgians are out protesting for Gaza (which is also important) but don't care one iota for what 3M did to half the ground water of the country — and how Belgian politicians and the EPP looked the other way. We're being slowly poisoned over here, but it's the war over there, you have nothing to do with, that matters the most. Right.
We are facing the dismantling of social protections, climate change, corrupt governments, and so on, perhaps people pick the one issue that feels remote enough yet meaningful to fight for.
But someone has to care about Gaza as well, I suppose. It would be far more useful to their lives if people fought for local causes.
>I'm appalled that Belgians are out protesting for Gaza (which is also important) but don't care one iota for what 3M did
How could possibly determine this? Obviously no one has clearly stated this so I'm assuming it's due to lack of protest.
What it people aren't aware of the situation or its dangers?
It's possible to care about more than one thing at a time.
I could be wrong but I think the parent comment's point isn't that no one cares, but that the scale of the issue—today and spanning far into the future—isn't presently regarded by people in a proportional manner.
So, people care, but not as much as it seems like they should.
The parent also used the phrase "care more"; they aren't saying people don't care at all, so they acknowledge that people can care about more than one thing at a time.
How can you measure caring?
For example I care more about Ukraine than what my boss at work does to annoy me but I talk about the latter more.
Really well written, so here's a gift link: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-3m-pfas-toxic-legacy...
I would encourage every single person reading this to have your water tested for PFAs.
Several years ago now an executive friend at WLGore, yes the very place that created it, gave me some information in passing. It was the kind of information in hearing from one someone you know that makes one pause for a moment in hearing it but then when one considers time against the statement it became less alarming in that moment. Now years of time have passed since that conversation occurred and the statements have manifested into reality.
I live literally down stream from WLGore and they have been dumping the toxins in the waterway for decades. Our local jurisdictions have been talking on PFAs for a few years now and in January of this year my time was up on my friends statement made years prior. I spent months doing research and in April I had our water tested. The EPA recommends 4 part per trillion is "safe" but in reality my conversation with medical professionals state NO amount of consumption is safe. My water test came back at 70 parts per trillion and I immediately purchased the special filtering needed to remove PFAs and installed it on our existing water filtering within days. I have also bought a whole house PFA filter that I intend to install in the coming weeks yet our water we drink, cook, and make ice with has been clean for months now as the post drinking system PFA filter test reflected <1 part per trillion.
No matter your wealth no one can purchase time, the only way to obtain more time is with your health.
Test your water because what you cannot see matters most!
https://archive.ph/6dfLp
I wonder if the manufacture and subsequent planet-wide spread of novel chemicals before their impact on life is fully understood is a great filter...
We've had plastics for, essentially, 100 years. PFAs for a bit less than that. We still don't understand their full impact on the body/life.
The only way to escape PFAS is to go to a different planet. 3M and Dow have poisoned the entire world. It's shocking how much effort and money I have had to invest to try to mitigate this problem as much as possible in my own home, not because the alternatives are expensive, but because of how pervasive PFAS use is and how it contaminates everything. Every single decision-maker involved should have been jailed.
There's the PFAS blood cleaning startup but is unvalidated and also we'll all just get more replacement exposure from routine activities of living soooo imo almost feels futile regardless: https://www.wired.com/story/this-startup-promises-to-clean-y...
What have you done in your own home? I’d be curious to know.
> What have you done in your own home? I’d be curious to know.
I've gotten rid of anything in my kitchen that I can that contains PFAS or is produced with PFAS or PFOAs. I use cast iron or stainless steel cookware, glass and silicone only for things that cannot be made of stainless steel. I've more or less eliminated plastics as much as possible from the kitchen. Unfortunately, I can't necessarily do that with food packaging, but even there when I have an option I will change brands or stores to buy things without plastic packaging, or paper packaging coated in PFAS/Teflon. Similarly to avoid PFAS and other chemicals in the production of plastics, as well as microplastics, I almost exclusively buy clothing made entirely from natural fibers.
Beyond that, I have a whole home water filtration system, and after that whole home filtration system I additionally run an undersink 5-stage RO system, both of which are NSF/ANSI certified (53 for the filter system and 58 for the RO system) to remove PFAS and PFOAs. I also go out of my way to find and buy products that don't contain added PFAS, because unfortunately PFAS are in many basic everyday household products like dishwasher detergent, rinse aid, laundry detergent, fabric softener, and the like. If you dig into this you will be disturbed at how many things have PFAS intentionally added to them, and then you will be even more disturbed to find out how many things contain PFAS incidentally, mostly due to contaminated water supplies.
Even with all of this effort, and more I'm not detailing in this comment, I am exposed to PFAS in the food supply and water supply daily, and in a myriad of other ways. It's impossible to avoid, even with a major budget and being extremely conscious of this issue. There is no way to get away from it. The entire world is contaminated. I don't even know how much my mitigations have any helpful effect towards my health, because it's so difficult to mitigate.
How do you deal with running electricity through the house? This is not meant to be a fully serious question, but I'm replacing old wires in my home currently and it doesn't escape my attention that PFAS added to the insulation makes the new wiring easier to use and possibly safer from a fire perspective. I'm not certain about this but pulling cloth wrapper wires out of the ceiling makes me think where such chemicals have been used. I know I buy precrimped jumper wires with a teflon coating for work. I'm certain some people strip them with a heated tool. And I certainly melted some insulation while soldering them as a teenager.
I've never owned a house old enough to be rewired, my previous house was built in 1992, the current house was built in 2017. That said, as far as I am aware, SIMpull does not contain PFAS, which is the slippery coating on Romex wiring. I don't know what the off-brand companies do, though.
For data cabling, which I did install myself in both houses, I looked up material safety data sheets (MSDS) for any products I purchased before buying them. The wiring I used also does not contain any PFAS in its insulation.
Interesting, I haven't looked at the datasheets but I assumed there were some PFAS used in the coatings. That is good to know. The problem I see is that the material properties of PFAS are so useful and desireable, so they are used in so many different contexts.
Let's compare to Purdue and the Sacklers, shall we?
Purdue owns a huge piece of the responsibility for the opioid epidemic. They created OxyContin and lied about it's addictiveness. They are probably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at this point. The Sacklers were heavily involved in all aspects of this and became billionaires because of it.
Nobody has been criminally charged. The government tried to give them a Jeffrey Epstein level pass by essentially allowing them to pay a few billion dollars over 20 years, which essentially amounted to interest off their ill-gotten gains. Last I heard an appeals court said no, you can't do that and release liability. This really was a slap on the wrist.
Now compare this to what China does [1][2][3].
Remember how all those people went to jail for mortgage fraud after 2008? Oh wait... And now? We just sell pardons [4]. This sort of thing used to cause a scandal (eg [5]).
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder...
[3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45728459
[4]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/trumps-flurry-pardons-include-camp...
[5]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-shadow-of-marc-rich
I agree there can be better accountability but China is not a shining example of anti-corruption, there it is used to destroy your political enemies and to increase your political power. Here the issue is probably that the political parties shield their rich donors.
Heroin was originally advertised by Bayer as a safe and nonaddictive treatment for morphine dependency.
>Nobody has been criminally charged. The government tried to give them a Jeffrey Epstein level pass by essentially allowing them to pay a few billion dollars over 20 years
Doesn't that settlement only cover civil claims? It doesn't grant them immunity over any criminal claims. It's more correct to say that they didn't bother prosecuting them criminally (possibly because it's hard to do so), and got a civil settlement instead because the evidentiary standards are lower.
> which essentially amounted to interest off their ill-gotten gains.
They offered to pay $6B of $11B gains. Maybe you think they should have been fined $100 trillion or whatever for all the harm they caused, but that money doesn't exist, and moreover it's unclear whether a long drawn out legal battle would result in more money than the settlement they offered.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-27/purdue...
> Doesn't that settlement only cover civil claims?
Yes, but criminal actions over the Sacklers personally while (IMHO) completely justified are incredibly unlikely. Forme, every Sackler involved in Purdue should die penniless in a prison cell.
The big gift of the settlement (which is why I called it an Epstein like deal) was that the bankruptcy court discharged any personal liability from the Sacklers despite it being Purdue in bankruptcy. This was so egregious that even this Supreme Court said "no" (and, weirdly, the 3 liberal Justices were completely fine with it, which is bonkers).
Companies routinely try this thing where, when they're facing significant liability, try to restructure the company such that the assets are in one company and the liabilities are in the other and there are rents or payments or royalties paid from the liabilit company to the asset company. This has, as far as I know, never worked, meaning bankruptcy courts have rejected this as a liability shield. Yet they keep trying and they will probably succeed at some point. The sacklers did this with Purdue too.
It's interesting that bankruptcy courts have rejected this restructuring to avoid liabilities (correctly) yet it's completely fine to avoid tax liabilities. Yes, I'm looking at your, tech companies with Irish subsidiaries who own the IP.
> try to restructure the company such that the assets are in one company and the liabilities are in the other and there are rents or payments or royalties paid from the liabilit company to the asset company.
Is DuPont spinning off Chemours an example of this?
> They offered to pay $6B of $11B gains. Maybe you think they should have been fined $100 trillion or whatever for all the harm they caused, but that money doesn't exist, and moreover it's unclear whether a long drawn out legal battle would result in more money than the settlement they offered.
Paying $6B out of $11B earned from literally killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Meanwhile Alex Jones receives a $1.5B judgement (against ~$10 mil in assets) for just harassing people that were killed?
Even involuntary manslaughter comes with years of jail time. Recklessly killing a single human being. Willfully destroying thousands? Nah, just give us some of the money you earned and we're square.
How does this make sense? This is an extreme injustice no matter how you look at it. The Sacklers deserve far, far worse.
>Meanwhile Alex Jones receives a $1.5B judgement (against ~$10 mil in assets)
You answered your own question. $10M doesn't buy a lot of lawyering. $11B Does. Moreover Alex Jones was dumb and did his misdeeds in a way that makes it a slam dunk to sue him in court. The linked article above mentions why suing the Sacklers is much tougher:
>How are you going to get the Sacklers to give up all their money? You could sue them, sure, of course. The entity that is most obvious liable for the opioid crisis is Purdue, the company, which is very bankrupt, but you can probably find some causes of action to sue the Sacklers. For one thing, some Sacklers were executives or board members of Purdue, so you could sue them personally for their own actions running Purdue. (But not all of them were.) For another thing, there are arguments under the bankruptcy code that they should not have been able to extract $11 billion from the company while it was facing all this opioid liability, that the dividends they got were “fraudulent transfers” and can be clawed back by the company.
>There are problems with all of this. There are a lot of Sacklers. They can hire good lawyers. Some of them live abroad. Much of their money is in trusts that a US court might not be able to get access to. If you sued all of them, it would be expensive and time-consuming and you might not get much money. You might! And you might at least make life very unpleasant for them, which has its own virtues.
Finally, the supreme court votes show how divided the justices were. Contrary to the popular expectation that Republicans are pro-business, they were actually the ones voting against the settlement. The justices voting against the settlement were Trump, HW Bush, W Bush, Trump, and Biden appointees; justices voting for the settlement were Trump, W Bush, Obama, and Obama appointees.
Mercury, Lead, PFAS, thousands of additives in plastics. What else?
Dont forget rubber additives (6PPD)!
http://archive.today/6dfLp
Justice-as-a-Service... The Enterprise subscription tier has a get-out-of-jail feature.
3M knowingly poisoned every single person in the world for decades.
Let them burn, and salt the earth where they fall. These fuckers don’t deserve a second chance.
How could they have done it better? Acknowledge the science when the problem was discovered in the 70s, publish the findings, let the scientific community study the problem and let people make informed decisions about the dangers. Had they done that PFAs might still be in use in very controlled circumstances. They certainly wouldn’t be used as waterproofing on our paper plates.
> Let them burn
Who is "them"? The scientists at the time? The managers at the time? The managers now? The stockholders who have already sold and made their profits?
If we can have a murder investigation and assign partial blame for people that are just there while the crime is being committed, why cant we do it for something that harms the entire human race?
Just because we don't have a great framework for something today doesn't mean we should not have it, just that incentives have been against it up to this point.
We won't get there by just saying "they" should be punished; most people can agree on that. Be specific on who and how.
>If we can have a murder investigation and assign partial blame for people that are just there while the crime is being committed, why cant we do it for something that harms the entire human race?
Check the bank balance of the people being convicted for being present when a crime is committed.
Compare it to the bank balance of the people who harm the entire human race.
Yeah, see my second sentence - throwing up your hands and claiming inaction isn't the way to solve anything. Saying "but the billionaires don't want it!!" sure, let me pre-give up so its super easy for them to keep winning.
> Compare it to the bank balance of the people who harm the entire human race.
Yet another reason why we don't need billionaires. No one should have enough money that they can just pay their way through crime after crime.
A recent article in The Atlantic said that one scientist would know it's harmful to humans and another would know it's in all human blood and 3M made sure they'd never meet.
So the scientist who knew it was harmful didn't know it was everywhere and the scientist who knew it was everywhere didn't know it was harmful.
Point is that it's possible to silo scientists in this way so they can't see the big picture.
Isn't one of the answers found in the dubious concept of corporate personhood?
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So when the chemicals get into our biological bodies, they hurt us mechanically, not chemically?
Yes. They repel water, fats and oils. Having waterproof kidneys or a fatproof liver isn’t great for normal functioning of said organs.
They are endocrine disruptors. The levels are not subclinical.
> Hormones work at very small doses (part per billion ranges). Endocrine disruption can thereby also occur from low-dose exposure to exogenous hormones or hormonally active chemicals such as bisphenol A. [...] Furthermore, since endogenous hormones are already present in the body in biologically active concentrations, additional exposure to relatively small amounts of exogenous hormonally active substances can disrupt the proper functioning of the body's endocrine system. Thus, an endocrine disruptor can elicit adverse effects at much lower doses than a toxicity, acting through a different mechanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor
> Between 2016 and 2022, the agency worked off an advisory health limit of 70 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOS and PFOA, two compounds commonly produced and used for decades. Last year, after science showed virtually no level of exposure to drinking water is safe, the EPA set non-enforceable “advisory health limits” of 0.02 ppt and 0.004 ppt for PFOA and PFOS, respectively.
> The new legal limits for PFOS and PFOA is 4 ppt each, levels that science shows are still dangerous to drink. Public health advocates say the discrepancy is likely the result of industry pressure on the EPA and an inability of PFAS tests that regulators use to check water for the chemicals at levels as low as 0.02 ppt. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry...
limited liability corporations are the root of all evil.
without Limited Liability Companies, a civil matter as simple as a copyright lawsuit could permenently bankrupt a small business and take the owners house and all their assets.
I don't agree with companies wantonly externalizing their costs onto the environment or the populace such as Dow or 3M poisoning the entire planet. Criminal liability never goes away for serious crimes, whether sole-proprietership, LLC, or Corp. We need to actually start jailing people though
If you are a part owner of a restaurant that's an LLC, and the restaurant engages in wage theft, which is rampant in that business, in many states the corporate veil can be pierced to recover stolen wages. "Limited" doesn't mean "none."
no reason to have a veil at all. Delete!
tort and copyright would be different if LLCs didn't exist
> copyright
Another thing we should flush down the drain to begin with
No flushing is necessary; it is conceptually fading on the internet whether the state acknowledges it or not.
It'll be great if some solemn elder-statesmen step up and read the writing on the wall instead of throwing more tantrums, but I think it's beyond obvious now that the internet will not abide copyright.
> could permenently bankrupt a small business and take the owners house and all their assets.
A small business, which practically is comprised of - in the US in most cases 1 employee, or maybe 1-3 employees, most likely related.
That person, who you say did a copyright issues, but maybe I say, accidentally used a chopsaw on someones hand... they're liable.
some fake paper does not reduce liability.
Why do you want to arrest grandma for owning Enron stock?
Clearly the system by which "grandma" owns a small part of a criminal organization is flawed.
Whether criminal liability needs to flow to individual owners I don't know, but I'm sure someone has done the thinking here about how to make this less insane.
Large shareholders are very different than grandma owning a few shares or even a few hundred shares. If criminal risk was priced into the stock, our society would look very different.
if LLCs didn't exist, clearly the stock market would operate differently
would Enron have been Enron if it wasn't an LLC?
Enron (like all publicly traded US companies) was a C-Corp, but that's a technicality.
a c-corp is an llc
I certainly do. The stock market would have fewer bubbles if risks were born by the owners!
I’m sure they’ll get off legally (just donate to the sitting president) but for the people affected by their practices they will be hard pressed to turn their legacy around.
I think it is incorrect to blame this on a currently corrupt president.
Counter-hypothesis: This is a systemic issue. Decisionmakers and shareholders that cause harm face very little consequences if their behavior does not violate the letter of the law.
Compare the leaded gas debacle: US lead industry suppressed knowledge about harmful effects, and even directly targeted researchers with smear-campaigns and lawfare for decades, but faced no real legal consequences once everything came to light.
I think it's even more systemic. The public knows about the harm and they are ok with it. They think the benefits outweigh the risks.
This sounds bleak, but I'm pretty sure that any improvement (more justice/corporate responsibility) would at least not be free: It would also have chilling effects on research/innovation from perceived legal risk and higher costs (because the customer always pays in the end, which also applies to indirectly legally prescribed risk mitigation).
It is plausible to me that the public is "close to correct" in its current stance, and I would at least not dismiss that notion out of hand!
The public is driven by convenience, and it's extremely convenient to prefer believing purported long-term harms are fake news, when that belief enables enjoying practically every other short-term convenience available to them
So, what is anyone gonna do about? Do YOU want to sacrifice your life to play supermario bros against the Managers and CEOs responsible for that? Are they even alive anymore?
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