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How the Disaster of "Forever Chemicals" Was Kept Secret
- alt227 11d agoThe Veritasium documentary on this is very informative: https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- croes 11d agoSo like with climate change the ones responsible knew for decades but preferred the profit.
- Sharlin 11d agoAnd tobacco. And leaded gasoline. And... We really are one fucked up species. But can evolution even produce anything better? Anything that's not so prone to coordination problems? https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- tracerbulletx 11d agoWe're our own moral judges. Biology doesn't have an ethical opinion.
- Sharlin 11d ago"Better", as in, capable as a civilization of avoiding doing things that are incredibly harmful according to their own morals. Capable of defeating their own Moloch, if you will.
- traviswingo 11d agoI’ve long suspected it’ll take us _almost_ going extinct to actually take this stuff seriously. There are too few of us who understand asymmetric risk, and too many in power who are willing to roll the dice for the entire species for profit. Realistically, it will have to get much, much, worse before it gets any better. IMO this is part of the natural evolutionary cycle.
- someothherguyy 11d agocheater detection and self-correction is important in systems. i am not sure "fucked-up" is a meaningful way to look at species-level things.
- Sharlin 11d agoYes, and our cheater detection is entirely broken, given that we prefer to give power to cheaters, as long as the cheater is smart enough.
- someothherguyy 11d agoyeah, sometimes cheaters winning is a net benefit or at least acceptable. although, i don't think those cases above are, heh.
- _puk 11d agoIt's just a bunch of grapes. If there's more than enough grapes for everyone and one person takes more than their fair share, then, on the whole, it's fine. There's enough to go round. If everyone tries to take more than their fair share, then the whole system falls apart. When there are this many people, and this much visibility of the hustle, just seeing others prosper by cheating means a not insubstantial number of people will be in the "well I want grapes, and likely need to cheat to make sure I get my fair share" camp.
- tux3 11d agoEven looking only at different cultures, saying nothing of nature, the degree to which people are willing to cooperate or defect against the group varies widely. The level of trust varies widely. People aren't motivated solely by the risk of being caught. Some people tell themselves that everyone else must be trying to cheat, so it's okay for them to cheat. But this type of thinking isn't a law of nature, it's just a human flaw. The amount of cheating is not a fundamental constant. Given that people are social animals and that we tend to be stronger as a group, in fact you'd expect that prosocial behavior is good for the species. If fucked up is to mean anything, poisoning the environment with forever chemicals ought to make the fucking cut, if you'll pardon my French.
- customguy 11d agoNo, these are really fucked up people, to leap from that to "the species" and from that to "evolution" which humans had no clue about even hundreds of years ago... is just avoiding confronting that and them. It's half of the the reason for why these things happen and get worse, a sort of global bystander effect. We feel okay to in public dismiss this. If you were one in a group of 4 people, and one of them fed poison to a child to remove a stain from their shoe, or just for a laugh, or for 2 cents, and someone got upset, would you talk about the species or evolution first thing? What habit did we normalise here?
- Sharlin 11d agoNo, we as a civilization are ultimately responsible for giving bad actors power, and indeed often glorifying those actors. There are evolutionary reasons why it is so, but that's absolutely not to say that these things just happen and a species with a very different psychology couldn't avoid the same trap.
- wongarsu 11d agoAs a society we tend to reward sociopaths with power, which leads to stuff like forever chemicals. But society providing neither checks-and-balances nor even a credible thread of punishment after the fact is also part of the issue. Even sociopaths are influenced by the threat of punishment
- unethical_ban 11d agoPerhaps the centralization of governance and the asymmetric power of government over the people is the problem. If a village of 20 people found out one of their members had been poisoning them for years, knowingly, to attain status as the mage/technocrat/leader, I suspect their punishment would be severe. Instead, any one person or small group of people feels powerless against a seemingly infinite bureaucracy and a justice system that would sooner punish "vigilantes" than hold powerful people to account for their malice and damage to society. You give more agency to the modern individual than I do, I think.
- root_axis 11d ago
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 11d agoOh, evolution certainly can. The bad ones always get killed off.
- ceejayoz 11d agoBad's a matter of perspective, as a quick review of Wikipedia's parasite articles will reveal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 10d agoIt’s not a matter of perspective to evolution, it’s a real binary between whether you can survive or not. We’re free to pollute the planet as we like, but it’s up in the air whether we can survive nature’s response to our actions
- mitthrowaway2 11d agoThe only species I can think of that coordinate better than humans do are ants, bees, and naked mole rats.
- clickety_clack 11d ago…gambling, social media…
- culi 11d agoAsbestos too. And glyphosates which have devastated insect populations. Veritasium did great documentaries on both of those crises glyphosate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ asbestos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc It took decades for the science to finally flow freely since both of these industries heavily targeted the scientific institutions themselves. Who knows what other pesticides and chemical companies are following the same playbook that we won't get to know about for decades.
- saikrn112 11d agoyup, this actually changed the way I look at capitalism now. This shows how much companies hold power over government and it takes a long time for public to hold companies accountable.
- culi 11d agoOne of the more depressing things to me is the "forever chemical" debacle. Even though we've banned PFAS in pizza boxes, food packaging, firefighting foam, and many consumer products, we're stuck in an endless cycle of the industry coming up with new chemicals that only differ slightly in their chemical structure and making all the same safety claims about them that they know will soon be disproven. It's no bother to them as they can continue to play this game indefinitely and advertise that they don't use those forever chemicals There's no way to fix it until we start punishing white collar crime the way we punish blue collar crime. Bad actors are bad actors
- cute_boi 11d agothere is reason why every civilization rise and fails.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 11d agoI don't understand it though. These chemicals poison their own families right?
- brokencode 11d agoBut money
- AngryData 11d agoThe people making the final decisions on their usage have the money to avoid 99% of it themselves and figure they will be dead before it would really matter to them. The rest are either ignorant or put their livelihood at risk oppossing a massive corporation.
- chaz6 11d agoCrimes on this scale warrant capital punishment.
- culi 11d agoImagine if we policed white collar crime anywhere near as much as blue collar crime
- wpietri 11d agoThat, alas, would violate Wilhoit's law.
- pton_xd 11d agoSteal some mail and buy a few hundred gift cards and you'll be tracked down and arrested [0]. Fine, they did break the law after all. Knowingly poison the population in search of profit? Nothing! No consequences! [0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/traffic-stop-led-police-400-221140055.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/traffic-stop-led-poli...
- athrowaway3z 11d agoTo what end? The severity of capital punishment barely effects civilian crime numbers. Instead - and i have spent all of 10 seconds thinking this through - what about we just pay people to snitch on a business/employer if its knowingly doing such things. Perhaps in % of the settlement and/or potential fall out costs. That'd change behavior as well as catch issues soon enough to prevent them.
- darth_avocado 11d agoAnd yet, here we are just pouring glyphosate on public lands by the tons… Nothing changes even if we know about these chemicals
- criddell 11d agoGlyphosate isn't a forever chemical, is it?
- alt227 11d agoIts not specifically a PFA, but it s a cancer producing chemical which we still approve to spray on our land and foods.
- contingencies 11d agoAlso, we are in the middle of insect biodiversity freefall. Summary: A global meta-analysis covering 166 surveys at 1,676 sites between 1925 and 2018 estimated terrestrial insect abundance fell about 0.9% per year on average—roughly 9% per decade, 24–25% over 30 years, or about 50% over 75 years https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax9931 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax9931
- fn-mote 11d agoI’m dismissing this as “whataboutism”.
- aftbit 11d agohttps://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-inside-story https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas...
- penguin_booze 11d agoThey should really consider adding an audio version, even if AI generated.
- aftbit 11d agoThe originally submitted link is a transcript of a podcast. I really respect the fact that they write these, as I prefer to read over listening. The URL I posted is linked in the original submission as the original story, which is even better for reading IMO. Here's a link to the audio form of the podcast, also linked in the original submission. It's on Apple Podcasts too, if you prefer. https://open.spotify.com/episode/32mnc87hQT9uigtMwy3l6j https://open.spotify.com/episode/32mnc87hQT9uigtMwy3l6j
- billfor 11d agoThe "interview" format is a bit difficult to read. Assuming they did keep it a secret, we had so many other hazards that were (and still are) in common use: lead, mercury, tobacco, chlordane, asbestos, etc... So even if true; even if you accept this as some conspiracy, it would seem to pale in comparison to the list I just gave. We seemingly survived and thrived with with substances far worse than a little plastic running around in our bloodstream, yet this remains the topic of the day and it makes me wonder how real the outrage is (proportionate to other hazards) or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example". It would be far more persuasive imho to just argue the later point independently, because the plastic (using the term loosely) topic comes up so frequently that to some of us it is just repetitive and not really constructive.
- actionfromafar 11d agoObviously the big companies look after us.
- Alwayshasbeeb 11d ago>or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example". Of course, as opposed to the objective minded "there is no conspiracy ever, when it is repeatedly demonstrated that corporations will poison, experiment on and destroy human lives if it favors their bottom line and they think they can get away with it, this is not to be interpreted as a pattern or structural issue, it's just coincidences and 'bad' individual actors all the way down". https://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-07-31/pfizer-pays-us75m-over-constant-gardener-drug/1372978#1 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-07-31/pfizer-pays-us75m-ove... https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/No_More_Bhopals_Environmental_Groups_Charge_Ch.htm https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/No_More_Bhopals_Env... https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o681 https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o681
- adjejmxbdjdn 11d agoThe commenter you replied to literally provided a list of items that are known to be extremely hazardous. Their questioning whether the outage surrounding a specific hazard is proportionate to its known danger does not mean they believe no hazards exist.
- jdw64 11d agoIt seems you and I now have something in common inside our bodies: PFOS. I've finally found a point of connection between us. Out of curiosity as to why 3M would insert this commonality into me to help us share a sense of solidarity, I looked up some safety-related research papers. I came across a 3M technical paper by Seacat et al. (2002)[1], which claims that under their experimental conditions, no harmful effects were observed up to a certain dose. Seeing this perfectly illustrates just how much science and technology are dictated by the institutions they are affiliated with. [1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12075127/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12075127/
- fn-mote 11d ago> 2002 research And from the article: at that point 3M execs had known this class of chemicals was toxic for 3 decades.
- clumsysmurf 11d agoBuckle up, the second Trump administration / Lee Zeldin's EPA approved 5 new PFAS / "forever chemicals" for use as pesticides to be sprayed on crops https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/10/health/pfas-pesticides-industry-influence-wellness https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/10/health/pfas-pesticides-indust...
- adjejmxbdjdn 11d ago> They have developmental effects, immune effects. Thyroid, liver, hormonal systems. Some cause cancer, kidney cancer, obesity. They bind to proteins in your blood, and they change how systems in your bodies work. Is there any evidence that the amounts found in humans using non stick pans, for example, and not those drinking water downstream from an industrial source of “forever chemicals”, have any of these effects?
- lokar 11d agoFirst, what happens to plant workers and surrounding communities matters. Second, yes, the pans are dangerous if you “abuse” them. By getting them to hot, using a mental utensil, or just using it after it has aged too much.
- mentalgear 11d agoPlus DuPont Chemicals dumped forever chemicals like PFOS directly into swimming lakes, rivers, and the ground where it also ended up in communities ground water.
- thuuuomas 11d agoIt’s not just from industrial sources. Many flame retardants are “forever chemicals” & are often wantonly dumped by fire departments, Air Force bases, etc.
- fn-mote 11d ago
- mentalgear 11d agoThere's an excellent film with, and produced by, Mark Ruffalo ("Avengers"). "Dark Waters" about the environmental lawyer who exposed the whole fowl conspiracy by DuPont Chemicals, 3M, and other industrial chemical companies and the knowingly poisoning of the (American) people for decades (and still continuing). Most recommended !
- alt227 11d agoJust watch the Veritasium documentary, its full of horrible truths and real information and not dramatised. https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY
- bilsbie 11d agoThis is a MAHA scam. These chemicals are fine.
- rkagerer 11d agoA team of New York University researchers estimated in 2018 that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to as much as $62 billion in a single year. This exceeds the current market value of 3M.
- contingencies 11d agoSeems as good a reason as any to nationalize it, have the shareholders forfeit their chips at a steep loss, and ensure its remnant facilities only produce socially positive, safe products.
- eszed 9d agoCorporate death penalty. I'm on board with that.
- Melatonic 11d agoWant to know the real way to reduce forever chemicals? Donate blood !
- ChiMan 11d agoAnd so, you run up against a phenomenon every bit as natural as the forever durability as PFAS: Markets can respond to uncomfortable truths. Organizations of real humans? Not so much.
- hefner1456 11d agoJust look up "firefighting foam military base". I know someone that had major thyroid issues due to this.