The title of this piece does not reflect its contents. So far, according to the article, DuPont has been forced to pay less than $100 million in damages for a chemical that resulted in $1 billion plus annual profits. Personal injury suits are ongoing, but "At the rate of four trials a year, DuPont would continue to fight PFOA cases until the year 2890."
The lawyer sounds incredibly and understandably frustrated with the situation:
"The thought that DuPont could get away with this for this long," Bilott says, his tone landing halfway between wonder and rage, "that they could keep making a profit off it, then get the agreement of the governmental agencies to slowly phase it out, only to replace it with an alternative with unknown human effects — we told the agencies about this in 2001, and they’ve essentially done nothing."
A better title would be: "Through effective legal strategy, DuPont delays outlays for pollution effects"
I did an undergraduate in Chemistry, and I occasionally get the question of, "Is X bad for me," or "Will Y give me cancer?" My response is always that our modern world is bad for you. There are millions (maybe billions) of chemicals produced by thousands of companies. Most are probably harmless. But it only takes one or two being really bad for you to get sick. PFOA is one more to add to this list of shit that's not good for you. Most people are lucky enough to not be Wilbur Tennant and live right next to a chemical dump that poisons their water. But most people do get low doses of chemicals like PFOA. And they probably get low doses of another thousand things that are just as deadly, but unknown. We live in a poisoned world, but its not poisoned enough to kill the people that make the decisions, yet.
- In the 16th century, the popularity of pale skin lead women to use lead-based pale makeup, with accompanying lead poisoning and skin damage (http://www.elizabethancostume.net/makeup.html).
- In Roman times, lead was ubiquitous. Of course, lead was used for the plumbing which carried the water supply. But just in case that wasn't enough, they would boil juice in lead pots to create "sugar of lead", which was used as a sweetener in cooking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate).
- Even in hunter-gatherer times, all kinds of naturally occurring substances would have been toxic. Poisonous plants were ubiquitous, as were poisonous substances in the water (drunk straight from the river or pond, remember). "Clostridia bacteria, for example, live in the soil but infect humans in a variety of nasty ways. These germs will grow on food, leaving the toxins that cause botulism".
You missed by far the biggest one: wood cook fires / hearths (or animal dung, or whatever).
The vast majority of all people who ever lived (including a great number still today across the developing world) dealt with much worse air pollution, in the form of wood smoke, than the worst cigarette cloud you’ll ever find in a bar, or the worst smog you’ll ever find in a coal-powered city.
The difference is that today, we know these chemicals and pollutants to be harmful, and yet we still allow them to be produced on an increasing scale.
Mercury, arsenic, lead, natural bacteria and fungi - we didn't know these were bad when they were prevalent killers - as you point out yourself, we even thought they had medicinal properties in some cases. Nobody is going to go around today sprinkling PFOA in their daily oatmeal for its purported medicinal properties, but they might get their ground springs poisoned as the result of known and accepted runoff from a nearby plant.
The environmental poisoning of today is the result of negligence and fraud rather than ignorance.
I don't argue with that. Poisoning the environment and ourselves in nothing new. And it is not limited to humans. You can get sick from drinking stream water for a number of reasons, some of them "natrual." But people think animals are somehow immune. Wrong, they die from bad water or random infections also. The world has never been safe or pure.
But we are actively making it worse, and are not improving anytime soon. It may seem like only greedy people do these kind of things, but we are all causing it. Everyone lauds solar polar for being green, but completely gloss over the environmental costs.
Not to mention the old obsession with radiation in the 1900s. Like that Doramad Radioactive Toothpaste. Or the radioactive drinking water and skincare products from the same period. For all the chemicals in modern day products, at least we're not making everything radioactive under the guise of a cure everything drug.
I feel like there should be a big effort for investigating health effects of chemicals before they even get tested in the lab, basically going back to first principles. Couldn't we build an inventory of every damn molecule occuring naturally in human bodies, tagged by the subsystems they are associated with (blood circulation, cell cores, digestion etc.) and then run simulations that tell you for a new chemical what they can bond with and what exposure is safe? Even just a molecular bonding database that you can query like this could be very powerful, maybe full scale simulation isn't even needed to get a qualitative view on health effects. Am I naive about what this could do or the feasibility of the implementation? Is it being done since a long time and chemical enterprises just keep it for themselves?
Couldn't we build an inventory of every damn molecule occuring naturally in
human bodies, tagged by the subsystems they are associated with (blood
circulation, cell cores, digestion etc.) and then run simulations that tell
you for a new chemical what they can bond with and what exposure is safe?
In a word? No. Not at all. Modeling the behavior of individual proteins is a NP-hard problem [0]. Modeling the behavior of multiple proteins interacting is even worse. And modeling the behavior of thousands of proteins, under the influence of thousands of unregulated chemicals is a combinatorial explosion of NP hard problems.
Thanks! Alright then. Am I guessing right that a powerful quantum computer could find the solution in constant time though? It seems to me molecular bonding is just an energy minimization problem.
Also, is it really necessary to look at everything in combination? You mean things like catalysts? Are typical chemical compounds really as complex as proteins? I think Computational Biology is lately often getting breakthroughs that were quite unexpected, see for example http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/01/16/nvidia-gpus-unfold-secrets....
I have only a very cursory understanding of computational chemistry, but I believe that finding out what molecules bind to the proteins in your body in what way is a hard problem. This is the reason why pharma corporations have to do lots of experiments with the actual stuff even though simulations exist; the necessary use of heuristics in these simulations make results unreliable. And even with all that testing it happens quite frequently that a new drug happens to have serious adverse effects that are only discovered during late stage clinical testing. I therefore don't think that it's feasible to determine the safety of all the chemicals we dump in the environment in this way.
This is always the case. The concern here is that the people who profit from being able to dispense harmful doses are also the ones that are responsible for monitoring its safety.
Dilution is a solution (in a figurative sense) if you know you won't want the substance later on.
In some ways, though, pollution is a materials technology problem, in that we don't know enough about materials technology to either use the pollutant directly or cheaply reprocess it into something we can use.
PFOA was only one of more than 60,000 synthetic chemicals that companies
produced and released into the world without regulatory oversight.
...
Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the E.P.A. can test
chemicals only when it has been provided evidence of harm. This
arrangement, which largely allows chemical companies to regulate
themselves, is the reason that the E.P.A. has restricted only five
chemicals, out of tens of thousands on the market, in the last 40 years.
Staggering. This is regulatory theater that makes
the TSA version look like a pre-school play.
My company is regulated by the EPA, so I was surprised by this statement and sent it to my lawyer to ask why the EPA often asks for tests for my products which are also regulated by TSCA but for which they have no evidence of harm. Turns out it's highly misleading as this statement only applies to chemicals in use before the EPA was setup in the 1970's. Those and naturally occurring chemicals were automatically added to the TSCA inventory (about 70,000 on the list). New chemicals do have to get approved for use. Clearly duponts cover up is egregious, but another way to read the fact that only five have been restricted is that many of the others are safe for their intended use. I can testify that EPA testing is pretty thorough, at least for small companies like mine.
I hate to be that cynic but it sounds like you need better conections like Dupont. You are probably not contributing political donations to the right people...etc. etc.
Sadly I don't think your cynicism is misplaced. I'm just back from a trip to Washington where the advice we got was essentially setup an industry group and hire a lobbyist. Am curious to see if it makes things easier.
Setting up and industry group and hiring a lobbyist is not at all the same thing as making wink wink campaign donations.
Having done work in the environmental space, I do think the cynicism is misplaced. EPA isn't constrained because of well placed campaign donations. It's constrained because a huge part of the country believes that God literally gave us the earth to use up and considers any environmental regulation to be unamerican. Not to mention that every attempt at regulation is met with the same response: "it'll kill jobs."
Do big chemical companies have lots of lobbyists? Sure. Their job is to point out to Congresscritters every bit of uncertainty in the science (of which there is a lot), to reinforce what they already believed. Those companies don't need to make big donations to get their way--they just have to tell Congresspeople how many good blue collar factory jobs they create in their district. It's the environmental groups that really benefit from lobbying.
The way the government regulates them is ridiculous, too. They do it in such a way that simply adding an O-H group here or there avoids the regulation. See, for example, the FDA action against BPA.
I think about this every day. It really fills me with a sense of wonder.
In a lab, in a meeting room, somewhere in the chemical industry, someone basically said "Now that BPA is banned, we need something with the exact same chemical properties" and boom they made a clone of it, skipped human testing despite knowing it has literally the same properties, and called the job finished because the job was to circumvent the law and the law has been circumvented!
Just imagine that kind of attitude in your life. It's hard to imagine an analogy. It's like if you were dropping red bricks off a building onto people on the sidewalk and the judge was like 'you are no longer allowed to drop red bricks onto people' so you switched to chicago bricks.
The analogy sounds childish or ridiculous. But as far as I can tell it's a perfect match for BPA/BPS
But damn, "PFOA was only one of more than 60,000 synthetic chemicals that companies produced and released into the world without regulatory oversight".
Consider breast cancer. One of the risk factors is nulliparity (having borne no children). There's also an inverse association between breast cancer risk and parity (number of children). One of the mechanisms for that, it seems, is that lipophilic organic pollutants are mobilized from womens' fat during pregnancy and lactation. People are born with ~20% of typical lifetime doses of such pollutants.
Human breast milk cannot be sold commercially. One reason is that it's too contaminated with organic pollutants. Life is funny.
Out of the article, I was most impressed by the tenacity of the lawyer in question, Bilott, and his law firm, Taft, for their willingness to keep him as a partner.
It makes me really sad how big corporations use the power they have to cover, fight and (sometimes) get away with practices that translate into money for them at the expense of everything else.
We have been told since always how we humans will once destroy earth, how one day clean air will be sold as a luxury.
Now we can see it happening everywhere, I remember have read that the most contamination California gets it is from China.
China effectively destroyed the environment for making money.
And then you are remembered how this money doesn't go to the everyday Joe, but to the 1%, who doesn't pay taxes (which are by definition a way of wealth redistribution) therefore destroying preventing Joe again for getting a better life, who also has a worst life because his environment has been destroyed.
All true. Just don't forget that Joe is complicit each time he chooses that "roll-back" at Walmart and saves a buck over the more responsibly produced item(1).
(1) Of course you could argue that Joe can't tell the difference and is too bad off financially for it to matter anyway.
We're just as much to blame every time we whip out or iPhone -- (http://www.cnet.com/news/riots-suicides-and-other-issues-in-...) not only involves working conditions so bad that people are driven to literally jump off the roof of the building so frequently that managers placed a net down, but the production of semi-conductors involves tons of rare-earth metals like yttrium.
One could argue a cabin-style zero-impact lifestyle would be the ethically sound thing to do, but the land you purchase to till was the result of systemic genocide and internment of tons of Native Americans (modern estimates between 76 million down to less than a quarter million over 4 centuries - obviously not all by the sword but those are still Stalin-esque numbers) over the course of a few centuries which makes the loss WW2 genocide look like a joke.
I really can't blame China for doing what any nation does as they progress into an industrialized 'first world' society. Travesties occur on all sorts of level in the pursuit of 'national progress' set by the agenda of a few tens of thousands of people. The populace isn't any more guilty than you and I are of the half a million deaths in Iraq. And I don't think those who are polluting are doing anything different than what the US did as we Manifest-Destiny'd our way through the country, reaping coal, oil, timber, tobacco, and cotton, without which our nation wouldn't have had the funding to progress into what we are (for better or worse..)
But it's not clear that the suicide rate is higher than the rest of the population.
> so frequently that managers placed a net down
That's a good thing. Restricting access to means and methods is a mainstream bit of suicide prevention. For tall buildings this means putting the telephone number for suicide prevention helplines around, and putting fences up, and installing nets if fences can't be put in place.
Of course, that's only the beginning, so if you're complaining that that's all they do then I agree, they need to do more.
But putting nets up is more than many places do. How many multistory car parks do you see that have easy access - no fencing, no netting?
Actually, in China it does go to the 99% or at least the 50% which is how many people have been moved from poverty to middle class through that industrial work that also caused pollution. The human benefits really have been staggering and could arguably outweigh the health costs of the pollution.
Do you have any links to some studies that have tried to weigh up the positives and negatives in modern China? Especially how the positives have not been equally shared.
I know it's an annoying question but there are a lot of millionaires in China however maybe the '0.1%' getting all the money in China is actually 0.2% rather than 50%
We're not destroying it. We're changing it. Whether that's bad for us, good for us or neutral for us is not a solved problem. The global warming issue is an issue because there's a risk it'll be bad for us. Nobody has any clear idea what will really happen. It might turn out neutral or good but we want to be careful just in case it turns out very bad.
"The Earth" isn't being killed. Human activity (emissions of CO2, toxic metals, persistent organic toxics and so on, and deforestation, soil depletion, etc) is changing evolutionary selection parameters in myriad ways for myriad lifeforms. That is indeed unprecedented for a single species.
However, it's happened before. For example, the emergence of photosynthesis profoundly altered the atmosphere. That brought extinction for most existing species (anaerobic bacteria). But it obviously set up the game for multicellular life.
Anyway, my point is that change is normal. Maybe we humans will drive ourselves extinct. But I rather doubt that. Most other species won't be so lucky, however.
So the total amount paid by DuPont was less than $100 million? Even with thousand of personal-injury cases pending this sounds like pocket change to a company with over $30 billions in revenues. How is this supposed to deter others?
This is worst that the situation with asbestos. My grand father died by a lung cancer, probably related to asbestos. He worked on a factory, many years, using it without any kind of protective suit. Far as I know, nearly all co-workes that he had, has been dying like flys this lasts decades.
Here's a great clip of Milton Friedman answering a question from a young Michael Moore about a similar issue, the exploding Ford Pinto debacle. The uploader put a childish title, but the video itself is good. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VdyKAIhLdNs
It's not a directly analogous situation, but it's easy to forget that there is a level of toxins that we prefer, over paying a lot more or not being able to have certain goods at all. Trying to deceive the public about the risks, however, is inexcusable.
>but it's easy to forget that there is a level of toxins that we prefer, over paying a lot more or not being able to have certain goods at all //
Profit motive is the part you've missed out there. Often we could have the goods, with less toxic effluent produced, at the same price but with less profit to the capital holders. So yes whilst the poor could forgo more "luxuries" it would in general be far easier for those who are richer to forgo relatively extreme luxuries. The greatest impact is probably made from the top end. I can refuse to buy Nestle products forever but it doesn't make a difference to Nestles terrible production and marketing practices at all - yet if one major shareholder takes the same stand then the ethics of the company can be changed rapidly.
In the UK we've seen some companies who appeared to be acting not only for profit taken over by larger international corporations that seem to seek nothing else - I'm thinking Cadbury taken over by Kraft - with [my perception being:] an immediate reduction in quality of produce, apparent manipulation of product weights (thinner bars of chocolate look the same size on the shelf; differently moulded bars have less chocolate but look the same size), apparent reduction in use of Fairtrade ingredients, increased prices. None of that needed to happen, Cadbury were profitable already. It's not just down to the consumer; Kraft have after all reduced consumer choice with their takeover.
In general if companies with poor ethics get more profit (eg by abusing the environment) then those companies can forceably takeover companies with better ethics.
A company that's willing to make a product for a 20% margin might not be willing to make that same product for a 5% margin. Would you put all of your savings in an account with 1% interest and zero-risk? The opportunity cost is important too. Also, remember that your pay as an employee depends on the success of the company, just as much as the dividends for the owners do. Not to mention that the owners include just about all of society, through mutual funds, pension funds, and retirement accounts. The more you raise burdens to business and profit, the poorer your society gets.
That's not to say we shouldn't regulate pollution, but we can't ignore the trade-offs involved. It's not just a matter of the rich taking less of a cut; that's not how it works.
>A company that's willing to make a product for a 20% margin might not be willing to make that same product for a 5% margin. //
Generally those doing the actual manufacture are probably perfectly happy to do it if they get the same wage. The share-holders perhaps won't want to invest, but then we're back to profit motive.
A company can in theory continue to pay all the employees and make zero profit, it can succeed in all it's goals except in paying out a large return for investors.
Even if, in theory, you can have a static society by forcing everyone to keep doing what they're currently doing--which you can't, because many peoples' business is providing services to new or closing businesses, and any unexpected events will cause cascading effects that your static society can't accommodate--I don't see how that's at all desirable or relevant to real economic issues.
And of course the profit motive is central. It's the whole reason why anyone makes products in the first place.
There are a lot of things in this world that we have because somewhere a big sacrifice is being made. This case with DuPont is one of many, where chemical companies have taken the liberty to sacrifice something they don't have to right to, so that they can profit but also so things can be made. So many of the products we use everyday are most likely tainted in hidden scandals. Just google what Unilever has been doing in India with mercury. We have to make these companies accountable and stop using there products until better methods to produce it are developed. Its equivalent to me saying "Hey give up oil, it damages everything."
What if instead DuPont followed proper disposal practices like recommended by the supplier of the chemical?
> Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. DuPont’s own instructions specified that it was not to be flushed into surface water or sewers.
There's nothing noble here, just a company being greedy. We could still have those things you are referring to but without the costs to the public.
3M also had the wherewithal to stop making the chemical when the effects became official, so DuPont went out and started making it themselves. Nice work, DuPont.
That's because VW explicitly bypassed regulations that the government is allowed to place on vehicle emissions. How we got to a place where chemical regulations are near impossible to create and enforce is the maddening part.
What I found interesting with this article is the payout from the class action suit. The lawyers received $21.7 million dollars, while 70,000 plaintiffs all received $400 a piece. 70,000 * 400 is 28 million dollars. So out of approximately $50 million dollars, the lawyers kept over 40% and split the rest 70,000 ways resulting in each plaintiff getting just a little over a week's worth of work at minimum wage.
Corporations are notional entities, granted rights by a government. The government owes them little in the way of human rights, so how is it so difficult for a government to impose sanctions on a misbehaving corporation?
The US is in poor company as a country that has a death penalty for humans, where is the list of corporate offences that justify a dissolution of this notional entity? Only Bankruptcy?
The US sanctions corporations all the time, by levying fines and imposing restrictions. Dissolving DuPont would mean firing 60,000 people - most of whom did nothing wrong - as well as screwing every manufacturer which relies on a DuPont product, most of which are safe when relevant handling guidelines are followed. DuPont makes a huge number of things; from Wikipedia, it's the inventor of "Vespel, neoprene, nylon, Corian, Teflon, Mylar, Kevlar, Zemdrain, M5 fiber, Nomex, Tyvek, Sorona and Lycra", and I'm sure a ton of other stuff.
But dissolving it and sacrificing those jobs will help millions of lives well into the future. USA is familiar with this approach, why not do it? Like drop A-bomb on a city full of innocent people as justification to end the war or kill a 100 people for 1 terrorist.
I didn't mean to suggest calling for their dissolution, apologies; but the possibility of it should be a factor in the risk-management and risk/reward decisions the executives make.
I do think that there should be a "death penalty" for corporations. Back in the day, before the railroads etc bought off the Supreme Court, incorporation required demonstration of public benefit. Violation of corporate charter was grounds for dissolution.
The lawyer sounds incredibly and understandably frustrated with the situation:
"The thought that DuPont could get away with this for this long," Bilott says, his tone landing halfway between wonder and rage, "that they could keep making a profit off it, then get the agreement of the governmental agencies to slowly phase it out, only to replace it with an alternative with unknown human effects — we told the agencies about this in 2001, and they’ve essentially done nothing."
A better title would be: "Through effective legal strategy, DuPont delays outlays for pollution effects"