The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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"
Is there any other place or time that would be less bad? Going back through history:
- In the 20th century, factories were far dirtier than today; the gasoline was still full of lead; London had its infamous killer smogs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog); rivers routinely caught on fire from industrial waste (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River); etc.
- In the 19th century, all kinds of common products (especially medicines) were hideously toxic. Mercury was used to make hats, so people became "mad as a hatter" from heavy metal poisoning. Famous artists painted with arsenic paint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green). Abraham Lincoln's doctors gave him mercury poisoning (http://www3.uah.es/farmamol/The%20Pharmaceutical%20Century/C...). There's a history book called "The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work, & Play" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Arsenic-Century-Victorian-Poisoned...).
- 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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
[0] http://www.piercelab.caltech.edu/assets/papers/proeng02.pdf
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....
Just look at the wonders of methylmercury.
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.
Staggering. This is regulatory theater that makes the TSA version look like a pre-school play.
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.
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.
Thank you. A few good men, indeed.
(1) Of course you could argue that Joe can't tell the difference and is too bad off financially for it to matter anyway.
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?
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%
Some people are really dense and will continue to deny well into their graves.
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.
I hope that DuPont's get sued to the oblivion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And of course the profit motive is central. It's the whole reason why anyone makes products in the first place.
> 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.
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?