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Comment by entee | Hacker News Reader

Yes but what will those new solutions be? Will they be better? How will we know? Most likely scenario: they'll be replaced by some other chemical that on the surface may be better, but will be far less understood by virtue of being new. We may well find out years later that it was worse on a whole host of criteria, and may even be worse on the "don't kill the bees" criteria after larger scale/more research.

It's easy to assume banning the thing we don't like will yield better outcomes but that's not necessarily the case. If we want to get rid of chemical risk, we'll have to get rid of chemicals. If we do that, we'll have to seriously re-evaluate our agricultural systems and be likely willing to accept higher prices.

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In the past we have generally managed to find safer alternatives for most substances.

CFCs, lead solders, DDT, leaded gasoline, radium paints, mercury lamps, cadmium paints, microplastics in cosmetics, ...

Sure, the first iteration of regulation of may have unintended consequences, but they are often smaller than the original issue and can be compensated for with another iteration. The process takes many years, but on average things are improving.

It's true but incomplete. For example:

DDT - May not have been anywhere near as bad as first thought, and replaced in part by these compounds, which themselves are being banned now. Also there's some argument that extensive use of DDT was key to ridding the US of malaria, we banned it worldwide, taking out one of the weapons in mosquito control. One could make an argument that banning DDT has killed people b/c increased incidence of malaria. It's hotly debated, but it's not a bonkers view, and most of those deaths would be in the 3rd world.

Cadmium Paints - Yes and no, artists still say it's not the same, and the replacements in industrial scale aren't always as good on a variety of fronts (https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-quest-for-billion-do...). Also not sure they're as affordable.

CFCs (then some HCFCS) - Good thing to ban without a doubt, but replacements are more expensive. The ACs made with the new gasses are more expensive, which has a real human cost: (https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/business/23cool.html)

I'm not making an argument for or against this particular ban or any of the bans above. I am making an argument that these bans are not without costs, and will almost certainly come with trade-offs. Some of those trade-offs will be overcome, others are much harder, and the short run will likely have some pain in the form of higher prices.

Lets say for example we got rid of all pesticides/herbicides. Could we generate enough food to feed the world? How much more expensive would staples like rice and wheat become? How much more expensive would high-nutrition fruits and veggies become? It's possible that someday get over it, but it's not good to minimize the practical drawbacks.

I think we've gotten to a point as a society where _any_ risk of something bad is too much risk, so we ban anything that presents risk. But we're left with things where either the risk is unknown, or that are bad in other ways. The average popular discussion of environmental/health risks often neglects to ask, "what might be an acceptable risk", I think sometimes the risk is worth it.

What's the source on DDT not being as bad as first thought? You can't just mention that in passing as an argument if it's not true.

(And I don't mean just to humans; that's only a small part of why it was banned.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/what-the-world-n...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-rachel-carson-cost-million...

From the second article: However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place.

There is some recent evidence of connection to breast cancer:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524999/

And the WHO has a few concerns:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-cancer-insecticide...

CDC Has a balanced view (though article is old): https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/clusters/fallon/ddtfaq.htm

That said the studies in question ask about very high usage, it's likely that more controlled sprays would be less damaging. That's the point I'm making, using chemicals responsibly can mitigate overall risk while maintaining their benefits. You don't have spray it in buckets everywhere (the procedure during the study period above) to do a good job of mosquito control. Plus you may save far more lives due to less malaria.

EDIT: In re. non-humans, I'm less familiar with that, but I'm an unabashed species-ist, I care that more humans live. If that has some environmental harm, then lets mitigate or try to reduce harm, but humans come first.

That does not make sense about the species-ist part because damage or loss to one particular species has all sorts of context-specific ripple effects to everything else.

One would need to assess what if any damage the decrease or extinction of a particular species would cause to the ecology as a whole and the other life forms in it, humans included.

"DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place."

Thats missleading, because we don't really use pesticices against mosquitos anymore.

Main "pesticide" today is a living bacteria which targets Mosquitos directly and apparently with not much side-effects to the nature besides reducing mosquitos and totally non-toxic to mammals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis

Not sure where you got the idea we don’t spray pesticides for mosquitoes anymore. There are large vector control districts all over the country that do exactly that. You may be interested in the NPIC page.

http://npic.orst.edu/pest/mosquito/mosqcides.html

The real problem with the replacement refrigerants is their reduced efficiency, leading to more energy use. Though we should just use propane since it doesn't harm ozone, has lower GWP, costs less, and has much higher efficiency.

Though we should just use propane since it doesn't harm ozone, has lower GWP, costs less, and has much higher efficiency.

...and is also explosively flammable. Remember that CFCs replaced early refrigerants which were flammable and/or toxic. This memorable incident may be attributed to using a flammable refrigerant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoanut_Grove_fire

Personally, I'm against an absolutist ban on CFCs, since it was mainly their mass release into the atmosphere that caused problems, and they had great advantages in closed-system uses. This may surprise a lot of HN readers, but I have the same belief about PCBs[1] and chrysotile (white asbestos)[2] --- "the dose makes the poison". Literally everything is harmful to something in some way, so the right thing to do is to manage use such that we can maximise the benefit:risk ratio, instead of the frenzied "ban everything" attitude that seems far too pervasive today.

[1] https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/controversial-science-envi...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581056/

We don't live in world where industry can control itself properly for this be put into practice.

That was fixed with driver/drive combinations that replaced electric motors coupled with on/off thermostat switches.

Anyway, I still wonder why ammonia fell into disuse as a refrigerent.

It's still in use in silent (Einstein) refrigerator units.

One reason might be that we had to evacuate our office when our small refrigerator in the pentry popped and vented all ammonia. It took a while to get sorted, and it can't have been much in that small unit.

Ammonia is still in use in large-scale refrigeration, indoor ice rinks and food storage being the major applications. The main reason it's not used in domestic refrigeration is the toxicity, although it's still common in absorption refrigerators.

Simple answer is yes we just become vegetarians and cattle land becomes crop land.

Stop taking about DDT. I had my own expirience when I went to Madagascar. Took with me ddt based insecticide (whatever it takes to avoid malaria) and got rashes all over my hands due to it.

Isn't there an explicit exception in the DDT ban for anti-malaria applications?

The difference is the precautionary principle, applied in the EU.

You can read up here:

https://ensia.com/features/banned-in-europe-safe-in-the-u-s/

The quintessential difference is explained in this qutein this quote:

"A key element of the European Union’s chemicals management and environmental protection policies — and one that clearly distinguishes the EU’s approach from that of the U.S. federal government — is what’s called the precautionary principle.

This principle, in the words of the European Commission, “aims at ensuring a higher level of environmental protection through preventative” decision-making. In other words, it says that when there is substantial, credible evidence of danger to human or environmental health, protective action should be taken despite continuing scientific uncertainty.

In contrast, the U.S. federal government’s approach to chemicals management sets a very high bar for the proof of harm that must be demonstrated before regulatory action is taken."

“We shouldn’t do anything because it might not be the right solution” has is not a productive outlook.

I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying we should be careful to consider the trade-offs. There's a lot of hysteria around "chemicals" in the world, and blanket bans are the result.

Similar hysteria has killed maybe the best hope we have for carbon-free baseline power load (nuclear power) because people were afraid of radiation. Coal power plants kill more people per year than all nuclear accidents to date ever will (http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/26/more-deaths-from-coal-poll...).

We shouldn't do anything as a knee-jerk reaction against things that look bad because there are charismatic harms (bees maybe dying), without considering the larger problems (humans having more expensive food, or in the case of DDT, dying of diseases).

Nuclear also bacame more expensive because of very tight over regulation that also applies to research. We are stuck with 70 year old reactor designs now of which PWRs and PHWRs are so far the safest, but we should really move on with research into MSRs and other fast reactors which allow recycling of nuclear waste.

While this is a reasonable point to consider, do you have any evidence that is actually happening here?

If we have good evidence that a critical element of our environment is being damaged by pesticides with certain characteristics, it seems like the opposite of prudence to wait on fixing it.

> If we want to get rid of chemical risk, we'll have to get rid of chemicals

Ah, you've seen the EU chemicals directive. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/reach/reach_en.htm

Getting rid of chemicals? Umm, everything is a chemical. What does that even mean?

Just like everything is a carcinogen. Damn near everything has to carry a warning that it contains a chemical known to be a cause cancer. Most infamously lately, Starbucks coffee.

Thanks California!

> Just like everything is a carcinogen

That's not true (nor equivalent transitively). What does this have to do with your derangements about California and Starbucks?

We ban accounts for personal attack, so please don't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone may be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Have we collectively forgotten about this mess already?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-lawsuit-coffee...

I like to substitute "petroleum distillates" when people say "chemicals".

That's exactly the point I'm trying to make (though a bit tongue in cheek). People usually don't like "chemicals" but don't understand what that means. Here I'm making a reference to the "petroleum/industrially derived chemicals" (admittedly also an imperfect category) as a commenter below suggests.

The solution to this is to ban by default, and put the onus on the company developing the solution to prove it is safe. There are many drawbacks to this, BUT it does address the root cause of your concern.

Not really, that's damn near impossible. There's almost no way to prove an exhaustive negative, and to get close is insanely expensive. As an admittedly imperfect analogy, take a look at how expensive it is to get a drug to market (currently ~$2.5B [1]) in large part because you have to prove so much about how it works and how little harm it causes.

BTW Most of these compounds ARE tested for safety, just in a far more limited way. Proving things never cause harm is an entirely different bar.

You forgot [1].

sorry, [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-to-develop-n...

I don't think it's impossible if the standard for "do no harm" was specified very rigorously.

Also I'd be interested to see if it's possible to make it an adversarial process, similar to how corporations define risks to shareholders. They can specify whatever risks they feel are correct, but if something happens that they didn't account for in their risks, they are liable for large compensation penalties to shareholders. Thus companies are incentivized to report every possible and conceivable risk to their business. Now to bring it back to the drugs example, have corporations specify on their own what "do no harm" looks like. And if it turns out the drug does impact something they never specify, have a penalty proportional to their revenue or market cap applied.

This reminds me of what happened with BPA. The chemical companies use to replace BPA is at least sometimes worse than BPA. But no one seems to care.

which is what?

May not be worse, but by tweaking a constituent group here or there, you can get similar molecules to BPA. Eg. BPF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_F

I care. And I think it's solvable, once we raise the burden of proof.

As it stands, male sperm rates have declined by over 50% in the last 30 years, it's only a matter of time until people switch to a more cautious attitude.

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