Silicon Valley is one of the most polluted places in the country | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley is one of the most polluted places in the country

theatlantic.com

318 pointsnsnick61 comments

Article does not even mention the Kaiser Permanente cement plant which has a dedicated train line bringing in coal for burning, is one of the largest sources of mercury pollution in California, and is perched right over Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Los Altos, and very close to Palo Alto and San Jose, bathing them in a haze of emissions.

All the highly educated and well connected residents, rich and powerful corporations, and even local governments can't do anything about it, because it is grandfathered in by federal law. It doesn't even appear on many lists of top polluters because many people who compile such lists only include power plants, and it is not a power plant.

It's a real world counterexample for people who say we can just turn off the switch of things we don't like (AI being the usual such thing). Well, good luck with that, if there are laws saying you can't... which there will be.

This plant:

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

Which is not owned by Kaiser Permanente?

It was founded by Henry Kaiser and named Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant after the Permanente Creek which flowed past it. It has since changed names. Kaiser Permanente the healthcare organization was named after the same creek. So calling it the Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant is outdated, but it's not saying that the healthcare organization owns it.

Yes! The KP HMO has history with but is not owned by the Kaiser industrial companies. It was essentially setup by Sidney Garfield at the behest of Henry Kaiser and the help of FDR to treat workers at the Kaiser shipyards, hence the name. It's a not for profit organization completely distinct from other Kaiser organizations. Funny enough I'm pretty sure at $79 billion yearly, it grosses more than it's industrial namesakes.

https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/our-story/our-history/how...

That is a different facility, but it is nearby.

This is still the best essay I have read on the topic: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-...

I've left Silicon Valley since I read it. And having read it, I hope to never move back.

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Works pretty good in reader view.

This is horribly frightening. What can I do at home to detect (or even continuously monitor) the presence of Superfund chemicals?

You can't, reliably. The entire geographical area is contaminated, so you should worry about living there and not just about your home. Now they are saying Google offices were breached and documenting one specific (but very prominent, easy to cover) instance, imagine what's going on in general in the background.

I moved to Europe from SF bay area years ago, coinciding with the birth of my son, and this was one of the factors.

There's a pretty good map here:

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/brchannel/Map-The-Chemical-Legacy...

TCE has a distinctive smell - sweet, like cookie dough or donuts. You'll know if you're in an area contaminated by it - I've smelled it at the Google Quad campus and some of the residential areas around it. (The area around Evandale is particularly bad, I've smelled it just driving through some of the residential streets there.) Some of the other chemicals used in semicoductor manufacture are odorless, though.

Most of the contamination is in industrial or office park zones, so I'd be more worried about your workplace than your home, and many of the spills are plain old gasoline (from service stations) which you can have anywhere.

Slightly OT: Meanwhile in Hamburg, Germany, at the construction site of the eastern Hafencity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafencity https://osm.org/go/0HoGuvP~t--?m=

they inject something into the compacted sand of the former quays/piers which makes you think you are getting high. At least it smells like electrical insulating paint i had to work with a long time ago. Open the drum and hold your breath, or get dizzy.

Was a few weeks ago, in the middle of the night while i was on S/Nightseeing tour. Two large tractors with large liquid trailers which had centipede-like appendages on each side, maybe 10 to 12 "legs" and fully automated. Stop, ram the legs into the ground and loudly squirt a minute or so, move on, repeat. The whole area stank! Never seen or heard of something like this before. Apparently it's called Geo Injection to stabilize the ground, or impregnate against water. Nothing about this in the local media at all.

I'm suspicious. Why in the middle of the night at 2 to 3 AM?

A few days ago i've been on tour again, also during the night, maybe 7km/4.35miles downstream while the Elbe was at low tide. Same intense smell, though no construction site in sight.

Would be awesome if there was an update there!

A related example from last year, near Page Mill Road: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/03/01/stanford-sues...

And an entertaining rant by a UC Berkeley Health Physicist, on D&D (Decontamination & Demolition): http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2019/05/a-stream-of-consciousne...

Really interesting links, the second one probably should also be posted as a separate HN post.

FYI, the location near Page Mill Road is where Facebook used to have their headquarters. Stanford did took various remediation measures when they converted the property into faculty housing, but IDK if the FB buildings were adequately protected/ventilated. My understanding is that the vapors are only harmful if they get into buildings and are not adequately ventilated. Stanford put vapor guards under each home they built, among other things.

Fun fact: Facebook's old headquarters (between Page Mill Rd and California Ave) was located on top of a superfund site. After FB moved to Menlo Park, Stanford built a faculty housing development there. They claim that they have done adequate retrofitting so that it poses no risk to residents, but I know some professors in the sciences who decided against living there after reading the environmental disclosures.

Also, if Stanford did this retrofitting, that implies that maybe FB did not do enough when they were there?

The housing disclosures have more info on the contamination and retrofitting: https://universityterrace.stanford.edu/disclosures

One of the worst was right across 10th St. from Solar4America Ice (formerly the San Jose Ice Center, home training facility of the Sharks).

I wonder how many such Superfund sites we already have in mainland China (I mean from a factual standpoint, not from a government reporting standpoint). The Chinese government is so out of control over the situation that, nominally, environmental pollution can be punished with death.

It doesn’t make sense. Anything can be punished by death in China, and laws are only selectively enforced anyways, so death penalty with the excuse of pollution would probably only occur for deeper political reasons.

China doesn’t really have superfund sites, in that they don’t have a specific category for expensive cleanup projects.

I meant: how many sites are already de facto so polluted that they require deep cleanup. May be decades before we find out.

To be more realistic, you'll never find out.

I'd challenge anyone who thinks we know all of them in the USA.

It doesn't even take the corruption that a big employer in a small town automatically creates to have a 'hidden' superfund site.

It only takes the lack of dedicated professionals testing everything all the time. Tracking sources and types of pollution is _not only_ difficult, highly technical work that requires a lot of infrastructure- but it also _requires its own R&D to keep up with new industrial chemicals_. This means it's fiercely expensive, manpower-limited, and that it takes a long, long time.

What country is going to dedicate that amount of resources to find problems that'll cost even more money to clean up (or possibly can't be cleaned up at all)? Maybe Norway. Maybe.

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

This always gives me pause, plenty don't have any known cause.

> May be decades before we find out.

You mean just like in the US?

Except now we know the consequences and have the experience and moreover have alternatives (even in simple management, mitigation terms) which might not existed five decades ago.

Yup. I mean London was covered in smog, just like Beijing is now. Not a big leap to expect a replay to some degree.

I'm sure the residents of Santa Clara and the workers in various campuses will rest more easily knowing that actually, there are much more polluted places globally.

Its not a competition. The article is saying SV is badly polluted. Pointing out that China might be worse just means there's another problem; that's redundant information in the context of talking about SV.

That's not the point? I'm just saying there's probably a whole lot of those in China. This is a problem to the health of many people.

> Its not a competition.

No one said it was, and nothing said detracts from SV. I think it's an interesting question I wouldn't have otherwise thought about. Fifty years from now will China be talking about the same environmental issues we're talking about now? Will it be better or worse?

China is also building hundreds of more coal plants in other countries and have plans to build more in their country.

I find it deeply ironic how everybody talks about what the US has to do to stop climate change; while China just goes about its business making the situation exponentially worse without anybody really caring.

Can't speak for "everyone" but here's my 2 cents on what you're describing.

As an American, my first thought it when it comes to most issues tends to be "what can we, America, do to make things better." This leads me to vote a certain way, consume a certain way, and live a certain way. I understand that out countries are doing their own things and having their own problems, but there's fewer mechanisms in place for the average person outside that nation to affect change (and depending on the structure of the government, there might not even be that much for people IN the nation to do).

I care that China has bad aspects of how their government works. But the low hanging fruit for me is to try and pressure the people in my neighborhood (either literally or metaphorically) towards better decisions. "Change start at home" and all that.

>But the low hanging fruit for me is to try and pressure the people in my neighborhood (either literally or metaphorically) towards better decisions.

The problem is that the low hanging fruit in America has been picked 30+ years ago. The things Americans can do to meaningfully impact climate change involve deep systemic changes - eating less meat, use of plastics, use of cars, general consumerism, etc. The impact of changing those would be big, but so is the level of effort involved.

I think you're misunderstanding what I meant by "low hanging fruit".

It's easier for me to affect my Town, State, and US political action than it is to influence Chinese policy. I can vote for green policy candidates who can institute actual change in the US. I have no ability to do that in the US.

Nobody remembers the Commodore Semiconductor Group? Commodore was a pioneer in personal computing, semiconductor and environmental accidents. In 1974, there was a massive leak of the 250-gallon underground concrete storage tank full of TCE, and today the site is still monitored by the EPA. Bill Herd, the chief engineering of Commodore 128, mentioned in his interview that the day he went to work, he didn't know the tank leaked and parked at the wrong side of the company, and his car was completely contaminated.

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...

Oh no, I worked in two different offices located on superfund sites. Probably a third too but I haven’t found supporting evidence yet.

So, a story about SV being polluted has 156 points right now, and sits nicely in the middle of the front page. It's an important story, apparently.

Meanwhile, Nature's story about climate change (The hard truths of climate change — by the numbers) got flagged and disappeared quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042101

There is no better way to show what "tech bubble" means.

That's a particularly uncharitable interpretation.

It's much more likely is that everyone's well aware of climate change (I'm sure I've read many hundreds of articles over my lifetime), but this is the first many people have heard of SV pollution (it certainly is for me).

This would explain one post rising quickly while another fades. When people are actively flagging, however, that's an entirely different, much more insidious action.

> much more insidious action

I'm missing something.

What exactly is the agenda?

Climate Change Burnout. I don’t flag articles on CC but I’ve been tempted to. There’s a new one every two days and they all say basically the same thing. Regardless of one’s political views, the onslaught of constant alarm can be exhausting. The people who don’t think it’s a problem are not going to be convinced by the 215th news article published this year.

There is no agenda, but people absolutely use the flagging feature for selfish reasons, e.g. “Dammit, I’m so tired of reading about this topic!” When in reality, it is intended for marking content that breaks the site guidelines.

Well, which do you think is more important/pressing right now?

The #2 story on the front page right now is “A photo survey of the blackboards of mathematicians.”

Maybe front page rank isn’t about how important or pressing the story is?

1) Hacker News ranking isn't about "what is more important/pressing right now" to a global audience. This is about what's interesting for the hacker audience at this moment.

2) It's generally frowned upon to comment about "why isn't this story getting more upvotes", etc. In other words, it's not adding value to the conversation, so please refrain from doing so and use the upvote/flagging features if you feel outraged something isn't getting the attention it deserves.

3) If you don't like something on the frontpage then don't upvote it. Simple.

4) I don't live in SV, but many people who are "Hackers" do. The article specifically targets tech companies who have offices in SV and are impacting the environment.

Can't believe that got flagged. Dang et al, are you able to see if there's some sort of flagging ring or similar going on? I get that political stories normally get flagged, but a Nature article is not that.

There are a large enough group of people who believe that climate change is political because some deniers have politicized science as if you can debate against science and fact.

I find this kind of behavior on HN both surprising and depressing. Do we really care more about SV pollution than about the entire planet?

I am honestly not sure if I want to continue to participate in this community.

I think you're making too big a deal of this. I would be really surprised if there's a flag ring going on considering the karma you need in order to be able to flag and articles about the environment are on the FP all the time.

Ironically it’s climate change advocates who have politicized science. The IPCC, whose reports are fundamental to climate change advocacy, is an intergovernmental panel. It is the epitome of politicized science. Judge whether or not this kind of politicized science is good or not, but in general I do agree that politicizing science is most likely a negative and ultimately a corruption of science.

Even ignoring the political aspects, we don't need six articles a day on HN about climate change. If nothing else, it's preaching to the choir. There's no news in most climate change articles, to say nothing of "Hacker" news.

If HN runs simply on what people consider politically important, it might as well shut down and just be a redirect to the Huffington Post or something. There is abundant evidence that online communities end up in certain strange attractors [1], and the dominant political narrative of the day is one of the strongest ones.

I didn't flag the particular article in question, but yes, I absolutely flag any article that can be replaced with little or no loss with $POPULAR_POLITICAL_NARRATIVE_IS_TRUE, regardless of which narrative it is, even the ones I more-or-less agree with. I doubt HN is anybody's sole source of news and it doesn't need to join the stampeding horde of other websites who publish that article 20 times a day.

[1]: A math term, not a term of judgment.

Everyone knows about climate change, that's not news. However there's a lot of denial about how bad rich areas like Silicon Valley and SF are today with pollution and population. The bubble is how the SV/tech community wants to change the world but has trouble maintaining its own backyard.

To be frank, there's hardly any convincing climate change science in the Nature story. It's mostly about activism, CO2 emissions with only some super high-level info of impact of greenhouse gases on people (without justifications or models given). It reads like a political story, not scientific one - I didn't know that nature is publishing such stuff.

Eh, I don't think "tech bubble" is appropriate to nail down the problems. Egotism and hubris, along with thinking being above the rest of society is the problem. And to be fair, it shows up here in HN too. There's a weird mentality of "Well I'm smart in computers and programming, that automatically makes me an expert in civil infrastructure, economic theory, social support programs, agriculture, etc". I mean, seriously, it's really weird and it's happening constantly. It's like a lot of this "revolutionary SV agriculture startups". They're bunk and retarded. They're just 1940s-1970s research projects without ever citing or learning from trails already blazed. They act like "No one has ever researched how to grow food, here I come to rescue with my power of programming and social media posts! Venture capital firms, I'm ready for money!" Not a single one realizes that a lot of large scale, efficient and affordable farming practices were pioneered by people like Norman Borlaug. But they "draw inspiration" from a random SV ceo. Just pisses me off.

Plus, "The people's voice matters. We must democratize everything... as long as they only agree with me."

Reality is, silicon valley is not really different from the old titans of industry. One difference, the old assholes were upfront "You need something, I hire people to make it, and I'm in it for the money." The valley, "I'm here for you. You giving me your money is the best way to make the world a better place through [insert disruptive product]. You'll be happy with a lighter wallet. We're going to save the world together."

I agree with your overall perception of SV as an outsider myself. There are very smart people doing big things alongside starry-eyed naive people doing silly things. Sometimes it's a blurry line between the two and sometimes I can't help but facepalm at some of the stories I hear coming out of SV...

Well, let's be honest about the "intelligent" part. Sure, there are some brilliant computer engineers out in SV. But would you say they're necessarily smart financial planners? The cost of living in a lot of parts of Cali in generally are ridiculous and some of the most expensive in the country. A lot of SV companies complain that there are not enough capable programmers in the area. Well, if a 50k-70k salary in other parts of the country gets you a decent sized house, a car, cheaper food and cheaper well... everything. While a 120k in SV gets you a studio apartment and reliant on public transpo... I mean, what makes more sense? God have mercy if you have kids.

So if you have a segment of engineers who believe living in SV is "smart" financially... do you really want them to make opinions on government spending? I'm not saying that "people not living in Cali" are instantly money smart. But, you don't quickly take financial advice from a friend that's gone bankrupt twice, is always in crippling debt due to overspending and throws money at ideas largely based on keywords.

I guess my long drawn out rant is just the problem where lots of folks consider SV "smart". Thus they're allowed to have an affecting opinion on things they're truly not "smart" about.

> The cost of living in a lot of parts of Cali in generally are ridiculous and some of the most expensive in the country.

A lot of these arguments could be made about New York, specifically Manhattan. There are people there that can genuinely afford it, and there are people that struggle financially because they want to be there (for whatever reason).

There are obviously lots of people in the Bay Area struggling to make ends meet, including some software engineers. But the reality is most talented people here are so well-paid it's not an issue. You're talking about $120k salaries, I'm talking about $100k signing bonuses. Of course the average engineer here isn't swimming in money, but there are plenty of people who make so much more money here that it's a wise financial decision to stay. Personally I ran the numbers and I put more money in my savings every year here than I would anywhere else.

I completely agree with the general sentiment that software engineers in particular suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect and I regularly have to explain to engineers that the world outside of software is not so neatly contained. But the notion that most software engineers here are not smart because they choose to live somewhere expensive is irrelevant if you aren't also talking about how much more money they make to live here.

Spot on. The amusing thing about farming is that the only thing that is hard is to do it at scale. You can make just about anything work at lab scale but as soon as you really end up having to feed a sizeable population of your product that's when all the nitty gritty little details start adding up to 'can't do'.

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