Hacker News Reader

Comment by doitLP | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not PFAS. It is extreme regulatory capture that got us to the this point. Even if we ban PFAS tomorrow, there are other alternatives that will be used and another 2 decades of lies and cover ups before we find out what harm those chemicals have.

Example: look at what happened when BPAs harms became known. Manufacturers switched to using any of the other 40 chemicals in the same bisphenol family (BPS, etc) many of which had even worse safety profiles, while proudly proclaiming their products were "BPA free".

We need to flip the approval process on its head -- from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe". The tally of harm to all life caused by these chemicals is on a massive scale that any mass murderer would be proud of.

View on HN

> Example: look at what happened when BPAs harms became known. Manufacturers switched to using any of the other 40 chemicals in the same bisphenol family (BPS, etc) many of which had even worse safety profiles, while proudly proclaiming their products were "BPA free".

It's worse than that. I remember when some 10 years ago Johnson&Johnson baby bottles were banned in one market, they were still available in others, and the FAQ on their website said they do this because they don't believe BPA is harmful. It is only after the total ban in 2012 that they stopped doing this.

Except that most evidence support the safety of BPA...

> from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe"

That’s about how the EU does it.

How can you prove anything safe without data on its use? Isn't that sort of a chicken and egg problem?

Should the data be collected without consent by exposing the public to it for decades or provided by clinical trials funded by the company that wants to bring it to market?

You are asking for the impossible. It can be impossible to tell with things that only have no - to mild effects. Proving a negative ("this is not dangerous") is hard :)

> It can be impossible to tell with things that only have no - to mild effects.

If any effects are unmeasurable with standard clinical trial practices, then it's safe. People care about things that actually are harmful.

> Proving a negative ("this is not dangerous") is hard :)

Which is why I never asked for it. Safety standards are always phrased positively. OSHA doesn't say "workplaces must not be dangerous", they say "wear a hard hat, the employer shall do ___, employees must not be forced to do ___". It's very easy to regulate that "new compounds must be shown not to affect human hormone levels at X concentration, must be shown not to be carcinogenic in Y model of cancer" etc.

Even still, PFAS started being used in the 50s. If it took us this long to figure out there is something dangerous about it, chances are a small study would not have found anything either. We’ve had lots of time and a huge N.

You collect data on a smaller scale, like clinical trials do for medications. There's a big range between "no data" and "we've enrolled eight billion humans in an uncontrolled trial".

Which isn't without issues of its own of course, for example the EU is notoriously backwards on the issue of genetically modified crops which may turn out to be a vital lifeline if climate change causes agricultural collapse. Another example I can think of off the top of my head is the atrociously bad legislation to what was then the new technology of vaping, it came in pre-Brexit just when I was considering quitting smoking (which I eventually managed and never could have done without a vape) and it was so poorly thought out I'm convinced the tobacco industry had a hand in drafting it!

The precautionary principle has its merits, but I think it's often cargo-culted and its limitations not well articulated. In cases such as GM crops where the stakes may within a human lifetime be "devestating famine" versus "less famine", or cases like vaping where although the harm is unknown it's certainly less than what it's replacing (vaping is uncontroversially less harmful than smoking) the precautionary principle actually has a harmful effect in itself.

Sure, banning GMO's outright would be a huge problem, but is it so awful that they be tested first?

I don't know if they test for this, but GMOs do run the risk of become invasive or destructive species which could potentially tilt things towards the "devastating famine" side of the equation.

I don't think the ecological concern is what most people worry about when they think GMOs, and I'm not of the mind that GMOs = Bad, but I think we owe it to ourselves to study the ecological impact of GMOs we plan to grow widely.

I think what the argument comes down to is how much risk we're willing to tolerate as a society. There's definitely a middle ground to be had between an under-cautious world where things like leaded petrol and thalidomide are on the market causing immense human suffering, and an overly cautious world where progress is suffocated by the glacially slow wheels of bureaucracy and endless spurious "safety" objections by lobbyists attempting to kill their competition in its crib.

Having said that, the EU is a bit of a unique specimen when it comes to things like this. I'm perhaps being a little unfair to the precautionary principle per se when I suppose it's more the EU's implementation of it that I'm criticising. I don't want this to come across as an anti-EU polemic either, there's obviously pros and cons here and I realise the EU is very much in a class by itself when it comes to political polities which make comparisons quite difficult. My own biases are probably at play here too, for various reasons I'd say my risk tolerance is probably higher than most.

I think that's fair criticism.

I've enough friends who work for the Canadian government or university administration to know that there is a coveted and illusive middle ground where vital regulation doesn't grind all it touches to a hapless stand-still.

Hot take: I think the HN software dev crowd might not be the worst equipped to help towards addressing these sorts of problem. From the horror stories I hear, disciplined approaches to tooling could solve a class of problems that appear to be pervasive.

On one hand, the multiple levels of bureaucratic red tape and regulatory approval keeps a lot of technology from progressing onto the market and into people's lives at the rate it could otherwise.

On the other hand, the multiple levels of bureaucratic red tape and regulatory approval keeps a lot of technology from progressing onto the market and into people's lives at the rate it could otherwise.

> GMOs do run the risk of become invasive or destructive species

Crop plants don't run the risk to become invasive or destructive species. They are bred to be easily digestible food sources, which the exact opposite of the strategy for surviving in the wild.

That's true and a relief, but they're also bred to be resistant to certain insecticides and to be robust.

I guess my point is that we don't always get what we think we're getting when it comes to GMOs/selection: when farmers selected for Red Delicious apples that were entirely red, they also selected out the gene that made them palatable. Surely they wouldn't have done what they had if they knew we'd be left with the mealy mess Red Delicious apples are today.

We hope we'll get edible plants that also don't do well in the wild, but there's a lot of room for error and testing is warranted in my not-an-expert opinion (I've a degree in Biochemistry, not Ecology or Agriculture).

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/the-evil-...

We're still decades from a potential global agricultural collapse caused by climate change, there's plenty of time to study effects of GMO crops on environment and human health.

Decades is a short time on a planetary scale, at risk of sounding alarmist I really do believe we should be hoping for the best but preparing for the worst when it comes to climate change. If there was ever a time for action it was fifty years ago, but now is better than further delay.

Part of the issue with GM crops is the corporations involved, and how to operate them ethically under capitalism. The EU has a much stronger stance against capitalism run amok, than the US' does, so even if you do trust the science, the science doesn't operate in a vacuum. The EU understands this.

This is my main gripe with GMO those days. With GMO, the farmers effectively buy a one-year _license_ for a seed (SaaS-like) which can't be used in next years. Also there were stories of farmers going broke due to neighbors' GMO crops taking over their fields, and being sued for license breach.

We must find a way to bound the corporate greed with a good regulatory framework because GMO sooner or later might become inevitable.

> the EU is notoriously backwards on the issue of genetically modified crops

The EU has more efficient agriculture by area compared to the US. Part of it by necessity of course. There are problems with pesticides that could be solved with GMO in some circumstances.

But the same principle applies: It isn't stricly necessariy to employ GMO, especially not for yield (we don't have any yield problems anyway). The problems of agriculture today are economic in nature and there still could be negative consequences if GMO strains are spread in nature.

So I don't see anything as backwards really. There just isn't a problem that requires GMO currently. I think saying GMO will be vital instrument against climate change is ridiculous to be honest. Maybe if plants could be modified to use less water?

No, that’s not how the EU does it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfluorex

A drug that was highly suspected of killing several hundred to several thousand people stayed on the market for decades.

A similar drug with similar risks was pulled from the US market 24 years earlier.

Would you say Benflourex is an outlier or the norm regarding the EUs stance?

If you think about REACH I heard it's not what it does (although it sounds like it does). The lobbies were there...

>We need to flip the approval process on its head -- from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe". The tally of harm to all life caused by these chemicals is on a massive scale that any mass murderer would be proud of.

That isn't always practically feasible and its a really tough problem to solve. Consider all the ways a compound released into the environment can break down and how long it might take for any exposure or even low levels of exposure might take to have any adverse health affects. The type of evidence you'd need to gather to demonstrate any compound is fully safe with that bar would make it nearly impossible to declare anything safe.

Microplastics, PFAS, and other compounds with potential long-acting health impacts are very hard to predict far in advance. Strong evidence against any adverse health effects would take considerable effort to gather while in the mean time they would offer massive clear benefits and solve so many problems. Plastics have massively reduced costs in almost every industry and have become almost irreplaceable in some applications such as medical equipment (think packaging for syringes, surgical tools, or anything that requires contamination control). Yet how they break down into microplastics in the environment and then eventually bioaccumulate in our tissues through the food chain is something that would've been extremely hard to predict at the onset of their creation. Even now we don't know if they're necessarily harmful.

> Even now we don’t know if they’re necessarily harmful.

Micro-plastics are definitely harmful, e.g. they’ve been associated with lower fertility [1,2]. We’re actively engineering our own extinction.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7967748/ [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/28/shanna-swan-...

Associated with sure, but at what exposure levels? Can we expect all microplastics to have this affect? What if the lower fertility rates are tolerable compared to the benefits of plastic use overall?

From your first source: >Data are still preliminary but suggest that ingested MPs bio-accumulate in mammalian tissue, including the testis, with outcomes on semen quality in rodents, as a consequence of inflammatory state and oxidative stress damage.

>The mechanisms decreasing fertility rate during the lifespan are still poorly understood.

>Taken together, although studies in mammals are still limited, preliminary observations point out a possible risk of MPs for male fertility.

The evidence is still "preliminary" and data "suggests" some outcomes but nothing is close to definitive. There are lots of confounding factors that can cause lower fertility that are explicitly noted in the that source. For example they even suggest that the microplastics themselves might not be causing harm, but rather that they act as "sponges" or vehicles for concentrating other pollutants that are actually decreasing fertility.

>>We need to flip the approval process on its head -- from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe".

Totally agree in principle.

There is one fly in the ointment - it is impossible to prove a negative, such as "X does not exist" or "there is no possible harm from this to any person ever" (water would not meet that standard).

So, this needs to be implemented in such a way as to not completely halt progress.

Should be straightforward to require testing to reasonable standards levels of biological harm to humans and ecology, persistence/degradability, etc. the levels need to be set by NEITHER the industry NOR the perfectionist eco-activists. Finding such a panel will be tricky.

What is progress?

I consider progress to be getting closer to technology that gets us out of the unsustainable ecological/biosystems hole which we have dug for ourselves.

We are not going to put the technological genie back in the bottle, short of eliminating 98+% of all humans and reverting back to hunter-gatherer tribes.

The only solution is to go through this dirty technology cycle and build and implement clean sustainable technologies that allow us to live with something resembling current populations without destroying the climate system, breaking the food web, or poisoning ourselves (& everything else).

So, yes, the only thing worse than halting all progress now would be to do it a decade age before solar, wind, etc. became viable, but we need a lot more progress, i.e., better performance for lower costs - both ecological & economical - for most of our technologies, and eliminating those destructive technologies. That would be progress.

What's your definition?

It's not entirely regulatory capture. Progress in science requires the ability to understand and accept that new information can arrive that invalidates prior decisions. In the political sphere, this is known as a "flip-flop" and is sadly considered to be a poor trait by a good chunk of the public. So long as governments represent the public, and a cross section of the general public thinks that flip-flopping is a bad thing, I don't think it's possible to have decisions driven by the best available science.

Side note: even scientists get things wrong. Businesses thrive on certainty, so some level of damping of changes in regulatory direction is required. Finding the right balance is, however, not something humans have done as well as we need to just yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com