Hacker News Reader

Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful. Leaded gasoline, CFCs, microplastics, pesticides collapsing insect populations etc. And it can take decades to fully understand those impacts. When the stakes are literally, "all rainwater on the planet is unsafe", should we ask -- would society be better off if we were much more conservative about demonstrating the long-term safety of new substances before scaling up their use?

Also, I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this: Will literally the whole planet be able to pursue lawsuits against 3M and peers for making our rainwater 'unsafe'?

View on HN

> We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful.

You missed the problematic last step.

We take technical innovations to a societal scale, discover a really harmful effect, and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all about it.

It's expected that harms, especially through complex side-effects take time to emerge. We can't see the future, nor can we exhaustively test everything in advance.

The problem comes with the response. A certain amount of market inertia is to be expected. Recalling and replacing products is expensive.

But what is absolutely inexcusable, and ripe for immediate radical global action to address [1], is the disgraceful, blatantly criminal behaviour of large corporations who move to suppress science, discredit researchers, silence critics and bury bad news.

Many problems concerning at-scale blow-back turn out to have been known about decades in advance of their impact.

[1] https://goodmenproject.com/the-good-life/the-corporate-death...

EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2]

[2] https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/08/its-time-bring...

This is nonsense. We have solved a ton of environmental problems in my lifetime. When I was a kid, there were legitimate worries about the ozone layer -- we banned CFCs and now it's a non-issue. Acid rain is vastly mitigated. Before I was born, we cleaned up America's rivers. And we've dropped per capita carbon emissions in the US by about 40% so far from its high in the 70s.

It’s not that we haven’t solved some major environmental problems; it’s that we haven’t solved all of them. In the U.S. we are also in a political environment where one party absolutely does not care. Republicans have gone from creating the EPA under Nixon and using cap and trade under Reagan to now considering environmental mitigation a leftist plot to destroy America. Dropping per capita carbon consumption is not the relevant thing to look at. When it comes to pollution and environmental effects the total amount is what matters. If x tons of a chemical causes a problem then talking about per capita values is meaningless.

The other party puts forward a figleaf of caring to appease its climate-minded constituents, while actively doing the doing the dirty work in the interests of some of the largest polluters on this planet.

Sure. If the political center of the U.S. shifted leftward to what it was back in the 70s then maybe the left leaning party would push for more tangible policies.

In my mind, part of the problem is that both parties are pandering to a base with nonsensical policies. One party wants to do nothing because that is popular. The other party is apparently allergic to economically-based policies like cap-and-trade or a revenue neutral tax and instead wants to throw money at the problem. Neither approach is particularly effective.

(At least one side is willing to acknowledge that the problem exists. That’s worth something but maybe not very much.)

It's not the parties, it's the people. In Washington state some environmental groups fought against a revenue-neutral carbon reduction plan because it didn't give them a slush fund. A couple years later they got an initiative which involved teaching carbon and sending them the money -- surprise, voted down too. Been six years IIRC since we could have had a tax on carbon.

Democrats have proposed cap and trade for carbon and indeed supported this when it came to acid rain. I think your view about both parties pushing absurd positions on this topic is incorrect.

This one might be a tough nut to crack. The carbon-fluoride bonds present in these chemicals require much more energy to break than what is found in nature, e.g. as heat and sunlight. These chemicals simply do not degrade, and due to their surfactant properties, they are almost impossible to contain once spread to the environment.

We have no way of getting rid of these chemicals except possibly to spread more chemicals, which then would need to break apart only those specific molecules AND capture their fluoride ions in some inert matrix to prevent them from forming other compounds as well as directly affecting the environment and our bodies.

We’re pretty much SOL and the only thing we can do is STOP using fluoride chemicals permanently, which we can’t entirely do, because things like uranium enrichment are dependent on teflon.

We could ban halogens unless its impossible to substitute. PVC can be replaced with polyurethane or polyethylene. Hydrocarbon refrigerants instead of HCFCs or pentafluoroethane. If a tiny bit of teflon is needed for uranium enrichment, so be it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon#History "CFC known to be an issue in 1974." What followed was a slow walk of bans that is still progressing. And it was fought. "In 1986 DuPont, with new patents in hand, reversed its previous stance and publicly condemned CFCs." There's plenty of non-compliance with the bans: "In 2018 public attention was drawn to the issue, that at an unknown place in east Asia an estimated amount of 13,000 metric tons annually of CFCs have been produced since about 2012 in violation of the protocol."

So, I state that while CFCs are mostly banned right now. They're still an issue, and it took far too long to regulate. It is seriously not nonsense.

I was responding to a poster who said:

> and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all about it.

That's nonsense. There's a world of difference between "we do nothing about environmental problems," and "I think some particular action should've taken five less years go do," and when you retreat to that position it's a different point entirely.

As to whether it took "too long" to regulate CFCs, what's your measure for that? Is it just vibes? If we had started the process of banning CFCs five years earlier, what's your assertion for the harm mitigated compared to the factual?

The 'do bugger all about it' wasn't aimed at society. It was aimed at internal company reports. PFAS was known to be harmful by DuPoint but they kept making it. Nicotine and tobacco industry. Global warming and oil industry.

What I honestly don’t understand is what the individual employees of these companies think. I’d love to see a documentary with interviews of a wide swath of employees (different levels within the companies) and how they rationalized this aggregate behaviour. Do they not have children and grandchildren? Do they think they don’t breathe the same air and drink the same water?

Certainly some, probably low level employees, didn’t feel they had the luxury of questioning their company’s ethics and looking for work elsewhere, but what about all the more senior people who presumably sat in boardrooms and spun ways to continue pouring shit into the environment with reckless abandon? What am I missing?

> how they rationalized this aggregate behaviour.

Fictionalised, quite accurately perhaps, Michael Cristofer as Phillip Price and Bruce Altman playing Terry Colby in Sam Esmail's "Mr Robot" both do an outstanding job of capturing the shrugging banality of evil at genocidal scale. The feeling I got from that (Esmail is a first class writer) was of those inside accounts of the Nuremberg trials with Eichmann laughing

The banality of evil is that murdering a million people is just something you do on a nondescript Wednesday afternoon over wine and canapés while everyone is watching the clock to get out to the golf course.

There is no "rationalisation". No moustache twisting or maniacal laughter. No drama. No thought at all. It is the "amorality", the total absence of moral thought that is horrifying beyond anything Colonel Kurtz could conjure up at the dark end of the river.

I will check that out, but one point: I don’t see the Nazi atrocities as good comparables. Those examples are people doing horrible things to other people. In the current instances of people at major corporations poisoning the air, water, and land, they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones, their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel like it is significantly more difficult to explain, as it can’t be rationalized as crimes being done to some demonized group that isn’t seen as deserving of protection. How can self-harm (and harm to your own loved ones) be moralized in the same manner that Nazis felt their acts to be moral?

> they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones, their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel like it is significantly more difficult to explain,

Excellent points, well worth thinking about more.

Hardly nonsense considering the speed of implementing new things far exceeds the research and attempts to scale back once harm has been identified. Private interests are far more powerful and well funded than the few scientists sounding alarms and attenpting to caution people. There were warnings about greenhouse gases causing climate change at least as far back as 1912, yet despite this the car and oil industries pushed forward against ethanol fuel, electric powered vehicles, public transportation, etc to spread and strengthen an automobile-centered norm of going about, which we take for granted as the way to get around and turning away from that is far more unlikely today than it would have been in 1912 if the science had been heeded and changes had been made. This is the norm of industries vs science, and it is present in almost every facet of our lives. Additionally, the issue with the ozone layer is still very much not a non-issue.

I think gp was arguing against the idea that there was a "problematic last step" where society does nothing about problems once they are discovered - not against the idea that innovation can bring unforeseen problems.

I don't think there was anything remotely close to a scientific consensus, or even a respected minority view, that fossil fuels would cause dangerous global warming in 1912, but correct me if I am wrong.

Ozone damaging refrigerants are still a huge issue. China has been releasing a lot of them. We dumped all the DDT in the ocean. This stuff isn't solved at all. Things don't go away, there's no magic wand to disappear all our horrible choices...

Non-issue? The hole in the ozone layer still exists today.

We're still using refrigerants with halogens when completely benign, more-efficient, and low GWP hydrocarbons are right there!

> We have solved a ton of environmental problems in my lifetime.

While creating a ton of new ones, which is sadly in the nature of most solutions; They tend to create new problems.

The question is how much "environmental capital" do we have left trying to figure out something actually long-term sustainable.

I'm encouraged that we have made sweeping changes in the past and altered the course of a disaster. Two examples are atmospheric CFCs and DDT.

Agreed it's harder now with increased misinformation, corporate capture, and failed political systems.

>EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2]

Okay, but isn't "corporate death penalty" equivalent to a fine that exceeds the value of the company? If we're having trouble fining companies for even 1% of their market value, then demanding a 100% fine seems a bit premature. The whole situation feel like people wanting to reduce wealth inequality by demanding a communist revolution, rather than something more reasonable like higher tax brackets.

> 100% fine seems a bit premature.

I don't necessarily agree with the "corporate death penalty" (for the same reasons I don't sanction individual death penalty - that organisations like individuals are not necessarily coherent and unified systems with clear intent and culpability) It's potentially a vast destruction of wealth unrelated to the crime.

BUT: It's a good example of radical action that's needed right now, so that's why I put it out there. The one thing that I vehemently disagree with you about is that it's in any way "premature". We are in the last seconds before midnight, and we ought to have the will put anything remotely effective on the table, before the crazies do, because they will soon have the will, the means, and the moral justification to go way beyond mere "corporate death penalties".

I feel like just when we start to realize we're destroying things with our chemical creations - before things can get fixed the conversation evolves to salving all of climate change.

Can't we just finish stopping the C8/CFC/Pesticide/whatever before we try to stop everything all at once with some nebulous, all-inclusive climate change plan that mostly causes people to only focus on oil use?

No, unfortunately multiple bad things can be happening at once, and FIFO isn’t a great way of dealing with that.

Dealing with it with FIFO is better than not dealing with it.

Yet we have a few billion people on the earth. I think we can spare a few thinking about other problems.

…the comment was suggesting not dealing with it, at least until earlier-identified problems had been dealt with, so it’s not clear what you’re responding to.

Not every comment reply on the internet is a counter argument to the one before it.

No, of course, but if the comment was a response to the earlier one it may better have been posted there.

> Can't we just finish stopping the C8/CFC/Pesticide/whatever

Most of this comes down to figuring out what's harmful and regulating it. We can't outlaw "chemicals". And, of course, there's the whole cooperation in other jurisdictions problem, which affects the next point...

> some nebulous, all-inclusive climate change plan that mostly causes people to only focus on oil use?

Look, uh, the climate change thing is bad. Really bad. And avoiding burning stuff is really hard. We can live without PFAS and glyphosate if we decide we really should. Avoiding burning stuff for energy is really hard.

The chemical harms are complicated: there are some that are long-standing risks, but most of our concerns do not raise to the level of something that screws up climate, agriculture, etc, for centuries.

We could ban halogens from construction and food industries though with a very short list of known safe exceptions (table salt, hypochlorite). Maybe we give up a tiny bit of convenience -- oh no, I can't leave tomato sauce in my pot overnight without washing, and I have to pay slightly more for longer-lasting fiberglass windows instead of junk vinyl -- but so be it.

The solution to climate change and all these crises is a vastly reduced human population living in small agrarian communities with preindustrial lifestyles. We keep having these environmental crises because technological civilization was a mistake.

It was only a "mistake" if the word is stripped of its normal meaning since it was inevitable. It may lead to our downfall, but it was then an inevitable downfall. That said, it's not at all obvious that this is the case yet.

I do think that the human population is too much, but so is dangerous chemicals in the environment. But, additionally to that is harmfulness to nonhuman environment (animals/plants) as well as human, and also harmfulness earning money at the expense of everything else in this world.

How do you assess "too much" when it comes to human population?

Most megafauna being endangered.

I like that criteria! But it's less affected by total population than it is on the distribution of people.

agree agree agree. but it's completely unrealistic to hope that humans will do what must be done on their own...

What the hell are you talking about??? Technological civilization arouse because our ancestors living in "small agrarian communities" were tired of living in a nightmare in which their children died like flies and the starved to death periodically every time the climate farted.

I'm tired on hearing entitled little sh1ts like you that have lived incredibly pampered lives and don't have a clue of what is like to have to live without a refrigerator, hvac or modern medicine.

> Technological civilization arouse because our ancestors living in "small agrarian communities" were tired of living in a nightmare in which their children died like flies and the starved to death periodically every time the climate farted.

This is what Daniel Quinn calls "living in the hands of the gods". We are not really fit to do anything else. Humans have survived for hundreds of thousands of years living off what the land provides them in its natural course. Civilization will probably not make it much past ten thousand years, if that.

So tell me again which is the bigger nightmare: living and dying according to the whims of nature, being one small part in a society that adapts and harmonizes to nature; or the death of billions, and the extermination of considerable amounts of other life, all because we wanted to rule in place of the gods and never learned not to shit where we eat.

> We are not really fit to do anything else.

If you go by that logic we are only fit to live in tropical savannahs in Africa where modern humans originated.

What I find supremely arrogant, though, is any Westerner who, while living in comfort and safety amidst high technology, proposes that everyone in the world should just be content with not having the comforts they are currently using (including some, like vaccines and modern medicine, which arguably have vastly less negative effects than PFAS and burning fossil fuels).

Anyone actually serious about this philosophy should try as much as possible to make their lifestyles like what they want for everyone. It probably wouldn't convince everyone, but it would certainly earn them a lot more respect.

100% this. The climate change debate takes up wayyyyyyy too much political oxygen and leaves little room for tackling a lot more lower hanging fruit. I actually think society's efforts to fight climate change have been a net negative for the environment, not to mention that many corporations have "green washed" their pollution by feigning being climate change warriors. This narrative needs to end and real progress on environmental pollutants needs to return. Hopefully sanity can prevail.

If we spend all the oxygen on climate change and yet we are pretty much falling at tackling it, then I think there is way too little "oxygen" dedicated to not destroying the planet.

Strange to target society's efforts to fight climate change for consuming the political oxygen, rather than those fighting tooth and nail to keep pumping out CO2.

It is the biggest environmental threat facing civilisation, but if only the climate warriors would give up in the face of powerful vested interests and economic intertia, perhaps they'd have time to plant a few wildflowers? /s

Climate change is no longer about the environment, and that is why we see so much movement now.

I would argue PFAS isn't about damaging the environment either. It's about human health. Same goes for CFCs.

It is getting problematic that 'being green' these days can either be caring about the environment and biodiversity like green-peace. Or it can mean 'doing whatever is needed to stop climate change and keep harmful (to humans) chemicals out of the environment'.

Those are actually two very different thought processes with different people who support them. Sharing the term is not working out very well.

The ecological damage from unchecked climate change is by far the largest amount of damage. I'm not sure why we should give it a pass and only focus on smaller amounts of damage.

Because then the conversation will just be dominated on focusing on a smaller issue, with a similar impasse. Just because a bully gets outraged when somebody stands up to them is not a reason to stop standing up to them, and the same folks opposing environmental protection will fight just as hard on other issues.

I feel like just when we start to realize we're destroying things with our chemical creations ...

FWIW, this was understood quite a long time ago. Consider that the EPA "SuperFund"[1] program began in 1980. And it's not like that was the first time anybody understood that some chemicals have very harmful impacts "in the wild."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

No, we have to immediately enact a huge number of measures globally for which we don't know the longterm impact and not worry about these things that make life more convenient if only minimally

/every s

>would society be better off if we were much more conservative about demonstrating the long-term safety of new substances before scaling up their use?

How? Why limit it to substances? Social media is unsafe What point in time were we only using safe substances so we can use that list of substances as the baseline and then somehow only allow new substances to be used when their long term safety has been demonstrated somehow?

Is this even a real point?

Yes, we should take new chemicals and study them for a significant time frame prior to extensive global use. The bar can be set higher.

Don't conflate social science with hard science.

Social media is great at steering populations, generating useful propaganda and generating useful profiles of individuals.... Why would governments want to restrict that?

who is we?

what is a new chemical?

who will study them?

how long is significant?

what does safe mean?

who will limit global use?

I'm not interested in a Socratic dialogue wherein you bring nothing to the table.

It would be good to have an objective measure of unsafe.

E.g. is the radioactive dust we are all exposed to from global coal plants unsafe? High levels of pm 2.5 from steel plants making your vehicles and roads? Low cost subsidized sugar making half the population obese?

We all die in the end, trying to balance where to act is a hard problem because time is zero sum.

That's the very core of the issue, not knowing what is unsafe.

It's not that the concentration of these chemicals increases past what we thought was safe, what changed was our knowledge of his dangerous they are, making current levels unsafe.

Any notion for "objectively" deciding these things has to account for unknown information, which means assigning subjective risk to these unknowns. I don't find an "objective" framework a coherent concept because of that. Ignorance of the world must be confronted head on and taken into account, and those that do not incorporate that risk directly into their cognitive models will perform worse at achieving their goals.

How do we determine the long term safety without first scaling it up? All of these things many seem innocent in a lab setting and it is only once they reach a critical point that the issues arise.

Usually if something is being eroded you check what chemicals the erosion releases. If you cook on a pan and you don't analyze the contents of the fumes you are totally responsible

The problem isn't that no one knew what's in the fumes and that those chemicals are being eaten/inhaled. It's that in laboratory testing they never showed any impact on humans - but scale it to few billion people and then you notice increased liver cancer rates.

The only good thing is that making non stick pans with this stuff has already been banned in US and EU for a good while.

Leaded gasoline and a few others seemed really unsafe at the time of introduction.

Exactly - lead was known to cause harm since well late Roman times I guess.

I recommend the paper "Precautionary Principle" by Nassim Taleb and co-authors

It does a great job presenting your argument in mathematical format as well as rebutting usual criticisms you may encounter

In a lot of cases the harm was known up-front, but then a handful of people in charge of the profits decided to scale up to “all of society” anyway. Cigarettes, leaded fuel, and fossil fuels are all in this category.

No individual manager at any corporation involved in this has a KPI that says: “Terminate the entire category of industry on which our profits are based.”

This is the problem, and governments these days are just an extension of the same broken system.

Chasing after profits will lead humanity off the edge of a cliff.

To be clear, the US political party that starts with a D has been actively spreading awareness and working to ban the substances you mentioned since the at least the 1960s, while the party that starts with an R will never stop being in denial about their dangers.

But we're all guilty of buying products created with those substances and driving cars so.. the fault lies with each of us on an individual level.

What breaks my heart is that the people with all of the money and power actively prevent the rest of us from inventing better solutions. They've created an entire economy around dead end service jobs instead of automation, to keep us distracted and disillusioned so we can never catch a breather and disrupt their meal ticket.

If it were up to me (it will never be up to me), I'd work towards creating open source alternatives for all resources necessary for life. I'd make a wiki of everything people work for (food, water, housing, incidentals) and make each one sustainable and as close to free as possible. Money would be optional and used for aspirations beyond necessity.

It would be kind of a Jetsons solarpunk future where a backyard robotic hydroponic garden grows all non-animal macronutrients. Eggs and kefir would largely replace meat. The house would be made of 3D printed hempcrete and recycled materials. Power and HVAC would come from free (7 year amortized) photovoltaics and passive solar-thermal heat pumps connected to the buried irrigation system.

This stuff is honestly so easy that I can only blame conspiracy for lack of adoption. Or maybe extreme laziness. Whatever the reason is, it's defeatist.

So I'm trying to deprogram myself and incorporate these solutions into my own life. So far I've only succeeded in buying a used electric car though. It's just too hard to save the $10,000 to fix each problem one by one, so I pay out more than that to be a consumer and stay trapped in the matrix. Where are the loans for these solutions? Where's the political will?

Thing is, it won't even be possible to demonstrate that unsafety on a low scale. I think we should just accept the risk. It will happen once in a while. We will adapt.

meanwhile when new stuff is rolled out anyone questioning the safety or efficacy or theorizing about potential dangers is demonized as a quack, people are so compartmentalized that they can’t see that humans are still flawed and make mistakes, somehow current year everything is a godsend break through, it’s marketing bullshit and corruption

>Leaded gasoline, CFCs, microplastics, pesticides

Cigarettes, sugar, asbestos, hydrogenated vegetable oil, "clean" diesel cars...

Has microplastics been proven unsafe?

Yes. Yes it has.

It's always helpful to post a link to back your claims up. Presumably if gp is asking, it's because they couldn't find a credible source by Googling.

What harm does it cause

> I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this

Since it was considered to be perfectly safe when they used it, and they stopped 20 years ago (presumably when they discovered it was unsafe), I don’t think there’s any legal ground to stand on.

They made money on something that turned out to cause damage. It's only fair that they give back the money they've made to mitigate the damage they caused. It doesn't matter that it was considered safe back then.

you think lawmakers are letting their highest-paying constituents expose themselves to that accountability?

Our rulers typically solve the lawsuits thing by limiting liability through statute. They did it with tobacco and they did it with vaccines

Guns too with the PLCAA

No need, metaobeyverse is coming, and everything will be new and shiny there. Virtual cities don't need maintenance.

There was a now-deleted reply to this that made a great point: Is it possible vaccines could be included in your list?

The answer to that is no, it is impossible for any vaccine to be included in that list, which gives rise to the more general point: modern scientific studies are so heavily agenda-polluted, that skepticism and conservative adoption are prohibited. That a handful of short-term (<100 years) studies are sufficient for rolling out unprecedented technologies to the entire world. That an absence of evidence of long-term effects is taken to mean evidence of absence.

Whether it be DDT, GMO's, or PFAS, if the science to date can't detect harm, then there of course cannot possibly be harm - throw caution to the wind and roll it out 100% the world over, from Antarctica to Tibet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com