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Comment by enslavedrobot | Hacker News Reader

3M is exiting the fluorinated polymer business of their own volition. They are spending billions to shut down a 2 billion a year profit center for the company. This should give you an inkling of how fucking toxic this stuff is, and how much liability they see in the future.

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I hope they do not avoid culpability for having knowingly polluted the planet for decades. They should be saddled with the cost of developing and deploying the necessary mitigation technologies to neutralize or remove the from the ecosystem. They knew what they were doing.

The U.S. needs to establish a process for collecting externality taxes from companies. Of course, it's impossible to track all externalities, but certain ones might be easier to track and it would make companies think twice before getting into industries without doing their due diligence on safety upfront.

Imagine if Big Oil knew they'd be on the hook for trillions of dollars in damages due to catastrophic climate change. As of right now, the U.S. gov is essentially making the citizens pay (in taxes) for the destruction climate change is causing, even though Big Oil has known for decades that they directly contribute to accelerated climate change.

Great documentary called “the devil we know” about the proliferation of perflorinated chemicals invented by 3m and sold to DuPont and chemical companies overseas.

To which company are the machines and territories sold too, and who owns the majority stake of the "spin" out company?

I have heard that so often, that this or that technology is faded out in the car industry, and in reality, that just ment, the factory is carefully dissasembled, shipped to some 2nd world or 3rd world country, reassembled and buisness just continus or more often then not, actually expands. Fridges, diesel cars, you name it.

One thing about fluorine chemistry is that it is an exquisite engineering challenge. The reason these molecules are majority synthesized by the major chemical companies is that smaller players lack the capacity to run these plants. There have been catastrophic explosions at more than one plant in China.

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