Maybe per year? Paid out by all former executives from the point PFAS were manufactured?... after all, if they claim responsibility and the associated bonuses for the good stuff, they should be held accountable for the bad too, right?
A less charitable reading is that it covers 300 cities. Maybe they can filter the municipal water supply of that many cities in perpetuity with currently unavailable commercial filter technology?
If it is nationwide, then $10b is a bad punchline.
The value of those houses (as a place to live) is $0 to anyone who cares about not consuming PFAS, and thus should be $0 until the problem is fixed. I guess you can rent them out to people you don’t care about, which would make them worth >$0, but also clearly unethical.
In a society that’s functioning correctly, sane people would pass a law prohibiting consumption of water with PFAS; those houses would be declared uninhabitable, the same way a fire marshal now can declare a building uninhabitable as it violates a fire code.
When someone sells their house, the price is an agreed upon valuation by buyer and seller. It’s probably the closest to true value we’ll ever get.
How do you propose to value better?
If they are selling for more than $0, then someone values them.
Obviously humans aren’t rational actors, so assuming as much would be dumb to use as the basis of an economic system. People generally are shortsighted- they build on flood plains, for example, or use toxic building materials that cause damage long term (ex: asbestos), or whatever.
Nor should humans be expected to be rational actors. (!) You shouldn’t need a PhD in biochemistry in order to evaluate water quality impact to health, in order to buy a home. If we require people like software engineers to be full blown doctors just to rationally evaluate a place to live, we have failed as a society.
Allowing the government to declare homes uninhabitable is clearly better than a pure market based system.
Otherwise, you either live in an unusual location that makes any kind of water-related infrastructure projects very expensive - like, idk., a small settlement at a summit of a mountain, or in the middle of a desert - or something is very much broken about that place.
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/bottled-water/pfas-in...
You do understand that that’s worse for you, right?
it's not a good defense for indiscriminate contamination of water, if that's what you're trying for
Fructose is ok to consume in amounts that are typical for fruit (which is less than you‘d think), but is a metabolic disruptor in higher amounts. Liver cells have to do a lot of work to metabolize fructose, compared to glucose which needs quasi no conversion. As to health effects of fructose, I‘ve found it hard to determine which studies are reliable, because there is just so much money in this industry, and high interest to influence research. But the metabolic complexity it brings is undeniable, and one could argue that fructose is kinda like a poison we have adapted to - if we lack key enzymes, we can’t metabolize it.
Glucose is harder on the pancreas and chronic high insulin seems to be really bad, so I‘d avoid that too of course. But a reasonably healthy liver can quickly buffer excess glucose (hepatocytes) and rather easily convert to glycogen and store it, in big amounts.
How can you accurately estimate any of this?
What they should be made to do is provide free filters to all of the governments to filter PFAS until a time when no PFAS is detected. Or if that's not possible, R&D until some form of it is possible then do that.
But that would probably damage the company forever, and that's bad.
If they don't wanna do it they could just spin off a 'water filter' division and then bankrupt it. Problem solved!
Because otherwise, I could incorporate as XYZ LLC and say that any blatantly illegal act that causes real harm is just a byproduct of me doing business, and that I'm not actually liable for anything that happens to anyone else during me committing said illegal acts.
The slope here is so slippery it's effectively made of banana peels.
PFAS wern't always known to be bad, and even after knowing chances are everyone reading this has some in their blood -- and most of you are doing just fine. Maybe 0.01% crappier than if you didn't have it in you, but it's a far cry from getting stabbed to death by a hired goon.
I don’t think that it is so far fetched that a corporation should be held criminally liable, and that executives should be criminally liable when they discover one of these risks and do not accurately disclose it and mitigate the risk.
It doesn’t strike me as intrinsically different to hit an LLC provided that the company knew about the impact of PFAS.
I didn't realize even judges go out of their way to try to make parties settle out of court.
No, it isn't.
> and tantamount to a judge not doing their job
No, it isn't.
> ... which is to oversee the proper discovery and application of precedent.
That is an extremely limited and narrow view of a judge's job. That's part of their job, but very far from all of it.
> I'd even make the contention that this fundamentally deprives people of their right to due process
No, it doesn't. People are encouraged to settle; they aren't forced to. If you insist on a trial, you can get one.
> and if it is the case that the judiciary cannot handle case loads
It takes a long time to bring a case to trial. I think that at least part of the bottleneck is the judges' time, but I cannot prove that.
> we need to start talking about the structural reasons resulting in that.
I would agree with that.
By and large, it takes as long as it does, especially based on cases between actors with drastically different resource pools from which to pool to acquire legal representation, because of fundamental limitations on the ability of information to be unambiguously extracted by a legal team (defendants team in finding docs that match criteria for discovery), the plaintiffs team (to comb through the discovered docs for meaning; thos is where malicious compliance or poorly worded queries can be disasterous for the amount of work it takes to sift through paper), transformed (arranged into a cross ref'able set of docs to be used in further proceedings), and loaded (brought before a jury).
The work of a trial is simple given good faith on the parts of all parties. I wager that happens much less frequently than we'd all like to believe.
When the prime arbiters of the judiciary start resorting to "just bypass us" there is a terrible, terrible problem here.
I mean thats how it often ends up, but extremely happy its not happening now. Maybe they will make sure form now on they don't do this highly amoral and criminal stuff, and maybe other companies will notice too. Jail time for CEO at that time would be a bonus, but we are not there yet.
Not sure if it'll do much to dissuade any companies from embarking on the next massive environmental fuckup, but one can hope.
0. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
1. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/pfas-project/companies-face-bi...
That claim seems suspect. Dupont booked around 4 billion in profits in 2016[1]. If the claim was true, it would mean PFOA made up around a quarter of their business. However, if you look at their net sales/profit by business segment[2] along with segment descriptions[3], there's basically no way that PFOA made up a quarter of their profits. They make too much other stuff for that to be the case.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/540512/net-income-of-dup...
[2] https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...
[3] https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...
Or them, meaning us? These fines will find their way to the market and we will be the ones paying.
This is simply the pseudo cost of doing business for these multi-nationals.
What needs to happen is that shareholder value is eradicated. Pension funds, banks, hedge funds, retail investors, they should all lose their money. Every last cent of it. Only if shareholder value is eradicated will shareholders start demanding executives follow procedures that prevent disasters like this from happening.
Holding the executives responsible is fun, but we all know the next executive is gonna be ruthless and try and get away with it anyway.
Unless executives lose freedoms (i.e., go to jail) nothing is going to change. The problem is, that wealthy ruling class can buy freedom when they need to. Those that miraculously lose freedom go to country clubs. On the other hand, if you or I rob the local convenience store (using a fire arm?) we will likely go to jail.
When they endanger the health and welfare of a child...millions of them...we pay the fine. Anyone who calls that justice is a fool.
Funny, I say similar about tobacco. That is, if a terrorist said, "I'm going to come to your country,and I'm going to sell an addictive carcinogen..." There would be protests in the streets demanding that terrorist be drone-strike'd to hell and then some.
As it is, the state and federal governments allow the product, *and* profit from it (via taxes). Talk about a page right out of an Orwellian novel.
https://www.guycarp.com/insights/2020/05/california-wildfire...
Real life story of lawyer who goes after Duport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)?useski...
The company's damage starts in the 1960's and wast most actively protected by states, in the 80s. Your link barely covers only to 2012.
- They lobby the government
- Their lobbyists go to work to the government, and then go back to work to the company and so on
The government won't touch them.
That's clearly not true, as evidenced by this settlement.
This is certainly a better result than the Purdue opioid lawsuit where the Sackler family received immunity and in exchange for a $6B settlement.
That's the bare minimum we should set. China/USSR had a more severe consequence for officers of the company that isn't likely feasible here in the US but is probably the real deterrent to this behavior in future criminal endeavors.
Completely agree. In China, it's pretty straightforward - you become the nail that sticks out. If you fuck with the population at large and make people sick, or you rob them blind, etc... it doesn't matter if you have or you haven't given The Party their cut of the action - your C-Suite will all disappear. A few will be lucky enough to be re-educated.
Whereas in America if you beat the regulators or catch them sleeping on the job, you'll have one side of the political aisle cheering you on no matter how many people you kill.
Nothing of note was accomplished. People just switched to fentanyl.