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Comment by 2devnull | Hacker News Reader

“Not only did we measure significant concentrations of PFAS in these containers, we can estimate the PFAS that were leaching off creating a direct path of exposure,” said study coauthor Graham Peaslee, PhD, professor of physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Notre Dame.”

I’m glad the EPA tried but have to wonder why congress can’t do their jobs.

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If you learn to see the world the way capital sees it, it makes some sense.

If you tell a chemical company that it can't make X but it doesn't have a factory to make X, they are not going to be so sore about it.

If they've borrowed from the bank to make a factory that makes X and then you tell them they have to shut it down they are going to be a lot more upset. The EPA can't discharge their bank loan, for one thing.

In the case of CFCs,

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

there was a ban on the most wasteful uses of CFC, but the main effect was that people quit building new CFC factories, it took almost two decades to shut those factories down.

But why can't they just fail for making a bad bet like the rest of us?

In the case of CFCs the dangers were hypothetical in the 1970s. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1980s that the ozone hole was documented and the chemistry of how it happens really understood. (I was doing a student project analyzing satellite observations of chemical species in the atmosphere around this time.)

It is also telling that the aerosol spray can ban was in 1978 and Dupont’s patents for CFCs ran out in 1979. Dupont was a CFC advocate up until 1986 when they had patents for HCFCs, at that point they thought a ban was a great idea.

We’ve been through a regulatory treadmill since then where now the first generation of HCFCs are known to be powerful global warming gases and those are getting banned so these are being replaced by newer patented substances. Asthma inhalers that would have been cheap have been expensive because they’ve either getting filled with new F-gases or are dry power inhalers, either way they are still under patent.

Someone has to be the advocate for the thing the government is trying to regulate/ban, we have an adversarial court/justice/law system in this country. Of course the party with the most to lose is going to be the one on the side of against it and of course that party is going to stop advocating when they no longer have that interest.

It's a good thing that people with something to lose can influence the government and make their voices heard. It's the job of the regulators to take that information and correctly weigh it against the interests of the people they represent. The problem is and has always been the regulators.

You're painting Dupont as the bad guy for advocating for themselves while giving a pass (passively) to the people who are supposed to be advocating for us.

Because businesses can rent-seek congress through lobbying sometimes much more effectively than groups of citizens.

See this

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

if you want to get depressed about the prospect of "the left."

Seems like a good lens through which to view California politics, which is often dominated for better and worse by special interests like the trial lawyers, firefighters, etc…

They do, it just takes a while.

- cigarettes

- asbestos

- leaded paints

- now pfas

Not many of these companies around anymore, and the flow of new capital has dropped to near-zero

They can, but like many of us, they’ll go down kicking and screaming due to sunk cost. The difference is that they’re operating at the scope of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So they’re willing to kick and scream accordingly.

Because the line only goes up!!!

You know damn well why

Congress can't do much of anything. Their ability to pass anything more important than naming a post office is essentially nil. They can't even perform the basic operation of keeping the government open, except by heroic last-minute effort.

Congress' rules were designed to protect minority opinions, and they're easily taken advantage of to prevent anything from happening at all. A fair number of Congresspeople were elected with the specific goal of locking Congress up, and they're pretty effective at it.

Don't be hand wavey though, there's only one political party doing this bullshit, and they've been open about their strategy and goal since at least Obama, and possibly even as far back as Newt Gringrich.

And they seemed to have no problem "getting things done" when the task was to ram through a supreme court justice right before an election after spending a year saying you cannot approve a supreme court justice "during an election year"

In Parliamentary system this is somewhat equivalent to "hung parliament" and usually results in re-elections. Governments must prove minimum support to pass legislations before they can claim to be "in charge"

We deliberately designed it this way, to prevent one party from having too much control.

Instead, we have no control. The legislature is effectively useless. The executive branch continues on, under not-always-clear authority. The judicial branch can easily throw a wrench into that authority, often more for political reasons than legalistic ones.

It's really, really bad.

> I’m glad the EPA tried but have to wonder why congress can’t do their jobs.

There is a certain large percentage of the population who vote in people who actively want to eliminate all oversight/regulations. How do you do that? Make the regulators look like they're not doing their jobs and say, "See? We just need to get rid of it all! They're wasting YOUR tax dollars!"

We have a process for banning chemicals. It requires a cost/benefit analysis, which the EPA did not do here.

They did their job, in this case, by giving the EPA authority to hire scientific experts to evaluate the evidence and promulgate rules.

SCOTUS may be poised to wipe out that authority.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-chevron-deference...

The natural outcome of the non delegation theory is that every member of congress needs to work at the mint printing money as that power can not be delegated to anyone else, federal prisons must close because there is no way we have enough representatives to run them.

Yes Congress did give the EPA authority to evaluate the evidence and promulgate rules but they did not give them the authority to violate the law. This is but the latest example of of the EPA being correctly guardrailed by the courts. I only wished that the courts could directly penalize the person at the EPA who knowingly exceeded their authority. Admittedly it was for a worthy cause but they or the Congress needs to remedy this through lawful channels.

“does not count as a significant new use since Inhance has been using this process since 1983”

They did, they made the EPA.

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