Canadians have been exposed to potentially toxic chemicals | Hacker News Reader

Canadians have been exposed to potentially toxic chemicals

ctvnews.ca

Not gonna lie, this seems like a reasonably generic article. Many water supplies have these problems. News would be if something new or different or interesting happened. Why is this article even here?

(I’m not intending to be dismissive of the problem, i’m simply stating we all know this already, it’s not news to anyone. How about an article on how changes are being made to work towards a solution, either politically or scientifically)

Canada has a very odd relationship with the environment. The apparent surplus of riches leads to it being taken for granted, and consequently you get crazy situations like basically every lake within 2 hours drive of the US border being polluted with something, even as mundane as leaking septic tanks.

One side effect is it is surprisingly rare to drink the tap water. Often it tastes horrible anyway, sometimes it is from a well, and if you are in a city there is a good chance it is loaded with lead.

At some point they will have a proper disaster, but the effects of it will be swiftly forgotten again.

If you’re interested in going down one heck of a Saturday night rabbit hole, you should read into some of the water issues downstream of Alberta’s tar sands.

The short version is that it takes 2.4 barrels of fresh water to get one barrel of tar out of the ground. We’re still a long ways from being able to use that tar but that’s a different story.

The vast majority of that water is too polluted to put back into the Athabasca, so it gets stored in tailings ponds. These ponds are big enough to be seen from space. And water being water, the ponds leak constantly. So some massive companies that we have all heard of have been warned repeatedly about how tar sands contamination is being found at wells far off site. Related to this, communities along the Athabasca River are becoming hot beds of rare types of cancer.

When I read up on it, I conclude that we already have a proper disaster but it just doesn’t get reported. I believe it doesn’t get reported because it gets heavily politicized and so it’s hard to find data in the midst of the strongly felt beliefs. But if you’re interested in starting, I’d actually start at the Alberta Energy Regulator, specifically at their compliance dashboard.

https://www1.aer.ca/compliancedashboard/enforcement.html

The AER is a good place to start because they love O&G but despite that love, they still write very openly about how much damage the industry does to water.

If that’s not enough excitement, the Prairie Provinces Water Board (ppwb.ca) has a lot of excellent reading about conservation.

Edit - The Parliamentary Library of Canada would be a good stop too. As early as 2006, papers started being published indicating that 40% of Canadian wells were contaminated.

Same pollution as depicted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)

When you remove the quantifier millions of Canadians it is misleading and implies all Canadians!

Is it inaccurate though? I would expect that most people on earth have been exposed to potentially toxic chemicals, especially including PFAS. You'd have to avoid essentially anything made of plastic or that has touched plastic in its life cycle. Teflon is incredibly ubiquitous.

Plastic fluorination is common. Everyone is exposed

https://youtu.be/uonYyotd3TQ

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