How the Disaster of "Forever Chemicals" Was Kept Secret
propublica.org
propublica.org
Is there any evidence that the amounts found in humans using non stick pans, for example, and not those drinking water downstream from an industrial source of “forever chemicals”, have any of these effects?
Second, yes, the pans are dangerous if you “abuse” them. By getting them to hot, using a mental utensil, or just using it after it has aged too much.
This is frustrating.
At some point you have to admit you’re in denial.
Or do some research yourself and at least post evidence that you think requires a higher amount of PFAS than you believe is reasonable.
Imagine making the same argument about lead. Leaded gasoline was suspected environmental toxin since like the 1920’s (!!). The EPA now says there is no safe minimum level of lead in the blood. Am I going to hear the same argument there?
// rant …
Chemical is known to be an endocrine disruptor. Maybe endocrine isn’t that important.
Chemical is known to cause birth defects. Maybe the levels used in the study are higher than observed in nature.
Chemical is proven to spread everywhere in the food chain. Maybe it’s inert. Well maybe at that level of concentration it’s harmless. Well maybe humans will adapt to its presence.
It’s like talking to someone who thinks the Grand Canyon was formed over 40 days and nights of the Great Flood. No matter what argument you present, it’s not good enough. There’s always a loophole. Maybe rocks used to be softer so they would erode faster, blah blah blah.
It's pretty reasonable to ask for that level of evidence for things that are this important.
PTFE (the actual pan coating) is a PFAS, but is not known to be a health hazard. It is environmentally challenging, as it does not decompose, but when people think of the toxicity, they think of the other PFAS that are needed to synthesize PTFE that often end up in the environment and get trapped in small quantities under the PTFE coatings of the pan sometimes (or used to) which can bioaccumulate and be toxic once ingested (which can happen if you damage the coating); or they think of the PFAS fumes that get released when overheating pans (they cannot bioaccumulate but are toxic enough that they can make you dizzy and kill pets). Supposedly, PTFE could also be manufactured differently in a safe way (probably still not environmentally friendly but at least non toxic), but figuring that out is hard especially given the economic stakes (some companies will claim without proof it is, other will try to dismiss it if it happens).
It's hard to find unbiased information about PFAS, both industries selling PFAs and selling alternatives are fighting hard on the Internet.
Knowingly poison the population in search of profit? Nothing! No consequences!
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/traffic-stop-led-poli...
Instead - and i have spent all of 10 seconds thinking this through - what about we just pay people to snitch on a business/employer if its knowingly doing such things. Perhaps in % of the settlement and/or potential fall out costs.
That'd change behavior as well as catch issues soon enough to prevent them.
The satisfaction of revenge and the entertainment value of watching it televised.
Public stonings, where you can bid on the rocks? Cut a thief’s hand off?
Treating a burglary as more severe than a multi million dollar pension fraud seems backward by any metric beyond the social status of the criminals involved.
This kind of harm is murder.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/albert-camus-reflect...
The incentive system in the West right now is structured such that corporate executives gain a great reward from serving their company, and little punishment from failing to serve humanity. If society is to flourish, humanity must be structurally prioritized.
Due to regulatory capture and general corruption, I don't think an approach that merely tries to punish corporations financially will ever work. If you have executive powers and commit or permit a crime against humanity in the name of your company, then you have declared your allegiance. A functioning society would punish this in the most serious way possible. Great power, great responsibility and all that.
Cynicism has washed that away. And people openly disparage public servants and get resentful of people who still manage to pull a living in this way.
But the larger point is that we should abolish the notion of 'limited liability' about corporations. That'll strike fear into the heart of executives, knowing that the law can come after both them and all their moneys and possessions. Suddenly the thought of 'oh, what if I fuck up?' pop up in their heads. They'll imagine their families begging on the streets for basic sustenance. That, if nothing else, will get them to behave like a normal person.
That is not what these crimes are nor who commits them. These people actually tend to speak with lawyers prior to committing their crimes, and their lawyers will report something between "not technically illegal" to "probably illegal and the penalty is [something you really don't care about at all]"
We can, should, and in fact already do have whistleblowers as well. But all you're doing is (slightly) raising the chances that you get reported. There are still many, many corruptible steps from that to being investigated, then from being investigated to being convicted, then from being convicted to being punished.
In fact, as we've already established, the actual "punishment" is frequently not a punishment at all. It's just the cost of doing business.
Consider these responses to an executive asking their lawyer for guidance on a legally ambiguous but clearly antisocial decision (where most of these decisions land):
Response 1: "Not clearly illegal, we could argue it in court, and if we lose the penalty is a couple million dollars."
Response 2: "Not clearly illegal, we could argue it in court, and if we lose the penalty is you going to prison for the rest of your life."
There’s a pirates-and-emperors aspect to this: such measures are taken in some societies to disincentivize O(1) violent crimes. Why (really, why? It’s worth thinking about!) are they rarely taken for O(n) crimes?
See who owns Thames Water now and compare with who held it 15-20 years ago
It is a form of mass scale murder once you add up all the collective harm.
Same thing goes for the oil industry and CO2 emissions, which we've known about for 5 decades.
We really are one fucked up species. But can evolution even produce anything better? Anything that's not so prone to coordination problems?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
There are too few of us who understand asymmetric risk, and too many in power who are willing to roll the dice for the entire species for profit.
Realistically, it will have to get much, much, worse before it gets any better.
IMO this is part of the natural evolutionary cycle.
If there's more than enough grapes for everyone and one person takes more than their fair share, then, on the whole, it's fine. There's enough to go round.
If everyone tries to take more than their fair share, then the whole system falls apart.
When there are this many people, and this much visibility of the hustle, just seeing others prosper by cheating means a not insubstantial number of people will be in the "well I want grapes, and likely need to cheat to make sure I get my fair share" camp.
People aren't motivated solely by the risk of being caught. Some people tell themselves that everyone else must be trying to cheat, so it's okay for them to cheat. But this type of thinking isn't a law of nature, it's just a human flaw.
The amount of cheating is not a fundamental constant. Given that people are social animals and that we tend to be stronger as a group, in fact you'd expect that prosocial behavior is good for the species. If fucked up is to mean anything, poisoning the environment with forever chemicals ought to make the fucking cut, if you'll pardon my French.
I'm saying it's variable, not that cheating can disappear completely.
In other words, utopia is fictional, but that doesn't mean the real world couldn't be better.
If you were one in a group of 4 people, and one of them fed poison to a child to remove a stain from their shoe, or just for a laugh, or for 2 cents, and someone got upset, would you talk about the species or evolution first thing? What habit did we normalise here?
If a village of 20 people found out one of their members had been poisoning them for years, knowingly, to attain status as the mage/technocrat/leader, I suspect their punishment would be severe.
Instead, any one person or small group of people feels powerless against a seemingly infinite bureaucracy and a justice system that would sooner punish "vigilantes" than hold powerful people to account for their malice and damage to society.
You give more agency to the modern individual than I do, I think.
Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.
I blame governments for not providing a way for whistleblowers to put the companies in a bind to actually do something
the best way to stop these is to force them to do something, not have them voluntarily admit wrongdoing etc.
it's like the whole "well the other ones are doing it too!" which can only be solved with aggressive regulation.
I don't think even today this stuff is being taken seriously enough.
We’re free to pollute the planet as we like, but it’s up in the air whether we can survive nature’s response to our actions
glyphosate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
asbestos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc
It took decades for the science to finally flow freely since both of these industries heavily targeted the scientific institutions themselves. Who knows what other pesticides and chemical companies are following the same playbook that we won't get to know about for decades.
There's no way to fix it until we start punishing white collar crime the way we punish blue collar crime. Bad actors are bad actors
Out of curiosity as to why 3M would insert this commonality into me to help us share a sense of solidarity, I looked up some safety-related research papers. I came across a 3M technical paper by Seacat et al. (2002)[1], which claims that under their experimental conditions, no harmful effects were observed up to a certain dose.
Seeing this perfectly illustrates just how much science and technology are dictated by the institutions they are affiliated with.
And from the article: at that point 3M execs had known this class of chemicals was toxic for 3 decades.
Here's a link to the audio form of the podcast, also linked in the original submission. It's on Apple Podcasts too, if you prefer.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/10/health/pfas-pesticides-indust...
Assuming they did keep it a secret, we had so many other hazards that were (and still are) in common use: lead, mercury, tobacco, chlordane, asbestos, etc... So even if true; even if you accept this as some conspiracy, it would seem to pale in comparison to the list I just gave. We seemingly survived and thrived with with substances far worse than a little plastic running around in our bloodstream, yet this remains the topic of the day and it makes me wonder how real the outrage is (proportionate to other hazards) or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example". It would be far more persuasive imho to just argue the later point independently, because the plastic (using the term loosely) topic comes up so frequently that to some of us it is just repetitive and not really constructive.
Of course, as opposed to the objective minded "there is no conspiracy ever, when it is repeatedly demonstrated that corporations will poison, experiment on and destroy human lives if it favors their bottom line and they think they can get away with it, this is not to be interpreted as a pattern or structural issue, it's just coincidences and 'bad' individual actors all the way down".
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-07-31/pfizer-pays-us75m-ove...
https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/No_More_Bhopals_Env...
Their questioning whether the outage surrounding a specific hazard is proportionate to its known danger does not mean they believe no hazards exist.
Lead, mercury - this is exactly the level of harm being asserted.
The claim that these are “far worse” is doing a lot of work here.
> assuming they did keep it a secret
So now this comment is denying the facts in the reporting? I was taking you seriously until I realized that you are claiming the whole narrative is false from the start.
Nothing changes even if we know about these chemicals