This is a pretty typical growth pattern. Industrial zone establishes and city is set far away in a safe area. City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work. People then see this and say they built industrial next to the poor people when the opposite occurred. Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong?
> City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work.
In cities like Mobile, Alabama, the opposite is usually true[1]: people already lived in those areas, but companies (and local governments) don't consider their health sufficiently important. I'll leave it up to you to infer why that is.
Looking at the outcome of economic effects with "right and wrong" isn't really a helpful measurement. We should force them, not because they are "wrong" but because the economic incentives deliver an outcome that is undesirable.
“Right” and “wrong” implies a sense of free will. When the expensive negative externalities of a business are legalized, a market is guaranteed to force any would-be altruistic actors out of existence. Those who get a job in one of these industries have no functional or legal ability to make choices which would bankrupt their own organizations. The only way to solve the issue is with a regulatory level playing field.
Economic incentives are a scientific force. You can’t solve problems by suggesting that people ignore them, you have to work within the bounds of the natural effects that inherently exist. Groups of people do not make moral decisions like an individual person does.
We won’t solve this issue with mere criticism while we continue to financially reward these outcomes. Make negative externalities illegal.
That’s still not the fault of industrial businesses. No businessperson could change this dynamic even if they wanted to. It’s the fault of our political process to give equitable representation to people of all economic backgrounds.
There is a difference between a person driving a car, and a factory spewing off a criminally high level of carcinogenic chemicals.
> A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts
And we should stop and fix that. Why do we accept this as ok?
> by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house.
My logic says we should phase out cars that we know kill people. Maybe build cars that use a new, less-polluting method of pollution. Like EV! We solved this issue with cars, maybe Exxon should solve their issue with petroleum.
I know I’m late to the party, but I wanted to let you know you’re an idiot in the kindest of ways.
No, there is no difference between a person and a factory. A factory is many people, so change your equivalence to “my suburb” or “my town”, by the time you get to “my city” there are hundreds of studies that prove car usage has much more widespread health effects - they’re slower to materialize and lifelong, but they also impact 100% of people over a much wider area.
You also assume electric vehicles are inherently better, which is a shockingly common logical fallacy. Where does the power come from? Once you trace that back, based on a geographical area, you can start to make comparisons.
For instance a lot of power (to your house and the car you’re charging in the garage, to the city’s charging points, to the Tesla charging points), still comes from burning coal or things like shale (particularly in certain areas of Europe). Know what you’ve done with your “green” EV? Take the pollution you spread out across the city/county/state/country and concentrate it around the local power plant.
What about the oil that lubes the moving parts? The tires? The metals in the batteries? The acid in the batteries?
And now you, your family, your friends, are all basically as bad as the chemical plant. Still sleeping ok at night up on your high horse?
The "optimal" level of pollution is not zero. While there may be exceptions to individuals, to society as a whole, the benefits of an activity may very outweigh the costs. This is true of every human endeavor. There are always costs. The question is whether they are worth it.
The optimal level in your opinion probably depends heavily on how close you live to that factory.
Anyway even if you want to live in Cass Sunstein land where everything is a cost benefit analysis then you have to work on some really hard problems like how it's not really possible to fairly cost something like a person getting cancer. It's also really hard to fairly compare them to the extremely diffuse "benefits", like the oil company doesn't need to spend a million bucks to install a scrubber so everyone's gas is 1 one trillionth cent per gallon cheaper on average.
Point is this kind of cost benefit stuff is a buck passing truism unless and until we can solve these problems and more. I won't be holding my breath.
The answer, IMHO, is to assign property rights and let people trade for the optimal outcome. People frequently and willingly make transactions that on average shorten their lives in exchange for short term benefits (e.g., eating at McDonalds or drinking alcohol). There are tools to address the problem of transaction costs.
> A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts
And we should stop and fix that. Why do we accept this as ok?
Of course. But it is not always easy. You can’t always wave your hand and make non-harmful alternatives. Sometimes it is due to incentives, but also sometimes it is really just chemistry or physics.
See the “tin whisker” phenomenon when they took lead out of solder.
We can fix those. If you could sue a chemical plant (or it's engineers!) that design/implement carcinogenic pollution, i bet the incentives get better fast.
> but also sometimes it is really just chemistry or physics.
>You can’t always wave your hand and make non-harmful alternatives
I think we can more often then we give it credit for. Especially if there was more money flowing into R&D, and more regulatory efforts.
> See the “tin whisker” phenomenon when they took lead out of solder.
I've never heard of this and I buy tons of electronics. Seems like industry incentives took care of this. Now we have no lead... and i can still buy iPhones whenever i want.
Why do we accept destruction in our society? Why don't we push for better? Nothing has to be the way it is if we don't want it to be.
> We can fix those. If you could sue a chemical plant (or it's engineers!) that design/implement carcinogenic pollution, i bet the incentives get better fast.
Or the pricing of everything goes up astronomically to account for the new risk, and the poor go back to living in the stone age because they can't afford to pay for the risk assumed by anyone using industrial processes.
Watch how quickly AC vanishes from the poor when Freyon becomes $2,000 for a refill. I doubt the chemicals we use to treat water are free of industrial carcinogens either.
> Why do we accept destruction in our society? Why don't we push for better? Nothing has to be the way it is if we don't want it to be.
Because none of this is free. Handling the tin whiskers wasn't free, there's a certification process for that now. It killed a satellite in 1998, temporarily shut down a nuclear plant, and may have been a culprit in some Toyota car issues.
That was probably worth the tradeoff. It was a fairly minor change, and the payoff was pretty good.
I don't think we can just handwave away that getting to 0 carcinogens would be a net benefit. I'd probably take a 1 in 50,000 chance of dying from industry effects rather than having to go back in time 200 years in terms of quality of life.
> Especially if there was more money flowing into R&D, and more regulatory efforts.
You won’t hear any argument from me there.
To put it into perspective, the annual budget of the entire (US) National Science Foundation is $8 billion. Now compare that the revenue or even profit of google, apple, etc.
That happens because the incentives and supply chain machinery allow it to. Externalities are never priced in regardless of where things are made. Price in externalities, regardless of origin, and things would change. That's just one example of a potential solution, and one that many are trying to do with carbon taxes/credits.
That seems to be the fatal trap we're in: government can compensate for the fact that capitalism is effectively unable to price in externalities, but the big winners from capitalism have the resources to simultaneously lobby government for less regulation and persuade voters that government is evil.
I don’t see any other method of economy / government solving either. USSR hid all kinds of dangers (including Chernobyl), China barely is reacting to climate change and notoriously has sacrificed its people for economic gain, etc.
The value structures of how much to care for any one person are different independent of government. Individual versus collective shows itself in both democratic capitalist governments on both sides, and now with market reforms so does communism.
No, but they did set out to create processes that fit into an economic envelope with forces (unchecked externalities) that encourage pollution. The engineers aren't evil people, but the incentive system that they participate in allows them to be more myopic than it ought to.
Engineers don't set out to design a bridge that will collapse, either, but folks still want them to be held to account when it happens; folks still expect bridge failures to result in root cause analysis and an update to standard practices after the cause is understood.
I don't think you really understand the implications of that statement. You can't even have bronze-age level technology with 0 carcinogens. At least not with present technology.
You can't burn wood. You can't heat a lot of metals. Practically anything that requires smelting metal is out because of the preceeding two. Eletrical power is basically a non-starter, because the mining and refining both release carcinogens.
We need more advanced technology to be able to truly isolate those emissions, but we don't have the ability to develop that technology without releasing those emissions. The goal should be managing the amount of emissions we allow, and prioritizing the "emission credits" towards goals that can reduce those emissions further.
When you have a campfire (or fire in your fireplace), you are releasing polluting carcinogens. When you heat olive oil to the smoke point, you are releasing carcinogens. If/when you do those things, are you also doing something wrong?
It is relatively easy, from my vantage point, to see dividing lines between "doing something bad for your own health," "doing something bad for your health and those in your physical and emotional circles," and "doing something bad for the health of an entire city, country, or region." It can be the case for each of these to be wrong, in different ways, without confounding or deflating the other cases.
Exactly. My former employer had repeated battles with the EPA over his supposed refusal to improve emissions. Never mind that we had already done everything technologically feasible, they only saw the pattern of improvement and then stopping. And they kept comparing us to a competitor that we kept telling them had to be faking the numbers. Took them 10 years to figure out we were right--and we spent more on compliance than their penalty when their non-compliance was finally discovered.
Other than mixing our own colors everything involved was available at the local hardware store. We were simply staining wood, the issue was the solvent evaporating while drying.
Sounds like a failing over EPA penalty, not that we should allow pollution! Why should we as a society allow large scale pollution to poison our world without containment?
"no carcinogens flat out" is an obvious straw man mis-characterisation, but neither can we dismiss small effects over many people and over time. This comment gets it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29193928
> If/when you do those things, are you also doing something wrong?
Its hard to say you're doing something "right" by releasing carcinogens. But scale is important here. Its hard to really conflate burning olive oil in your kitchen with oil refining.
If you burn a tire, you're polluting and releasing toxic fumes around. But one burnt tire doesn't affect the neighborhood.
Industry is not negligible. At larger scale toxic waste hurts a lot more people, of course it does! The campfire whataboutism is a bit silly in comparison.
As someone who grew up in the Clear Lake area of Houston in the 90s and 00s, I can tell you that the La Porte and Deer Park areas were bad, but weren't this bad. People lived in the surrounding areas before some of those plants ramped up.
It isn't always one way or the other.
As someone who is seeing more and more how irreversible so much of our environmental damage is these days, I am leaning on the plant owners being responsible, not the schoolchildren who are getting rolled a 1:20,000 chance of cancer.
Perhaps, knowing how much pollution affects surrounding areas, we should force such chemical plants to purchase all the land around them that will be affected to a certain extent. Internalize the costs of their damage to the community, and prevent others from being exposed to it.
It's the same when people move next to the airport and then complain about noise.
In general this can be solved with an extension of property rights, the industrial zone/airport/music venue etc can own the rights to "pollute" the neighboring areas, much like buying air rights in a city. Then it's clear when you purchase / rent / what level of noise / pollution you can expect.
This allows market forces to work, if after a certain time the city is bigger and that land is more valuable for quality housing then they can buy the rights from the polluter and shut it down.
The right to pollute should never be granted in perpetuity. If anything, it should be a recurring cost that increases or decreases based on the how much polluting is occurring. That way the markets work in incentivizing less polluting.
Yup. For the most part I would like to see current pollution regulations tossed wholesale.
Instead, put a price tag on each pollutant. The charge is applied at the point in the supply chain where the pollutant is created or extracted and is rebated to anyone who destroys the pollutant (although they may be charged for other pollutants created in the process.) Think of the oft-proposed carbon tax, just much, much broader.
In an ideal world this would be a great solution, but on earth I think this would invite a whole host of corruption, similar to the carbon offset trading. Not combating the problem but making everyone richer.
This is interesting and far too progressive for any of the cities to regulate at this time (or at any point in the past). This does sound like the right way to permit new industrial areas / processes. Though I imagine it might be difficult to pull off. Grandfathered industries would have such a huge advantage.
aren't you assuming we spend the money to adequately track the problem and hold the correct people responsible? that's certainly not the case now in the US. maybe you can fix that by creating a market somehow?
Gonna have to side with city zoning being the wrong party here. It’s really the people who represent the tax base that should be protecting said tax base.
That completely lets the companies off the hook for dangerous and unnecessary pollution. Even if nobody was around, they should have an ethylene oxide scrubber. That is a major source of teratogenic emissions per the article.
Also, it strikes me as extremely speculative on your part that this is a zoning issue. How do you know that these plants didn't shift product mixes or expand after there were established communities nearby, or that the companies provided incorrect information to regulators? Unless you want to fund armies of scientists for the regulator to validate the truth of claims made on submissions then you have to blame the companies that submit false data. That seems far more likely than your assumption.
I’m responding to a post which mentioned zoning issues. Generally, this is an article about “sacrifice zones” - I’m confused.
Putting zoning aside, companies have no motives outside of growth and profit. That’s why governments exist to protect the population they represent. From people, companies, foreign invaders, etc.
Not even profit these days, just growth. For-market-capitalization companies, profits are just to look good on the balance sheet, what you want is revenues, really.
Houston is imfamous for not having zoning. That's how you get an industrial plant next to a school next to a mall next to housing next to a cattle feed lot.
Given how zoning utterly ratfucked half the west coast into being all single-family hellscapes; I'm not inclined to say Houston should start having American-style zoning codes. Zoning goes way beyond safety regulation and includes all sorts of things that should never have been brought under democratic control. If we want to keep housing from being built next to polluting factories, then that should be the EPA's job[0] to enforce.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the other places didn’t have similar features. Responsible zoning, imho, would put residential far away from industrial, especially when they have smoke stacks or other offgasing.
Who do you think is setting up these neighbourhoods? A lot of times it's the industrial companies as well looking to diversify their investments.
But not always, let's not paint them with the same brush. Zoom out on the problem broader.
Why are industrial companies polluting land that they don't own? Well, because this was all established in an age when we considered pollution out of sight and out of mind. If it's not an oil barrel lying in a ditch, but some happy vapor going out into the atmosphere, who cares?
So the lack of government regulation of pollution on land not owned by the companies is the problem.
In 21st century sensibilities about externalities, an industrial plant should not be able to pollute land it doesn't own. And if there is no way to avoid that, the government should set it up as an isolation zone not zoned for residential, and force the company to price that into their economics.
By the way this is what the rest of the developed world does. The US, with it's obsession with profits, and deregulation, and "letting the free market" decide doesn't, and now has the worst correlation between health outcomes and socioeconomic class of any developed country.
I would still blame the industrial zone in this case. If it is unsafe to live within 5 miles of the plant they should own all land within 5 miles of the plant.
That wasn't your property to make unsafe. If it's your own property that you've made unsafe, then sell it, I'd consider it on the buyer, unless you hid that it was unsafe
If it's your own property that you've made unsafe, then sell it, I'd consider it on the buyer, unless you hid that it was unsafe.
No one should be able to build houses or establish habitations on poisonous and polluted area. You can sell poisonous land to someone else but anyone owning poisonous land needs to take precautions to keep people off.
It's like one should be able to sell spoiled food (to eat) or lead contaminated toys. Warning people here isn't enough because some people will be foolish or desperate.
I think they way you described was a bit harsh. That said this is a serious challenge for industry that have large footprints and health risks to the community. In the electric markets there are lots of power plants that were originally far from communities but then housing spread and fell into the catchment areas.
Going forward wouldn't it make sense to zone an entire area to not be allowed to build for residential purposes (essentially a buffer around the industrial zones)?
It feels like its a grey area of responsibility etc. For industrial processes that are known to be highly toxic it would fall on the industrials but as we find out more information around toxicity and impacts (which it feels like more is coming to light all the time) it will require some deft navigating.
You're underestimating the ruthless disregard most large industrial producers have for the communities where they locate. These companies are led by sociopaths and fools.
The largest new industrial facility in West Virginia, Rockwool in Ranson, is permitted as a top ten polluter for formaldehyde in the entire United States and was built 1,300 feet from an existing elementary school just last year.
Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong?
This argument confuses policy and morality and somehow implies we should ignore both.
Morally, if you spew chemicals you know are going to cause significant excess deaths, you will have to live with yourself and myself and many people will think little of you.
Legality, if you spew an otherwise unknown chemical that you happen to know is quite toxic, you'll be liable. If you stay with EPA guidelines but happen to know this is going to kill or injure significant number, you only have public perceptions and your own conscious to answer for.
Policy wise, the EPA should impose regulations that make all neighborhoods reasonably safe. Moreover, I suggest structuring the regulation process to incentivize creating compliant processes rather than in terms of after-the-fact punishments. (I've heard a variety of contrasts between the US and Europe, where despite the US very "pro-capitalist", the regulatory paradigm is entirely adversarial).
I just launched a non-profit, part of is it high quality air quality monitoring for Gary, IN. I'm looking to install it at/near the nearest residential area near USS Gary Works.
I've only been able to afford a 3 month rental of AQMesh's sensor, hopefully it'll trigger enough interest to get a few of these bad boys around Gary/Chicagoland.
Chicago used to be (and somewhat still is) an industrial and transportation hub. A substantial amount of metals and chemical industry still operates there.
I'm surprised by the levels in Houston. I wouldn't expect so much pollution in such a populated area. Louisiana gets a bonus mention-- there are quite a few polluters along the Mississippi just north of New Orleans. I can only imagine the impact this has on their water quality
Some anecdotes as someone who lived near one of these locations growing up (fortunately about 30 mi away)
1) Every now and then, our entire town would smell terrible, presumably from the winds carrying the emissions to us
2) A friend who moved here during my high school had to move away since his whole family suffered from asthma and it was made much noticeably worse here
3) Heard a couple huge explosions during my lifetime from these refineries sadly.
I did an internship at a pulp mill that was on the Canada-U.S. border (Canadian side). There was an elementary school literally besides the plant (~50m away).
If there was a release of sulphur dioxide that was going to stay on the Canadian side, the plant management notified the relevant authorities. Sometimes the kids were told not to go outside for recess.
If the SO2 was potentially going to drift over the border, the entire plant was shut down because the U.S. EPA would hit them with millions of dollars in fines.
Not particularly but for what it's worth things like bad smells and explosions haven't happen in a really long time here. I am not sure if there's an increased cancer rate where I am located but will likely be researching that soon.
As I've said for years, any time you see a glittering urban core full of glass towers, steel bridges, and classic old stone architecture, somewhere there's a Mordor nearby that made all that happen.
I think this is a fantastic way to think about pollution.
But to make sure that it doesn’t veer into city bashing (as HN is sometimes wont to do): the only difference between the glistening urban core and 300 square miles of suburban sprawl is the number of trucks needed to distribute the raw materials involved. All things being equal, the pollution involved in building the former is both lesser and more sustainable.
Boston area has no big chemical/hard industrial industry, and nothing on that map. Neither does seattle (but the map shows some small process in areaa). Id wager a lot of modern "intellectual" cities (where knowledge worker industries dominate) can be devoid of such processes. Tourism cities too - eg, Vegas and Miami don't have such a history and their maps are clean.
Obviously SFBay is a notable exception to the knowledge-worker idea, but SV was founded on horribly toxic silicon refining which, while mostly gone, has a terrible history of poisoning the ground.
Then you're simply being pedantic, and illustrating the inherent danger of free-for-all negative externalities. If the polluting was done far enough away, it doesn't matter?
Jesus, this story is going to have all the bad takes. People's main takeaway from the article is, "it's just the way cities grow," "it's the zoning board's fault," "people moved near a cancer cluster, it's their fault," "you should be able to pollute an area you pay for."
Seriously? The problem is the government allowing private corporations to poison the environment to benefit the bottom line of the corporations. I don't care if someone moved next door to an industrial plant or a pig farm, if they are spewing toxins into the air we breathe, the water we drink, the ground someone else will eventually purchase, they are responsible for damaging the environment as well as harming, and in the long run, killing people and that should absolutely be illegal and stopped. We're not talking about a bad smell or loud noise, we're talking about people getting leukemia or Parkinson's and so on. Are you sociopaths?
Absolutely! I have started a project to encourage municipalities to use land use to protect their water and other sensitive spots from service stations.
The EPA has all sorts of silly guidelines like saying setback a gas station 500 feet from school or wetlands if they pump over 3.6MM gallons a year. Under that? 25 feet.
A crazy thing I learned recently is the cost of cleanups for underground storage tanks is not really tracked or published publicly. I started requesting information a few weeks ago. https://postpump.org/oregon
Exactly. This isn’t some sort of weird environmental topic. This is a human rights violation. The foundation of a huge swath of our law is “no one has a right to encroach on a person or their property.” (Examples being murder and theft.) Pollution is a violation of that principle on a massive scale and it should be treated that way.
yes, internalize externalities first, starting with the most dangerous and egregious. most other ‘solutions’ are apologist distractions from this primary mitigation.
> The problem is the government allowing private corporations to poison the environment to benefit the bottom line of the corporations.
I disagree with the notion that regulations are inherently harmful to corporate profits. Foreign competitors do generally exist in other countries with different regulations, which complicates the matter in the real world; but in a healthy, homogeneously regulated market, a new regulation should increase the operating costs of all suppliers more or less equally. Assuming that there's a sufficient amount of competition to keep profit margins reasonably thin, the increased cost of regulatory compliance should be passed onto customers in the form of higher prices.
I'm thinking of where I grew up. A local anti-establishment rag noted a cancer cluster in one part of town and wouldn't let go even when shown the truth. The end result of the mess was it went from a cheap but decent area to somewhere I wouldn't want to venture even by day.
The only toxic stuff in the neighborhood was benzene from all the old cars about--the "cluster" was because it was the cheapest decent area in town, people who got sick and had medical bills and couldn't work ended up moving there. The rate of *diagnosis* of cancer there was below average, the cluster was purely due to immigration.
"Cancer clusters" by themselves are not really surprising, since statistically if you look at enough small subsets it's certain you'll see such seemingly-anomalous "clusters." It's interesting only as the first step in an investigation, and not at all interesting as evidence.
But the problem with estimated cancer risk is you end with the whole breast implant issue - it was “proven” silicone breast implants caused cancer until data proved they didn’t.
Do you have evidence to back up this claim? I'm aware CA puts many warning stickers on various products... but isn't it possible that profit-seeking corporations are, in fact, using cancer-causing materials simply because they're cheaper?
The point isn't that the amount of cancer caused is literally zero. Just by chance, everything will have some (generally infinitesimal) effect on cancer, and often it will be positive. The question is whether "causes cancer" is being applied to products that cause amounts of cancer that are so small that it's not worth warning people about. That consumer products and businesses are covered in these warning and few people take them seriously is prima facie evidence that this is the case, but you'd have to dig into the numbers to be sure.
For instance, Wikipedia:
> The requirements apply to amounts above what would present a 1-in-100,000 risk of cancer assuming lifetime exposure (for carcinogens)
Using the standard ~$5M statistical value of life, this mean that you need to label a product if it is estimated to impose the equivalent of $50 in costs if someone is regularly exposed to the chemical over an entire lifetime. I'm not sure what frequency of exposure is being assumed here, but naively that means that if I use the product once a week, it requires notification of about 2 cents worth of harm per usage.
You're not going to get more customers by labeling your product with "99% less cancerous than what the standard requires" next to the warning that it causes cancer.
They're not labeling things that are particularly known to be harmful. CA Prop 65 warnings are on all rice, coffee, and multi-tenant garages. When you begin labeling things that common and benign as "cancer-causing" people learn to tune it out. Pretty sure rice, coffee, and/or multi-tenant garages are found pretty much everywhere.
This article is not very convincing. I mean sure, the thing about coffee was over the top, but they also stopped requiring that one.
Meanwhile the other examples it uses are that you have to be warned when you're being exposed to things like diesel exhaust. Which, um, actually does cause cancer.
Regulations always have dumb results. If you put the warning on anything with lead in it, people make fun of the warning on a Tiffany lamp. If you don't, people are shocked that you don't have the label on a child's toy with lead paint.
Regulators are never going to thread the needle that well. They're not capable of it. This is a huge problem when they're banning stuff. When they're labeling stuff, eh. People will figure it out.
People don't seem to change their behaviour due to those warnings. Nobody's going into a coffee shop, seeing that warning sticker and thinking 'ah whoops better get out of here' are they? The warning 'cancer-causing' has no effect.
This works, if you have 20 coffee shops, and one of them has "there's asbestos in this building" warning.
If you have warnings literally everywhere, for minor things, that noone really cares about, because the risks are miniscule, people will start ignoring even the dangerous but identical-looking signs. "this item causes cancer" ... are we talking about asbestos, or are we talking about a roasted potato? If the labels are the same, people stop noticing them.
I agree with your sentiment, but fear of asbestos is also another danger that has been highly exaggerated. Asbestos is only dangerous if it is particularized and inhaled in high quantities over a period of time. Men that changed breaks that had asbestos in them and thus lots of asbestos dust or men who worked on installing asbestos pipes and were cutting them all the time, were the ones who got cancer (or their wives who washed their dusty clothes). The fear of asbestos objects or buildings that have, say asbestos insulation on pipes in the basement, is not reasonable and another example of overblown fear that probably cost the US a hundreds of billions dollars (wild guess) that could have been spent much more productively on something else.
Ultimately you're describing how asbestos is generally handled, apart from the rare exceptions of subsidies to preemptively replace it. But eventually, maintenance has to be performed on things made out of asbestos, which would then disperse it into the air and surrounding environment. So sure, asbestos is basically inert until it's disturbed, but once some part needs to be disturbed then it makes sense to do a full scale remediation rather than setting up expensive containment and only finishing part of the job.
I was going to suggest that asbestos was a bad example, because, in most cases, as long as it's left undisturbed, it's completely safe. The only risk from asbestos is from breathing it into one's lungs. If it's not in the air, it's not a problem.
But, then I thought: hmm... maybe his is a great example. People are terrible at assessing risks. The word 'asbestos' is likely to cause a greater reaction than is warranted. It's the opposite side of the coin from peoples' reactions to those prop 65 signs.
I almost bought olive oil, then noticed the California warning sticker that it contained lead, and didn’t buy it - I don’t see that on all olive oil. So it does make a difference sometimes
My social circle is in CA. None of us pay any attention whatsoever to prop65 labels. They're about as useful as any other type of product or business labeling: there's so much of it that it's just visual noise that's long-ago been brainfiltered out of existence.
Devil's advocate, it has an effect on some minority of people. Then the company loses sales and has the incentive to stop using the carcinogen if possible.
Your lifetime risk of getting cancer from that thing might have been one in a thousand, so you don't really care, but the company has ten million customers and getting them to change prevents 10,000 cancers.
This is a pretty good alternative to banning the thing. Because if there is a reasonable way to stop using the carcinogen, you don't want to be the company that has the cancer warning when your competitors don't. But if there isn't, maybe the risk is low enough that people make an informed choice to take the risk for the benefit of the thing with no better alternative, and that's fine too.
I absolutely pay attention to Prop 65 when I buy products and will find alternatives. I also try to find out _why_ there's a prop 65 warning and then decide how much I care (e.g. if an SSD has it, I don't care because I know I'm handling it so little and it shouldn't be offgasing anything; where as with food or things I'm always touching, then I care very much).
The fact that every coffee shop in California is still open, despite people being warned for years that they sell products that cause cancer. The vast majority of people clearly do not care about the warning.
And what do you think is the benefit of putting unsupported warnings on things? Do you think it's actively beneficial? Do you think it's harmless? If it's beneficial or harmless we might as well go ahead and put a warning label on absolutely everything regardless. Then how do we react to this linked article? We'd ignore it.
If you're the one who wants warning labels on things that don't need warning about then you justify that position!
It's not clear to me if you're arguing just about warnings on coffee or if you're arguing that all warning labels are useless.
>The fact that every coffee shop in California is still open, despite people being warned for years that they sell products that cause cancer. The vast majority of people clearly do not care about the warning.
Or they care, but have balanced the risks vs. their enjoyment of coffee. But they may see a warning on, for example, olive oil which contains lead, and decide to buy another product.
>putting unsupported warnings on things?
What do you mean by unsupported here? As in, not supported by science? Or by the people? Because I'm pretty sure it's well supported by science that certain products are carcinogenic and that consuming them, unsurprisingly, isn't very good. We can argue about what thresholds constitute a tangible risk, for sure, but either way the fact that some things cause cancer is surely considered "supported".
>that don't need warning about
Same question -- just referring to coffee or all labels on everything? I agree with this if you're just referring to coffee, but there are certainly labels that I do pay attention to and consider a warning useful.
I think there's a happy middle-ground here. If my favorite juice has lead, I want to know. If my favorite coffee shop has a 1 in 10,000,000 of causing cancer, I probably don't need the warning each day.
The problem I see with these labels is they lack specificity. A sticker on the visor in a new car says this vehicle contains chemicals that cause cancer and /or birth defects. I know the paint does, as do all the fluids.
What about the steering wheel and the arm rests?
My pen doesn't have a warning, is that because the manufacturer chooses to consider exposure through skin contact only, but chewing on it is actually a sizeable risk?
I think the reality is we have so many terrible chemicals all around us that it feels like an over reaction, when it's actually the exact opposite -- manufacturers have made many a deal with the devil.
In many cases it's natural risk, not the products at all.
Everything has some amount of lead back from the days when it was used recklessly. Everything has some amount of mercury that's still going up smokestacks. (Now we catch most of it--not all of it!) Plants pick up some arsenic from the soil--for medical reasons I eat a lot of rice and it's enough of an issue I make sure to buy rice grown in low-arsenic areas.
Yep, California has raised the bar, and to do so it had to take risks. In particular, it risked looking silly-- and in penis-politics looking silly in front of your opponents is an existential risk. The good news is, some of these risks paid off and became national standards. So, thanks to California, you are poisoned a little less every day.
Speaking personally: fuck you for making fun of that effort!
I'm not making fun of it - I'm saying it's actively harmful because when people now see articles like this and read 'cancer-causing' they'll think 'like Starbucks coffee, so I'm happy with that risk - not a problem'.
> when people now see articles like this and read 'cancer-causing' they'll think 'like Starbucks coffee, so I'm happy with that risk - not a problem'.
Well, I can think of multiple site guidelines I see violated here too.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Really, it'd be a compliment to call your comments facile. This article has as an opening graphic a stark juxtaposition of harsh industry and children attending school, which it then proceeds to discuss pretty thoroughly. It is difficult to believe you think the discussion there is about risks analogous to drinking a cup of coffee.
If you think the behavior of people who do not read the article will be unchanged by yet another discussion of cancer, I think you will perhaps be surprised to learn that people who don't care about privacy don't care about yet another discussion of government overreach and people who don't care about politics remain unbothered by news articles decrying fascism or communism.
The article was quite interesting, and showed some very good points. When you use words like "when people now see articles like this" to completely dismiss its very point, it ceases to feel like good faith discussion of anything besides some personal agenda you related to an article keyword.
> When you use words like "when people now see articles like this" to completely dismiss its very point
I think you're misreading my comments.
I'm not dismissing the article. It's the opposite. I'm saying that my fear is that other people will unfortunately dismiss the article, due to fatigue of being warned that things cause cancer.
You are strongly whitewashing your own comments. Your first comment - as mentioned re: personal agendas - was about 75% dedicated to to railing against California. The other 25% was where you expressed your opinion of the article: "probably nobody cares"
Please write more carefully if you mean what you say when pressed, because these thoughts are not without merit, but the top level comment was completely off-topic and derogatory to the article and has scarcely spawned a useful discussion.
I’m really not sure how you managed to take that away from the top level comment! I didn't say anything derogatory about it if you re-read it. I think you're possibly bringing in some kind of preconception.
The article is important but its impact is watered down by people making ‘cancer-causing’ a daily warning. That was the point.
You are a sad person to use language like such a snake
> I didn't say anything derogatory about it if you re-read it
he says in response to a comment clearly outlining why it reads as derogatory regardless of author intention, ignoring those points to instead imply I am the problem.
> The article is important but its impact is watered down by people making ‘cancer-causing’ a daily warning. That was the point.
You can't really tell me that was the point - where do you suggest the article is important in your initial comment? Answer with a quotation please.
To me, and any reasonable reader, the point was that you hate California, and everything else was just a weak justification to make that comment on this article.
Every post is going to attract someone "just asking questions" about whether a normal, serious, hypothetical person would immediately be thinking about right-wing talking points instead of thinking about health and suffering.
Cmon, prop 65 is terribly implemented, and so the results are absurd. It’d be like if your software’s logging just sent “there’s an error” over and over via email to the whole team with no more details. Not even time stamps.
I think parent is referring to the useless Prop 65 warnings that are plastered on everything. They're so ubiquitous as to be completely meaningless. No sense of scale or relative risk. The coffee carries the same warning as the jug of pesticide you spray on your fruit trees. Same warning is on an Ethernet cable as is on a can of paint.
The risk posed by these different items varies wildly, but they're all treated the same from a warning label perspective. And once you realize benign items get the label, you start to ignore it wherever you see it.
What California did for air quality is fantastic. I'm proud of my state for its leadership on that and related things. But that doesn't excuse the failure of Prop 65 warnings. They're worse than just "silly". They dilute real warnings and cause people to ignore the whole lot.
That's the equivalent of software monitoring alerts that engineers can't do anything to fix.
Alert! A new user has joined.
Alert! A user has logged in 47,000 times in the last minute
The second gets ignored because of the flood of the first kind of message. It's called Attention Fatigue and policies often don't take the effect seriously enough.
Better would be a warning with relative danger. Something like a how-cooked-is-your-goose measure: rare, mid-rare, medium, medium-well, well done, charcoal.
I would remove the fu stuff. But I appreciate your appreciation of prop 65. Even if tons of products still have the warning, the amount of lead in various things has dropped significantly since implemented.
I wish your comment was the parent comment. It would be nice to understand what the benefits are because we all know about the silly cancer warnings in Starbucks.
"Before there was climate denial, there was cancer denial."
Cancer is just a risk. Having a job an earning money will always outweigh that risk. People will put up with a lot of crummy environment to put food on the table.
What many corporations try to do is downplay the risk or flat out deny, and pay a fool's wages because the locals don't know they're slowly getting poisoned. Ignorance is great for business because it increases profit margins.
You can argue about the merits of having that informed consent and still _choosing_ to put up with it, and whether that's truly free will or necessity, or something in between.
But time and time again, there are companies that will lie to everyone, employees included, about the risks.
That is _not_ informed consent, and is not defensible for any reason.
Before the emissions control feeding frenzy begins, let's try to remember that further regulation without industry input contributes to further inflation & moves more polluting production overseas where we have no control over its impact on the world.
Yes, we should aim for zero emissions. Yes, the health impacts carry their own costs not to mention the human tragedy. However, good public policy is about rewarding good behavior (eg. tax credits) and punishing bad behavior (eg. tax, enforcement, penalties). Everyone loves to talk about the latter, while the former is ignored.
We really need to be long-term smart about how we craft environmental policy in America, and particularly so given other countries unwillingness to manage pollution in an effective or transparent manner.
> let's try to remember that further regulation without industry input
Industry contributes all the time. Their contribution is to make sure nothing at all gets done by funding politicians, lawyers and fake science. This pattern has been repeated ad naseum with lead, asbestos, PCBs, climate, etc.
In a just world this kind of bad faith action would mean at a minimum industry is ignored in the policy process while a solution is imposed on them. Better would be to wipe out the shareholders in order to compensate for the externalities they've inflicted on others.
You mean they'll be like oil fields out in the middle of a desert where nobody lives? If it's gonna off-gas, might as well be in the middle of nowhere.
> further regulation ... moves more polluting production overseas where we have no control over its impact on the world.
Large corporations and not governments offshore production. Arguably this hasn't much to do with regulations but wholly different economies such that the comparative cost advantage is 10x or more. And of course it's possible to check under what conditions suppliers produce things.
