Comment by rayiner
3 hours ago
The EPA first issued health advisories around PFASs in 2009. Why didn’t these folks file this petition sometime during the 12 years since then where it likely would’ve gotten a more favorable reception?
3 hours ago
The EPA first issued health advisories around PFASs in 2009. Why didn’t these folks file this petition sometime during the 12 years since then where it likely would’ve gotten a more favorable reception?
Because we learned more, gathered more public concern, and then acted?
If there’s not a eureka moment of knowledge, should we do nothing?
Because the EPA called it the "2010/2015 PFOA Stewardship Program" not the "2010/2015 PFAS Stewardship Program" PFAS != PFOA
I feel like most people hadn’t heard about them until a couple of years ago.
The timeline is wild. It took Patagonia like a decade to actually make PFAS free stuff.
whataboutism is a tiresome argument.
Lets agree that these folks are wrong and ideally they should have petitioned 12 years ago. The question to ask is - for an admin which loudly claims to make America healthy again and talk about making everything chemical free etc - why can't they pass this? Is it because they can't score brownie points with base or they are overtly corrupt and do the same thing they accuse others of doing? Or that they know their supporters will not look at the validity of the claim and instead discredit people by asking whataboutism and party line questions?
In any economy, there is a slider you can move to make tradeoffs between environmental protection and ease of doing business. The parties openly campaign on moving the slider in one direction or the other. Regulating PFAS would have a major economic impact, because they're in everything. So it's not a surprise that the folks who favor moving the slider more to the ease-of-business side would be opposed to stringent regulation of them.
What I'm asking--as someone who thinks we should have draconian regulations around endocrine disruptors, costs be damned--is why there's not more energy around regulating PFAS from the side that generally favors protecting the environment even if that increases costs of doing business. The MAHA people seem to be the most energized about the issue, but they're in the wrong party to do anything about it. How did PFAS fall into this weird donut hole?
Congress mandated the FDA for a particular mission and the president is obligated to execute on that mission. He clearly failed, so there needs to be a way to recall the president.
2 replies →
Because the majority of Americans are too stupid and too lazy; they won't bother until the threat is literally killing them.
2009 is a generation ago. Asking why a new generation why they might not have petitioned 17 years ago seems like asking where a 21 year old was on 9/11.
As for a better reception, the assumption was RFK Jr. would take it more seriously.
> Why didn’t these folks file this petition sometime during the 12 years since then where it likely would’ve gotten a more favorable reception?
Because then The Uniparty would look bad.
Instead, we can prop up the illusion of democracy and point fingers at "the other side" of good cop / bad cop while elites poison everybody more. We wouldn't want people living too far beyond their working years, after all.
Ya, everything is a conspiracy. It couldn't be that the FDA has been working on PFAS related issues for 6 years now and this petition was more to speed things along in a way that would force progress.
But no, everything is a big conspiracy.
> Ya, everything is a conspiracy.
No conspiracy required. It's just corporations acting like one would expect. In fact, it'd be very strange if they didn't.
It's fundamentally a design problem (or for elites, a solution).
It's not a "conspiracy." The way our government is currently structured, we have a permanent bureaucracy that mostly runs things. And there is a robust revolving door between them and the industry. While they'll take dramatic actions on things that are hot button political issues, like climate change, they are extremely resistant to rocking the boat on almost anything else.
Environmental pollutants like PFAS fly under the political radar, and there's very little incentive at places like FDA to regulate the problem boldly.