Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

May 20, 2024 7:57 PM

Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe Reporting by Sharon Lerner for ProPublica.
posted by biogeo (25 comments total)

Wow. Jim Johnson is a sociopath. In a story that has plenty of them, his assholishness really stands out.
posted by Ickster at 9:06 PM on May 20 [10 favorites]

In the case of forever chemicals, the unspooling began on a cattle farm. In 1998, a West Virginia farmer told a lawyer, Robert Bilott, that wastewater from a DuPont site seemed to be poisoning his cows: They had started to foam at the mouth, their teeth grew black and more than a hundred eventually fell over and died. Bilott sued and obtained tens of thousands of internal documents, which helped push forever chemicals into the public consciousness. The documents revealed that the farm’s water contained PFOA, the fluorochemical that DuPont had bought from 3M, and that both companies had long understood it to be toxic. (The lawsuit, which ended in a settlement, was dramatized in the film “Dark Waters,” starring Mark Ruffalo as Bilott.)
recommend reading TFA, also the film
posted by HearHere at 11:05 PM on May 20 [4 favorites]

"The lab had just reported something odd, however. For the sake of comparison, it had tested blood samples from the American Red Cross, which came from the general population and should have been free of fluorochemicals. Instead, it kept finding a contaminant in the blood."


This may be the clearest articulation of why controls are important I've ever seen.

You really never know when the phenomenon you're studying might effect _every person on the planet_.
posted by constraint at 11:55 PM on May 20 [26 favorites]

Infuriating and heartbreaking.

Someday the last human on Earth, riddled with cancers and toxins, will writhe and suffer and die, and it will be the last act in a centuries-long tragedy that we've already been writing for a hundred years. Folks like Jim Johnson and companies like 3M and Dupont have laid the foundation and set the scene, and a thousand other bureaucrats and functionaries and their companies continue the work now, each of them making little choices every day that put their job security and year-over-year profit and shareholder returns over the continued survival of life on this planet.

The only bright spot is that after we're finally dead and gone, it'll only take another ten or twenty thousand years for all the poison we've sown to work its way out of the Earth's system. Hardly any time at all, geologically speaking. It'll shrug us and our cloud of profitable toxins off like a bad dream and go back to what it was doing before all this homo sapiens nonsense came along.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 1:53 AM on May 21 [15 favorites]

Someday the last human on Earth, riddled with cancers and toxins, will writhe and suffer and die

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful momentin time we created a lot of value for shareholders"
posted by DreamerFi at 3:43 AM on May 21 [26 favorites]

Humans are a lost cause, and the humans in this story are fascinating for what they hold inside, how they keep going. One knows it is too late, and knows the corp knew before she was born, keeps working for the company. Even the sociopath has to reject science in old age to keep from giving up on life.

I want to know more about how these minds work, and the lawyers and the CEO adopting the sleepy defense. We already know the chemicals.
posted by drowsy at 5:39 AM on May 21 [1 favorite]

The part that stood out to me was when one dude brings in blood from his horse and then when it tests positive he really thinks he's caught her being wrong.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:27 AM on May 21 [11 favorites]

Death penalty.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:34 AM on May 21 [5 favorites]

Between microplastics and this, I feel polluted. It's so depressing.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:59 AM on May 21 [4 favorites]

This is depressing but really, shouting doom isn’t the only possible response.

Remember acid rain, DDT (mostly…) and CFCs.

We can continue to:
- support journalism like this
- lobby politicians
- get active and connected

Sure, it sucks. But apathy and inaction (see also: this article) are what corporations count on. I get the response but my question is how to keep up the pressure for that 2025 PFAS ban.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:51 AM on May 21 [47 favorites]

It's ok to feel depressed about this! It's not "shouting doom." I get exhausted that any time someone feels sad about the sad fact that our world and our very bodies have been poisoned, there's a quick, "don't despair." I believe it's incredibly un-validating that it IS depressing and no, there's nothing we can do about the fact that we are already poisoned. I'm going to go ahead and feel sad about that. Those feelings have nothing to do with action or inaction, as it's all out of our hands anyway, just like climate change.

This article was well written and interesting as it shows the human side of discovery and cover-up of this, and I'm glad I read it. Next time I'll remember to keep my feelings to myself.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:07 AM on May 21 [11 favorites]

(Corporations count on profits. Which is all they care about. They care not one whit for our feelings, so I'll keep feeling 'em.)
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:08 AM on May 21 [4 favorites]

I’m not loving the comments that center on the sociopathic behaviors of the rich global north, as if that’s all of humanity, and then shrugging “humans suck but don’t worry, we’ll be dead soon.” There are literally billions of people who are suffering from capitalism while not at fault for capitalism, so let’s not act like 1. everyone’s the same and 2. these actions were inevitable because humans ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ whatcha gonna do
posted by toodleydoodley at 9:13 AM on May 21 [19 favorites]

Dark Waters was the reason we paid $2000 to put a PFAS/PFOS filter in our house, which has well water. On the one hand, the levels were below the WHO recommendation of 100 parts per trillion, and on the other hand, they were (just) above my state's recommendation of 13 parts per trillion. The official line of the EPA is that the only acceptable level is zero because the compounds don't break down, but the EPA's proposed ban is at 4 parts per trillion because anything below that is not reliably detectable.

When we were doing our research to decide whether to put the filter in, we found the wildly different levels that were deemed "acceptable" by different orgs very frustrating to navigate, especially because I'd just had a baby and PFOS/PFAS are said to be especially bad for young infants (as most kinds of pollution are). The state had just lowered the standard to 13 the previous year, and it was a controversial move, since at that level the majority of wells would fail the safety test. Lots of pressure to set the standard somewhere that would make the majority of wells "safe" and focus efforts on the worst areas. From a harm-reduction standpoint, I can't even say that's the wrong approach!

But yeah we ultimately decided, if there's this much political pressure to set the standards high, and the EPA is pushing to set them so low, we'd better put the filter in, just in case.

And then after doing all that, I still get tired of throwing out every nonstick pan with a scratch in it, arguably a greater threat to health. I replaced a few of them with pricey 'green' ones but that's also expensive. Honestly the Feds and other world governments need to just ban this entire class of chemicals and all related ones and we will suffer through nonstick pans that aren't really nonstick.
posted by subdee at 10:02 AM on May 21 [12 favorites]

I get the sense that some of the claimed correlations of diseases related to PFOS are likely to turn out to be spurious, as so many health claims do. It seems like the richest line of inquiry would start with an analysis of the incidence of various diseases over time. If all the effects that are thrown out there as possibilities were actually happening, we'd see much higher rates of those things now than we did in the past.

That heuristic leads me to find the claims about hormonal changes that could lead to obesity and diabetes the most plausible of the bunch. Wouldn't it be ironic if it turned out that highly processed food is mostly fine and the obesity epidemic was actually the result of the various PFAS compounds throwing our hormones out of whack?

I must admit, though, that I was very skeptical about the possible danger until I learned that these chemicals bioaccumulate. We've always got some amount of shit coursing through our veins that's bad for us. Much of it having fuck all to do with human activity. There's an awful lot of stuff found in nature that can hurt us with too much exposure, after all. It's a hell of a lot easier to get to "too much" when the stuff in question builds up over time. I think that part being kept hidden is what I feel most outraged about.

That and the fact that we still haven't gotten to the point where factories have to not clean their effluent as long as whatever they're spewing hasn't already made it onto the naughty list. It should really be the other way around. Nothing comes out of your waste pipe unless it's known to be safe, everything else has to be captured and disposed of in a way that it is exceedingly unlikely to end up in the environment or processed into things that are known to be safe if that happens to be a possibility.
posted by wierdo at 10:40 AM on May 21 [9 favorites]

The circuit breaker moment after which Hansen could no longer face the implications of her own discoveries came when she tested her own blood after delivering twins, and found some of the lowest levels of contamination she’d ever measured in a contemporary human, and yet knew that mice could reduce their own levels at the expense of their offspring by getting pregnant and having a litter.

Interesting that she had twins.

Here is a study finding that late exposure to toxic fine particulates led to 'discordant' growth rates in twins, strongly suggesting to me that the toxic chemicals might have been concentrated in one of the twins, leaving the other relatively unharmed.

Almost as if one of the twins became a sacrifice.

I tried to find a study investigating whether toxic exposure made it more likely that a woman would conceive twins but didn’t come up with anything.
posted by jamjam at 11:45 AM on May 21 [6 favorites]

3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-­it notes

Actually, I invented Post-It Notes.

(Just starting what I’m anticipating to be a really interesting article but I had to pause for humor.)
posted by bendy at 12:14 PM on May 21 [3 favorites]

That was awful. Not only the fatally-toxic ubiquity of the chemicals created by 3M and the despicable Johnson but I can feel Hansen’s pain and frustration at the way her employer treated her. I’ve been there on a much smaller scale and it’s so demoralizing and disrespectful. Ugh.
posted by bendy at 12:33 PM on May 21 [2 favorites]

Against fatalism: there are counterexamples of people working to prove beyond a doubt manmade contributions to environmental problems-- they can be solved. Not easily, not quickly, but it's possible. Both CFCs and lead are good examples. Lead is a great story also,here's one well-written version.
posted by lwxxyyzz at 2:33 PM on May 21 [10 favorites]

I'm on team death penalty. We need it baked into society that things like this are on the same level as war crimes.

Apparently Biden and Senate Dems are pushing for a 20% bump to the EPA's budget, so that's at least something positive.
posted by Room 101 at 5:13 PM on May 21 [7 favorites]

Actually, I invented Post-It Notes.

Are you Romy or Michele?

(Jumping on the humor bandwagon before RTFA)
posted by gtrwolf at 6:00 PM on May 21 [2 favorites]

Someday the last human on Earth, riddled with cancers and toxins, will writhe and suffer and die

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
posted by evilensky at 4:27 AM on May 23 [5 favorites]

ProPublica followup article: Nine Takeaways From Our Investigation Into 3M’s Forever Chemicals
posted by ursus_comiter at 9:19 AM on May 24

They’re in pans, fruit, dust – and even tap water. But can I eradicate toxic forever chemicals from my home?
posted by rory at 6:39 AM on May 28

^ Short answer = not a chance!
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:02 AM on May 28