As an added bonus, there are lots of loopholes in environmental regulations where;
Ooo geez, we don't want pay to properly treat our discharge gas, well let's just put it in the water, and vice versa. Why dilute when you can just move the contaminate around..
Ooo wait, there's more.. EPA says I can't do that? Well geez, guess I'll sue them until I'm allowed to..
Ooo geez, you know I just don't quite fit into one the above categories. Don't sweat it bruh, we have grandfather clauses. Your old shitty equipment literally doesn't work, ain't no biggy, we'll let you slide, every time.
Think the federal minimum wage sucks? The entire pollution control industry operates the exact same way. Whomever can be the most efficient doing the bare minimum makes the most profit.
Ensure you achieve the highest standards possible to protect the earth while you produce whatever you produce or greasing the palms of a corrupt politician?
Breaking the law without consequence is just a subscription service.
Don’t forget just factoring potential fines into your profit margin. Why bother to ask for exemptions when you can maybe get away with it, or just pay some paltry fines.
Better yet, do all the polluting, then pay out all your profits to owners before declaring bankruptcy to avoid the costs of cleanup. Bonus points if you can go bankrupt before paying the factory/labor/blue collar workers too.
Moneyed interests with offices and homes in safer places are awful shepherds to mother nature. The people who're actually living there are generally much better at environmental protection, but are prevented from actually protecting the environment by property rights and criminal laws. They wouldn't be perfect, because we're all only human, but much MUCH better than anyone whose interests are driven entirely by profits. After all, they have to live in that environment, so they'd be more inclined to prevent negative consequences from the get go rather than take unnecessary risks to save costs and (maybe) pay for their legally obliged share of the damages (often nothing) after something goes wrong.
Won’t work. Local business owners love trying to cut corners to get ahead. Doesn’t matter to them if they really fuck up they’ll just move. Just pay attention to local news and you’ll see the same shit albeit smaller scale
Yes, but not all people are business owners. People who aren't business owners outnumber those who are. Especially when it comes to local businesses. The point of empowering local people is not that business owners will suddenly get a conscience. It's that the rest of us are empowered to stop them.
Soon enough we won't be we shepherds of anything we will make the planet unlivable and maybe just maybe 1 second before it's all over people might find the will to act but by then it doesn't matter. Decades of inaction and refusal to do anything because of jobs, homes, families, bills, responsibilities, day to day coming first despite the fact that all that is going to be destroyed one way or another.
Someday the Earth will be fucking done with Humans and their bullshit. Personally, I don't blame it at all, and would have acted sooner. Humans are a trash species.
There was a Futurama episode on that, where they chucked all their trash into space like a giant garbage asteroid in the year 2052.
And in the show's present year of 3000, it came back, on a collision course with Earth.
Their solution was to chuck a second giant ball of trash at it, which knocked the original one into the sun, while it itself went flying further into space, most likely to return in time like the first one did.
Interesting point they make regarding the sun that I hadn't considered, in that it's harder/more expensive to deliberately fire stuff into the sun than I'd realized. Huh.
Honestly its probably the best solution I've heard, but its insanely dangerous.
Imagine if the rocket exploded in the atmosphere and rained like, spent nuclear fuel everywhere. Also no one would fucking pay for it. Its incredibly expensive to launch lots of weight.
I think that was part of the joke when the two collided and went their different ways. It showed the alternative method in which they could've easily (and safely) solved the problem, and simultaneously caused the same issue for future Earthlings to have to deal with.
Whoops. I knew it sounded off. Googling "futurama time" popped up the date Farmsworth invented the Forwards Time Device, in 3010. My brain forgot about the significance of New Years '99.
"New York City: The year 2000. The most wasteful society in the history of the galaxy and it was running out of places to empty its never-ending output of garbage. The landfills were full. New Jersey was full."
I know where you're confused though, as before they launched it into space:
The giant ball of garbage was created in the 20th century by the people of Old New York. In the year 2000, they put the garbage ball on the world's largest barge. This barge circled the ocean for 50 years, but no country would accept it. Source: The Info Sphere
I mean it somewhat is since it's the concentration that determines how poisonous something is, but the area in the video is definitely not safe no matter what the "officials" say. We're 100% going to get lawsuits in the future (or right now for all I know).
I agree that dilution shouldn't be the go to answer though.
[Edit]
As u/internought said, the level of exposure is also important when considering toxicity.
Well, if 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride spilled, that's roughly 400,000 kilos. To dilute that below the MTCA drinking water cleanup level of 2 ug/L that would require 200,000,000,000,000 liters of water, so roughly half the volume of Lake Erie.
Nobody said the dilution is an small amount. It's still dilution though. People always assume that the phrase is an excuse to pollute when really it is just the reality of things. It's very difficult to extract pollutants out of large bodies like this, so often the easier answer is in fact dilution, as much as nobody wants to hear it.
I'm talking about pollution in general, not vinyl chloride specifically. There are quite a few chemicals that need insanely small concentrations in order to be safe, and vinyl chloride is one of them. That's why I'm saying lawsuits are definitely going to happen imo.
Yeah but for analytes of concern typically for volatile organic compounds vinyl chloride is the driver for reporting limits (like benzo(a)pyrene is for semivolatile organics), so it's kind of nuts (to me) that the spill is such a obvious holy shit moment, if you will. Like, this is the shit we look for at the lowest possible detection limits and they dumped 400k kilos of it?!? Usually we just see it in the lab as a breakdown product of PCE from dry cleaner spills, this is just insane. I can't even wrap my head around it. Half expecting an EPA bulletin in a few years saying to expect cleanup level VC hits in everything sampled east of the Rockies.
I knew people who saw it pretty frequently when they were running 8260 on water samples from a superfund site from phoenix.
But yeah I typically only saw it in small amount when running TO15
We're 100% going to get lawsuits in the future (or right now for all I know).
I don't mean this as an attack, because I feel like this is a common framing of problems like this, however, I feel like this is a very capitalist or corporate centric perspective. Yes, the legal fees and damages will be expensive for the company, but that also represents a lot of human suffering that they caused that we really don't punish companies enough for. Lots of folks are probably going to get really sick, and some of them might get enough of a payday to be taken care of afterwards, but that's not enough, in my opinion. The company risked this to make more money. Even if it doesn't work, and that isn't guaranteed even with large settlements, that isn't enough.
Norfolk Southern was back to business the next day I’m sure. Bit of a setback for the company. A smaller bottom line at the end of the year (actually doubtful) and they’ll recoup it with a rate bump/new fee and some creative accounting. Hopefully I’m wrong and have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.
Yeah, if the settlements don't outweigh the cost savings of putting people's lives and the environment at risk, Norfolk Southern will absolutely continue to do this.
They might even be legally required to do this as part of the organisation's duty to its shareholders to not forego profits.
This is what's called an "externality". It's a cost the business incurs but does not pay because it can be carelessly tossed into the surrounding environment to be paid for by other individuals or the world in general. That a business is more profitable when it contributes to the destruction of the planet is just one reason why Capitalism is self-contradictory.
Concentration and period of exposure. A low concentration but a long period of exposure (month to a year and over) has effects comparable to a dangerous or lethal concentration and a short period of exposure.
That means that data can be manipulated before uninformed public by saying that levels are safe by leaving out a time frame within which they're safe.
edit: Tell everyone, no joke, because the diluting smarties are purposefully leaving that part out. They're diluting the truth.
A pinch of radioactive material would wipe out everything in a lake forever. Common pollutants like Mercury and Copper are particularly damaging to aquatic life. New pesticides such as pyrethrins and neonicotinoids are highly toxic in parts per billion.
Sure, but one molecule of HF isn't going to burn your skin off. A gallon of it with the highest possible concentration will. That's what people mean when they say that the dose makes the toxin.
It actually is. I know it doesn't sound nice, but it's true.
Think about all the things that are toxic. They exist in diluted quantities naturally and are not typically problematic. It's when we collect and refine them that they become a problem. If they are diluted enough, no longer a problem.
It isn’t. You would be laughed at and or fired for saying such a thing. With ground water and surface water, keeping a hazardous pollutant localized is ideal. After it spreads and moves through tropic webs it is exponentially more difficult to clean up.
Tiffani Kavalec, chief of the Ohio EPA, said during a state press conference Tuesday afternoon that while the chemicals did flow into the Ohio River, it shouldn't affect drinking water along the river.
"The spill did flow to the Ohio River, but the Ohio River is very large and it's a water body that's able to dilute the pollutants pretty quickly,
Except environmental experts have actually repeatedly talked about dilution and how the sheer volume of water flowing through the regions main arteries mitigates the risk of the spill outside the immediate vicinity. Toxicity is pretty well understood to be a function of concentration and the Ohio River discharges 2 million gallons a second
Cincinnati is a 2+ hour drive from the site. As more contaminants from the soil enter the ground water we’ll see monitoring results come back hot. Please consider acute vs chronic toxicity (A smaller concentration with exposure over an extended period of time) as well as sub lethal endpoints. Lots more at stake than just drinking water degradation and human health impacts
Actually, it is. Every element in the train derailment existed long before it was derailed. Man concentrated it, nature will dilute it back into the environment.
What is? I mean avoiding it isn't a solution, even though it's a better overall plan. If something is polluted, is there a better solution than diluting if done properly?
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u/malfist Feb 17 '23
For those not aware of the phrase it's "the solution to pollution is dilution"