Sorry, but that seems a bit ignorant. A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts.

I’m not saying this is good, but by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house.

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.

> Sometimes it is due to incentives,

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.

>And we should stop and fix that.

By exporting it to a poorer country? Because that's what happens.

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.

It's more like installing a catalytic converter on your car. Or adding a muffler.

The article says the factory does not have an ethylene oxide scrubber installed.

If your car is damaging property that’s not yours, then absolutely!

The engineers didn't set out to create processes that resulted in toxic by-products, your statement is not helpful at all.

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.

The engineers have a responsibility to manage toxic byproducts their processes give off.

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.

> The engineers didn't set out to create processes that resulted in toxic by-products, your statement is not helpful at all.

if the engineers did not set out to create a process free from polluting carcinogens, then they did something wrong.

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.

> we spent more on compliance than their penalty

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?

> When you have a fire in your fireplace, you are releasing polluting carcinogens. When you do that, are you also doing something wrong?

Yes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51581817

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/property/1430579/wood-b...

For the reasons that you set out. It's fairly straightforward.

So you’re for banning almost all foods that brown through baking this form acrylomide, a known carcinogen?

I'm for banning uncontrolled infliction of that and other carcinogens on one's neighbours, yes.

Say bye bye to BBQ grills and any sort of frying then!

Bye bye.

nobody has demonstrated that bread acrylamide poses a true risk to public health.

That’s my point. OP has already said “no carcinogens” flat out

"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.

Yes.

Dont bring your olive oil to the smoke point

Yes, except scale makes all the difference.

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.

Each one of us burning one tire is a large scale toxic waste issue. Same thing with wood fires.

Yes. If you care about the surrounding people's health.