The title of this piece does not reflect its contents. So far, according to the article, DuPont has been forced to pay less than $100 million in damages for a chemical that resulted in $1 billion plus annual profits. Personal injury suits are ongoing, but "At the rate of four trials a year, DuPont would continue to fight PFOA cases until the year 2890."<p>The lawyer sounds incredibly and understandably frustrated with the situation:<p>"The thought that DuPont could get away with this for this long," Bilott says, his tone landing halfway between wonder and rage, "that they could keep making a profit off it, then get the agreement of the governmental agencies to slowly phase it out, only to replace it with an alternative with unknown human effects — we told the agencies about this in 2001, and they’ve essentially done nothing."<p>A better title would be: "Through effective legal strategy, DuPont delays outlays for pollution effects"
I did an undergraduate in Chemistry, and I occasionally get the question of, "Is X bad for me," or "Will Y give me cancer?" My response is always that our modern world is bad for you. There are millions (maybe billions) of chemicals produced by thousands of companies. Most are probably harmless. But it only takes one or two being really bad for you to get sick. PFOA is one more to add to this list of shit that's not good for you. Most people are lucky enough to not be Wilbur Tennant and live right next to a chemical dump that poisons their water. But most people do get low doses of chemicals like PFOA. And they probably get low doses of another thousand things that are just as deadly, but unknown. We live in a poisoned world, but its not poisoned enough to kill the people that make the decisions, yet.
<i>PFOA was only one of more than 60,000 synthetic chemicals that companies
produced and released into the world without regulatory oversight.
...
Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the E.P.A. can test
chemicals only when it has been provided evidence of harm. This
arrangement, which largely allows chemical companies to regulate
themselves, is the reason that the E.P.A. has restricted only five
chemicals, out of tens of thousands on the market, in the last 40 years.</i><p>Staggering. This is regulatory theater that makes
the TSA version look like a pre-school play.
Rob Bilott is indeed a hero.<p>But damn, "PFOA was only one of more than 60,000 synthetic chemicals that companies produced and released into the world without regulatory oversight".<p>Consider breast cancer. One of the risk factors is nulliparity (having borne no children). There's also an inverse association between breast cancer risk and parity (number of children). One of the mechanisms for that, it seems, is that lipophilic organic pollutants are mobilized from womens' fat during pregnancy and lactation. People are born with ~20% of typical lifetime doses of such pollutants.<p>Human breast milk cannot be sold commercially. One reason is that it's too contaminated with organic pollutants. Life is funny.
Out of the article, I was most impressed by the tenacity of the lawyer in question, Bilott, and his law firm, Taft, for their willingness to keep him as a partner.<p>Thank you. A few good men, indeed.
It makes me really sad how big corporations use the power they have to cover, fight and (sometimes) get away with practices that translate into money for them at the expense of everything else.
We have been told since always how we humans will once destroy earth, how one day clean air will be sold as a luxury.
Now we can see it happening everywhere, I remember have read that the most contamination California gets it is from China.
China effectively destroyed the environment for making money.
And then you are remembered how this money doesn't go to the everyday Joe, but to the 1%, who doesn't pay taxes (which are by definition a way of wealth redistribution) therefore destroying preventing Joe again for getting a better life, who also has a worst life because his environment has been destroyed.
So the total amount paid by DuPont was less than $100 million? Even with thousand of personal-injury cases pending this sounds like pocket change to a company with over $30 billions in revenues. How is this supposed to deter others?
This is worst that the situation with asbestos. My grand father died by a lung cancer, probably related to asbestos. He worked on a factory, many years, using it without any kind of protective suit. Far as I know, nearly all co-workes that he had, has been dying like flys this lasts decades.<p>I hope that DuPont's get sued to the oblivion.
Here's a great clip of Milton Friedman answering a question from a young Michael Moore about a similar issue, the exploding Ford Pinto debacle. The uploader put a childish title, but the video itself is good. <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VdyKAIhLdNs" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VdyKAIhLdNs</a><p>It's not a directly analogous situation, but it's easy to forget that there <i>is</i> a level of toxins that we prefer, over paying a lot more or not being able to have certain goods at all. Trying to deceive the public about the risks, however, is inexcusable.
Related story and comments, 5 months ago: <i>The Teflon Toxin (firstlook.org)</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045156" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045156</a>
There are a lot of things in this world that we have because somewhere a big sacrifice is being made. This case with DuPont is one of many, where chemical companies have taken the liberty to sacrifice something they don't have to right to, so that they can profit but also so things can be made. So many of the products we use everyday are most likely tainted in hidden scandals. Just google what Unilever has been doing in India with mercury. We have to make these companies accountable and stop using there products until better methods to produce it are developed. Its equivalent to me saying "Hey give up oil, it damages everything."
What I found interesting with this article is the payout from the class action suit. The lawyers received $21.7 million dollars, while 70,000 plaintiffs all received $400 a piece. 70,000 * 400 is 28 million dollars. So out of approximately $50 million dollars, the lawyers kept over 40% and split the rest 70,000 ways resulting in each plaintiff getting just a little over a week's worth of work at minimum wage.
Corporations are notional entities, granted rights by a government. The government owes them little in the way of human rights, so how is it so difficult for a government to impose sanctions on a misbehaving corporation?<p>The US is in poor company as a country that has a death penalty for humans, where is the list of corporate offences that justify a dissolution of this notional entity? Only Bankruptcy?