Littering was a social norm when these chemicals were invented. Even today, most Americans eat meat from factory farms, drive gas powered cars, and throw most trash in a landfill. Problems that will have to eventually be fixed.
If you’re born into this kind of society are you going to handicap yourself by holding yourself to a stricter set of rules than everyone else? The ‘yes’ and ‘no’s to that question don’t fall neatly into class lines.
If you want to be proactive about problems you need the political will to create and enforce rules. But nobody votes for rules that make people’s lives worse now, but future generations lives better. You can’t just blame rich people for that.
The political will didn’t exist for pfas back then, and it doesn’t exist for things like water scarcity, or antibiotic resistance, or e-waste today.
Knowingly poisoning people is a criminal offence, and always was. They knew their workers were dying from it, they had done studies that show it’s toxic.
No new laws are needed.
This is not the case of finding loopholes in laws or pushing a problem off to the next generation, like climate change.
This is a corporation profiting off someone’s death and getting away with it.
Littering was a social norm when these chemicals were invented. Even today, most Americans eat meat from factory farms, drive gas powered cars, and throw most trash in a landfill. Problems that will have to eventually be fixed.
If you’re born into this kind of society are you going to handicap yourself by holding yourself to a stricter set of rules than everyone else? The ‘yes’ and ‘no’s to that question don’t fall neatly into class lines.