Politicized Science: The ‘Erin Brockovich Chemical’
If you believe the Environmental Working Group’s latest “study,” your drinking water might be contaminated with dangerous levels of a chemical that the group has conveniently dubbed the “Erin Brockovich chemical” — aka chromium-6. By hyping risks and by capitalizing on Hollywood sensationalism created by the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, the group has begun to build pressure for expensive regulations that could drain the already strained budgets of small towns and cities across America.
EWG’s “study” has captured headlines, the attention of policymakers on Capitol Hill and at the Environmental Protection Agency, and it is the subject of hearings before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee this week.
EWG claims to have found harmful levels of hexavalent chromium (aka., chromium-6) in the drinking water of 35 U.S cities, and it is calling for swift federal regulatory actions. The group timed their study to coincide with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) routine review of its drinking water standard for chromium — but the EPA review doesn’t support EWG’s claims.
The evidence of significant risk from chromium in U.S. drinking water is weak. EPA’s draft risk assessment on chromium-6 (September 2010) states, “The epidemiologic data are not sufficient to establish a causal association between exposure to hexavalent chromium by ingestion and cancer.”
It is true that some studies have linked chromium-6 to lung cancer among workers who inhaled high levels of chromium-6 over a relatively long time period, but those studies are not very relevant to ingestion of trace levels in drinking water.
Still, EWG says the chemical is dangerous because it has produced tumors in rodents. But those studies, which were conducted by the National Toxicology Program in 2007 and 2009, involved rodents that ingested relatively high levels — between 5,000 to 180,000 parts per billion — of the chemical in drinking water over two years, a long time frame in the life of a rat.
These very high, long-term exposures of rodents to chromium tell us little about impacts on humans who are periodically exposed to levels that are thousands of times lower. For example, the amounts of chromium-6 that EWG found in U.S. drinking water averaged at just 0.18 parts per billion, with the highest rate of 12.9 parts per billion in Norman, Oklahoma.
Exactly. The “settlement” between the law firm and PG&E was a deal to benefit the law firm, its recruited clients, and PG&E. PG&E could pass all costs on to the ratepayers, in that old public utility era, and the law firm could reap big bucks. Both sides knew that chromium-6 in drinking water was not the problem.
New and/or hazardous contaminants are continuously being researched and re-evaluated all the time. Some level of Chromium-6 is probably dangerous. However, with each order of magnitude that we establish is required, the cost to remove it goes up exponentially.
Two observations: there is a knee jerk reaction by those who hate chemistry. Call it Methyl-Ethyl-Bad stuff and someone will protest it being in drinking water in parts per trillion.
People who hate chemistry – how true!
Maybe they flunked it in high school, or worse still, were never taught any of it.
Ironically, we are all made of chemicals – even people who hate chemistry.
This reminds me of the comical bit about “dihydrogen monoxide.” Now that stuff is REALLY dangerous – people drown in it all the time!
The latest “contamination scandal” is a supposed high incidence of cancer among people living near Ft. Detrick, MD, the (former) home of biological and chemical warfare testing.
Watch it be exposed as a scam in a few years, but buried way back in the MSM news cycle.
Right.
I for one, suspect that the whole “Asbestos” thing was as contrived as the whole “thamaldihide” thing.
The asbestos in schools, anyway, was encapsulated (bound in a matrix) and not a threat to the kids. I knew many teachers who had taught in the school for over 20 years each. Not a case of asbestosis in the school. But it was removed during the “scare years” at a cost of over $100,000, and ours was but one high school out of about 8 high schools in the county. So, most likely another $1,000,000 wasted in but 1 county in 1 of 50 states.
Classic Liberal scare tacticts. All of our local news outlets here in Honolulu had splashed big headlines about Honlolulu water being unsafe due to excessively high levels of Chromium-6. A week later they quietly mention that our 2 parts per billion probably isn’t a problem afterall. Unfortuantely everybody remenbers the big headlines, and most people missed the addendum a week later.
This hexavalent-chromium tsuris reminds me of an analysis I worked on when I was a civil service employee. I won’t name the chemical involved because of the security clearance I had. We found that a direct analysis could detect 0.1 part per million (ppm) of the chemical in water, and that a longer, more expensive method could detect 0.06 ppm. We told the government agency about the direct analysis method, and sure enough they set 0.1 ppm as the maximum allowable limit. This confirmed our fears that they would have mandated the more expensive method had they known about it, thus costing the government much time and money for essentially no benefit.
Depending on the context that it could be perfectly reasonable to set a legal limit at a limt of detection: such as a harmful substance in food that isn’t an evironmental contaminant and can only get into product by deliberate and illegal adulteration.
By the way, a limit of detction of 0.1 ppm and 0.06 ppm is for all practical purposes exactly the same anyway. I doubt any one would pay money for such a non-existent improvement.
How about the more potent chemical dihydrogen monoxide, a hydroyxl acid, a run off from our farmlands? Shouldn’t the Senate have a hearing on that first?
Petition was signed by attendees of the Cancun Climate Conference to eliminate this hazard.
Hexavalent chromium is readily converted to the benign trivalent chromium in any acid, so your stomach acid readily will do the trick (unlike your lungs).
TO: All
RE: Contrived Chemical Crises
Asbestos was a joke. A cruel and costly one. Early one Saturday morning, a local hospital tore down an old house on it’s property. A house that was to be declared an historic landmark. There was asbestos used in the steam-heat system plumbing. THERE WAS NO ASBESTOS abatement at all. The dozer showed up and just started knocking the building down. The job was so rushed that the hospital even forgot to turn off the natural gas.
Not a peep from the local ‘authorities’ about the violation of the law.
Several years later, an old apartment building is torn down and the city ‘authorities’ are all over the owner like ugly on an ape.
What a bunch of hypocritical idiots!
Now all the rage is ‘lead-based paint in old buildings’. Doubling the cost of re-painting an old home. Something most elderly people can’t afford on their fixed income. So the houses just deteriorate. Great for the community. However, there’s no REAL evidence that the paint is a hazard. But the asbestos industry is running out of targets. So they need to drum up a new ‘threat’ to our health.
Then, locally, we have selenium in our water. Due to the high content of the soil. People talk up how it is a hazard, however, I did some math and if a 100 pound child went swimming in the local reservoir, he’d have to drink 33 GALLONS of water before it would have any adverse effect. HOWEVER, the poor kid would die of an overdose of dihydrogen monoxide poisoning before the selenium manifested itself.
Meanwhile, downstream, we grow the best tasting cantaloupe in the WORLD. This stuff is the ‘Hatch’s chilies’ of cantaloupe. And I suspect it’s because of the selenium content in the soil.
With this chromium-6, I suspect someone is pimping the system again in order to make a bundle of money and Congress is looked to as aiding and abetting.
THIS IS NO WAY TO RUN A COUNTRY!
Regards,
Chuck(le)
["Criminal Lawyer" is a redundancy.]
P.S. There are a LOT of ‘lawyers’ in Congress. Too many, if you ask me.
Scientific reports are now timed to make a big splash, just like movie photo ops. It is a profitable industry, which links environmental ideologues, particularly those who hate large corporations, scientists on the make, and liability attorneys. They attack, force EPA to issue near zero safety levels, unchallenged because there is little funding to counter the opinions of like minded people, inside and outside government, so the “officials” standards are cast in stone for all ensuing law suits. Any large corporation which has sufficient market share, finds it cheaper to pay off the litigation and pass the costs on to the customer. Smaller organizations face the real problem: bankrupt, get their technical people to lie, or become crooks, operate illegally.
Two technical issues are involved. Mankind, in the last two decades, has developed instruments that can measure parts per billion. We can detect traces of known dangerous substances, but we do not know what the tiny numbers mean. Obviously if you drop a ton of Chromium 6 on a rat, it will die. But long term exposure to trace amounts require expensive, decades long testing and attracts no smart grad students who want to make more than minimum wage for a life time.
I have known highly educated technical people who were destroyed by lead, asbestos, radiation, SOX, NOX, and a host of “bad” things. Polluters do pay, and the major cost is that few American go into engineering, a field that involves cost effective science, because one scientist one lawyer, and one regulator can totally destroy a profession, thousands of careers.
As a rule of thumb, I have concluded that any concentration of anything less than 100 parts per million (100,000 ppb) can be eaten daily for breakfast. Whatever it is, it is not nearly as dangerous as an EPA safety standard.
Risk is a part of life, and future performance can not be guaranteed by prior results, your life. You will die someday. It this is a problem consult with your mommy.
Yep, I’m awaiting for the Erin Brockovich follow-up ‘sequel’ anytime now.. haha
What’s ‘odd’ as well is in EVERY library you can find NUMEROUS copies of the fictitious ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ and a myriad of PBS, NOVA and History Channel op-ed ‘documentaries of global warming’. Though NO copies, videos of ‘Fahrenhype 9/11′ and other combating ideas of AGW.. ‘weird’ eh?
Yep, easier to sell boogeyman, empathy-laden dogma than truth.
I love seeing people drinking bottled water/’energy water’, eating organic-only food and the like. I fill up my Nalgene and/or Camelbak from running streams when in nature and have yet to grow that goiter or 3rd head.
@ Ozzy and Chuck Pelto
Actually, the dangers of asbestos have been known since at least the time of the Roman Empire – both Strabo and Pliny, for sure, noted the lower lifespan and increased lung illnesses in people who mined and worked with asbestos.
Now, whether asbestos insulation (once installed) poses any significant danger… I have no idea. In the end, I suspect the fire resistance of asbestos probably would save more lives than it would claim, but that’s just speculation.
Yes, that’s accurate. Direct, frequent, or constant, exposure to asbestos has been shown to cause harm. Encapsulated asbestos within building structures causes no harm whatsoever.
The whole issue is how genuine risks are distorted, magnified, and “mis-placed” so as to generate power for unneeded bureaucrats, and fabulous incomes for unscrupulous lawyers. It’s also an example of a flagrant abuse of the precautionary principle.
Osam bin Laden is seen in a captured video expressing surprise that the effects of the attack on the WTC exceeded his expectations.
He was an engineer by training, and assumed that the towers were built before the asbestos ban. He was wrong. The WTC was one of the first major building projects where another substance was substituted for asbestos (in typical bureaucratic/political fashion, many years before a fully effective substitute for asbestos could be developed). The steel understructure of the WTC melted faster than anticipated by bin Laden. Whether asbestos would have prevented a collapse is hard to say, but its absence because of a less effective substitute helped result in a certain collapse.
There was never any practical or justifiable need for banning asbestos from building structures.
The Environmental movement is like any other movement founded on scare science they must continuously find a bogey man and use the ignorance of the general public to do three things: 1) create a scare; the threat of an incurable disease as in this case or some global catastrophe as in the case of anthropogenic global warming. 2) Cast the blame on greedy, self absorbed, profit driven Corporate America knowingly and with malicious intent, acting with a compete disregard for public safety. 3) Lobby and convince the Congress to pass some draconian legislation or regulation to punish the “guilty” and all their equally evil, by definition, counterparts. Having accomplished this the intellectual, ideologically driven environmental organization feels it has done its part to “save the American people from themselves” and any economic considerations or disruptions are the justifiable price to be paid for blessing us with their presence and “impartial” brilliance. Thank the stars for the watchdogs that are “saving the planet” and keep those taxpayer dollars rolling in until they can gen up another scare. Can’t blame them in a way; all that cash spent on getting an education in one of Americas institutions of higher learning and they have to work and earn a living wage too don’t you know as long as it’s not from one of those icky, evil, profit driven Corporations. Profit, BAD, paycheck, GOOD and these guys and gals, bless their little altruistic hearts, deserve those taxpayer dollars. I have to say though, I did like that Erin Brockovich movie; she really stuck it to the “bad guys” and that always makes us “less fortunate, downtrodden citizens” feel really good; the opiate of the masses, stick it to the “fat cats.”
TO: Alyric
RE: Asbestos
Actually, the dangers of asbestos have been known since at least the time of the Roman Empire – both Strabo and Pliny, for sure, noted the lower lifespan and increased lung illnesses in people who mined and worked with asbestos. — Alyric
It’s from prolonged exposure, Alyric. Not from infrequent. You even point that out in your comment. But someone got Congress to make it an environmental hazard as opposed to an occupational one. And they made scads of money off of it while making life hard on lots of good people.
GET IT??!!?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[CONgress, n., Opposite of PROgress]
P.S. And with the lead-based paint in old homes and THIS chromium-6 and the selenium business, they’re going to do the SAME DAMNED THING….screwing over good people using Congress as the ‘driver’ while driving another ‘nail’ into the US economy.
P.P.S. Speaking of political correctness and environmental issues….
[1] If ASBESTOS had been used in the World Trade Center….it would STILL BE STANDING TODAY. Despite the ‘best efforts’ of Islamic terrorism.
[2] If we had used a better insulator, i.e., one not banned by CONGRESS, on the Columbia, it would STILL BE FLYING.
These are just two of the more spectacular prices US has paid for political correctness over risk assessment by CONGRESS!
You may see PROFESSOR JOHN F. BANZHAF III, Professor of Public Interest Law, George Washington University Law School, on TV, advocating for one or more of all of the above. I can no longer find the web page but a few years ago I came across a law course he was teaching – Marketing.
It is a shame more research is not available on the correlation between what is taught in Law Marketing courses and the changes in the type of product being litigated.