3M to end 'forever chemicals' output

You establish agreements over a large enough market that it actually makes a different so that competitors doing the right thing aren’t penalized or aren’t penalized enough that they’re disincentivized.

Sometimes that market is the US and you only need a local bill to do that. Sometimes you do a bilateral or multilateral treaty. But these things happen all the time even today. Eg if not for trump there would probably have been a new pacific trade agreement and Biden has managed to rally multilateral cooperation around security issues around Russia (eg see new applications to NATO as one example as well as related economic agreements and sanctions) and climate change.

The main challenge is that Trump’s behavior of cancelling deals that were on the finish line as well as backing out of existing agreements (Paris accords + Iran) means that partners are now more wary of entering into agreements in the first place.

This has less to do with globalization and more to do with USA’s increasing instability as a reliable partner that can execute on agreed-upon commitments across political transitions. So now countries are less reliant on commitments from the USA. From one perspective, that’s good - local autonomy is a powerful tool. From a different perspective, the USA frequently (not always and maybe not even a majority of the time) lead the way and set a global direction through unilateral action (ie even without treaties). Again, that’s gone less because of globalization I think and more that the world has grown tired of USA’s political weight throwing and realpolitik behavior rather than sticking to common principles (democracy, rule of law, not torturing enemies no matter what they’ve done, human rights, raising up scientists and facts even when politically inconvenient or leaders applying pressure to move their voter base instead of playing tail wag the dog, having principles about who we count as our allies etc). One set of behaviors engenders trust while the other degrades it and leads to whatsboutisim politics. Agreements in low trust environments are rarer and harder to maintain. Agreements in high trust environments are much cheaper.

So, while I agree that the “governments around the world coordinating” is harder I disagree that it’s impossible or that it was caused by globalization Val multi-generational realpolitik weight throwing and underhanded behavior that killed a lot of the good will brought about as the “saviors of WWII” propaganda that was wide spread + “golden city” aura post WWII and during the Cold War + technological and economically outpacing Russia. We’ve been leveraging that good will more than our finances because the former is completely invisible and impossible to quantify and measure.

A few years back, 3M entered a near-$1 billion settlement with Minnesota for PFAS groundwater contamination. I suspect they have been working on a replacement since 2010 or not long after (when the legal action first started up) and, given the two year timeline to phase them out, I'm thinking they've got the replacement already and just need to get it to market.

It really only takes the EU and US agreeing that something is bad. Together they represent a huge chunk of the imports of nearly every sector of the global economy. In practice that is what globalization largely is - other countries producing stuff that the US and EU buy.

If you manufacture a chemical and the US and EU both decide that chemical is banned and can't be imported, your business may very well be toast, and you will have a large incentive to produce stuff that they want instead. This doesn't necessarily even take legislation as the relevant governments have a variety of ways they can apply tariffs, disincentives etc. to stuff they don't like.

I love my cast iron, stainless, and carbon steel pans, but calling them nonstick is a stretch. In fact, their stickiness is pretty much their valuable property in getting good browning on food.

You can definitely cook delicate fish and scrambled eggs on say, cast iron, but you will either be scraping hard during clean up or using an absurd amount of oil to cook. I don't mind it myself, but its clear why nonstick is popular.