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EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

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Re: EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

#341

Post by mandeepj »

rickydroll wrote: post #328
shigawire wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a democratic voter I don't like this either. I vote because I want rule of law. It's not as clear cut to me that discarding rule of law to beat the GOP is the best option. There is a chance they can be defeated without undermining having a functional electoral system

One possible solution is to get all the liberal/progressive voters to register as Republicans and run liberal/progressive candidates as Republicans. Built on the Eisenhower platform of 1956 and his record as a military commander. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p... Granted, it's not ideal, but coming in the back door may be necessary.

> get all the liberal/progressive voters to register as Republicans

Sorry, didn’t quite follow that! You can vote for anyone regardless of who you Registered for? Or, was that suppose to give a misleading signal to Republicans that they have way too many voters? :-)

Re: EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

#342

Post by jjani »

shigawire wrote: post #304
hedora wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right managed to succeed with their electoral reforms. Gerrymandering is legal, and the president is now above the law. The left should use the same tactics: Focus on state and local elections then use those positions to fix elections so that the national majority of voters decide who runs the federal government (instead of the current 25-30% of voters). Doing this is completely legal now that the Supreme Court h…

As a democratic voter I don't like this either. I vote because I want rule of law. It's not as clear cut to me that discarding rule of law to beat the GOP is the best option. There is a chance they can be defeated without undermining having a functional electoral system

They can be "defeated" that way in the sense of a classic Pyrrhic victory, exactly like in 2020, sure. That's the absolute worst out of all options available. "Losing" in 2020 would have been much better. You need to start thinking about the game, realpolitik, and the patterns that have been happening. And the long-term. You think you're thinking long-term by prioritizing the things you do, but it's the exact opposite.

The first thing you need to come to terms with is that losing in 2020 would've been better for the long-term. Once you've gained that freedom, realizing that simply winning an election can be the worse option, you can start thinking about what would instead be better.

Re: EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

#343

Post by hypeatei »

DrewADesign wrote: post #182
hypeatei wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tiny handful of actual progressives ... that are messing everything up I never said that. There were many far-leftists who sat out in 2024 due to Palestine, proclaiming that Kamala would've been just as bad or worse than Trump on that issue which is ludicrous. Needless to say, I'm not opposed to progressive ideals but the reality is that they're more focused on principles than getting elected. > that also poll extr…

… did you see how many mainstream popular national politicians came out of the woodwork to support Cuomo despite being the less popular candidate by a significant amount? Did you catch the coordinated drop-out/endorsement of Clinton in 2016 which killed Sanders’ lead? Did you see all of the people in the party rushing to make an issue of Mamdani supporting Palestine in a race for mayor of NYC which is definitely not…

> look at recent polls

If you could link them, that'd be great because I don't know exactly which ones you're looking at. My guess is that these ideas sound great on paper: who doesn't want more affordable housing? But, the actual policies (or lack thereof) being proposed are not popular with the general voting populace.

Affordable housing sounds great for example, but the plans from Bernie et al. seem to include a lot of government spending on building public housing and implementing rent control on private housing. I can personally see why someone might be opposed to voting for even more government involvement in housing which we already have quite a lot of and look where we're at.

I concede that the DNC (and their donors by extension) resist far-left candidates but I don't believe that, if the proposals are so popular, it would be consistently suppressed by higher powers in that manner. Basically, I don't think the lack of far-left politicians can be explained by that single issue.

> Blaming individual voters for voting ‘wrong’

My point was that they're not voting at all. No one in politics will take those people seriously because that doesn't get anyone elected. Maybe you don't personally purity test or sit out elections, but that kind of behavior certainly exists and turns off people outside the circle.

Let me be clear, the Dems didn't lose the 2024 election due to progressives sitting out. I just think they could be taken more seriously as a bloc by not abstaining because they're mostly aligned with the objectives of the Democratic party. There are only two options we have in elections, and working with what we have is the only option to get out of this mess.

Re: EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

#344

Post by softwaredoug »

the__alchemist wrote: post #37
aaviator42 wrote: post #11

Countless lives over the next decades are going to be lost due to decisions being made by this administration. Deaths and illnesses that otherwise would have prevented using existing frameworks and systems had they not been destroyed.

I don't understand why the left puts up with it. They are too easily distracted by hot-button issues. These are some of the most important issues facing the present and future of our civilization and biosphere. I wish I had a solution, or knew the step to take. I suspect one of the root causes is the narrative, e.g. from news agencies, is being controlled by the propagators of the problem.

I think because “The Left” in the US - The Democratic Party - is actually a big tent, center-left party with a lot of different issues and stakeholders. They look more like a political party has historically in the US (big, messy, inconsistent)

Re: EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

#345

Post by recursive »

adrr wrote: post #177
flkiwi wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Identity politics. Rejecting identity politics for economic justice. Rejecting economic justice for economic revolution. It goes on and on. There are so many overlapping and contradictory purity tests among the various branches of the left, that meaningful opposition from the left is more of a coincidence than anything one can plan for.

Name a purity test. Stop dancing around the question.

This is a setup to fail a purity test. We'll skip the formalities and you can just preemptively consider this a failure.

Re: EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

#346

Post by DrewADesign »

scarface_74 wrote: post #310
DrewADesign wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Absolutely no one who voted for this mess went in blind. I think it depends. I suspect that political messaging has become so tailored that the Mercola/Natural News crowd that voted primarily because of RFK’s anti-vaxxing platform could have been getting so heavily hammered with the “this is the ’chemicals are bad’ administration” messaging that the anti-regulatory stuff seemed pretty quiet in comparison. And I’m p…

The presidential debates were the most watched tv last year beating out football. Trump was in office for four years. No matter how filtered the news is, people knew exactly who Trump was.

And one hundred million more people voted than watched that debate. And of the people that watched it, I’ll bet most people couldn’t name half the topics discussed that weren’t in their list of top voting issues. I’m not saying they were deceived or didn’t have access to the information, I’m saying that the things they didn’t care about were easily drowned out by what they did. That’s how the human brain works. Nobody’s seeking out reasons to dislike someone they’re excited about and being emotionally validated by. Saying someone supports something just because it didn’t stick out enough to kill their support for someone doesn’t make sense. That’s no different than saying anyone that voted for Harris because trans rights were extremely important to them also supports Israel’s massacre. The world just isn’t that black-and-white.

Re: EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

#347

Post by giantg2 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #293
giantg2 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me a nation with perfectly maintained pipes that doesn't use chlorine etc. If you can't show me that, then your proposed solution is invalid.

In Germany chlorine is used to treat water in the plant but it's removed before it goes into the pipe. There is a tiny residue but that's residue and not intentional to prevent issues with the pipes.

If there is residue of the chlorine then wouldnt there be residue of the harmful compounds it reacts to create?

Re: EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

#348

Post by giraffe_lady »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #313
scarface_74 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where we set our eyes don’t matter. The US electorate has shown we care more about “owning the libs”, “anti-woke” and what bathroom people use than our own health and welfare. Absolutely no one who voted for this mess went in blind.

Well then maybe it's time to cut some dead weight from the left platform... Many centrists want clean water and sane society and bathrooms and woke ideology maybe needs to take a back seat in discourse for a while

Isn't this what they have been doing? What nationally prominent democrats are vocal proponents of progressive social policies now? I certainly don't remember harris running on any of the things being implied here.

> cut some dead weight

This "dead weight" is the rights of minorities to participate in public life plain and simple. This is exactly why leftists are so skeptical or even hostile to "centrists." Once you're calculating whose rights you can drop for political convenience you share a lot more ideologically with the far right than with historic liberalism.

Re: EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

#349

Post by softwaredoug »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #45
the__alchemist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why the left puts up with it. They are too easily distracted by hot-button issues. These are some of the most important issues facing the present and future of our civilization and biosphere. I wish I had a solution, or knew the step to take. I suspect one of the root causes is the narrative, e.g. from news agencies, is being controlled by the propagators of the problem.

The American left is one of the most impotent political entities. The only purpose they seem to serve is strengthening the far right by imposing counter productive purity tests and pushing people to vote for the far right options over more centrist ones.

“The Left” as educated elites clustered in cities has and will always be fairly impotent (at least electorally, maybe not culturally)

“The Left” as defined by a broad, working class based coalition independent of urban/rural has historically been formidable. But as the closest example of this in recent history - Obama coalition - erodes, and GOP eats into working class voters, it becomes less formidable.

Really The Left (the Democratic Party) needs to rebuild an electorally successful coalition. The leaders that could lead that aren’t obvious to me yet.

Re: EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

#350

Post by cryptonector »

This is what the EPA says in their filing:

> Now, after further reviewing the statute pursuant to a publicly announced reconsideration process, EPA agrees with petitioners that parts of the rulemaking process were unlawful and parts of the Rule are thus invalid.

This does NOT preclude lawfully making the same ruling later. It also does mean that Zeldin thinks we shouldn't reduce PFAS in our water.

It does mean that:

- had the EPA held to its previous position the court could have found the rulemaking process illegal and forced the EPA to start over

- the EPA retains the ability to restart this rulemaking and this time comply with the applicable acts of Congress.

TFA says:

> Separately, EPA previously announced that it will seek to extend the compliance deadline for PFOA and PFOS standards by two years from 2029 to 2031.

Well, yes hello!! Take these two bits of news in combination and what do we have? We have this:

- the EPA concedes that the previous rulemaking was illegal

- the EPA indicates that it wants to restart the process and get to roughly the same rules with compliance deadlines in 2031, and this delay is presumptively due of the delay in rulemaking due to the previous rulemaking process having been illegal.

And TFA and the commenters here are all screaming their heads off that Zeldin (and Trump) are trying to kill us all or something.

Maybe look at the details first? TFA certainly doesn't mention the details! After a fairly obscure first two paragraphs it launches into a diatribe.

Fortunately TFA did link the EPA filing, and the very first paragraph of that filing tells us the first half of the story: that the Biden EPA did not follow lawful process. Surely one could debate the lawfulness of the process followed by the Biden EPA, but if the court was on its way to ruling as much then the EPA getting ahead of it was a good thing. The second part of the story is less* clear from just TFA and this filing, but TFA gives us a clue that the EPA apparently intends to restart the rulemaking process, which presumably will lead to roughly the same rules.

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