We Don't Need Impossible Clean Water Standards
Clean, drinkable water is a luxury of the modern era. Most people in the United States have only had to worry about dying of dysentery when playing the old Oregon Trail video game. Indeed, while one in four deaths in the US 100 years ago were due to contaminated drinking water, since President Nixon started the EPA in 1970, contaminated water kills only about three people every year.
Things are so good that even New York Harbor is clean! Objectively, the 21st Century’s biggest threat to clean water will be lithium pollution from all the discarded electric car batteries
However, a comfortable status quo sits unwell with those in search of a problem to solve.
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its first-ever federal drinking water limits for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. (Most people just call them PFAS for short.) Part of the Administration’s broader PFAS Strategic Roadmap, the plan will save our oh-so troubled water-ways by “leveraging the latest science and complementing state efforts to limit PFAS by proposing to establish legally enforceable levels for six PFAS known to occur in drinking water.”
These “enforceable levels” are 4 parts of PFAS per trillion, or 1 part PFAS for every 2.5 billion molecules water. This is such an astonishingly lower level that it is even below the New York Department of Health’s maximum contamination level (MCL) of 10 parts per trillion, the EPA’s own 2016 limit of 70 per trillion, the World Health Organization of 100 parts per trillion, or Canada’s limit of 200 parts per trillion.
All this for a chemical whose “human health effects from exposure to low environmental levels of PFAS are uncertain,” according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Now, most water-management infrastructures cannot detect substances in water down to such low parts per trillion. To meet the proposed demands, more than 5,000 water systems will have to develop new infrastructure to handle the regulations, according to a recent press release by the American Water Works Association (AWWA), while another 2,500 water systems will need to adjust theirs.
Equipping all municipalities with these cutting-edge detection systems would cost billions in taxpayer dollars that can be better spent on initiatives that have been better researched scientifically – or maybe helping people in East Palestine, Ohio.
Not to mention the priorities in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that was passed in 2021 like removing lead pipes in cities across the country. Perhaps the Biden administration is better serving these communities by prioritizing these types of programs instead of handing down these MCL edicts from on high.
Almost as though the goal with this impossible standard – rather than clean water – is to create an impossible standard.
The further scientific problem is that – given PFAS is a blanket term for 5,000 different kinds of chemicals – no one really knows scientifically how harmful they are for humans and animals to drink. There could be seven that are deadly, but 4,993 that are fine. Furthermore, attacking PFAS chemicals writ large attacks our way of life. These substances invisibly make up the luxurious way of life that we all take for granted. They’re an integral part of commercial electronics, semiconductors, cloud computing, cell phones, medical equipment – like the facemasks – fire-retardants, and surgical devices.
This is the problem with an attitude toward environmental protection that is protest first, regulate second, but only think somewhere down the line (if at all).
There is no reasonable scientific standard for attacking the PFAS class of chemicals unless one is simply doing it as an article of faith.
Of course, Biden is leaning on executive action to force policies on Americans, as the PFAS Action Act couldn’t get through Congress even when Democrats held the majority. This crusade misconstrues data, lumps 5,000 products into one basket, and threatens our way of life – all for something that can’t be measured and probably doesn’t need to. Our way of life cannot survive green policies like these (nor does the earth really need them).
Jared Whitley is a longtime DC politico, having worked in the US Senate, White House, and defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai.
