I know this is going to be unpopular on HN, but I think there's this "environmentalist inertia effect" on display when it comes to stuff like that.
A lot of the early industrial chemistry was pretty terrible for you and deserved public attention and regulatory crackdowns. Leaded gasoline and paint, organochlorine pesticides, mercury catalysts in rubbers, and so on.
But then, the negative publicity then continued for substances that were a lot more ambiguous. For example, DDT saved millions of lives, and the backlash against it was probably overblown. Still, you know, good riddance - at least until malaria comes back in the developed world due to climate change?
And now, we're in this place where any accusation of substances being artificial and cropping up somewhere at parts-per-billion or parts-per-trillion levels is enough to cause outrage, even if we can't demonstrate serious adverse effects on humans or most other life. Microplastics seem to be the most egregious example of this. But the panics around phthalates and BPA are another interesting case where, if you look closely enough, there just isn't a whole lot of good science to back any of it.
I'm kinda torn about this, because I think we should be working toward reducing plastic waste, and I'd rather see phthalates replaced by safer plasticizers, such as benzoates. But the amount of alarmist headlines in this space is pretty wacky.
prohibiting more and more things is, in my book, the diametrical opposite of progress; progress is when you can do more and more things, not less and less
Only if your definition of progress is maximal technological advancement at all costs. Prohibiting dangerous chemicals or processes is progress in terms of human living conditions.
historically speaking, it has occasionally been progress by my definition (you can't do much at all if you're crippled by minamata disease, although the chemicals and processes that caused minamata disease weren't prohibited, just done more carefully) but much more often it has been pure superstition (like the european union borax ban), racist paranoia (like the us ban on marijuana), or regulatory capture aimed at preventing market competition and boosting the profits of the currently dominant lobbyists
A lot of the early industrial chemistry was pretty terrible for you and deserved public attention and regulatory crackdowns. Leaded gasoline and paint, organochlorine pesticides, mercury catalysts in rubbers, and so on.
But then, the negative publicity then continued for substances that were a lot more ambiguous. For example, DDT saved millions of lives, and the backlash against it was probably overblown. Still, you know, good riddance - at least until malaria comes back in the developed world due to climate change?
And now, we're in this place where any accusation of substances being artificial and cropping up somewhere at parts-per-billion or parts-per-trillion levels is enough to cause outrage, even if we can't demonstrate serious adverse effects on humans or most other life. Microplastics seem to be the most egregious example of this. But the panics around phthalates and BPA are another interesting case where, if you look closely enough, there just isn't a whole lot of good science to back any of it.
I'm kinda torn about this, because I think we should be working toward reducing plastic waste, and I'd rather see phthalates replaced by safer plasticizers, such as benzoates. But the amount of alarmist headlines in this space is pretty wacky.