Pollution of our water is necessary to combat global warming???

News from The Intercept (my comments in italics)

“CHEMOURS HAS OFFERED a novel argument in defense of one of its toxic PFAS chemicals, known as GenX: that the compound, which causes cancer and other health effects in lab animals and was released by the company into the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people (just upstream from where I live), is necessary for the fight against climate change.

“Chemours, a chemical company that was spun off from DuPont in 2015, made the case for GenX as an environmental good in response to a toxicity assessment of the chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency finalized in October … Chemours’ attorneys asked the agency to weaken its threshold, arguing that GenX is necessary for the country’s transition away from fossil fuels.

“Chemours’s chemistries are critical to achieving the United States’ energy transition and decarbonization ambitions,” attorneys from the firm Arnold & Porter wrote, going on to note that GenX is used in the process of creating compounds called fluoropolymers, which are used to make lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars, membranes used for water purification, and hydrogen from renewable sources.

“The company, which makes GenX in its plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and uses the chemical at its facilities in New Jersey and West Virginia, also insisted that continued domestic production is important for U.S. energy independence: “There are often no domestically manufactured alternative replacement products available for these mission-critical applications.”

“According to Chemours, which reported net sales of $6.3 billion last year, restrictions on GenX are not just a threat to the company’s bottom line … The company’s attorneys argued that the “EPA’s Toxicity Assessment, unless corrected, has the potential to cause significant harm to Chemours as well as to the broader United States economy.”

 

The last sentence is very telling. Big corporations routinely assert that their well-being and the of the “broader United States economy” are one and the same. It’s an interesting extrapolation from neoliberalism and was central to the ideas of the Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek (author of The Road to Serfdom), and the Chicago School of Milton Friedman.

In his response to Hayek, Karl Polanyi posited that capitalism had reversed the traditional relationship of the economy to society. In precapitalist eras, the economy was organized to serve society, but under capitalism, society serves the interests of the economy. Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation, although written almost 80 years ago, should be on everyone’s reading list, as we look at neoliberalism and its consequence, runaway inequality.