Leperflesh posted:

I wonder how feasible it'd be to get the federal government to impose export tariffs on tree nuts or something. Probably run afoul of some free trade agreement or another. And it wouldn't stop California growers from selling alfalfa to texas cattle ranchers, anyway.

e_angst posted:

I thought export tariffs were banned in the constitution, Article I, Section 9 & 10.

quote:

No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws

FRINGE posted:

Have you ever been to SoCal?

Litany Unheard posted:

I can't find any source that says the EPA wants to prohibit the use of chloramine. I can find a lengthy Q&A on the EPA website explaining why they feel chloramine is safe to use for disinfecting water supplies.

quote:

...

In recent years, many water utilities have tried to reduce contamination caused by water treatment by switching from free chlorine to chloramines, compounds made from chlorine and ammonia gases.

Chloramines are more stable than chlorine and do not produce as many trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids. The EPA has reported that when Washington Aqueduct, a U.S. Corps of Engineers facility that treats drinking water for Washington D.C., switched to chloramines, the estimated average of the regulated water treatment contaminants in these two families dropped by 47 percent (EPA 2006).

Yet switching to chloramines has not solved the problem but rather moved the problem – and may have complicated it.

Chloramines are toxic to kidney dialysis patients and extremely toxic to fish (EPA 2012b).

A nationwide study on water treatment contaminants conducted by the EPA reported that chloraminated drinking water had the highest levels of an unregulated chemical family known as iodoacids (EPA 2002). Some researchers consider iodoacids to be potentially the most toxic group of water treatment contaminants found to date, but there is still relatively little research on them (Barlow 2004, Plewa 2004).

Other dangerous compounds formed by chloramine are nitrosamines. In 2010, then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson launched a new “drinking water strategy.” During these deliberations, the agency is addressing, among other things, nitrosamine contamination. Nitrosamines, which are currently unregulated, form when water is disinfected with chloramine. The U.S. government says some chemicals in the nitrosamine family are “reasonably anticipated” to be human carcinogens.

In a 2011 report called “The Chlorine Dilemma,” David Sedlak, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, detailed the “dark side” of water treatment and the new and unanticipated hazards of water treatment plants’ shift from chlorine to chloramine. “Nitrosamines are the compounds that people warned you about when they told you you shouldn’t be eating those nitrite-cured hot dogs,” Sedlak told National Public Radio in 2011. “They’re about a thousand times more carcinogenic than the disinfection byproducts that we’d been worried about with regular old chlorine.”

The bottom line is that switching to chloramination may have achieved the desired effect of reducing trihalomethane and haloacetic acid levels, but it may have inadvertently exposed the population to additional unregulated byproducts that are more harmful in the long run.

Chloramines present other potential problems. Utilities observed that chloramines were not as effective at disinfection as free chlorine, so, according to the EPA, many treatment plants began to alternate between chloramines and chlorine to “dislodge biofilms and sediment in water mains” (EPA 2007). When chlorine was reintroduced to a system for a month-long “chlorine flush” (EWG 2007), the result was “chlorine burn,” which removed sludge and sediment from pipes but also temporarily raised the level of chlorine-generated contaminants. Customers of utilities that used both types of chemicals were exposed to varying amounts of multiple water treatment contaminants.

There were more severe and long-lasting complications. In 2000, the Washington Aqueduct switched to chloramine without realizing that chlorine prevented corrosion of old lead pipes but chloramine did not (Brown 2010). The switch caused D.C.’s old lead pipes to discharge quantities of lead into the city’s drinking water, triggering a public health crisis when the problem was detected in 2004. The belated discovery of high lead levels triggered warnings, broad distribution of water filters, firings, Congressional hearings and extensive replacement of lead water lines.

In a study published in January 2009 in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, scientists Marc Edwards and Simoni Triantafyllidou of Virginia Tech and Dana Best of the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington wrote that during the D.C. lead crisis, the number of babies and toddlers with elevated lead levels in their blood increased by more than four times, compared to the pre-2001 period (Edwards 2009). The authors warned that many of the youngest could suffer irreversible IQ loss or other developmental difficulties.

...

The Trouble with EPA

The EPA’s rules for water treatment contaminants date back to 1974, when scientists discovered that chlorine was reacting with dissolved pollution in the water supply to create more contaminants. Five years later, the EPA set the nation’s first standards for trihalomethanes at 100 parts per billion, calculated as the running annual average of total concentration of the chemicals.

In 1998, the Clinton EPA lowered the trihalomethane cap to a running annual average of 80 parts per billion and set a new legal limit for haloacetic acids at a running annual average of 60 parts per billion.

But the agency’s regulatory scheme succeeded in conveying a false sense of security to the public.

As noted earlier, the EPA regulates just nine pollutants generated by chlorine or chloramine-- four trihalomethanes and five haloacetic acids (EPA 2012a). These nine regulated chemicals represent less than 2 percent of the more than 600 unwanted chemicals created by the interaction of water treatment disinfectants and pollutants in source water (Barlow 2004).

The legal limits for the nine regulated chemicals are not what either the agency or many independent scientists believe is truly safe. Rather, the regulations represent political compromises that take into account the costs and feasibility of treatment.

In 2010, California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment proposed a “public health goal” for trihalomethanes of 0.8 parts per billion. A “goal” is not a binding legal limit, but setting a goal is the first step in the process that establishes such a limit. California regulators estimated that if the goal of 0.8 parts per billion were attained, bladder cancer risks would be reduced to no more than 1 in a million (OEHHA 2010). The state is still in the process of publishing its final goal. Still, the 2010 proposal represents what California’s public health and environmental experts believe should be done to protect the public from carcinogenic trihalomethanes. It is significant that this proposed goal is one-hundredth of the EPA cap.

Yet another problem is of the EPA’s own making. The agency established an unusual monitoring method that all but guaranteed that many Americans would be overexposed periodically to spikes in water treatment contamination. For most toxic chemicals in drinking water, the agency set a simple limit on the maximum level of the contaminant that could be measured at any time. But for water treatment contaminants, the agency permitted utilities to average the pollution throughout their systems and over the previous four quarters. This method made it legal for utilities to distribute excessively contaminated water from chronically problematic sections and use readings from other sections that were below average to remain in compliance with federal law and regulations.

This flaw is not theoretical. EWG’s analysis of 201 utilities’ water quality reports for 2012, known as “consumer confidence reports,” uncovered several utilities in which annual trihalomethane and/or haloaceticacid levels for some sampling locations spiked to between 2 and 8 times higher than other sampling locations within the same systems. The entire systems escaped penalties because their water averaged out with a passing grade from EPA. But at certain times and in certain places, the water was excessively tainted, sometimes severely so. Pregnant women and their unborn children could be affected by these spikes.

...

Recommendations for Consumers

Anyone drinking tap water should use some form of carbon filtration designed to reduce exposures to trihalomethanes, haloacetic acids and other water treatment contaminants.

...

FRINGE posted:

The wiki reference is to a manual of chemistry I will never lay my hands on, but EWG had some references:

http://www.ewg.org/research/water-treatment-contaminants


Im going to stop, because reading about public water in this no-longer first-world country depresses me.

ProperGanderPusher posted:

More than likely GOP and therefore more likely to be anti-urban/pro-ag.

Zachack posted:

Where does that say that the EPA want's to prohibit chloramine use?

Why did you stop quoting the article when the next paragraph is about the law changing (where the article also makes a false statement unless I'm really misreading the EPA website)?

quote:

Gaps in research on how monochloramine affects water should be filled.

•There are few studies on how monochloramine affects human health.

•There are few studies on the disinfection byproducts that form when
monochloramine reacts with natural organic matter in water.

•Compared to chlorine, water treated with monochloramine may contain
higher concentrations of some unregulated disinfection byproducts.

FRINGE posted:

Do what you want. The EPAs own pdfs have all the same warnings just spun the opposite direction. Their small section on "disadvantages" highlights that their long list of "why we thinks its fine" are all bounded by not knowing much.

http://water.epa.gov/lawsregs/rulesregs/sdwa/mdbp/chloramines_index.cfm#three

FRINGE posted:

Have you ever been to SoCal?

ProperGanderPusher posted:

My impression is that outside of LA, it's a considerably conservative area. Or at least it has been, historically.

ProperGanderPusher posted:

My impression is that outside of LA, it's a considerably conservative area. Or at least it has been, historically.

quote:

In 1932, [Riverside County] was one of only two counties (the other being Benton County, Oregon) on the entire Pacific coast of the United States to vote for Hoover over Roosevelt

Forceholy posted:

To be fair, that's true of a lot of supposed blue states

Leperflesh posted:

There are no blue states or red states.

FMguru posted:

OC, San Berndoo, Imperial Valley, San Diego - all very conservative and Republican (although that's changing).

OC is the birthplace of the John Birch Society and gave the world people like Congressmen Bob "B-1" Dornan.

San Diego has several giant military bases and is full of military retirees. It used to have a ton of defense contractors, too.

Ron Jeremy posted:

*ahem*

Leperflesh posted:

There are no blue states or red states.


...although oklahoma and kansas sure are giving being a red state a good try. And vermont is really quite blue.

Cicero posted:

I'd like to see a map like this except with counties sized to match population.

Leperflesh posted:

doctorfrog posted:

LA strikes me as one of the few places that has room for the Olympics, can competently host the Olympics, and both can absorb and deserves all the negatives of the Olympics.

Leperflesh posted:

Cicero posted:

Thanks! That is interesting. Also, kind of hideous looking.

incoherent posted:

Positive talk: Olympic talk: LA is in the running

FilthyImp posted:

This seems like the perfect time to take over the Hollywood Park racetrack rebuild and also jam through Carson/Compton/Hawthorne's Super Football plan.

Dear {Sports Team}, now YOU can play in the historic {Name} Dome, site of the 2024 Olympics!!


Really though what are they going to do? Raze the Coliseum? Rent out a shload of venues for events??
AirBnB will be making GBS threads cash if this actually happens.

doctorfrog posted:

Just more video fuel for the angry-about-dumb-farming fire:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh90Tm_TH1Y

I recently drove to LA along the 5, and you still see those signs: CONGRESS-CREATED DUST BOWL.

ProperGanderPusher posted:

You'd be surprised how much I hear the sentiment, "Trains are for Europeans. This is America. We drive cars here. The solution is always more roads." Typically from people over 60, of course, but they vote faithfully.

FRINGE posted:

Lane-splitting wins again.

http://www.tickld.com/x/woman-writes-an-open-letter-to-the-motorcyclist-she-didnt-kill

ProperGanderPusher posted:

You'd be surprised how much I hear the sentiment, "Trains are for Europeans. This is America. We drive cars here. The solution is always more roads." Typically from people over 60, of course, but they vote faithfully.

FRINGE posted:

Lane-splitting wins again.

http://www.tickld.com/x/woman-writes-an-open-letter-to-the-motorcyclist-she-didnt-kill

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

No it didn't; that idiot still lived long enough to write this lovely article.