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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

> The engineers didn't set out to create processes that resulted in toxic by-products, your statement is not helpful at all.

if the engineers did not set out to create a process free from polluting carcinogens, then they did something wrong.

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I don't think you really understand the implications of that statement. You can't even have bronze-age level technology with 0 carcinogens. At least not with present technology.

You can't burn wood. You can't heat a lot of metals. Practically anything that requires smelting metal is out because of the preceeding two. Eletrical power is basically a non-starter, because the mining and refining both release carcinogens.

We need more advanced technology to be able to truly isolate those emissions, but we don't have the ability to develop that technology without releasing those emissions. The goal should be managing the amount of emissions we allow, and prioritizing the "emission credits" towards goals that can reduce those emissions further.

When you have a campfire (or fire in your fireplace), you are releasing polluting carcinogens. When you heat olive oil to the smoke point, you are releasing carcinogens. If/when you do those things, are you also doing something wrong?

It is relatively easy, from my vantage point, to see dividing lines between "doing something bad for your own health," "doing something bad for your health and those in your physical and emotional circles," and "doing something bad for the health of an entire city, country, or region." It can be the case for each of these to be wrong, in different ways, without confounding or deflating the other cases.

Yes, except scale makes all the difference.

If you burn a tire, you're polluting and releasing toxic fumes around. But one burnt tire doesn't affect the neighborhood.

Industry is not negligible. At larger scale toxic waste hurts a lot more people, of course it does! The campfire whataboutism is a bit silly in comparison.

Each one of us burning one tire is a large scale toxic waste issue. Same thing with wood fires.

Yes.

Dont bring your olive oil to the smoke point

Exactly. My former employer had repeated battles with the EPA over his supposed refusal to improve emissions. Never mind that we had already done everything technologically feasible, they only saw the pattern of improvement and then stopping. And they kept comparing us to a competitor that we kept telling them had to be faking the numbers. Took them 10 years to figure out we were right--and we spent more on compliance than their penalty when their non-compliance was finally discovered.

Other than mixing our own colors everything involved was available at the local hardware store. We were simply staining wood, the issue was the solvent evaporating while drying.

> we spent more on compliance than their penalty

Sounds like a failing over EPA penalty, not that we should allow pollution! Why should we as a society allow large scale pollution to poison our world without containment?

> When you have a fire in your fireplace, you are releasing polluting carcinogens. When you do that, are you also doing something wrong?

Yes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51581817

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/property/1430579/wood-b...

For the reasons that you set out. It's fairly straightforward.

So you’re for banning almost all foods that brown through baking this form acrylomide, a known carcinogen?

I'm for banning uncontrolled infliction of that and other carcinogens on one's neighbours, yes.

Say bye bye to BBQ grills and any sort of frying then!

Bye bye.

nobody has demonstrated that bread acrylamide poses a true risk to public health.

That’s my point. OP has already said “no carcinogens” flat out

"no carcinogens flat out" is an obvious straw man mis-characterisation, but neither can we dismiss small effects over many people and over time. This comment gets it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29193928

> If/when you do those things, are you also doing something wrong?

Its hard to say you're doing something "right" by releasing carcinogens. But scale is important here. Its hard to really conflate burning olive oil in your kitchen with oil refining.

Yes. If you care about the surrounding people's health.

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