News Brief by Kip Hansen — 25 October 2024 — 650 words/3 mins
Unsafe at any level! If the current administration’s Environmental Protection Agency [ EPA ] has its way, if any ambient-air dust is found inside an apartment building then that would require property owners to perform exceptionally expensive remediation.
“Wait, that’s crazy!”, you might say. But, hey, come on, it’s the EPA and they are “still crazy after all these years.” (h/t Paul Simon)
Don’t take my word for it, here it is in the NY Times:
“The Biden administration said Thursday that it was strengthening requirements for homes and child-care facilities to remove lead-based paint dust, a move that could better protect more than 300,000 children a year from the toxic metal.
Under the new rules, any detectable level of lead dust in the building would be considered a “lead hazard,” and property owners would be required to pay for cleanup. Property and business owners who could be affected expressed concern about potential cleanup costs.”
No, I haven’t cheated….the EPA says “any detectable level of lead dust in the building”.
So, how much lead – what level – is found in the ambient atmosphere?
Naturally, it varies a great deal, but as for air pollution, the “National Trends in Lead Concentrations in 2010 – 2023” for the USA shows a level of just over 0.025 ug/m3. That’s a detectable level. The air measurement includes any particulate matter air. In Europe, soil levels of lead are measured in nanograms/m3, and found at 25-35 ng/m3, which is the same. The average hasn’t changed much in the last decade.
This means that both in the US and in Europe, the ambient air has a detectable level of lead of about 0.025 ug/m3. The ambient air concentration measurements include any particulate matter (read “dust” – PM2.5/PM10) in that volume of air.
According to a press release from MIT “testing for lead in water requires expensive, cumbersome equipment and typically requires days to get results. Or, it uses simple test strips that simply reveal a yes-or-no answer about the presence of lead but no information about its concentration. Current EPA regulations require drinking water to contain no more that 15 parts per billion of lead, a concentration so low it is difficult to detect.”
The new testing system being developed as discussed in that press release expects to be capable of detecting lead concentrations “as low as 1 part per billion”.
Now, no one wants to have their children, or themselves for that matter, exposed to lead in their drinking water, in the paint on baby’s cribs or toys or in the paint dust in their older homes.
But “no detectable level” is not a standard – it is an activist’s pipe dream.
The air around you probably has detectable levels of lead in it. A recent document from the EPA shows that the dust in the air, averaged across all monitoring sites, ranges from 0.015 to 0.045 µg/m3.
If the water in your home is likely to have detectable lead levels, and the dust in the air outside your home has detectable lead levels, how is it possible to lower the lead levels inside your home to “no detectable level”?
It is not.
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Author’s Comment:
A demonstrably impossible target is no target at all. It is nonsensical. No amount of cleaning, no amount of remediation can possibly reduce lead levels inside a home below the levels found in the tap water and ambient air around and thus in the home. Homes are not, and cannot be turned into, cleanrooms.
It is possible that the current crop of EPA administrators, NIH and UN WHO apparatchiks have simply lost their minds. Or maybe they have some secret knowledge from another planet that makes the impossible possible and they are hiding it out in Area 51?
Things are getting weirder.
Thanks for reading.
# # # # #
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It is an American dream to set the level of any “pollutant” to zero. A moving target, as detection methods evolve. An air quality standard which considered a forest air “polluted” comes to mind.
CG ==> ah, but the air in the forest is polluted and the forest must undergo remediation for lead contamination. They only need to test the dust found there, or the dust in the air there.
CARB,the California Air Resources Board, set the allowable level of Volatile Organic Compounds in the Los Angeles air basin at a level such that emissions from plants alone exceeded it.
Leaves from many plants emit “green leaf volatiles”. These are low molecular weight alcohols and aldehydes. In pine forests, terpenes are emitted from the needles. If the bark of the trunk is breeched by bark beetles for example, resin oozes out seal the wound. Resin contains about 65% turpentine.
Roughly, if you can smell it, the plant is emitting VOCs.
Exactly. “Zero” is an arbitrary concentration that is actually above zero.
Analytical equipment manufacturers are first asked to answer the question, “how low can you go?” Then they are challenged and incentivized to develop more sensitive technology to go even lower. There’s a lot of money to be made in this limbo dance.
Interestingly stated… Thanks.
The entrenched whackos/lawyers in the EPA need to find new professions.
Karlo ==> All these guys and gals are interconnected in the Mad Mad World of Public Health. Driving one another to more and more “virtuous” positions on pollution, foods, diets, risks and hazards — with very little reliance on good solid reproducible science.
It is true that lead is not good for most organisms — but lead levels were two orders of magnitude in higher in my lifetime and kids chewed on lead-painted cribs and toys without creating a public health disaster. My brothers, however, probably are dumb because they chewed pencils painted with lead-based paints. (Don’t tell them I said that!)
My father was a pediatrician (1950s), and he never voiced a concern about lead poisoning in his patients.
Lead acetate was used as a sweetener in Roman times, especially for wine.
I remember leaded gasoline till back in the 70’s. A local lead smelter
sold most of their lead for gasoline. I got offered a job there and
went in to see what was involved. Took one look around and left,
very scary place. There was/is a radius of several miles around it
where the grass if eaten by a cow will die in a short time. The
EPA was a new thing back in I think 1968 and the first thing they did was put
a huge nozzle reduction on the top of the stack that pushed the smoke up higher
in the air. Forced the lead plume further down wind.
As bad as the lead pollution was around that place it’s
the groundwater that is really polluted. If you drink a small glass out the
groundwater around that place in the morning you will be dead in a few hours. Arsenic.
It’s a pretty big plume moving slowly down gradient. To fully understand the EPA
you need to see where they came from. Their first solution solution to pollution
was dilution.
Actually, once the cow eats the grass, the grass is dead, and cannot die any further.
Really? Pasture grass regrows on my property after grazing every year.
I’m dubious about your claim about the speed and small quantity of lead/arsenic in grass or groundwater that will kill a cow or an adult human quickly. For one thing, toxins are rated by their LD50, which is the quantity that, if ingested, will kill 50% of those doing so. There is a fairly wide range of tolerance.
You made a blanket statement, without any information about the type of lead or arsenic compounds that are water soluble, which implies the concentration is well above the LD50. Lead and arsenic tend to be cumulative poisons that affect one’s thinking well before one dies.
You might find the article I wrote in 2016 ( http://www.friendsofmineralogy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2016_Jul.pdf ) on toxic minerals, to be found on page 25, to be of interest.
This is a Super Fund Site, The operators were forced to purchase the grazing
rights on the surrounding land. All of the soil from the lawns in the town were
removed and put into a lined repository.
https://www.mtenvironmentaltrust.org/newsite/wpinhere/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/R23-2023-Interim-Corrective-Action-Performance-Monitoring-Plan-EH-Final_Reduced.pdf
There are a number of mine waste sites in this area =====>
https://fluoridealert.org/news/the-town-that-refused-to-die/
I know several of the people involved with this deal some of the
land still can’t be grazed or sold, no one would buy it.
Often times the government only tests for the presence of a particular element known to be toxic in its elemental form. The question of bioavailability is usually ignored. Did you go to the link I provided and read it? What was the mineral form of the lead that was hauled off?
Were you aware that when the government tests for ‘mercury’ (actually methylmercury) they do it on raw fish? Methylmercury is volatile, having a boiling point the same as water. When I was doing research on the San Jose (Calif.) water supply, the lab I used warned me that if I couldn’t get any fish to them withing 24 hours that I should freeze it. Out of fear of ingesting parasitic flat worms, few Americans eat raw freshwater fish. Yet, the government bases its warnings on the elemental mercury content of raw fish. There is not a single case of well-documented methylymercury poisoning in the USA since it became of concern in the 1970s.
Your link to a supposed problem with ‘fluoride’ (species unspecified) is lacking any technical details. However, it sounds like the problem was actually from sulfur dioxide, a known toxic gas. This was an industrial accident.
An excellent resource documenting the toxic effects of the local mining read the book The Battle for Butte by Michael P. Malone. The lethal effects
of arsenic are well documented in Montana mining history. The copper
mines in Butte began as played out silver mines. It was Marcus Daly who
figured out how to extract the copper from the ore first by open roasting
the ore in a timber pile. After over 100 people died from arsenic poisoning
one winter he was forced out of town and built a smelter in what is now known as Anaconda. The smelter he built poisoned the grass in the northern edge
of the Deer Lodge valley killing many hundreds of cattle soon after.
Here is a video of a local ghost mine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9aMjCnhU-k
The Hopkins brothers ran this for many years. I think they had
degrees from MIT. I can go into considerable detail on the geology
of this area. The first mine in this area of the batholith is at the top
of that mountain. It’s called the Big Dick mine. It had a vertical vein
20ftx3ft and went down 200ft and then went into a secondary enrichment.
The yield was 1100oz of silver and 7oz of gold per ton in a galena base.
The geologists sometimes call the mines on that mountain the Viking Complex
There’s another ghost mine on the back side but the scavengers have hit
it hard.
The story of Anaconda and its smelter is a classic problem of not appreciating the danger of the arsenic fumes and there not being any regulatory agencies at the time.
Found this piece on the arsenic found in the ground water under the lead
smelter. Note that the level found was 22,900 times the federal limit
on arsenic in drinking water.
https://helenair.com/news/local/asarco-toxic-legacy/article_a4624cbc-ccf5-5ccb-a108-b19580338265.html
I would have liked to read your link, but it requires a subscription. Arsenic is often a problem in drinking water, largely because of chronic exposure, rather than acute exposure. India has a considerable problem with arsenic occurring naturally in the ground water. From what I have read, the arsenic can be removed by filtering the water through a sand bed of magnetite. Unfortunately, without testing, people often don’t realize there is a problem. Ignorance is a great killer of people. What was the source of the arsenic at the lead smelter? You imply that it was the galena, but that may not be the case.
I see where this is going…
These quango agencies need to be done away with or have their ability to set questionable yet enforceable standards blocked.
mleskovarsocalrrcom ==> There are efforts underway to rein-in these agencies — but they have a lot of political momentum. In the current administration, it is accepted that EPA is allowed to make new laws through rule making. Questioning their version of science is labelled mis- and dis-information and Science Denial.
The most egregious case is their absurd declaration of CO2 as a pollutant.
The best bet is through challenges in the US Courts, resulting in ruling from the Supreme Court that they have overstepped their authority. These types of cases have been mostly wins recently for the forces of reason.
Setting up the EPA as a separate agency was one of Richard Nixon’s more malign choices. The “special prosecutor” effect should have been foreseen.
Tom ==> Early EPA did some good work….but a non-elected bureaucracy self-perpetuates and seeks new victims to infect….thus spreading far beyond their intended remit.
Very true, I did one the earliest Environmental Impact Statements, a few pages after required homework on a coastal pipeline, old style problem solving. Apparently those increased in size by orders of magnitude which produced paperwork overtaking homework. I also did an early project for an EPA lab and had students work in such as they like many agencies had many good and necessary scientists. The demon oil was so common in places after WWII that it was difficult to find unpolluted control stations to study for over two decades, probably longer in places. This was despite natural physical, chemical and biological degradation.
In the last couple of decades I’ve known a few people who have had to work with them. Overregulation including state agencies overlap. This hurts solutions for real problems similar to what our family doctor had to go through. Lousy metaphor but they are dinosaurs, too big to survive, much less operate. The good in dinosaurs suffer.
Kip,
Colleagues and I were writing internal requests for funding corporate mining projects in the mid-1970s. If there was a known impediment for a project, like toxic products that were harmful and difficult to handle, this was included. In hindsight, we might now call these environmental impact statements, corporate 1970 style.
There was a difficulty. What we saw as a problem of this type, later official bodied like EPA magnified the harm estimate 10 even 100 times. In the mid 1980s we took Victoria’s EPA to court and won when they required a lead contamination cleanup that was unrealistic.
We Aussies mined lead in large global quantities at Mt Isa, Broken Hill, etc. We were taken over by North Broken Hill mining and continued. Decades later, we still have not seen significant harm in large numbers coming to anyone. Likewise for uranium, where my own company discovered Ranger One, a world scale mine.
People do not need teatment for imaginary or projected illnesses that never come to anything. (People causing harm by inventing or inflating sickness numbers might need psychatric help, like people crying “Fire” in a theatre.)
Geoff S
Thanks to President Trump’s picks for Supreme Court vacancies. Just read the dissenting opinions from the Leftist/Socialist/Marxist Justices; you will see how absolutely wacko and ideologically polluted are their minds. And they can’t even define what a woman is in a legal sense.
Bill Clinton helped get the ball rolling by insisting that one must define what is is. And can you imagine the popular response to a Republican President getting blow jobs (a Lewinski) in the Oval Office from a powerless intern many years younger than himself.
NLT is rubbish – it, of itself, is pollution.
Not depending on the Supremes for much in the way of Critical Thinking… based upon what they should have taken up in recent years, yet have ‘avoided’.
Kip, I respectfully disagree with your “best bet”, although it may be the most realistic one. What is sorely needed is different Congresspeople to change the laws that enable this dicktat of the un-elected bureaucrats. I know, I know, unlikely. But we can hope and work towards that.
Sending any such Mandarin to the Aleutians is a good step, after reversing their policy.
Tom ==> Hey, why send them on a nice vacation?….I’d love to visit the Aleutians — on a small cruise ship, of course.
17-day Aleutian Islands Cruise
Steve ==> Good suggestion!
It was interesting seeing the chalk-like complexions of the service members returning from a stint in the Aleutians.
Dave ==> Lack of sunbathing opportunities, I suspect.
I am 87 and live in the UK. The house I grew up in had lead pipes and we would run the water after coming back from holiday to be sure we had no undue exposure to lead. But then too we used leaded petrol and we used lead paint as well. Much of which is now controlled.
I submit that present controls and present levels of control are quite sufficient.
From the NY Times excerpt given in the above article:
“Under the new rules, any detectable level of lead dust in the building would be considered a ‘lead hazard,’ and property owners would be required to pay for cleanup.”
(my bold emphasis added)
And as documented and stated by author Kip Hansen:
“. . . in the US and in Europe, the ambient air has a detectable level of lead (dust) of about 0.025 ug/m3.”
(again, my bold emphasis added)
Those two statements taken together mean that the property owners of all US Federal and State and local governmental buildings—that is, taxpayers everywhere—must immediately begin spending $ trillions to reduce ambient air lead levels to below detectable limits in all such buildings, wherefore I recommend starting first with buildings occupied by EPA personnel.
As they saying goes, “you first”.
ToldYa ==> Well, let’s protect their children and grandkids first, start with their homes – at their own expense.
The EPA has long since met it’s founding goal, as such the goals have been moved to keep the EPA in existence. It’s long past time for the EPA to be disbanded.
They did a good job of cleaning up our lakes and rivers and smog is a distant memory here in the Central Valley of CA. Yet they want to take away gas heaters and barbecues. Enough is never enough. I hope the Supreme Court Chevron decision puts a stop to this nonsense.
I B,
Do you really know that the cleanups you mention would or would not have happened if the EPA was never formed?
I was doing resources development before our EPAs were formed. We did routine cleanups without having to be told. See today our magnificent work with beach sand mining on the NSW North Coast, onece a hot spot for agitators, now practically indistinguishable from areas that we did not mine).
I agree with those sayinmg that EPA has lived its day. I go further, to say that EPAs were not needed before they started. Why do people think that regulators and miners have different views about the best way to treat land? The difference is that EPAs take your money and make you spend it by their timetable, when that timetable is seldom the best fit with corporate plans for timing of income and expenditure.They have long been lead in the saddle.
Geoff S
I think you can give the credit for the smog cleanup to the California Air Resources Board not the EPA. As I recall, they fought a long, rather lonely fight, to deal with the fairly unique air pollution problems of the LA basin. BIG mountains on the East, Gentle winds from the West much of the year. Lots of people and cars in between. Months on end of sunny weather cooking the stratified air. They ended up with vehicle emissions control devices on cars sold in California that eventually became nation (and largely world) – wide. I think that the few of us here who experienced the air in the basin back then think that the controls there were/are are superfluous. It really was pretty grim. Here’s Edward Abbey’s description from (I think) Desert Solitaire (1968).
But I also think that the inadvertent policy of proofing the initially sometimes-troublesome devices in Southern California before requiring them elsewhere was an excellent one. Nowadays, the technology seems pretty much trouble free. I recall having to replace an Oxygen Sensor a couple of decades ago and a $30 valve in the emissions hardware maybe 10 years ago. Not that big a deal.
Pournelles Law always applies.
The original goal of cleaning up the superfund sites has not been completed, if they can’t get the first job done why are they moving on or exist?
On the subject of what the EPA considers:
remember that the EPA declared CO2 as a pollutant on December 7, 2009 when they issued an “endangerment finding” stating that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare”.
Meanwhile, human metabolism means that the human body expels CO2 at a concentration range of 35,000 to 50,000 ppm (depending on activity and individual metabolism) versus the ~420 ppm that it takes in.
ROTFL!
Don’t forget the fact that the air with 35,000 to 50,000 ppm of CO2 and only 8% or so of oxygen can still be used to resuscitate another person and save their life.
“mouth-to-mouth” or rescue breaths is no longer a recommended procedure. Chest compressions only, and yell for an automated external defibrillator (AED). AEDs are now common in public places.
True but that doesn’t belay the fact that what I described worked for many years. Personally I don’t think the new method is any better, it is just more likely to be used in this age of “germ terror”, where people are more likely to just video someone dying rather than try to save their life.
You actually want me to touch a sick person I don’t know with my lips!!!! 😱
“the fact that what I described worked for many years.” Exactly. Work the Fear Factor is the message.
John:
Actually they would prefer rescue breaths but only by those trained to do it properly,
in conjuction with chest compressions.
For most of the publicyou are correct: chest compressions, designate someone to call 911 [in US] and someone else to get an AED.
MTM may not be optimal, but apparently worked for decades.
Well, the NWO is doing their darndest to cut down on the human ‘expulsion’.
Another linear no threshold impossible to meet EPA standard.
I was curious so went to see what the Mayo Clinic says about childhood lead poisoning. At blood level above 5 micrograms per deciliter (5mcg/dL) they recommend periodic testing because there is definitely ingestible lead in the child’s environment. Below that level, ignore it and carry on—environment exposure to ordinary soil dust is obviously not a medical problem. If the blood level gets to 45mcg/dL Mayo recommends chelation therapy to ‘immediately’ lower blood lead levels, plus environmental remediation. The chelator binds with the blood lead and it is then excreted in urine without harming the kidneys. There is an easy to use oral chelation agent, and if the child is allergic to it there is an alternative intravenous chelation agent. Both are available at Mayo.
Minnesota Department of Health (Mayo is based in Minnesota) says if lead paint is peeling and chipping, it should be professionally removed. If not, they recommend it is safer and much cheaper to simply paint it over to seal the old lead paint in. They also say the main childhood exposure is not lead paint ‘dust’, but children eating peeling lead paint chips, or drinking tap water from old lead pipes (the Flint Michigan fiasco). Apparently lead paint chips taste sweet.
Rud ==> I have never lived in a house that was not old enough to have been painted with paint containing lead. I live in one now. The only dwelling I ever had with no paint with lead was our boat.
In my youth, I must have painted thousands of square feet of ship’s hull with red lead paint (Red lead paint is a heavy, orange-red paint that contains lead tetroxide – Pb3O4.)
Our former ‘mansion’ in Winnetka while the kids were growing up was built in 1922. Lead paint everywhere when we first moved in from Munich in 1983. We had all the woodwork and ceilings painted over, wallpapered all the walls, and then finally in the full basement we repainted all the walls and the ceiling in white to brighten them, then I stripped the old lead paint off the entire concrete basement floor and covered it all with linoleum tiles. Never had a problem even though we had the pediatrician check the kids at their annual checkups until they became teens.
Rud ==> I suspect you could have just painted the basement floor with a good non-lead primer and laid the lino on that….
And, yes, for most older homes, painting over with good quality “one coat” modern paints seal the lead-paint away and render it safe. Just don’t eat your woodwork.
I was told that an effective way of dealing with spill of alpha particle emitters (radioisotope) on a concrete floor was first lay down a couple of coats of bright yellow paint, followed by coats of grey paint. Put another coat or two of grey paint down anytime the yellow starts to show through.
FWIW, this advice came from a health physicist.
Erik ==> The paint wear being an indicator of the need to repaint….
Leftists always compare any human-based system against utopia (Greek for “no place”).
Under that standard, every single current system on the planet fails.
QED, we must therefore uproot and discard every current system.
They never seem to consider if their replacement is even close to as functional as the system they purged.
50 years ago we routinely measured heavy metals in water by atomic absorption. Lead was the only element we could detect at the parts per billion level but I don’t remember the detection limit then, but at low levels it was nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, with technical advances allowing far lower detection limits, coupled with human failings, the dangers become highly exaggerated.
The EPA and Nixon’s War on Cancer were part of the same thing, a view that trace exposure is deadly. LNT was their idol.
OT..
Liberal Party (conservative party) win working majority in Queensland
Another great result for sanity…
Icing on the cake.. Greens.. zero seats. 🙂
Next…. to get rid of Labor at the Federal level.
Be Nice ==> Your beloved (?) ABC says “The Queensland election wasn’t the emphatic LNP victory many predicted, but a roller-coaster ride instead”.
Congratulations!
Absolutely magnificent. I did my part, putting greens at the bottom in my preferences!
No surprise here after all Obama set acceptable ozone levels below the natural occurring levels. It all about control not about human health or wellbeing.
Long past time to designate EPA [mod~snip, yeah that’s over the top]
Let’s hear what you really think.👏👏👏
“Unsafe at any level!”
This reminds me of the Ralph Nader book “Unsafe At Any Speed” in which there was a harsh critique of the Corvair’s handling. Our family never owned a Corvair sedan, but we did buy a used Greenbrier van (same drivetrain as the car) which we kept for a few years.
Our family owned several VW’s, both Beetles and Buses, which had a rear-engine swing-axle drivetrain with similarly quirky handling. So you had to drive carefully, aware of the tendencies which differed from the typical front-engine rear-drive cars.
My point? The inclination of the “do-gooder” class to push an agenda without a sufficient dose of common sense.
David ==> The Corvair controversy still rages on with supporters of the Corvair (now “classic car enthusiasts” ) vs. Nader fans.
We had a Corvair for a while but traded for a Chevy wagon — needing more space.
This has nothing to do with a clean environment and everything to do with targeted enforcement. Make a statement that opposes the narrative and the government can shut you down.
Let’s all hope that is reversed in about three months (or less).
Kip:
I have read somewhere that much of the USA’s lead in the atmosphere blows in from the west
[Asia’s coal plants were cited as culprits]. Is there an East-West lead gradient in ambient lead levels?
If not, what is the source for aerosolized lead?
Zipper ==> Haven’t heard that but the EPA has this to say:
https://www.epa.gov/lead-air-pollution/basic-information-about-lead-air-pollution
The Linear No Threshold theory, LNT, is at the core of this problem.
There is a general relation between the dose of a toxin and its harm. The easy assumption says that a toxin at high dose is also a toxin at low dose. The incorrect but easy way is to draw a straight line down to zero dose, giving the erroneous LNT that officialdom has adopted almost everywhere. The bureaucratic answer to a scientific problem is often wrong, as this is.
QUWT kindly published this essay about LNT a year or more ago. It is about Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s starting a campaign to control LNT, particularly for the newish topic of nuclear radiation.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/07/18/corruption-of-science-by-money-and-power/
As an example, gamma rays do not follow a linear path to harm. Below a certain level, the harm levels out. At even lower level, there is “hormesis” by which some beneficial effects are measured. Even lower again, there is no measurable harm, certainly not a linear function to zero.
The element Lead (Pb) has been demonised rather severely. Very many official web sites dealing with environmental harm have sentences like “There is no safe level for Lead”.
the World Health Organisation alleged in 2023 –
“There is no level of exposure to lead that is known to be without harmful effects.”
Lead toxicity is no longer determined by observing symptoms in patients. Blood tests below a certain level are now used to class people at poisoned by lead, whether they symptoms or not. At least one author, Bruce Lanphear, has taken the population of many people with blood lead above this level to be sick in a way that makes them vulnerable to heart attacks.
a paper by Lanphear in April 2018
He has calculated that lead poisoning is possibly killing 400,000 US citizens each year. Factually, the average number of US people each year with “lead poisoning” on their death certificates is about 15, many from illegal moonshine distilling by still with lead solder to hold them together.
I have almost finished a draft paper on lead poisoning. Warts and all –
Geoff S
https://www.geoffstuff.com/finallead.docx
Geoff ==> Thanks for the thing on lead — great job!
Kip,
You and I are among the few people who send actual data to WUWT. Rick W and David D are others, there are not many more. Most people merely chatter.
I hope that you can spread the Lead data I linked. I included it to show the depth of research that is usually behind my short comments here on WUWT.
Geoff S
>
A demonstrably impossible target is no target at all. It is nonsensical.
…
Not nonsensical if the purpose is to protect the public out of existence, first out of house and home, and then off the equally polluted streets.
Because housing and child care aren’t expensive enough, I guess.
The USEPA is out to out-silly the California EPA.
Gunga ==> Succeeding with this proposed rule!
Detection Levels/Limits are a function of a technology available to perform a particular analysis. The ability to concentrate air or liquid onto a solid then back to either phase can increase the ability to provide a concentration to that element or compound.
I have observed over the last 25 years that with lower detection levels/limits from analytical instruments what follows is lower EPA limits on contaminants.
Let take forever chemical aka perfluorinated compounds; detection limits become lower increased regulation at the lower limit follows.
For example: On April 10, 2024, U.S. EPA announced the final per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) maximum contaminant levels (MCL) rule for drinking water. In this rule, U.S. EPA establishes MCLs for the five PFAS compounds listed: 4.0 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS; and 10 parts per trillion for PFNA, PFHxS, and HFPO-DA (Gen X).
https://epa.ohio.gov/about/media-center/news/usepa-announces-pfas-mcl-rule-for-drinking-water
How much is 1 part per trillion (ppt)?
Imagine you have to clean 500 swimming pools, each with 20,000 gallons. One drop splashes out.
Also imagine having to design a technology to treat groundwater to that level and the cost associated with it. Who is paying for it?
I was born in 1947 and grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey. That’s a densely populated city across the river from NYC. I was exposed to old lead paint, leaded gasoline combustion products, lead water pipes etc. I went on to graduate with a BS in chemistry and a career in that. I guess that had I not been expose to so much lead i might have been an Einstein LOL
This is why Trump is going to place the EPA under the jurisdiction of Robert Kennedy Jr. He is adamant about bringing these ridiculous bureaucrats under control.