Customer Reviews
Shocked and appalled don't even begin to cover how I feel after reading this book. If you care about your health, read this book. You need to understand a major cause of our cancer epidemic. Mariah Blake has written a highly researched treatise on the subject of chemicals that never disappear from the earth, and which disrupt our bodies and our health. Take a couple of days and get an in depth seminar on PFAS and TFA. Then ask your best AI engine what the major precursor of TFA is currently. You will find it is R-1234yf, the newest refrigerant in use by the automotive industry with the lowest GWF (global warming factor). R-1234yf is saving the ozone layer but when it leaks or is released from air conditioners, it degrades into a forever chemical which kills human beings. Read this book to understand the roots of the problem.
Deeply researched and beautifully written. A must read for our times.
The forever book about forever chemicals!
This is a history of how the existential threat of PFAs and other forever chemicals came to be. How the U.S. government collaborated with Dupont since the 1820s and more recently helped the government hide the damage they did to people's health and the environment so that both Dupont and U.S. government could avoid the financial consequences. No wonder people don't trust the government and voted for extremist politicians who will only make their lives even worse as institutions that protect Americans are being dismantled, such as the EPA, CDC and other health institutions, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and many others.What really got me was when whistleblowers in small towns were shunned by Dupont workers, who say their lawsuit as having the potential to take away their jobs, if Dupont might move their factory elsewhere. I was also struck by how it was DuPont that taught the Tobacco industry how to cast doubt and hide findings of their own scientists that smoking was deadly. So this book will never be out of date because it has the history of how companies that made forever chemicals kept it secret for so long.The book ends with the latest 2025 updates on what has and is happening today with regulations of PFAS:“After many years of negotiation, in 2016, our famously gridlocked Congress voted overwhelmingly to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act, ushering in the most significant environmental legislation in decades. The revised law required the EPA to screen all new chemicals coming onto the market and—more importantly—mandated vetting for existing chemicals. No more grandfathering. The bill owed its success partly to backing from the chemical industry. Facing intense public anxiety over ever-present chemicals like PFAS and phthalates, manufacturers saw federal regulation as the best way to preserve faith in their products and to avoid a cumbersome patchwork of state regulation. In return for their support, industry lobbyists insisted on provisions that would make the process slow and ponderous.What they hadn’t reckoned on was a Donald Trump presidency. Almost as soon as the new administration took office, it began working to gut the legislation entirely. Just weeks before the EPA was due to finalize its rules for implementing the law in June 2017, a former American Chemistry Council lobbyist named Nancy Beck was appointed to the number two spot in the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Beck pressed agency staff to rewrite the rules along industry-friendly lines. One of her chief demands involved guidelines for picking which chemicals to prioritize for safety testing and possible regulation. The draft called for factoring in various ways people are exposed, since heavier, more widespread exposure can translate into a greater risk. Beck wanted to overhaul the language for “legacy” chemicals like PFOA that had theoretically been phased out. Specifically, she wanted to bar the EPA from considering key routes of exposure—including drinking water.Beck’s colleagues warned that this approach would drastically underestimate the hazards since these chemicals were still ubiquitous in the environment despite dwindling U.S. production. Beck ignored their concerns and took charge of rewriting the rules herself, a highly unusual move at an agency where guidelines are usually drafted by career civil servants with specialized expertise.President Trump, meanwhile, tapped a former Saint-Gobain (another forever chemical maker) lobbyist to head the EPA office that oversees the federal Superfund, one of the programs Hoosick Falls was counting on to compel polluters to pay for cleanup.In July, the president announced his nominee to head the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety. It was none other than Michael Dourson, the industry-funded toxicologist who helped set the dangerously lax standard for PFOA in West Virginia. If confirmed, Dourson would not only oversee implementation of the new chemical-safety law but would also be in charge of vetting some of the very substances whose dangers his group had downplayed while taking money from their manufacturers.”
The most important book you’ll read this year. Plus it's absolutely riveting.
