[on-hold music] Whoever said this country can't come together about anything anymore in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-six were wrong because PFAS, or forever chemicals, are in the blood of ninety-seven percent of Americans right now.
They're in our water, our cookware, our food packaging, children, pets.
The companies that made them knew they were toxic as early as the nineteen sixties, and the federal government is trying to roll back the drinking water protections we've had for them for about a year, but they're not even in effect yet.
But here's the thing, people are fighting back. Awareness is growing. Communities that were poisoned are building a national coalition right from their kitchen tables.
Scientists are literally breaking apart molecules that were designed to last forever, and states are stepping in where the feds will not. So what can I do about a chemical contamination that's already inside me?
Every week, I ask someone working on the front lines of the future the most important question in the world: what can I do? I find out why they do the work and what you and I can do to support it.
I'm Quinn Emmett, and my guest today is Rachel Friesen.
Rachel's an energy and environmental reporter at The Hill and co-author of Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America, a new book built on years of original on-the-ground reporting in four contaminated communities across Alabama, Colorado, North Carolina, and Maine.
She dug through decades of internal corporate memos, as sh- we talk about today.
She sat with families, some of whom you'll meet in our conversation, families who've lost siblings and neighbors to rare cancers, and she's traced how the chemicals in your non-stick pan ended up in your bloodstream.
We're gonna talk about what PFAS are and how they got into virtually all of us, what the companies in the military knew and when they knew it, where regulation stands right now as of March twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-six, and what you can actually do to protect your fam- and to join the people who are demanding that this gets fixed for us and our kids and for later generations.
Let's go. [on-hold music] Let's do this. Rachel Friesen, welcome to the show. Thanks for hopping on. Thanks for having me.
We always start with two questions, and you just kinda hinted at it, and so I'm excited to hear how you complete these. It sounds like it's the same question, but it's two different ones. And it is,
why do you have to do this work? And why do you, Rachel, have to do this work? So, like, why does it have to be you, and why do you feel like this is the itch you've got to scratch? Go.
I am lucky enough to have probably the best job in the world, if not one of the best jobs in the world, covering energy and environment policy. I...
This job I truly lucked into in all senses of the word, you know, with journalism being a really competitive industry with just so happening to, for there to be an opening on this beat that I was, you know, sort of in the right place at the right time to get.
In that job, I started to hear about PFAS or forever chemicals and started learning, you know, there are a lot of pollution problems that I come across, and that's not to say that this is the only one worth writing about, worth covering, worth paying attention to.But I think what sticks out to me about forever chemicals or PFAS is just how ubiquitous they are and how long they last.
So, you know, our original working title was Forever and Everywhere because these things are going to be around for an exceedingly long time, and they are in each one of us.
The more they're looking for it in nature, the more they're finding it.
And so this isn't just a problem that's impacting communities, you know, in nearby areas, although it is really disproportionately impacting those folks.
This is something that is basically in all of us and is a challenge that, you know, we as a society will have to fight together, and I think that it is only going to be a bigger growing one.
And, you know, I think when I first heard about this, I was like, "Wait a minute, this stuff is in me, and it's in you, and nobody told me, and nobody told you, and nobody told my mom, and my grandma, and, you know, my next-door neighbor."
Like, like, "Somebody's gotta tell people about this, you know?" And I appreciated that you said that offline, you know, "I needed to tell somebody about this." I think that is such a fantastic way of
answering what we call the most important question, which is like, "What can I do about this specific thing?" Forever chemicals, like you said, it's gonna last a long time. Don't use that word lightly, obviously.
And I wanna use that as some context here because, you know, we half-joked earlier about everything that's going on, to be honest about, like, how I struggle to have conversations that are both timely but evergreen.
I don't wanna talk about the news. There's enough of that. I'm not interested. Everybody else isn't. And it's not that forever chemicals aren't important. Like you said, this isn't the only pollutant,
but there's so much happening, or as we like to use the active voice, being done to our society right now, and like you said, some folks a lot more than others, that understandably and justifiably feels urgent and immediate and scary.
ICE raids, democracy on the brink, pick a war. It can feel irresponsible to pause and look away from it,
but that's how issues like forever chemicals, right, PFAS, get worse, or the climate, or we forget how warm the ocean is getting, right? We're all being forced to watch something else. Meanwhile, the EPA is
semi-quietly rolling back drinking water protections, right, for chemicals that are already in the blood of ninety-seven percent of Americans with a version of those protections.
Nobody else is gonna, like, break into the news cycle about this, so we're gonna do this. I wanna talk, to set the tone a little bit for people, about two things,
what PFAS are, how did they get into our water, and to ninety-seven percent of Americans, how did they get into Brenda Hampton's water?
PFAS, or forever chemicals, are the nickname of a family of thousands of chemicals that are manmade, and basically what they are is they are a chain of carbon atoms surrounded by a bunch of fluorine atoms, and that carbon-fluorine bond is exceedingly strong and, you know, basically unbreakable.
That's why they're called forever chemicals. They take hundreds or even thousands of years in the environment to break down. They are also very useful.
That, you know, can be a good thing, you know, if you're looking for something to be non-stick or waterproof or stain-resistant or sometimes fire retardant.
Like, these things have really useful properties, some of which, you know, are probably essential as far as safety, and some of which are more matters of convenience. And so,
you know, they were invented by accident, but then applied both, you know, by the military, you know, and used at military bases to fight jet fuel-based fires, and applied to, you know, a bunch of our household products, our waterproof makeup, our non-stick pans, our, you know, waterproof rain jackets, our fabric sprays that prevent stains.
So that is how they came to be not only in Brenda's water but in all of our water.
But to speak more specifically about one of our main characters, Brenda Hampton, who is an activist in Alabama who is doing truly incredible- It was incredible... to fight this in her community.
She lives right near a plant that is owned by the company 3M, where 3M has historically made and used some of the most toxic forever chemicals and, you know, has polluted, you know, the water.
I appreciate you talking about where she lives. I had a conversation recently, another version of plastics, and how we have normalized
justifiably, like you said, really useful and often justifiably called essential plastics from pill bottles to all of the different things. Pipes, right? We gotta get the lead ones out, which we still haven't done.
Everyone has something made by 3M in their home. I guarantee it. There's not even, like, a question, especially in your office.
But we've normalized that, and we've normalized this pattern through the 20th century of US industry from fossil fuel emissions to cigarettes to forever chemicals, a legitimate internal corporate record
where they not only knew and covered it up, but often talked about it publicly and covered it up.
Let's talk for a moment about DuPont and Dorothy Hood and finding birth defects in rats and taking pregnant women off the production line.
Help folks understand the timeline of when these companies knew and how that compares to when the public really started to find out.
Two of the biggest historic makers, as you alluded to, have been 3M and DuPont of forever chemicals.
And yeah, they have studies going back decades, you know, showing that these things are harmful, showing that they are ubiquitous, showing that they are in the bloodstream.
As you mentioned, Dorothy Hood was a DuPont toxicologist, and she wrote in a memo in the early 1960s, I think it was 1961 or 1962, saying, you know, "These things are dangerous, and they need to be handled-"With extreme care.
And, you know, there is an immense record, again, of, you know, them documenting studies. I think it was 1965 that DuPont was finding harm to, like, livers in dogs as well as in rats.
And I know rat stuff you can kind of explain away, but the dogs, in the dog studies, they were like, "Yeah, this might be useful for detecting impacts in humans." And sure enough, it damaged the dog livers.
One that got left on the cutting room floor, I forget which of the two companies, but it was in the '80s, had been doing trials on monkeys, and at one point they had to restart the trials 'cause all the monkeys died.
They gave them too much of the stuff and, you know, none of the monkeys, you know, could make it to the end of the trial, and so they just had to abort the study and say, "We gotta start again.
All these monkeys died, you know. Maybe that should tell us something." Let's pause for a moment here. Yeah.
In the '80s as well is when we started, there were some studies in rats showing birth defects, and so both DuPont and 3M, in what they would describe as a precaution, pulled women of childbearing age off of the production line.
DuPont also recounted anecdotally to its employees who gave birth to children with birth defects themselves.
For a little while, they did tell sort of women of childbearing age, like, "You can't be on the production lines, you know, while we make this stuff." And they actually did bring that to the EPA.
But ultimately, it was found, and I don't have, you know, the study to back it up, so it may have been legitimate, I can't say, but they found that it actually was not harmful, or so they were saying, and so they let the women back and, you know, continued to make and use this stuff.
And it then didn't get sort of re-brought back to the EPA until the late 1990s when 3M did eventually sort of blow the whistle on itself. As it was recounted to me, they basically, they could not find a human blank.
They could not find a human blood sample that did not have indicators of PFAS in it. And so that's kind of when they said, "Okay, we have to tell the EPA about this."
Although in the '70s, outside scientists came to them and said, "Hey, we're finding fluorine inside of a lot of people. Could this be you?" And they kind of said, "No, it wasn't us back in the '70s."
But, you know, in the late '90s, they did bring this to the EPA. Again, as it was told to me, could not find a human blood sample that didn't have this stuff.
I appreciate you filling in some of those dates then and what they knew and what they didn't, and outsiders coming in and taking things to the EPA, which obviously has, however you want to phrase it, changed hands quite a few times since the '90s, or as my children describe it, the 1900s, because those little fuckers.
I want to pause for a second, talk about your journalism, because again, the dates and stuff, this is all always really helpful to me. This is so meticulously documented. That's not easy to do.
Why was it really important to you to really so specifically document this all out? Well, thank you. Well, first of all, I cannot take all of the credit.
A lot of these documents are, you know, have come up as a result of lawsuits and are now sort of in an EPA administrative record.
And so I did dig through, you know, my colleague Sharon and I, we went through and looked at, you know, which titles looked interesting, and I pulled all of those documents and went through, and it was finding needles in haystacks, because for every interesting document, there were plenty of boring ones.
I think that it was really important because, you know, while the rest of the world is still sort of getting its hands around this scientific issue and is more recently coming to terms with these health impacts, I think it was important to show, you know, this is not new science.
This is new science- Right... to the general public, but the, there's been evidence of this for decades, and it was not acted upon. And I think that is an important part of the story.
I also, just as a person, I'm a nerd, and I think as a journalist, I get nervous when somebody says something to me.
But if there is proof, if there is a record, if there is a document that shows this is not just something somebody said, there is hard evidence.
There is a document out there that shows, hey, you know, in 1965, you were finding that this could harm, you know, dog organs. What did you do about that? Right.
And unfortunately, at this point, 1965 was a really long time ago. When I was born, I would have told you it seemed like a long time ago, and that was a very long time ago. No dearth of records here.
Like you said, that whether they're in the record or not requires... There's an abundance of this stuff. But I do really appreciate how you guys took the time to say, "Here it all is."
You've mentioned a few times the 97% statistic. We wrestle with this sort of thing all the time, right? 90-whatever percent of scientists agree about climate change. Like, it should be done.
97% of people, it's in their blood. Most people are influenced more by stories, and that's why I really appreciate you opening and ending, frankly, with Brenda.
And in a town, I can't remember what her town in Alabama was. I'm sorry, I didn't write it down. But in a town fewer than f- 500 people, she's counted 54 cancer cases and 14 kidney failures on two streets. Is that right?
Something like that? Yes. That sounds right to me.
She lives in a very small town, and I'm not sure whether that survey would've been in Courtland or North Courtland, sort of the two towns, but she counted an immense amount of illness in a very small area.
I feel like those stories and examples go further for folks, right? Your Erin Brockovich type stories. My wife did an entire TV show on a version of this.
The people you know and see every day are more sick than they should be in a country that does very well at making people sick above board, right?
How did you find Brenda, and how did you decide to open the book with her, knowing you were gonna lay out all these other receipts otherwise?
Prior to writing our book and sort of how we got into the book, my colleague Sharon and I did a series for The Hill about forever chemicals, about the legal hurdles that people face in pursuing justice.
And we had read, you know, in other news stories about her activism as well as, you know, her own health struggles, and we kinda thought, you know, we've gotta talk to this woman.
And Sharon ultimately is the one who made contact with her, and she was like, "Yeah, I've got stories to tell." And-I want to tell them.
And, you know, Sharon and I each visited her in, in Alabama, and we got to sit down with her, and we were like, first of all, this woman is amazing.
Her commitment to her neighbors, her dedication, as well as, you know, her own pers-- like, she's got stories, you know, her own personal story, you know, we just found to be exceedingly compelling with her own health challenges as well as, you know, the terrific work that she's doing.
And then we also, I think, were moved by findings like those, by her finding where she found, you know, dozens of health problems in just her small town, as well as, you know, the stories in her own family.
I think she told me about a week where she, you know, they had a double funeral for two members of her family who passed away from illness because there was just so much there and was just really sort of both heartbreaking and inspiring all at the same time.
Our duty then is to say, "How can I use that to tell a story that'll hopefully change something?" Right. You've talked about these small towns, and we've talked about,
you know, and I mention all the time how we've, again, normalized things like Cancer Alley, right, for all the oil, unplugged oil wells in Los Angeles County that kids have to sleep next to and go to school next to.
But the opposite of small towns sometimes are some of the world's biggest military bases. I am, and not far from you, but we've got Fort Eustis. We've got Norfolk, biggest naval base on the planet.
We're surrounded by it, and it's wonderful, incredible people in the armed forces, but the military's a really big piece of this. When we talk about proximity,
help folks understand how the military and proximity and I believe it's AFFF was such a major contamination path for so many Americans. Yeah.
So the military is a massive piece of this story, and I believe it started out as well-intentioned, even though ultimately, you know, military- Of course. So did Tupperware... litter. Yeah. Yeah.
So there was a massive fire aboard one of these ships, and they did not have adequate fire retardants to fight this stuff, and so they came up with the help of 3M with AFFF, firefighting foam that could put out jet fuel-based fires.
It was effective. Unfortunately, they started spraying this stuff all the time, not only to fight fires, but also in training exercises in bases around the country and around the world.
Folks who live near, you know, Air Force bases or other air bases or training grounds became exposed to this stuff because they sprayed it, and then they washed it down, and then it seeped into the groundwater.
It seeped into the drinking water. And the other thing about this that I think I haven't really covered is that it moves.
These chemicals are highly mobile, and so they don't just stay, you know, right next to the military base.
They travel through the groundwater, you know, into the drinking water supplies and have polluted the soil and the water, you know, in places downstream from a lot of these military bases.
And if you look at a map, there are military bases all over the country.
And so that means that at a lot of them, especially, you know, where they handled, you know, jet fuel or any place that might have a jet fuel-based fire,
there's a good chance that they were also spraying, you know, foam laced with forever chemicals. They, too, had some record of evidence at a certain point these might be harmful. They might be pollutants.
But at the same time, you know, when you have a substance and it's deemed mission critical, it can be hard to break those patterns. It can be. Thank you for sharing that.
And we do a really good job here, whether it's, again, versions of pesticides, some of which are what they are, and as everybody knows, like organics use different versions of it. Everything is complicated.
There are these bad versions, and we do a really good job when we find something really useful. Again, plastic, these fire retardants. I'm sure this building is filled with asbestos. It's four hundred years old.
None of us who serve, much less who's, who don't serve, whose job is not to put out jet fuel fires, right, can diminish the
feeling of safety of finding something that can put those out, to not just save those lives, but also, you know, these fires can be enormously costly in a world where we already spend so much.
We also do a really good job of taking something we found to work really well and then applying it elsewhere, like you've said. Where else can we use this?
How else can we use it without thinking, like you said, of how it gets into the ground and the groundwater and things like that.
And like you said, there's, we've mil- military bases not just all over the country, all over the world, but really predominantly throughout the s- the South and the West in the US, right? This is not a blue state issue.
This stuff is everywhere. There are, like you said, concentration, concentrations of bases, you know, in the South, in the West. There are also some in the North. I know this has become- Yeah...
a massive issue also in, like, places like Michigan. But yeah, no, this is not just a blue state problem. This is a problem that is happening all over.
That being said, some states have been more proactive about it than others and, you know- Mm-hmm... setting water standards.
I know the EPA is sort of working on getting its standards, you know, now, although as there's some, they are working on loosening them to some extent right now under the Trump administration.
But several states, predominantly blue states, have put forward their own standards in the meantime. Objectively,
it, for any state to pass something like this right now is difficult when they're trying to pass bills like, "How do I keep our police from not working with this or keep books banned?" Or whatever it might be, right?
I wanted to focus on a specific story for a moment. Talk to folks about the Favor- Favors family, I believe it was, in Colorado Springs, which again, tons of military stuff. I think it's Peterson Space Force.
I mean, you know, Colorado is absolutely rich with abundant resources, and you think people are outside. The, the Olympic Training Camp is still in Colorado Springs. Tell folks that story if you don't mind. Yeah.
Mark Favors is another one of our main characters, I guess I'll call him. He actually lives in New York now, but he's from Colorado Springs and he's got a lot of family members living near that base.
It was formerly an Air Force base.
Now it's a space force base, and, you know, it is one of the locations where-They have used this stuff a lot, and it has polluted the water, polluted the community, and Mark has members of his family who have suffered from a wide variety of illnesses.
And the thing is, you know, someone might try and wave it off and say, "Oh, well, they, maybe they're just a sick family, maybe they're just genetic."
But, you know, he's, "Well, I've got family members who are only related by marriage who are both sick, so I don't see how that could be, where, you know, if this is a genetic thing, like, why is, are these two people who are technically both my family members but are only by marriage and not related to each other, like, how are they all getting sick?"
And it, it's the drinking water. And, you know, at that base, they found just immense levels of forever chemicals.
I believe they are working on, if they've not already sort of gotten systems in place to filter it out at this point. But it seems like it has had lasting impacts on community members there and on the drinking water.
And then again, if it's being filtered now, that stuff, people have still been drinking that stuff for decades. And so we're working towards solutions, but that doesn't mean the damage has not been done. Hundred percent.
And you-- it's very easy to start pulling this string and go, "H-how long? How many people have been impacted?" You know?
And there's obviously a lot of questions that remain to be answered about how and why and where these things affect us. Okay. So some brief history.
The Biden EPA finally set the first-ever national drinking water standards for, I believe, six of the PFAS in twenty twenty-four. Big deal.
The Trump EPA apparently keeping the limits for PFOA and PFOS but is trying to rescind the other ones.
It's tied up in the courts, including Gen X, which you talked about in the book in North Carolina, and enforcement is being delayed further back, I believe twenty thirty-one. Meanwhile, it's still in everybody's water.
Let's talk about where regulation stands right now at whatever jurisdiction and what these rollbacks mean for folks who drink water.
In twenty twenty-four, you're right, the Biden administration set drinking water limits for six PFAS, and those are sort of the two most notorious ones known as PFOA and PFOS, as well as a few others, including Gen X, which was sort of made as a substitute for PFOA.
They said it was safer, and, you know, it may have, you know, it may not be quite as toxic, but certainly has had lasting health impacts on people in North Carolina.
The Biden administration said, "Okay, so, you know, if everybody's got to test and if you as a water system find any, you know, unacceptable levels of any one of those six, you've got to do something about it.
You've got to put on water filter by twenty twenty-nine." The Trump administration has done two things. They've removed four of the six.
They've kept PFOA and PFOS, but they've removed it for drinking water standards, including Gen X, and they've pushed back the deadline to twenty thirty-one.
So now water systems have two extra years to get their tech in place, and regular people may have to spend up to two extra years drinking contaminated water.
I guess the bit of nuance that I would add there is that a lot of times these can be co-occurring.
And so if you have Gen X, you may, and it's likely that you also have PFOA or PFOS, so you may still qualify for drinking water standards.
But that's not to say that's necessarily true everywhere, and there may be communities that are entirely left out now if they had one of those other PFAS, but they don't have one of the ones that qualifies under the standard.
And so that's where we are. I appreciate two ways you have framed this, which is there's nuance, and then you literally have a chapter called Whack-a-Mole. Uh, and the idea that, like,
somebody gets regulated or, or phased out, and there's a new one, right? Because again, these are incredibly useful and incredibly widespread. Nuance in this discussion, right?
So when we talk about water standards, a lot of the technologies that can filter out those two really bad ones also filter out the rest of them.
So if you're putting in this water filtration system, it probably will filter a lot of the PFAS.
Now we are seeing with some subtypes some breakthrough on some of those filters, and so [chuckles] if you'll allow me to get a little technical here, you know, PFAS are measured sort of in as long chain, short chain, or ultra-short chain because, again, there are thousands of these things and, you know, they patented and made and used a lot of them, and we're just getting our hands around some of them, and they're working on studying them a couple at a time or in groups, and it's, it can be difficult to even know fully what's out there.
You know, the long chains are usually, like, eight or so carbon atoms in a row. The short chains are probably about six carbon atoms in a row.
What's become known as ultra-short chain are three or fewer carbon atoms, and those are the ones, because they're smaller, that are breaking through some of these filtration technologies that we're seeing.
I saw Project Hail Mary this weekend, so I'm like, "Oh, I think I get science." I don't, but I really appreciate it. And you're right, there is a lot of nuance there, and it makes sense, right?
But if you've got a, like, a colander that you're using for cooking, right, if the holes are small enough, it's gonna catch the big stuff and the small stuff, right? It's designed to catch both.
I know that's not a great metaphor, but ignore the current political reality for a moment.
How do we, if we ever can, at what jurisdiction do you think might be most effective, again, objectively, to target these things on a categorical level versus whack-a-mole compound by compound by compound?
Is there a political reality where that is possible? You know, a lot of activists are calling for PFAS to be regulated as a class. They're saying, you know, "Don't just ban one, don't just ban two.
Let's phase them all out."
I don't know how realistic it is to say let's get rid of all of them across the board because, again, some of the uses may still be essential, but, you know, I think a lot of folks are calling for restrictions or, you know, some sort of, "Hey, you can't release them into the environment.
If you're gonna use them, you have to use them in some sort of closed-loop system and dis-dispose of them in, you know, a really environmental or really secure way."
And so I think that it's not so out of the realm to say, "Hey-We've got to regulate the disposal of all of these, and, you know, we've got to find a way to make it so that companies maybe can still use some of the most important ones while, you know,
making-- you know, having really tight restrictions on disposal. And that is still also kind of a challenge is what do we do with them sort of at the end? And something that is still
also an open question, but I am optimistic that, you know, science will get us there, and we will find ways to get rid of all of them.
But, you know, even so, I think that they can be-- There are ways to do it as subtypes. It's like, "Hey, we've found that this subtype is some of the most harmful to human health. Let's target those."
And so I think that it can be sort of a an all-of-the-above approach.
Well, it seems based on the volume and the fact that they're in water, they're inside people and obviously animals and ecosystems, that it's going to require this kitchen sink approach.
And I appreciate that you're optimistic or future positive about it because there are some very small scale and some possible large-scale solutions.
You know, we're big believers in donate to Feeding America to feed people tonight, but we also need to change our food systems, right?
We need to make it so people don't suffer the same level of poverty or lack of food accessibility, whatever it might be.
So I want to talk about these solutions because it's a big reason why I think it is important to, again, not just tell people about this amid everything else, but again, we can't ignore it.
But there, there are solutions, and those are there because people are working on them, right?
You talk about these scientists said they'll get us there that are trying to actually break up these unbreakable chemicals, right? I love the PFAS annihilator. I feel like that's a bumper sticker I want.
Tell me about-- Let's talk about the destruction and the filtration technology available to sort of society at large. Like, where are we on those?
So as far as drinking water, even though, like I mentioned, there is some breakthrough with some of the technologies, there are pretty good technologies out there, both at the utility scale and at the individual level that are-- that can make our water safe.
One of them is called granular activated carbon, which basically operates sort of like a giant Brita filter or like a colander like you mentioned, where basically they have these carbons, like coal actually, and because it's so porous, you know, the PFAS can get trapped in the pores, and you do have to sort of change out the carbon.
And what do you do with that waste carbon is a question mark.
You know, immediate situation that can work as a filter to keep water safe, something called ion exchange, which is sort of like chemi- where they're using chemical reactions to, to make the, these chemical to have other things bond to them, and so to take it out of the water that way.
You got reverse osmosis, which is another sort of water filtration technology that, you know, can be used to filter them out. And that one can be a bit expensive.
But that one in particular I think is also available not just at the utility scale, but also for home use. You can get a reverse osmosis filter for your sink, or you could get a whole house filter if you wanted to.
And, you know, for some people, that might be the best option, especially if, for example, you are on a private well as opposed to a public water system.
That may be sort of your only option actually is to get at least a drinking water for filter for your tap so that you can do something about it. But that tech is out there.
Like you mentioned, there are also scientists who are working to break these unbreakable bonds and annihilate them or really, you know, otherwise break them apart or clean them up.
And, you know, I know the EPA does have some remediation technologies on the regulatory side. You know, in addition to
the drinking water, there's also the question of should they be regulated as hazardous substances, and should companies be on the hook to pay for them?
And the Trump administration, I think in a surprise to a lot of people, said, "You know what?
Yes, the company should be on the hook to clean these up," and held up the Biden administration's designation of these as hazardous substances.
And so now, you know, the folks who have some of that cleanup technology either have to do the cleanup themselves, the companies, or the EPA can do it and send companies the bill. Yeah, that was surprising.
It almost felt like an accident, like someone signed the wrong paper, but I'll take it wherever we can get it. I appreciate you noting sort of, again, you can-- faucet filters are great.
We'll do some work on our end to try to maybe we'll send them to you, like these are seem to be the most effective, whole house filters, things like that.
I'm sure there's some of these that are, I don't want to say scams, but not as effective obviously. It's really easy to read.
Ninety-seven percent of people have this in their blood, and it's everywhere and whatever, a hundred and seventy-five million Americans have it in their waters as far as we know.
Federal level, state level actions, blue states, red states. Are you military? Are you not? Whatever. People want to know, is my water contaminated, and is my blood?
And my question is, we can probably do more about if your water's contaminated with some of the filters you just talked about. What is-- Can someone do a blood test to discover this?
And if so, what is the utility of that at this point? I don't actually know the answer to that. Yeah. It's a good question. There are some commercial tests available.
I think like some of those brands like Quest would be able to... You know, they've got tests. Mm-hmm. I don't know that they test for every single PFAS, but I think they test for some of the biggest ones.
And, you know, you, if you're able and willing to pay for it, you can get your blood tested for it. The utility might be, you know, for sort of health monitoring down the line. So if you find- Mm. Mm-hmm...
high levels, you can say to your doctor, "Hey, I have high levels of these forever chemicals in my blood.
They've been linked to, you know, kidney cancer, testicular cancer, prostate cancer, you know, some evidence of breast cancer. Let's keep an eye on these things going forward because I am at a higher risk."
And that's the utility.
And so that's not to say that I think every single person needs to go out tomorrow and get their blood tested, but I think if you have reason to believe that you might, if you grew up near, you know, heavy industry, if you grew up near a military base,
this might be a good thing for you to look into. It's not gonna change-How you're feeling or how you might feel, but like you said, it's information in your pocket a little bit.
I was talking with a friend recently who, relatively young to sort of suddenly have some seizures, and it was because of a medicine he started taking, which was totally fine, but it was-- that was because he had a, what seems to be like an otherwise benign, like, cavernous malformation in his brain.
And they only discovered that by doing a scan, and their point to him was, "It's probably been there forever. You just didn't have a record," 'cause we don't on an annual basis do those.
Like, we take blood, and you have a record of that over time, and see how you fall both, both within societal objective measurements and ranges, but also for yourself. You wouldn't have otherwise known.
Now you do, and we can maybe check and see does it change, right? Or could something else that affects you be because of that? It seems like that's a little bit like this, right? Where you go,
there's not a whole lot of practical utility for it for the moment besides to go, "Maybe this is why."
Like I, I know a lot of women who grew up near big rivers where Kodak dumped a bunch of shit in the river in the '70s and '80s, you know? And they have fertility issues, and they go, "Maybe," right?
It's not gonna fix it, but maybe. So information gathering I feel like, always helpful. We're still really working on the science of really conclusive causal health effects of these things.
Is really pushing people to take civic action in the meantime something that's worth it with everything else that's going on?
How do we convince people to fight for it when knowing that, like, we're still working really hard to try to make those connections to make it provable? I mean, know there's a ton going on in the world.
I know that it's exhausting, and I don't- Right... mean to tell people like, "Hey, those other issues don't matter. Just look at this. Forget about, you know, your beliefs about, like, war, you know? Who cares?
It's, it's, PFAS is the thing." But I think what people should remember is that this is their health, and this is also the health of future generations.
Because these things last for a very long time, the polluting that we did, you know, 50 or 100 years ago is still impacting us today, and the polluting that we're doing today might be impacting people 50 or 100 or 1,000 years down the line.
And, you know, like I mentioned, there are a lot of those remediation technologies. The problem is, you know, tr- can we use them at scale to clean up the entire world?
People can feel and be clear-eyed about the problems that we as a society are facing right now, including this one, and they can also know, hey, this issue is not just impacting people today, that this is something that affects future generations and is something to keep their eyes on the ball.
I also think that this is one that isn't just a national level issue. This is not just about what the EPA is doing. This is not even just about what your state is doing.
This is about what your local drinking water utility is doing, right? Are they gonna drag their feet and wait till 2031 to install this technology if they find it? Should you be pushing them to get it online faster?
And, you know, you can look up at the EPA. There's also a website, EWG, the Environmental Working Group. They're an advocacy group. They have a tap water database as well.
You can look up your drinking water, and if you're finding concerning levels of this stuff in your own drinking water, you can go to your city council, your county commission, your water utility.
I know some water utilities are publicly owned, and some are privately owned. You know, this isn't just, you know, necessarily Democrat, Republican thing.
This is a health thing, and regardless of, you know, whether you live in a red state or a blue state or how you feel about this administration, you can go to your city council and say, "Hey, this stuff's not our drinking water.
We've gotta do something about it."
And so I think this is something that even if you are feeling sort of hopeless on a national scale about what you can do about some of these bigger national issues, this is one that you might be able to take on, you know, in your hometown.
And, you know, as we tell people, it's an egregious example, but I feel like at some point I got an email from someone saying, "I'm up, up s- what do I do about the jet stream?"
And I'm like, "I've, I don't know what to tell you." But climate change, for example, public health, this is your schools, and your offices, and the water you drink, and the heat on your back, and things like that.
And so I appreciate that appeal to the community level. Everybody's got a local water system, whether it's been privatized over time or it's bankrupt because of water shutoff.
The whole thing, yes, that's all complicated. You have one. And they have a moral mandate to act on this, but like you said, the enforcement keeps getting pushed back. And in the meantime,
we're drinking this stuff, and the next generation is. That really matters 'cause at some point, they're gonna, we're gonna be the old grandparents where they go, "Hey, what the hell, man?"
And the excuses of, "Well, the science wasn't quite there to be able to say one plus one equals two" are not gonna cut it. Judging by how my children react to everything already, not gonna get a lot of room.
To end things on a hopeful note, I do- Please... think that awareness is growing, and I think that more people are demanding action, and I think that's true across the political spectrum.
To give a little bit of a silly anecdote, last night I was at bar trivia with my friends. Sure, as you do. Are you-- Were you dragged to it, or are you the people who drag people to trivia?
Yeah, I'm the personality hire. I've got smart friends, and I get them together, and I'm the tough one who, like, we get parked or something. [laughs] So, I was at bar trivia last night with my friends. Mm-hmm.
A PFAS question came up. Nailed it. Excited for me. But it was one of those, you know, electronic ones where, like, you can see how the other teams do. Uh-huh.
And, like, 87% or I think 86% of teams got the PFAS question right. So now- That's both great and terrible. Yes. So the point being, yes, this is a nerdy crowd. Yes, it's for PC. Sure. Sure.
More and more people are learning and are growing and are becoming- Mm-hmm... aware of this issue.
And, you know, I kind of feel like as somebody who set out at the beginning to be like, "Somebody's gotta tell people about this," I think over the past few years, and that's obviously not to just take all of the credit myself.
There are a ton of incredible journalists and activists and, you know, others speaking up about this. And, you know, certainly, you know.
But I do think that awareness is growing, and I think that we are seeing pushback, you know, not just from Democrats.
You know, by been, a big piece of the MAHA movement, the Make America Healthy Again folks who, you know, maybe can be out of touch-The mainstream science on vaccines.
They are very angry about PFAS and are pushing the Trump administration on this issue. So we are seeing sort of unlikely people coming together to fight this.
And so I think that while there are still immense challenges here, there is also awareness that is growing, and action and activism that is growing on this.
And I think that it's something that, you know, a lot of different people can come together on.
I feel like we use this phrase a lot these days, fortunately and unfortunately, it's really not never, but rarely been easier to sort of draw a line in the sand on whether you're for or against something.
And clean water is obviously a human right.
And so hopefully your people, whether they understand what PFAS stands for or all the different combinations or where enforcement is, understand and agree and would hopefully fight for whether they've had to been exposed to it like someone like Brenda or not, that's something that they would fight for, at least yell at their water utility about.
So I appreciate you deciding to tell even more people about it. Last question I'd like to ask folks is what are you reading about bes-besides PFAS papers?
And there, there are some other good books, like Exposure by Rob Bilott is a good one. I really like The Radium Girls, which I read kind of recently. I thought- Oh, I heard that's great. It's an incredible book.
It is again, also, also sort of- It's on the beat. It's on the... It's in your wheelhouse. Right. [laughs] I'm on brand at all times. Anything for fun?
At night I'm doing like dragons or like naval ware- warfare from the 1700s. I don't have anything else in me. Oh man. Yeah. A friend lent me a book recently. It's about World War II though, so it's also not super off.
It's called The German Wife. For fun, I do watch, I watch more fun TV. I've been watching Survivor. That's been really fun. Okay. Okay, nice. I have never watched Survivor.
Apparently it's on its 50th season, and it- It's the, you know, the, it's, it's 50, it's a big one. [laughs] I've missed a lot of things. I just watch baking shows. That's my speed. That's as tense as I can get.
Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for writing this book. Do you wanna give people a shout out where they can follow you on the internet for better or worse?
I think on pretty much all social media, my handle's Rachel Frazen. I'm on X, I'm on Blue Sky, I'm on Instagram. You can also follow my reporting at thehill.com, the sort of news of the day on energy and the environment.
I think that's where you can find me. And thank you again. Really appreciate it. Thank you. That's it.
You can read our critically acclaimed newsletter and get notified about new podcast conversations at importantnotimportant.com. Thanks so much for listening and thanks for giving a shit.
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