The Biden administration has announced a proposal to “strengthen its Lead and Copper Rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years,” the White House said in a statement on Thursday.
According to the White House, more than 9.2 million American households connect to water through lead pipes and lead service lines and, due to “decades of inequitable infrastructure development and underinvestment,” many Americans are at risk of lead exposure.
“There is no safe level of exposure to lead, particularly for children, and eliminating lead exposure from the air, water, and homes is a crucial component of the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic commitment to advancing environmental justice,” the Biden administration said.
Can’t wait for the GOP to sabotage this so they can oWn ThE LiBs: “Lead free pipes are for socialists!”
I’ve long wondered if lead exposure accounts for their behaviors over the past couple decades. Lead that accumulates in the bones over one’s lifetime leaches out into the bloodstream when one becomes elderly, like calcium does with osteoporosis. Cognitive issues and rage are associated with lead exposure.
I’ve long wondered if lead exposure accounts for their behaviors over the past couple decades.
That’s exactly what has happened.
Imagine, if you will, a country that has a lot of land area, which uses personal ground transport to grt around. Imagine if, for decades, those personal transport machines used large, ineffcient engines that ran on a fuel that caused aerosolized lead to be blown into the atmosphere at a staggering rate?
Imagine, if you will, a three by seven inch wooden frame – a frame that’s a gateway to a world of imagination. Wipe your mind on the welcome mat. You’re about to enter…
The Scary Door.
I’m not sure about that, I’ve had lead poisoning for thirty years and I’m still not stupid enough to support those assholes.
it’s dose dependant, and while your particular neurological effects may be different, in population studies for almost every country where lead has been banned, there is a direct relationship to violent crimes as well. Lead gasoline use goes up, crime rate goes up. Lead gasoline stops, and as the lead is measured to leave the environment, the violent crime goes down.
Intelligence is only one possible thing affected. It’s also highly associated with emotional impulsiveness.
People typically can see a ~3 IQ point deficit with long term lead poisoning.
I worked on a community gardening project in the city when I was in grad school. We had an ordinary urban residential lot and wanted to plant a community vegetable garden.
The soil was so incredibly contaminated with lead from 70 years old leaded gasoline that we had to scrape off the top 6 ft of topsoil and send it to a toxic waste dump, and the replace all of that. Then we built raised garden beds to mitigate lead uptake in the plants.
Most cities in the world are still heavily contaminated and lead will never go away.
Came here to say this. I look forward to whatever their excuse is to not solve the toxic drinking water problem. And likely immediately spend more on DoD or cut taxes to the rich.
It’s funny, because the hexbears basically have the same “Biden bad” reaction. Almost like there’s a weird amount of ideological overlap.
Not a hexbear, but the leftist “Biden bad” narrative wouldn’t demonize investing in infrastructure, they would call out shit like unconditional support for Israel or failing to meaningfully improve social safety nets via Medicare for All, or other such measures. Biden is a Liberal, at the end of the day, and that’s not going to please any leftist except by not being a fascist.
Flip your district blue in 18 years with this one weird trick!
This is a greater threat to the republicans than gerrymandering is to the democrats!
Huzzah! Another great move by the Biden administration that will probably be overlooked by most commenters, like his labor board appointments that led to the recent union resurgence were.
How many Biden fellators does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Hooray Biden for doing less than the absolute bare minimum!!!
Do you do literally anything besides endless serial shitposting about how much you hate Joe Biden? It’s incessant. Get a grip, fucking weirdo.
Those who smelled it dealt it.
More than 2/3rds of democrats don’t think he should run. I have a feeling your head is in your ass
I’m afraid your opinion of the bare minimum is not the universal definition of it. You shouldn’t be surprised when people differ with you on that.
When everything’s below the bare minimum, it becomes a meaningless metric. You’ll still have to rank the available options, and there can still be a huge difference between those options.
Those that purposely destroyed the water systems with cuts in Flint Michigan should have been quartered in a public square.
Sadly in reality they probably received bonuses and perks.
Those that caused the switchover to Flint River water that resulted in the disaster surfacing definitely should be drawn and quartered, no question. Snyder and his city managers put all this nonsense in motion and should be charged with crimes against humanity.
However, it’s also a systemic, deeper problem in the US. Flint’s pipes didn’t suddenly become terrible overnight. The entire water system was in disrepair for decades. The only reason it didn’t surface sooner was they were regulating the water going through it to hold the demons at bay. Even when it was working, pre-disaster, the water was safe to drink, but horrible from a drinking water perspective.
The whole system was a giant leaking piece of junk that basically kept working due to positive pressure pushing contaminants out of the leaks, and the pH level being maintained so the old pipes wouldn’t start leeching into the water. That a GM engine plant had to switch water sources because the water was damaging the engine construction is just mind-blowing. Human bodies are vastly more delicate than engines.
Flint’s not the only one either, many American cities with aging water infrastructure that wasn’t properly maintained all have/had similar problems.
We are such a short-sighted country that seems to so quickly forget that our infrastructure requires constant maintenance and updates. I really think the generation that got to live among all the New Deal and post WWII infrastructure just thought they lived in a magic time where all this stuff just exists forever, rather than realizing it takes stewardship to keep things “the way they are”. Now, we on the back end, reap the rewards of everything falling apart at the same time, faster than we can fix it.
A friend of mine was starting into a tirade a while back about how terrible it is that all water pipe installed in houses today is plastic even though we know BPAs are killing people. I suggested that they might be better than lead pipe. We still high five from time to time.
This is one of those times I’m like why are mass shootings always schools and bars and not assholes like the people responsible for this
Just another day on which I as a European am absolutely shocked how shit the quality of life in the US is.
Europe has lead pipes as well, buddy.
They’re perfectly safe as long as idiots don’t change the water supply to one that’s more acidic without buffering the pH.
Hell, England and Wales have nearly 3x more than the entire US.
That isn’t perfectly safe. That is normally safe, but once in a while something will go wrong and they become unsafe.
If it goes wrong long enough after the pipes have been in service it’s barely an issue iirc because there is now a coat of corroded lead inside the pipes that does not cause lead poisoning
When people say europe they usually aren’t thinking of countries such as Russia, Turkey, or the UK.
What. I can maybe give you Russia (“Eastern Europe”) and Turkey (seems more culturally Middle East than Europe), but most people are absolutely thinking of the UK. What other group would they be part of?
We currently have the freedom to drink lead tainted water, can you say the same?
Yes. 25% of domestic residences still use lead piping in the EU, compared to 10% in the US.
Europeans “Try Not To Talk Shit About Something You’re Actually Worse About” Challenge:
Impossible.
But it feeeels like they should be better! Don’t bring facts into the Europe self-suck contest
That data is still from 2009 though, but sadly there doesn’t seem to be a newer statistic. Since that time many changes were made to push for the removal of old lead piping in the EU.
Anyway the threshold for lead in drinking water in the EU is 10ug/L since 2013.
Since 2020 a regulation has been in effect with the goal to have less than 5 ug/L drinking water at the consumer until 2036 everywhere in the EU.
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC125733
The US has a threshold of 15 ug/L.
Yeah! Tell that bad British person to shut up about my freedom water! They almost made me drop my crayon and I’m trying to find dot #6! I can’t wait to find out which shape these dots are going to make me draw… There’s seven dots and the word “stop” in the middle, so I’m thinking a school bus!
You don’t even have pipes in Europe. You drink water that you squeeze out of your sheep’s wool
It’s worth noting that 9.2 million homes is an extremely small percentage of American homes and I’d say almost all of them are extremely rural homes or dying rural towns that just need relocated. Think of North Dakota as akin to the Siberian oblasts or northern Finland, neither get a lot of infrastructure care because no almost one is there. This is the Biden admin trying to look out for the little guy that’s been ignored the last century
He should do high speed internet next. My mom has been stuck on a 3mbps WISP since 2007.
Agreed, the ISPs pissed away the billions they got in the early 2000s. It’s time to pony up another few billion but let the military do the work this time then hand the actually completed project to gouvernement ran ISPs.
My dad is still paying frontier like $80 a month for 4mbps that doesn’t work half the time
