Commentary

On May Day, 2024, the California State Water Control Board (SWCB) voted to declare hexavalent chromium a danger to public health if it reaches a maximum contaminant level (MCL) of 10 parts per billion in drinking water.

After a 30-year delay, SWCB had created the nation’s very first health standard for this chemical.

Poisoned water, whether by negligence, recklessness, or criminal human behavior, has always been illegal and punished in practice and common law. Poison your neighbor’s river, well, or pond, and you just might pay a heavy fine or go to jail, if your neighbor doesn’t rightfully hang you first.

It’s the dose that kills. Trace amounts of hexavalent chromium in drinking water is not such a case. No doubt, hexavalent chromium does cause lung cancer in workers who inhale it over long periods of time in exposures 1,000 times higher than in nature and in most workplaces.

Today, too many are terrified of the air and water surrounding them and are surrendering their freedoms to those who manufacture and manipulate hysteria.

What made California’s water police at SWCB finally change their collective minds after 30 years?

The politics of science was given a masterful assist by a Hollywood cult hero—magnificent “Pretty Woman” actress Julia Roberts playing fireball Erin Brockovich. Our legendary heroine was a hard-driving legal assistant. In the nineties, she organized a 650-plaintiff lawsuit against Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). From there, lawyers scavenging for chrome found gold—PG&E’s $333 million.

Water that leached through ground soil around a PG&E power plant had deposited hexavalent chromium into the water supply of Hinkley, California. The terrified victim-residents of Hinkley happily cashed their PG&E checks.

So why did it take 30 years for SWCB (and no one else) to decide to set a standard for human health?

Over 30 years of research, extensive studies found there just was no scientific evidence that this chemical in the amounts found in Hinkley posed dangers to public health. Peer-reviewed science concluded there was absolutely no way hexavalent chromium was responsible for every discovered health problem among persons living in Hinkley. The chemical in low doses was not responsible for nosebleeds, miscarriages, Hodgkin’s disease, breast cancer, spinal deterioration, or prostate cancer.

How about cancer?

Statistical anomalies, “cancer clusters,” found at Hinkley (or elsewhere) were not scientific proof. A statistical association, mathematical correlation, guilt by association, does not prove causation or guilt. That conclusion still holds in May 2024.

The American Chemistry Council, the California Chamber of Commerce, and other manufacturing and technology groups said the SWCB board’s May decision was based on “outdated science”; moreover, it “will undermine state and local water affordability,” particularly in “economically disadvantaged communities.” Poor people will pay, not in bad health, but the high local costs of water purification.

However, guilt by association does provide perfect pretexts for politically radical solutions and profitable lawsuits.

The worst human fears are dangers to the health and well-being of oneself, family, friends, and community.

The power and profits from exploiting such normal human fears are substantial. Science and facts hardly deter lawyers, environmentalists, contractors, and agitators making a very good living stirring up fears and collecting bundles of cash and obedience from the innocent, indoctrinated, ignorant, and terrified.

Criminally inadequate public education, ignorance, is also a factor. A mere 4 percent of your body mass consists of minerals, but you die without them. Small amounts of sodium, potassium, magnesium, iron, and chloride are essential for a functioning body. Very small amounts of calcium, iron, and zinc are micronutrients essential to bones, teeth, nerves, muscles, blood cells, hormones, hydration, blood pressure, metabolism, immunity, and healing.

There are 21 other essential minerals to a healthy body, and their deficiencies can make you sick. These trace minerals are zinc, cobalt, copper, manganese, molybdenum, iodine, selenium, sulfur, chloride, boron, silicon, vanadium, nickel, arsenic, and chromium.

Most of these terrifyingly healthy things are readily available in the food we eat and the water we drink.

Despite what the fear mongers say, most air and water contaminated as measured by parts per million, billion, or trillion, constitute remote to zero dangers to human health. Today’s measurement technology enables the last molecule on earth to be declared guilty of murder.

Hinkley’s problem is universal. There are many examples.

There is no peer-reviewed, empirical, fact-based science showing that a human-caused increase in CO2 has been the primary cause of climate change. It was 192 U.N. politicians who originally set environmental policy, not the “hundreds of leading scientists” with whom they claim to be associated.

The American Cancer Society does not accept California’s Prop 65 cancer scare list as scientific proof that chemicals cause specific cancers. The cancer society, going about curing cancers, knows there are many types of cancers having differing causes that are difficult to find.

Pesticides or natural toxins in food are not a significant cancer risk in the United States. Eat more, not fewer, fruits and vegetables.

Based on 6,000 studies, the World Health Organization and the National Academy of Sciences—14 scientific societies representing 100,000 microbiologists, toxicologists, and food scientists—said the risk of the chemical Alar in apples was effectively zero.

A U.S. Air Force 20-year study of 995 Air Force Ranch Hands who physically handled dioxide-contaminated Agent Orange herbicide in Vietnam found insufficient scientific evidence to prove any adverse health effects, but Congress, like PG&E, reacting politically to hysteria, pays vets for countless numbers of legally presumed health problems.

Hairspray in populous Harrisburg did not create the ozone hole over the South Pole. Extreme cold, an active volcano, and the location of the sun seasonally open and close the “hole.”

Michael Crichton, technologist and Harvard M.D., stated: “The impact of air pollution on health is scientifically complicated and mostly blown out of proportion. In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better.”