Silicon Valley is one of the most polluted places in the country

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/silicon-valley-full-superfund-sites/598531/

by nsnick • 7 years ago

318 58 7 years ago

A related example from last year, near Page Mill Road: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/03/01/stanford-sues...

And an entertaining rant by a UC Berkeley Health Physicist, on D&D (Decontamination & Demolition): http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2019/05/a-stream-of-consciousne...

paganel• 7 years ago

Really interesting links, the second one probably should also be posted as a separate HN post.

gnicholas2• 7 years ago

FYI, the location near Page Mill Road is where Facebook used to have their headquarters. Stanford did took various remediation measures when they converted the property into faculty housing, but IDK if the FB buildings were adequately protected/ventilated. My understanding is that the vapors are only harmful if they get into buildings and are not adequately ventilated. Stanford put vapor guards under each home they built, among other things.

DrScump• 7 years ago

One of the worst was right across 10th St. from Solar4America Ice (formerly the San Jose Ice Center, home training facility of the Sharks).

H8crilA4• 7 years ago

I wonder how many such Superfund sites we already have in mainland China (I mean from a factual standpoint, not from a government reporting standpoint). The Chinese government is so out of control over the situation that, nominally, environmental pollution can be punished with death.

seanmcdirmid• 7 years ago

It doesn’t make sense. Anything can be punished by death in China, and laws are only selectively enforced anyways, so death penalty with the excuse of pollution would probably only occur for deeper political reasons.

China doesn’t really have superfund sites, in that they don’t have a specific category for expensive cleanup projects.

H8crilA4• 7 years ago

I meant: how many sites are already de facto so polluted that they require deep cleanup. May be decades before we find out.

onion2k• 7 years ago

I'm sure the residents of Santa Clara and the workers in various campuses will rest more easily knowing that actually, there are much more polluted places globally.

Its not a competition. The article is saying SV is badly polluted. Pointing out that China might be worse just means there's another problem; that's redundant information in the context of talking about SV.

H8crilA4• 7 years ago

That's not the point? I'm just saying there's probably a whole lot of those in China. This is a problem to the health of many people.

mieseratte• 7 years ago

Its not a competition.

No one said it was, and nothing said detracts from SV. I think it's an interesting question I wouldn't have otherwise thought about. Fifty years from now will China be talking about the same environmental issues we're talking about now? Will it be better or worse?

at-fates-hands• 7 years ago

China is also building hundreds of more coal plants in other countries and have plans to build more in their country.

I find it deeply ironic how everybody talks about what the US has to do to stop climate change; while China just goes about its business making the situation exponentially worse without anybody really caring.

moate2• 7 years ago

Can't speak for "everyone" but here's my 2 cents on what you're describing.

As an American, my first thought it when it comes to most issues tends to be "what can we, America, do to make things better." This leads me to vote a certain way, consume a certain way, and live a certain way. I understand that out countries are doing their own things and having their own problems, but there's fewer mechanisms in place for the average person outside that nation to affect change (and depending on the structure of the government, there might not even be that much for people IN the nation to do).

I care that China has bad aspects of how their government works. But the low hanging fruit for me is to try and pressure the people in my neighborhood (either literally or metaphorically) towards better decisions. "Change start at home" and all that.

jwr3• 7 years ago

So, a story about SV being polluted has 156 points right now, and sits nicely in the middle of the front page. It's an important story, apparently.

Meanwhile, Nature's story about climate change (The hard truths of climate change — by the numbers) got flagged and disappeared quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042101

There is no better way to show what "tech bubble" means.

crazygringo• 7 years ago

That's a particularly uncharitable interpretation.

It's much more likely is that everyone's well aware of climate change (I'm sure I've read many hundreds of articles over my lifetime), but this is the first many people have heard of SV pollution (it certainly is for me).

endorphone2• 7 years ago

This would explain one post rising quickly while another fades. When people are actively flagging, however, that's an entirely different, much more insidious action.

jwr3• 7 years ago

Well, which do you think is more important/pressing right now?

te_chris• 7 years ago

Can't believe that got flagged. Dang et al, are you able to see if there's some sort of flagging ring or similar going on? I get that political stories normally get flagged, but a Nature article is not that.

endorphone2• 7 years ago

There are a large enough group of people who believe that climate change is political because some deniers have politicized science as if you can debate against science and fact.

jerf• 7 years ago

Even ignoring the political aspects, we don't need six articles a day on HN about climate change. If nothing else, it's preaching to the choir. There's no news in most climate change articles, to say nothing of "Hacker" news.

If HN runs simply on what people consider politically important, it might as well shut down and just be a redirect to the Huffington Post or something. There is abundant evidence that online communities end up in certain strange attractors [1], and the dominant political narrative of the day is one of the strongest ones.

I didn't flag the particular article in question, but yes, I absolutely flag any article that can be replaced with little or no loss with $POPULAR_POLITICAL_NARRATIVE_IS_TRUE, regardless of which narrative it is, even the ones I more-or-less agree with. I doubt HN is anybody's sole source of news and it doesn't need to join the stampeding horde of other websites who publish that article 20 times a day.

[1]: A math term, not a term of judgment.

manigandham• 7 years ago

Everyone knows about climate change, that's not news. However there's a lot of denial about how bad rich areas like Silicon Valley and SF are today with pollution and population. The bubble is how the SV/tech community wants to change the world but has trouble maintaining its own backyard.

badpun• 7 years ago

To be frank, there's hardly any convincing climate change science in the Nature story. It's mostly about activism, CO2 emissions with only some super high-level info of impact of greenhouse gases on people (without justifications or models given). It reads like a political story, not scientific one - I didn't know that nature is publishing such stuff.

corodra2• 7 years ago

Eh, I don't think "tech bubble" is appropriate to nail down the problems. Egotism and hubris, along with thinking being above the rest of society is the problem. And to be fair, it shows up here in HN too. There's a weird mentality of "Well I'm smart in computers and programming, that automatically makes me an expert in civil infrastructure, economic theory, social support programs, agriculture, etc". I mean, seriously, it's really weird and it's happening constantly. It's like a lot of this "revolutionary SV agriculture startups". They're bunk and retarded. They're just 1940s-1970s research projects without ever citing or learning from trails already blazed. They act like "No one has ever researched how to grow food, here I come to rescue with my power of programming and social media posts! Venture capital firms, I'm ready for money!" Not a single one realizes that a lot of large scale, efficient and affordable farming practices were pioneered by people like Norman Borlaug. But they "draw inspiration" from a random SV ceo. Just pisses me off.

Plus, "The people's voice matters. We must democratize everything... as long as they only agree with me."

Reality is, silicon valley is not really different from the old titans of industry. One difference, the old assholes were upfront "You need something, I hire people to make it, and I'm in it for the money." The valley, "I'm here for you. You giving me your money is the best way to make the world a better place through [insert disruptive product]. You'll be happy with a lighter wallet. We're going to save the world together."

bavell• 7 years ago

I agree with your overall perception of SV as an outsider myself. There are very smart people doing big things alongside starry-eyed naive people doing silly things. Sometimes it's a blurry line between the two and sometimes I can't help but facepalm at some of the stories I hear coming out of SV...

jacquesm• 7 years ago

Spot on. The amusing thing about farming is that the only thing that is hard is to do it at scale. You can make just about anything work at lab scale but as soon as you really end up having to feed a sizeable population of your product that's when all the nitty gritty little details start adding up to 'can't do'.

herostratus101• 7 years ago

This is still the best essay I have read on the topic: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-...

I've left Silicon Valley since I read it. And having read it, I hope to never move back.

cryptozeus• 7 years ago

Page is not readable on phone

trenning• 7 years ago

copy/pasted text https://pastebin.com/d63CwAtN

rad_gruchalski• 7 years ago

Works pretty good in reader view.

xvector• 7 years ago

This is horribly frightening. What can I do at home to detect (or even continuously monitor) the presence of Superfund chemicals?

armitron• 7 years ago

You can't, reliably. The entire geographical area is contaminated, so you should worry about living there and not just about your home. Now they are saying Google offices were breached and documenting one specific (but very prominent, easy to cover) instance, imagine what's going on in general in the background.

I moved to Europe from SF bay area years ago, coinciding with the birth of my son, and this was one of the factors.

nostrademons• 7 years ago

There's a pretty good map here:

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/brchannel/Map-The-Chemical-Legacy...

TCE has a distinctive smell - sweet, like cookie dough or donuts. You'll know if you're in an area contaminated by it - I've smelled it at the Google Quad campus and some of the residential areas around it. (The area around Evandale is particularly bad, I've smelled it just driving through some of the residential streets there.) Some of the other chemicals used in semicoductor manufacture are odorless, though.

Most of the contamination is in industrial or office park zones, so I'd be more worried about your workplace than your home, and many of the spills are plain old gasoline (from service stations) which you can have anywhere.

nabeards• 7 years ago

Would be awesome if there was an update there!

natch2• 7 years ago

Article does not even mention the Kaiser Permanente cement plant which has a dedicated train line bringing in coal for burning, is one of the largest sources of mercury pollution in California, and is perched right over Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Los Altos, and very close to Palo Alto and San Jose, bathing them in a haze of emissions.

All the highly educated and well connected residents, rich and powerful corporations, and even local governments can't do anything about it, because it is grandfathered in by federal law. It doesn't even appear on many lists of top polluters because many people who compile such lists only include power plants, and it is not a power plant.

It's a real world counterexample for people who say we can just turn off the switch of things we don't like (AI being the usual such thing). Well, good luck with that, if there are laws saying you can't... which there will be.

kayfox• 7 years ago

This plant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanente_Quarry

Which is not owned by Kaiser Permanente?

goda90• 7 years ago

It was founded by Henry Kaiser and named Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant after the Permanente Creek which flowed past it. It has since changed names. Kaiser Permanente the healthcare organization was named after the same creek. So calling it the Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant is outdated, but it's not saying that the healthcare organization owns it.

natch2• 7 years ago

That is a different facility, but it is nearby.

gnicholas2• 7 years ago

Fun fact: Facebook's old headquarters (between Page Mill Rd and California Ave) was located on top of a superfund site. After FB moved to Menlo Park, Stanford built a faculty housing development there. They claim that they have done adequate retrofitting so that it poses no risk to residents, but I know some professors in the sciences who decided against living there after reading the environmental disclosures.

Also, if Stanford did this retrofitting, that implies that maybe FB did not do enough when they were there?

The housing disclosures have more info on the contamination and retrofitting: https://universityterrace.stanford.edu/disclosures

chrisdhoover• 7 years ago

Oh no, I worked in two different offices located on superfund sites. Probably a third too but I haven’t found supporting evidence yet.

bcaa7f3a8bbc• 7 years ago

Nobody remembers the Commodore Semiconductor Group? Commodore was a pioneer in personal computing, semiconductor and environmental accidents. In 1974, there was a massive leak of the 250-gallon underground concrete storage tank full of TCE, and today the site is still monitored by the EPA. Bill Herd, the chief engineering of Commodore 128, mentioned in his interview that the day he went to work, he didn't know the tank leaked and parked at the wrong side of the company, and his car was completely contaminated.

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...

Silicon Valley is one of the most polluted places in the country

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