“EPA Proposes Yet Another Impossible Standard” By Kip Hansen

“Unsafe at any level! If the current administration’s EPA has its way, if any ambient-air dust is found inside an apartment building then that would require property owners to perform exceptionally…”

Watts Up With That?

EPA Proposes Yet Another Impossible Standard

By Kip Hansen on October 26, 2024

News Brief by Kip Hansen — 25 October 2024 — 650 words/3 mins

Unsafe at any level!  If the current administration’s Environmental Protection Agency [ EPA ] has its way, if any ambient-air dust is found inside an apartment building then that would require property owners to perform exceptionally expensive remediation.

“Wait, that’s crazy!”, you might say.  But, hey, come on, it’s the EPA and they  are “still crazy after all these years.”  (h/t Paul Simon)

Don’t take my word for it, here it is in the NY Times:

“The Biden administration said Thursday that it was strengthening requirements for homes and child-care facilities to remove lead-based paint dust, a move that could better protect more than 300,000 children a year from the toxic metal.

Under the new rules, any detectable level of lead dust in the building would be considered a “lead hazard,” and property owners would be required to pay for cleanup. Property and business owners who could be affected expressed concern about potential cleanup costs.”

No, I haven’t cheated….the EPA says “any detectable level of lead dust in the building”.

So, how much lead – what level –  is found in the ambient atmosphere? 

Naturally, it varies a great deal, but as for air pollution,  the “National Trends in Lead Concentrations in 2010 – 2023” for the USA shows a level of just over 0.025 ug/m^3.    That’s a detectable level.   The air measurement includes any particulate matter air.  In Europe, soil levels of lead are measured in nanograms/m^3, and found at 25-35 ng/m³, which is the same.  The average hasn’t changed much in the last decade.

This means that both in the US and in Europe, the ambient air has a detectable level of lead of about 0.025 ug/m^3.   The ambient air concentration measurements include any particulate matter (read “dust” - PM2.5/PM10) in that volume of air.   

According to a press release from MIT “testing for lead in water requires expensive, cumbersome equipment and typically requires days to get results. Or, it uses simple test strips that simply reveal a yes-or-no answer about the presence of lead but no information about its concentration. Current EPA regulations require drinking water to contain no more that 15 parts per billion of lead, a concentration so low it is difficult to detect.”

The new testing system being developed as discussed in that press release expects to be capable of detecting lead concentrations “as low as 1 part per billion”.

Now, no one wants to have their children, or themselves for that matter, exposed to lead in their drinking water, in the paint on baby’s cribs or toys or in the paint dust in their older homes.

But “no detectable level” is not a standard – it is an activist’s pipe dream.

The air around you probably has detectable levels of lead in it.  A recent document from the EPA shows that the dust in the air, averaged across all monitoring sites, ranges from 0.015 to 0.045 µg/m³.

If the water in your home is likely to have detectable lead levels, and the dust in the air outside your home has detectable lead levels, how is it possible to lower the lead levels inside your home to “no detectable level”?

It is not.

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Author’s Comment:

A demonstrably impossible target is no target at all.  It is nonsensical.  No amount of cleaning, no amount of remediation can possibly reduce lead levels inside a home below the levels found in the tap water and ambient air around and thus in the home.  Homes are not, and cannot be turned into,  cleanrooms.  

It is possible that the current crop of EPA administrators, NIH and UN WHO apparatchiks have simply lost their minds.    Or maybe they have some secret knowledge from another planet that makes the impossible possible and they are hiding it out in Area 51?

Things are getting weirder.

Thanks for reading.