Trump can just take the whole NOAA budget himself now and replace them with a legal pad and a black sharpie. I assume that's the plan. Say, we can just steal anything from any budget now right?
Distilled water is the purest drinking water you can get on this planet (and you just need a $150 distiller producing about 1 gallon of clean water per run).
PFBA is transported in rain and snow. That suggests that it sticks around in the vapor and condenses back into the liquid. There's no escaping it except to break it down, but that's the crux of the issue - the PFAS class of molecules are extremely energy intensive to break apart, which is why they don't break down naturally.
Also distillation is very energy intensive. A solar still makes sense if you need to do this a lot and live in a sunny place.
It's also unsafe to drink in larger quantities, as is seawater. Both will let you live for a few days if there is no other source of water, but anything longer and you're looking at serious levels of minerals mismatch.
> It's safe to drink if you're eating a balanced diet, since food will provide all the minerals you need.
And that's a pretty ambitious assumption. A lot of people don't eat anything even close to a balanced diet, as evidenced by insane obesity rates or the return of malnutrition diseases like scurvy.
But we're talking about minerals here, common ones, not things like vitamins or iodine.
Which mineral do you propose will be found in ordinary tap water but not in food?
Anyway, I challenge you to come up with published evidence for your initial assertion there. I find it highly dubious.
EDIT: I looked up calcium. The average tap water in the US contains about 50 mg/L of calcium. The minimum daily requirement for calcium intake is 1000 mg (1300 mg for teens). If you are depending on tap water for this mineral you're going to be in sad shape.
Consuming seawater is generally a bad idea, people died of thirst before drinking the material in which they swam for some time (if documentaries are correct, haven't faced this myself)
Seawater has a high salt concentration—about 3.5%, or 35 grams of salt per liter. The human kidneys are limited in how much salt they can filter out; they need a lower salt concentration than what seawater has to effectively expel salt. When someone drinks seawater, the kidneys are forced to use more water from the body to dilute and excrete the excess salt. This actually leads to a net loss of water, worsening dehydration instead of hydrating the body.
In '78 I worked as a general dogsbody doing water quality analysis around the river forth estuary. Suspended solids, phosphate & nitrates from fertiliser factories and manufacturing alongside sewage outfalls were measured right upstream, to tidal limits and from the top north shore to the south. 100km or more. My constant tl;dr is that stuff moves, and whilst nothing like the tidal zone, groundwater is anything but static.
My case? Estuarine. The Biscayne aquifer is limestone. Highly porous. Water will travel as water does. If anything even close has contamination its getting in, if there's transport from surface water into the aquifer. The stuff here says urban canals and groundwater flows definitely feed in. Any firestation testing foam? Its in. PFAS contamination from airport fire testing is a thing.
Don't worry, DeSantis will just enact legislation or make an Exec Order to forbid government employees talking about it. Problem solved!
There is a far simpler solution. Just stop measuring it.
That's very likely. One of the proposals in Project 2025 is to defund NOAA. https://www.axios.com/2024/07/20/project-2025-trump-what-to-...
Trump can just take the whole NOAA budget himself now and replace them with a legal pad and a black sharpie. I assume that's the plan. Say, we can just steal anything from any budget now right?
Or do it like Alberta and celebrate the pollutant instead
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/10/18/news/alberta-ucp...
Distilled water is the purest drinking water you can get on this planet (and you just need a $150 distiller producing about 1 gallon of clean water per run).
PFBA is transported in rain and snow. That suggests that it sticks around in the vapor and condenses back into the liquid. There's no escaping it except to break it down, but that's the crux of the issue - the PFAS class of molecules are extremely energy intensive to break apart, which is why they don't break down naturally.
Also distillation is very energy intensive. A solar still makes sense if you need to do this a lot and live in a sunny place.
It's also devoid of minerals so you might want to supplement, if you mean to consume distilled water.
VEVOR distiller is a lot cheaper than that
While that's true, effectively the same process is occurring to create rain, and if rain is contaminated so will your distillation stream.
You'd need to do something that destroys it entirely if you want to remove the lighter molecules.
It's also unsafe to drink in larger quantities, as is seawater. Both will let you live for a few days if there is no other source of water, but anything longer and you're looking at serious levels of minerals mismatch.
It's safe to drink if you're eating a balanced diet, since food will provide all the minerals you need.
In very large quantities it's unsafe, but that's true of any kind of water.
> It's safe to drink if you're eating a balanced diet, since food will provide all the minerals you need.
And that's a pretty ambitious assumption. A lot of people don't eat anything even close to a balanced diet, as evidenced by insane obesity rates or the return of malnutrition diseases like scurvy.
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/scurvy-is-re-emerging-due-to-mode...
Obesity isn't caused by bad diet. It's caused by overconsumption for a low effort lifestyle.
But we're talking about minerals here, common ones, not things like vitamins or iodine.
Which mineral do you propose will be found in ordinary tap water but not in food?
Anyway, I challenge you to come up with published evidence for your initial assertion there. I find it highly dubious.
EDIT: I looked up calcium. The average tap water in the US contains about 50 mg/L of calcium. The minimum daily requirement for calcium intake is 1000 mg (1300 mg for teens). If you are depending on tap water for this mineral you're going to be in sad shape.
> It's safe to drink if you're eating a balanced diet, since food will provide all the minerals you need
I mean, not OP, but you're the one who made the initial assertion. Maybe you should be the one providing published evidence?
Consuming seawater is generally a bad idea, people died of thirst before drinking the material in which they swam for some time (if documentaries are correct, haven't faced this myself)
Seawater has a high salt concentration—about 3.5%, or 35 grams of salt per liter. The human kidneys are limited in how much salt they can filter out; they need a lower salt concentration than what seawater has to effectively expel salt. When someone drinks seawater, the kidneys are forced to use more water from the body to dilute and excrete the excess salt. This actually leads to a net loss of water, worsening dehydration instead of hydrating the body.
Related: https://youtu.be/-ht7nOaIkpI?t=699 . MyLifeOutdoors - "Your Gear is Poisoning You! (Not Clickbait)" (14m21s) [2024-10-23]
He mentions finding PFBA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorobutanoic_acid ) in a pristine mountain stream, most likely because the chemical evaporates and gets carried by the air.
> Miami has been identified as the US city with the 3rd highest levels of PFAS pollution in groundwater among 44 locations assessed
Do we know why?
I don't think a lot of manufacturing happens near Miami.
In '78 I worked as a general dogsbody doing water quality analysis around the river forth estuary. Suspended solids, phosphate & nitrates from fertiliser factories and manufacturing alongside sewage outfalls were measured right upstream, to tidal limits and from the top north shore to the south. 100km or more. My constant tl;dr is that stuff moves, and whilst nothing like the tidal zone, groundwater is anything but static.
My case? Estuarine. The Biscayne aquifer is limestone. Highly porous. Water will travel as water does. If anything even close has contamination its getting in, if there's transport from surface water into the aquifer. The stuff here says urban canals and groundwater flows definitely feed in. Any firestation testing foam? Its in. PFAS contamination from airport fire testing is a thing.
https://www.evergladesfoundation.org/post/water-on-earth-exp...
This article goes into some of alleged sources:
https://news.fiu.edu/2023/how-pfas-forever-chemicals-are-get...
Article:
https://phys.org/news/2024-11-rainwater-samples-reveals-lite...