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Kaos Yuftberlt's Climate Contemplations
Adjusts tired eyes and sets down another stack of environmental studies
My columns serve as a chronicle of humanity's slow-motion suicide—a methodical documentation of how we've transformed our only home into a hostile environment through sheer industrial hubris. Week after week, I translate the dense scientific literature into plain language, revealing how our pursuit of convenience and profit has poisoned our air, water, and soil with chemicals that will outlast civilizations. These aren't abstract environmental concerns or distant future problems; they're immediate threats already coursing through our bloodstreams, already altering our climate, already ensuring that the world our children inherit will be less hospitable than the one we received. I write not to inspire hope—that luxury died with the coral reefs—but to bear witness, to ensure that when historians of some future species excavate our remains, they'll understand that we knew exactly what we were doing to ourselves. My columns are dispatches from the front lines of our self-inflicted apocalypse, written for those few souls still willing to stare unflinchingly at the data and accept the mathematical certainty of our trajectory.
Eternal, Never Ending #4 - by Getty AI
The Permanent Stain: Forever Chemicals and Our Chemical Inheritance
By Kaos Yuftberlt, Climate Desk
Another morning, another cup of coffee that tastes faintly of industrial progress. As I write this, the rain patters against my window—each droplet carrying its invisible cargo of synthetic compounds that will outlive us all. Today, we discuss PFAS: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, though their colloquial name tells you everything you need to know. Forever chemicals.
How fitting that we've finally created something truly eternal in this age of disposable everything.
The Birth of Indestructibility
PFAS have been used in consumer products around the world since about the 1950s, born from our magnificent obsession with making life more convenient. DuPont's Teflon changed our lives, but also polluted our bodies—a perfect encapsulation of our species' gift for unintended consequences.
These chemicals exist because we demanded them. We wanted cookware that wouldn't stick, clothing that wouldn't stain, packaging that wouldn't leak. Nonstick cookware, grease-resistant food packaging, and waterproof clothing are all products that make our daily lives less messy, but that convenience comes at a cost. Industry obliged, creating molecules with a chain of linked carbon and fluorine atoms so robust that the carbon-fluorine bond is one of the strongest, these chemicals do not degrade easily in the environment.
We built them to last forever. Mission accomplished.
The Ubiquitous Invasion
These toxic chemicals are so common in consumer products and manufacturing that they're everywhere—including inside our bodies. Today, Teflon-like compounds called PFAS are found in the blood of almost all Americans. Think about that for a moment. Nearly every person reading this column carries these synthetic compounds in their bloodstream—a chemical inheritance from a century of industrial ambition.
The sources read like an inventory of modern life: Consumer goods, including non-stick cookware, food packaging, cosmetics, and clothing. Manufacturing or chemical production facilities that produce or use PFAS – for example at chrome plating, electronics, and certain textile and paper manufacturers. Even our food supply betrays us, PFAS in the environment can enter the food supply through crops and animals grown, raised, or processed in contaminated areas.
Both outdoor and indoor air may contain PFAS. The very air we breathe has become a delivery system for our own chemical legacy.
The Persistence of Folly
Here's what makes PFAS particularly insidious: they don't break down. These "forever chemicals" pollute water, don't break down, and remain in the environment and people for decades. Every molecule manufactured still exists somewhere—in groundwater, in soil, in the fatty tissues of wildlife, in us. We have created a pollution that accumulates across generations.
PFAS chemicals are associated with low birth weight, thyroid disease and an increased risk of certain cancers. The compounds we welcomed into our homes to make life easier are now linked to the very diseases that make life shorter.
What Can Be Done?
The question haunts me daily: What should you, dear reader, do with this knowledge?
First, reduce your exposure where possible. Avoid nonstick cookware, especially when scratched or overheated. Choose glass or stainless steel containers for food storage. Eating food packaged in material made with PFAS is an avoidable risk, so seek out products with minimal packaging or companies that have committed to PFAS-free materials.
Filter your drinking water. In April 2024, the EPA finalized drinking water standards for six PFAS and estimated that up to 105 million people will have improved drinking water, but this barely scratches the surface of the thousands of PFAS compounds.
Support legislative action. European civil society organisations published the Ban PFAS manifesto calling for EU Member States and the Commission to urgently ban PFAS, the 'forever chemicals', in consumer products by 2025 and across all uses by 2030. Demand similar action from your representatives.
Yet even as I write these recommendations, I feel the familiar weight of futility. These are individual solutions to a systemic catastrophe. Researchers are seeking a breakthrough on how to get rid of PFAS, which have been found in drinking water, food packaging and soil, but we are decades behind the problem.
We have spent seventy years perfecting the art of creating indestructible pollution. Now we must learn the harder lesson: living with what cannot be undone.
In my garden this morning, I noticed the tomatoes seem smaller this year. I wonder what they're absorbing from the soil, what they're concentrating in their flesh. Even here, in this small sanctuary I've carved from the world, the forever chemicals find their way in.
Some inheritances, it seems, cannot be refused.