>> i just have to add we are out of time. is that dick was the other opponent being chosen and argued strenuously against it for many years and the president finally leaned on him down in texas on the hot porch of the ranch house and senator dick was sweating and the president was sweating and finally dick said okay, i'll do it. >> he never held my bluntness against me either. he could not have been a better colleague and more importantly a better mentor. >> i'm terribly sorry, we're out of time. i hope you'll agree this is a wonderful opportunity. >> the c-span online storehas booked tv products . go to the c-span store to check them out. see all the products available. >> rob billott is a partner in cincinnati ohio where he is is practiced ndenvironmental

law and litigation for more than 28 years. he's a former chair of the cincinnati bar associations environmental olaw committee and graduate of the new college of the ba at ohio state university of law. jd cum laude. rob received the international livelihood award commonly known as the nobel prize for his years of work on pfo a. please give a warm savanna welcome to rob billott. [applause] >> good morning. thank you so much for inviting me here. with t to thank everyone the book festival. this is really an amazing event and i'm honored to be here. it's moving for me to be part

of this group and looking through all the otherfolks that are here you are wondering this guy is a lawyer . what's going onhere ? and that's what i want to talk about today is why i ended up writing this oobook exposure and what's the story about and why i believe it's an important story forall of us . you know, i think most of the people in this room have probably heard of flint michigan and the lead crisis, right? i'm curious how many people here have heard of her and polly fluoro alkylated substances. some, okay. i think most of us realize that we turn on the television, we're watching the news. we saw nonstop coverage of the flint michigan lead crisis for good reason. we had contaminated water, drink children drinking that

contaminated water. it was on all the news networks what 24 seven coverage. yet what we're going to be talkingabout his contamination that basically spans this entire planet and it's been going on for decades . and isaffecting everyone , not just in one city, not just in one country but this entire planet and we're talking about chemicals now that are in the air and water all over the globe and likely in every person listening today. in the blood of children, babies as their board. we're talking about an unprecedented global contamination that has essentially gone under the radar for decades. there hasn't really been much talk about this at all.

most people were completely unaware these chemicals even existed and most people still remain unaware of these chemicals and so i wanted to really try to put that story together, to try to explain and help people understand how did that happen? how does something like this happen in the united states during our lifetime? this is not a story of something that happened back in the 1800s . this is modern day contamination going on worldwide that we are all pretty much completely unaware of. and unfortunately it's a story that involves concerted effort frankly to keep that information from the rest of us. how does that happen? how does something likethat occur ? this started for me about 20 years ago . i started practicing law in 1990, started with the law firm in cincinnati ohio of

hollister, i was doing primarily corporate defense work representing big chemical companies and other corporations that were trying to figure out how do we comply with all these different state and federal environmental laws and how to help them manage that system . so for the next eight years i worked within that system. all these different rules and regulations that identified all these toxic -hazardous chemicals and as long as we were making sure we were getting the right permits, complying with the rules and limits and standards of these identified listedregulated materials , hopefully things were okay and that we were protecting the environment and doing what was required to prevent unnecessary risk and harm to folks . it's the world i lived in for eight years and one day i got a call from my telephone network and the man on the

other end of the line started rattling on about cows dying on his property. had no idea why he was calling me. this is not what i did and i was about to hang up the phone when he mentioned i've got your name from your grandmother . so at that point i decided i would listen. and try to figure out why was he calling me and how did this relate to my grandmother and what he explained was he was raising cows on property outside of parkersburg west virginia and he was having trouble with over 100 of his animals had died. he was watching them waste away, tumors forming, blackened teeth and it wasn't just the cows on his property. he was seeing the deer, the fish, the birds in the area all dropping dead. and he told me he had gone to everyone he could think of in town.

the state epa, federal epa. the company he believed was responsible for causing this and what he told me was he owned property right next to a landfill. he could see white foaming water coming out of that landfill going into a creek that his animals drank out of . these animals would stand and that water, drink this foaming water and he watched them develop these problems and he was convinced somethings in that white foaming water and why would anybody attention to him or listen to him? then he explained to landfall was owned by thedupont company and it so happened that dupont operatedone of the largest manufacturing plants in that town . right up the river , a few miles away where most of the people in that community either worked there, knew somebody that worked there or was related to somebody in that town and when this farmer had gone saying i

think dupont is causing a problem here i, people were shutting him down. didn't want to talk about it, told him talk to somebody else. my mom and her entire family had grown up in parkersburg and it so happened that this farmer whose weight name was wilbur tenant was talking to his neighbor who had been on the phone with my grandmother that day who was writing about her son being an environmental lawyer so certainly he could help. so i got that call and i said i'm happy to take a look at whatever you have. come up to cincinnati. bring whatever wyou have, we will take a look at this and see if there's something we could help youwith . that was october 1998. he arrived at our offices the day of the vhs tapes, all these big black videotapes, boxes of photographs and we sat down and i started watching the states, looking

at those photographs and it was clearsomething very wrong was happening here . it waspretty obvious, you could see the white foaming water . see it coming out of the pipe marked dupont company. so to me i thought okay, is what i do. this is what i've been doing for years. this is a regulated landfill. regulated by the state of west virginia, we can pull the permits, figure out what regular did, what materials are in this landfill and get to the bottom of this quickly . this was somebody that couldn't afford our rates. and our law firm typically represented big corporate clients, hundreds of dollars per hour and i thought again , this is a family friend . this would be a fairly straightforward case. we agreed to take that caisson on a contingency fee, our first ever case for our firm but we thought it was

straightforward. started digging into that case 1999. started trying to get all the permits, reviewing everythingi thought i could review that i've been doing for years and nothing was explaining what we were seeing . and not filing a lawsuit against dupont in 1999 . started asking, we want all your records for this landfill. tell us what's in this landfill . started sure, we are happy to give you everything about what's regulated, listed in that landfill . darted reviewing all that again and nothing was jumping out. so i then said well, what are you making up that plant down the river that's sending this waste to this landfill? maybe it's something not on your permit. then we got a little bit of pushback to put it mildly from dupont. this is a wild fishing expedition. we will stick to the permit. we had to get an order, require dupont to turn these documents over and i started pouring through these. nowadays if you are in a case like this everything is done electronically. they do the searches for

computers. these are the days when everything was paper so i start getting all these paper files, putting them in order in my office, walking through them all chronologically trying to figure out what's going on. one day there was a document that jumped out at me . dupont talking to the us epa about this landfill and mentioning a chemical called pfoa. had never heard of this. went to all of our lists, all our information about regulated chemicals, couldn't find anything about it yet this is the summer of two 2000 and at that point i called one of our chemistry experts we worked with for our corporate clients . never heard of it but i just saw an article about the 3m company pulling something similar sounding called pfos off the market, a chemical that made scotchgard.

if there pulling that chemical of the market, maybe you ought to ask about that so we started asking dupont duwhat is this pfoa stuff, this is 2000. finally started getting the l documents in, court ordered dupont to turn those chemicals over. lots and lots of paper. many hours going through all this and when i started to piecetogether was disturbing . it opened my eyes to realize there was a whole world out there that existed outside of this regulated listed chemical world i've been dealing with for eight years . what i saw was we were dealing with a chemical that was completely unregulated . and was outside the scope of any of the state or federal rules at this point and you would think okay, then it's probably not harmful. if it was harmful andtoxic it would be regulated .i started going through the documents, the internal

studies from dupont . and what i see is this story . this is a completely man-made chemical. did not exist on the planet prior to world war ii. right after world war ii the 3m company in minnesota developed these new types of chemicals that were, that involved floorings attached to carbons and i'm not a chemistry experts so excuse my simplistic description of these. but apparently when you combine these carbons and floorings together it's an incredibly strongchemical bond . so these chemicals that were invented after the war, two of them in particular 3m started making, one called pfos the one they pulled off the market in 2000. they were using that to make scotchgard. this other chemical pfoa they were selling to dupont.

dupont was using it to help them make teflon. the plantin parkersburg was the world's largest teflon manufacturing facility . it had been built in the 1940s and dupont started purchasingthe stuff from 3m as early as 1951 . because it was useful in making teflon. it wasn't an ingredient ingredient but it helps the manufacturing process so 1951 , that's decades before the us epa even existed. didn't come into existence until 1970. first federal regulations governing new chemicals coming on the market didn't come out until 1976 so dupont start purchasing this stuff decades before these rules go into effect, shipping it down to westvirginia where it's used in this manufacturing plant ,thousands of pounds of that used a year . since it wasn't regulated at the time, the wastes are going directly into the ohio river, not being filtered in any way.

in missions from the manufacturing process go up the smokestacks and were blowing across the river to ohio and these liquid sludges that were being generated were being dumped into pits all over the plants where they are unlined by the wayso they would filter directly into the water . dupont even though there wasn't an epa at the time, dupont had some of the biggest labs in the world and the most sophisticated scientific laboratories that existed . thousands of scientists, some of the best scientists in the world. they started looking at these unique chemicals their bringing down to their plant and started realizing this stuff is really unique. this chemical bond, once this stuff gets out into the environment it doesn't break down. it stays there forever. we are hearing about these chemicals being referred to

as forever chemicals. they can't break down under national natural conditions so once they get out there they stay there and dupont startlooking at what's the toxic effects of this stuff ? they start doing toxicity studies in all kinds of laboratory animals. dogs, monkeys eventually and seeing all kinds of toxic effects. by the 1980s they start doing a cancer study and they find out that this chemical causes cancer in the laboratory rats, not just might be related to. their own scientists say this is a confirmed animal carcinogen, possible human carcinogen. they start tracking the workers, they see the workers getting similar problems, similar cancers so they are seeing all these toxic effects. in the 1970s particularly disturbing piece of information comes out. this stuff not only gets out stays environment and there. when it gets out into living

things that are exposed to the chemical , absorb it and it gets into the blood and stays there so it not only persists in the environment, it persists in living things and every little bit will build up in your blood in your body. by the 1970s 3m and dupont were aware this stuff was getting into human blood. and i'm looking at the studies and seeing they knew this was ugetting into human blood, notjust their workers across the united states . and they start monitoring the workers to see what kind of effects this has so they know by the 1970s it's toxic, it's getting into people, it's staying in people. the tiniest amounts are building up so dupont is very concerned about this and starts saying we are admitting this into the air, into the water. they see the air in missions are going into ohio where there's a public water supply field.

they know it's also going into the ohio river. there's a public water supply well field next-door so they start sampling the water supplies and by 1984 they found the chemical is in the drinking water in ohio and west virginia. by 1984 though this chemical still unregulated. the epa and the state pretty much don't even know it's out there. you may think how does this happen? that law that came out in 1976, the toxic substances control act, supposed to regulate new chemicals going on the market, it's focused on new ones. one that come out after 1976. what about these existing chemicals like pfoa and flou that have been out since the 50s? the loss is essentially the company's manufacturing these chemicals have to tell epa if they think the chemical presents a risk to human health or the environment and these internal studies i'mseeing , cancer

being caused in animals, there is repeated discussion internally in the company to do a report to the epa and the decision was no and then when it's found in the public water supply that's also not reported so ghi'm seeing all this information and i'm realizing as i'm sitting here going through these documents not only is this chemical one that's a massive amount being used at the manufacturing plant. when dupont found it was getting into the public water supply in west virginia they thought it was coming from those pits where they had had pumped all the sludge and was seeping down into the groundwater so in the 80s 7000 times this c8 pfoa soaked sludge and dumped it and guess where it was dumped ? the landfill. and what does this stuff do when it hehits the water can mark it foams and dupont had

gone out and sampled the water coming out of that creek. by 1990 they weremonitoring that . dupont was aware it was in the landfill in the creek water in the public water and this is still, government agencies aren't aware of this . dupont scientists say what would be a safe level of this for people who are exposed to it? in 1988 their own scientists sat down and said no more than 0.6 parts per billion and they said what does that mean? the relevance of that is at the time the lowest you could probably even found in the water under dupont's own method was 0.6 parts per billion and in other words, if it's in the water you need to filter it out. because of the

bioaccumulation effect. in other words this stuff sitting in people is like a ticking time bomb. dupont took that number, rounded it up to one part per billion and compared it to the levels they were finding in the public water supply. public water was 2 to 3 times that level. community wasn't told, government regulators were told . a sample of the creek the crap cows were drinking from, 1000 times that level and there's analysis, what with this due to cows so it's clear what was going on at the landfill. after i saw all of this we were able to settle thecase for mister tennant and his family . but at that point we are then stuck with we now know, i'm looking at information showing this chemical is in the drinking water of tens of thousands people around the plant and has likely been there for decades. nobody knows. the public has been told, we have draftpress releases, what would we say if we are asked about this, they never went out . the government agencies hadn't been told so in 2001 d.i sat down and decided this is

a massive public health threat because i realized this chemical wasn't just used in making teflon in parkersburg. this chemical has been used in a wide variety of products. talking about the foa that's been used to make things like fast food wrappers, stain resistant carpeting and clothing. firefighting phones and a wide variety of different consumer products. and the fact that it was being fined in human blood across the country, was very concerning. and the fact that nobody knew about this, to me was equally concerning that point, i put together a massive letter and sent it to the us epa. because mister tennant was so convinced and was telling me, people just needto see what's going on. when you sit down and look at these facts it's clear and he was right, when i looked at what you brought me , clearly there was a problem in 2001 i

assumed i need the latest out for the us environmental protection agency, attacked all these documents and surely they apwill come in and set appropriate dripping water standards that i cited all the different federal laws,everything epa could do to stop this . that was part of 2001. 19 years ago. unfortunately, crickets. but when that letter went out , community finally found out this was in the water and the community came to us and said we want it out. if it will cause these effects in these animals, and could potentially be carcinogenic, we want it filtered out of our water and we want to know what will do to us in the long term ? this is as a lawyer i'm looking at this thinking how do we do this , because it's not regulated. there are no state or federal standards a. and it ended up bringing a lawsuit against dupont. and it's a class action for the entire community trying to seek water alteration and

appropriate testing and studies to tell these people when it will do to them over time. that was in 2001 . ended up through that lawsuit we found out additional testing, 70,000 people were being affected by this chemical in their drinking water. communitiesall up and down the ohio river outside of the parkersburg plant . i continued to funnel that information to the us epa as i was getting it from dupont internally to try to warn this public health threat, you need to do something rid 2002 the epa did step in 2and said we're going toinitiate a priority review of this chemical . this seems to be something that went completely unregulated. we think we may have to ban this. at 2002. in 2004, us epa then sued dupont saying you withheld information from us about the toxicity of this chemical, the fact it was in treating water, the fact that this chemical process the percent

of from mothers to children and children are born with this chemical in their blood. you should haveprovided that information to us . that lawsuit filed in2004 and at this point , one of the, something happens that hadn't happened yet. the media starts for the first time publishing articles and actually information starts to trickle out to the public about what is going on with this chemical. you start seeing headlines like teflon chemical linked to cancer. abc 20/20 ran a showabout it . so information started to finally come out. at that point, dupont settled our lawsuit in west virginia. they settled the case that the us epa brought area it was claimed to be the largest civil administrativepenalty in the history of the epa . $16 million.

and you have to remember, the company was making hundredsof millions a year off this product . so the epa says it's been settled. and then there's an announcement. dupont will stop making the chemical over the next 10 years. and you may think wait a minute, dupont was making it, i thought 3m was making it . 3m was making pfoa and pfos. they announced they were going to stop making both of them in 2007 and dupont rather than stop using pfoa at that point saw a market opportunity. stepped in and started making it themselves so they had been making pfoa during this time so in 2006 there is this commitment dupont will phase out pfoa and to the public as it it's as if this all went away. the chemical is being phased out . lawsuits have been settled

and in fact most people inthe public didn't hear another thing about these chemicals for the next 10, 15 years. you think what is going on there ? think about it. all that chemical that's been pumped out into the environment the preceding 50, 60 years was still there. agreeing not to make more was great that it didn't address what was already out there in our environment that was going to stay there forever in soil and water and landfills around the country yet the epa backed off. the press went away. you never heard anything more about this and under our settlement in west virginia one of the things we agreed to do was not only filter the water created this unique process. dupont was saying despite what we were seeing in the animal studies, that animal data includingthe cancer data

was completely irrelevant because rats are humans. even though keep in mind the only reason you're doing the rat studies is to predict human effects .nobody's caring whether the rats are getting cancer. you're doing it to predict human effects so then we said look at your worker data. well, those are such highly exposed people, that human data isn't relevant to the people drinking it. so when we sat down and did our settlement, what we did is we created an independent panel of scientists at both dupont and us, both sides sat down and said we want independent scientists to look at the levels people are actually drinking in this community and tell us is that in fact linked to these diseases including cancer . we set that up in 2005. that took seven years. to do. over those seven years, that's when pfoa is being phased out. you're not hearing anything about this and every time we try to push this issue what we're told is the science is uncertain . afafter all, the science panel is looking at and they haven't reached any conclusions yet. we ended up getting 69,000 people from that community

that came forward, gave blood, provided medical information. this independent panel and not doing some of the most comprehensive human studies ever done on any chemical. and in 2012, they finished their work and announced that drinking this chemical was linked with six different diseases including kidney cancer, testicular cancer, alterative colitis, thyroid disease, preeclampsia and high cholesterol . when that data came out, i thought certainly, things are going to move forward. we will have federal standards now. after all you have more data than you could ever want on any chemical. number at that point epa says amwe have to determine whether this chemical exists anywhere else, whether this is a federal problem so nothing began for the first time in this country 2013 2014. public water supplies were required to start testing. sure enough it's being found everywhere but there were still no federal guidelines.

then a dramatic thing g happened. in 2016, a new york times magazine article came out that right the history of this. s and it basically went through the history and it pointed out the fact that this testing was occurring across the countryand this was found in other places . within just a couple months after that, us epa up with their first guideline ever for these chemicals in drinking water, guideline. nor no more than 80 parts per trillion . now, that triggered massive sampling all over the country because the department of defense realized these chemicals, they had been used in firefighting phones which .we talked about. outside military bases and airports across the country. they started systematically goingdown the list and the sampling for those chemicals . sure enough it's being found everywhere. during 2016 2017 almost every day some new community across the united states and

worldwidesampling began in other countries as well , started realizing these chemicalswere in their water to . and under our settlement, one of the things that also happened was once those links were found, everybody in the community .medical testing, paid for by the client and the people who had one of f those linked diseases, they were able to go forward and pursue damage claims against dupont and dupont would not dispute under our agreement drinking that water at those levels can cause those diseases. we had 3500 people in that community had one of those six x diseases, they brought their claims. the first one went to trial in 2015. so the first time ever all of this information was laid out to the jury, to the public. verdict against dupont for having caused the woman's kidney cancer. two more trials both verdicts

against dupont. ever-increasing verdict er amounts including a jury saying dupont acted with conscious disregard of the risks in which they did. and as this information is coming out the new york times magazine article is finally out there.juries are seeing this. there's still relatively little being reported about this .ti most people in the countryare so completely unaware this chemical is out there in the water . when communities are finding out it's in their water it's as if this emerging chemical we've never heard of is now here. i guess we need to study it and what we then hear from folks as they start learning about this is we don't know what these chemicals will do and the companies come forward and say there's no evidence yet of what these chemicals willdo so it was incredibly frustrating . as i'm watching this happen, as all of what we tried to do to get this information out to the public. and keep in mind, once we knew about pfoa, it took 20

years to get this information out about what it does. what it's been known to be able to do internally by the companies rent finally getting this information out, that during that 10 years of the phaseout of pfoa, replacements chemicals have been brought out onto the market. once with maybe one or two fewer carbon atoms and suddenly those are new . and what we're hearing from the companies are there all that had science about pfoa doesn't relate to these. these are different new chemicals. there's no tevidence that any of those caused any adverse human health effects so it's almost as if suddenly we start all overagain . taking all this time to get this information out, we get a little bit and suddenly it's new and we start all over so what we've been seeing happen is people are realizing we need to address not just pf away but his entire family of related chemicals called t5, the one

i mentioned at the beginning. part of poly floral alkylated substances. there are hundreds of not thousands of those. we've looked at the pfoa, pfos and we realize all these others are out there as well and we're being told there's not enough science. yet all of us that are being exposed and having these chemicals in our water, in our body, we are told under our, the way our legal system works, we have the burden to prove whether they're causing us harm. we have to do the studies show whether they're causing harm or not. so over these years as i see that happening and as i see this aup again where despite everything we've done on the foa we still have folks saying we don't know enough about it. there's no science. nothing's been done to tell us what the harness and these related chemicals, we don't know anything aboutthat either . i've been doing what i can to

get that information out. to try to provide as much of that information as i can. particularly when i hear people get up and say there's never been any studies done on this. and the science isstill out, we need to take more time and study this . that's why i decided to do the book. to try to put this information together, to give people the facts really here's what happened. here's what we know and here's what it was like for these communities to have to go through this. here's what it's like for a community that's told you people being used as guinea pigs, you have to prove the science, you have to do this . here's a case where the community did that read they did this massive study, went through all of those who yet as we sit here today in the united states, this chemical, pfoa is still not regulated at the federal level. the state are having is that forward and trying to do this themselves so i want to put this together in hopes that

there would be at least a source out there for people to know as their learning every day, different parts of the world, this chemical is being found all over now. it's being found in australia, new zealand, italy, germany, you name it. in drinking water, and human blood all over the planet. we do know enough about it that we should be taking steps now to protect people from this . don't make other communities who are learning about it for the first time do this 20 year process again. so it's been incredibly encouraging to see the book come out and after the new york times article came out, mark ruffalo calls and says how is this happening in the united states and i've never heard of this, how do we bring this story up to a larger audience. luckily he teamed up with the folks at participant media and they rolled out a movie that just came out a couple months ago in the united

states, dark waters to tell this story . to try to get this information out in a manner that people can understand. this is what happens in the united states. this is what's really happening. each of us, each individual to be like mister tennant . stand up, speak out and say this isn't right. we need to stop this. we shouldn't be exposed to this and we've got to do something hiabout it so i'm hoping with the book,with the movie, there's also a documentary the devil we know that shows the real people involved . with all that information anhopefully people will be inspired to know we can speak up, take steps to prevent this and hopefully our children won't have to repeat this process . we will all learn something from it thank you. >>. [applause] if folks have

questions, i believe they'll want to comeup to the microphone . i'd be happy to answer some questions. >> i do so much for your work. it's a reminder to me that journalists and lawyers and government regulation gets a really bad rap. especially today and it's really a reminder of how important they are and how much more likely i think we need the truth told. i would love to know if you drink any water at all and what you would recommend that we might do to try to keep ourselves, i'm going to go home probably take all my pans away and get out my grandmother's cast-iron pan. but really, what steps can we take for our own health or is there anything we can do lesson mark. >> one of the things that we tried to do with the rollout not only of the book but also with the film is trying to make information available online. there's a ilcampaign that's called fight wherever

chemicals.com for example created in conjunction with the movie to try to give people information so that people can make their own choices. none of us had a choice to be exposed, none of us were told this is happening but hopefully if wehave information about where were these products used . which companies are switching away, which products no longer have these so we can actually start making choices and try to support the folks that are making a switch and there are a number of companies now are actively switching away, trying to promote safealternatives so that is happening . unfortunately, it's in drinking water very much everywhere. and one or more of these related chemicals and it's difficult to avoid the exposure but information to me is key and as you indicated, the role of the media and the role of the journalists is critical and i tried to explore that in the book. try to talk about how critically important it was for the journalists who are

able to bring this out, first outside of parkersburg to the wider state of west virginia, then on a national basis and how important it was when the media ethically went away for over 10 years and even now, even with this movie that's beenout there , it's still very difficult to get people to look at this story, to have anybody in the national media report anything about it. so it's dicritically important role and unfortunately in the last couple of years as we've seen a lot of the investigative journalists or for a lot of people unfortunately, the newspapers are getting rid of that branch. so it's a critically important part of this and in the book, i tried to talk about how all those different things interplay. it's not just a legal case. it's not just the regulations but also how d,science is generated. is published, how the media

reports , all those things together create a situation . >> in the beginning i was impressed at the fact that dupont was doing all this research kand discovery. so the fact that they didn't follow up onit, is that an example of laziness , financial considerations or arrogance? >> again, i explore this a lot more in the book because this was kind to me a fascinating dynamic . you saw scientists and lawyers within the company saying we need to do somethingdifferent. we need to switch away, move away from this material . lawyers recommending company needs to do something different and then you had the business folks who are saying this is going to penalize ourbusiness . this is not required under the regulations so you have this tension and dynamic and what we see in this case at least is the business interests won the day.

>> the second question is based on the present administration, epa is going the wrong direction i'm assuming . >> this particular situation is one that i view as essentially, i don't think it's a partisan issue. thisis clean water, clean blood. i don't see it as red blue, democratic republican . as you look at the history we out late in the book this is gone on through multiple administrations . this is gone on for 20 years, through republican and democratic administrations. these forces i'm talking about are bigger than one administration or one political election time. it's a systemic problem in the way we regulate and address chemicals in the united states is going to go far beyond one election . >> 2014 i was a resident of holyoke ohio and i wonder went toxic from agricultural

runoff. so this is a two-part question, what communities are responding well to the pfoa pfos issue and how are they going about it and secondly january 28 of this year how they're supposed to go todefine it as a hazardous material, what would that look like in the future ? >> as far as which communities are handling this well, through that fight forever chemicals campaign there are a number of different community groups that have formed and different community groups grappling with this issue. where the dupont replacement chemical which is called gen x is being manufactured and used right now outside of fayetteville north carolina, that new chemical has managed to contaminate erthe drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people in the wilmington north carolina area.

community groups have gotten together to bring attention to that issue and bring awareness to this broader group of chemicals so through the fight forever chemicals campaign, the environmental working group, center for environmental health, green science policy institute there are organizations trying to help bring that information out and give communities the tools to help bring that information to residents and as you indicated, it's been incredibly encouraging to see just within the last year the first time we have seen legislation being proposed at the federal level in this country to deal with these chemicals. it's taken 20 years to even have that discussion begin and there are bills that have been proposed to try to require epa to actually designate these chemicals as hazardous or to require them to be regulated, because as i indicated they are still not

technically at the federal level. states at the federal level there is still incredible resistance to doing that . you have massive potential liabilities here. think about it. you've got man-made chemicals that are in the blood of virtually every person and in drinking water and soil across the country that don't go away unless they are removed and their are dessentially fingerprints back to only a couple of companies so you're talking about massive potential liabilities and the department of defense is very concerned about this because of all the military bases and all the contamination from firefighting foams over the years so it's a very big debate now going on. so there was legislation that almost passed here just a few months ago. but at the last minute, those did not pass and i believe there's already a bill pending in the u.s. house and i believe that i think the current administration has already publicly said it would veto it so it's a fight that's going on right now and i was justin europe last week

and the eu , uk and european union, there realizing steps need to be taken to address these chemicals now on a proactive basis. they're taking much more proactive steps and here in the us where we are still fighting aboutwhether they should even be regulated . >> thank you for your work. this has been very enlightening and very upsetting. 2 questions. you first mentioned altering. is there a filtering system we could install in our homes that would filter the south of the tap water and the other question is surely i suppose your first work with mister tennant was pro bono but that can't be still the case, who's been supporting you on this work? >> address the second question first. this was again one of the things i talked about in the book. i think just a remarkable series of events that had to

align in order for any of us to know about any of this right now gand one of those was not onlymister tennant calling me and my grandmother recommending him , but the fact that our firm took this case on. thinkabout this. this took almost 20 years and it's still ongoing and this is still being litigated . there are a lot of smaller firms or particularly firms that represent plaintiffs, personal injury type cases who would not have been able to stick that out or have the resources to finance that, a particularly when a lot of this happened during massive economic meltdown and thatwas when the economy was collapsing, 2008, 2010 so to have a firm with the resources to take this on was important . filtering area the chemicals that were primarily talking about, pfoa and pfos, 18, it's very easy to filter these out.

through carbon filtration, granular activated carbon. dupont, this is not rocket science technology. it's been around forever and as soon as we sued them and brought this out and they put the filters on they were able to reduce the pollution by 99 percent almost overnight and they could have done it decades earlier and under our settlement the public water supplies in people's homes with private wells all got bl activated carbon as well so the problem has been as those chemicals and then phased out and we are moving to these replacement chemicals, these c sixes, see force, they're showing to be a little more difficult to filter and there are for example down in north carolina where they have the gen x problem, they're looking at these new ways to try to filter this out and

unfortunately that can be extremely expensive and the communities and the city dealing with this and the people who are drinking it right now are being told they have to foot the bill to do this. the companies are not necessarily coming forward and saying we will pay for all of this. those communities are having to spend millions of dollars to put filtration systems and, to work for long period's of time so it's expensive problem to deal with. unfortunately something that probably could have been prevented at least with the ch decades ago . to have stopped this emission into the ohio river. >> what is troubling to me also is that in spite of lawsuits and settlements and finds, the people who make these decisions, the ceos, if not even a slap on the wrist to them they suffer nothing from this . and that's, we can look back over so many situations where that'sthe case . do you think that there's any possibility that someday

instead of these being civil suits that the ceos of these companies that do what dupont did, they knew all along and they just didn't care. the people who made the decisions who didn't care. because they knew it wasn't going to affect them. what is the possibility that this, that the laws change and these kind of people can be held criminally responsible? that would make a difference i think. >> you raise a good pointand what i've heard from a number of communities that are dealing with this issue . there actually was a criminal investigation that was initiated by the united states department of justice against dupont beginning in 2005 and after this is out an announcement that they would stop making the chemical , that investigation was dropped and to this day i'm not aware iof anybody pursuing sense. so nobody has gone to jail for any of this even though

it's basicallycontaminating everyone on the planet . but unfortunately most of the emphasis to this day has been civil cases vifor money damages because it's up to the government entities to decide whether to bring those kind of charges. yes. >> yes, my wife and i are former parkersburg residents, we retired down here last year. my question is she used to work for them in the mid-80s. i was a contractor, been in their 100 times. they've gone through some name changes. it was chemors and others. have they done this for some reason to get around regulation? >> you raise an interesting point. as we finally were going to trial, the first trials were starting in 2015.

to bring this information out and have juries decide whether the company should be held responsible. right before that , dupont which had been making teflon since day one actually spun off its entire teflon business into a completely new company called chemours as you indicated so dupont's response was that not us, that's chemours and now we have a fight going on. a very public fight between chemours and dupont. dupont has since morphed as well. what was left of dupont merged with dow chemicals and split into three new companies. one of which is the new dupont which is very different from the dupont that existed during the timeframe where talking about but you now have chemours

suing dupont saying this was all a fraudulent transfer. the creation of chemours was a fraud. there are claims being pursued about that right now we will see how that playsout in the court system but that happened around the time this was finally coming out into the public the . [applause] >> as the coronavirus continues to impact the country here's a look at what the public itching industry is doing to address the pandemic. the spring book festival season has been canceled with book fairs in san antonio, annapolis maryland and charlottesville virginia opting not to reschedule. the "l.a. times" festival of books set to take place in april has decided to hold their festival in october and north america's largest publishing industry convention book expo has decided to push back their scheduled date to july.

bookstores are working to provide remote services for their customers through online sales, curbside pickup and local deliveries. many like politics and prose in washington dc are offering virtual author events during crowd cast. the country's book publishers are currently still fulfilling their schedule of new publications but may delay the release of certain titles. book tv will continue to bring you new programs and publishing news. also watch all our archived programs anytime at booktv.org. >> welcome to the commonwealth club of california for our program tonight. just a quick housekeeping, if you have anything that makes noises, cell phones, beepers, husbands, whatever, just put them on silent. we are recording this for tv and podcast so we appreciate the non-beeping. and now i wod