Charles Duhigg Quotes

I simply can't believe nice communities release effluents.

The situation is quite serious - groundwater is important source for water use, including drinking water, and if it gets contaminated, it's very costly and difficult to clean.

Government and other scientists have identified hundreds of chemicals that are linked to diseases in small concentrations and that are unregulated in drinking water or policed at limits that still pose serious risks.

The fracking chemicals sit in open pits, get trucked around, or sent through pipelines that can burst. What do you think happens when frack chemicals and floods and storm swollen rivers mix?

By polluting clear water with slime you will never find good drinking water.

From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.

Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change - they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies.

When I discovered that hexavalent chromium was causing cancer in the town of Hinkley, California, it led to residents being paid $333m in compensation. But, unbelievably, that chemical remains in our drinking water.

We notified the EPA 18 years ago that PFOA in drinking water presented a public health threat, and in 2019 there are still no federal regulatory limits.

It is a fact that our fresh water is becoming more scarce and that the new ways we are getting energy in America - fracking, mountaintop removal, cyclic steam extraction, deep-sea drilling - all pollute water, pollute the air, and pollute our soil and food.

The usual way of growing cotton is highly petrochemical-intensive, requiring 110 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre. Some of the fertilizer is broken down by soil bacteria into nitrate, a toxic and highly soluble chemical that can leach into groundwater or get washed into lakes, creating oxygenless dead zones.

For years, agency officials said that atrazine in drinking water posed almost no risk to humans or the environment.

In some cases, it's not just about cleaning up the factories. It's about cleaning up the nearby rivers and lakes that have been tainted with heavy metals.

Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It's agriculture. It's golf courses. It's domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf.

The coal industry is a huge industry when we're talking about polluting the environment, our air and our waterways.

I think about what's going down my sink. So I won't pour oil down my sink. I won't - if I'm cleaning a pan, I'll wipe it and bin because I've seen - I've been down sewers.

Pesticides came about after the first world war. Some brainy petrochemical money maker said, 'Hey, that mustard gas worked great on people, maybe we could dilute it down and spray it on our crops to deal with pests.'

When you can light your water on fire due to methane contamination in your ground water, what else can you do but laugh?

Hydraulic fracturing requires massive amounts of water. Disposing of the toxic wastewater, as well as accidental spills, can contaminate drinking water and harm human health.

Shrimp farms are a scourge on the earth, frankly, from an environmental point of view. They pour huge amounts of pollutants into the ocean. They also pollute their next-door neighbors.

The air that people breathe in many Chinese cities has become dangerously polluted. Their food supply is subject to constant contamination scandals. Now it appears that not merely stagnant ponds but the water people draw from deep underground is already tainted.

I'm not really fond of the trails left in the sky and a lot of chemicals that are being pumped through factories and even in the clothes we wear.

You’re going to drink that Potomac water and never come back.

We are introducing compounds into the environment that did not exist only a few decades ago.

You can’t imagine what it’s like to live in one of the nine counties effected in West Virginia …what it’s like to not have any water except to flush commodes and put out fires….It has devastated this area … everything is closing … no restaurant is allowed to open…, the people are in their homes, the schools are closed. You’re not supposed to take showers and certainly not supposed to drink the tap water…. I smelled it and tasted it, and I knew something was very wrong.