6 ms·

I don't know what it's like in India, but in the US people seem to only care about pollution that looks or smells bad. If rivers are catching fire or the sky is

I don't know what it's like in India, but in the US people seem to only care about pollution that looks or smells bad. If rivers are catching fire or the sky is hazy from emissions, people seem to become more environmentally friendly. Which makes sense, you're not relying on some elite expert, but your own gut reaction. However if we start hiding pollution will that have the effect of making people care less about the effects of pollution that aren't easily detectable anymore, such as climate change?

jessriedel 10y ago
You're making a general argument that we should impose injuries to people in order to incentivize them to not produce a negative externality. Not a transfer from them to someone else (like the government) in order to align their incentives, but literally a dead-weight loss, as if the government smashed your windshield in every 10k miles you drove in order to incentivize you to drive less. Actually, it would be more like the government randomly picked a thousand motorist on the road each day and executed them in order to disincentivize driving. Literally half a million people per year die of smog in India. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/11/air-pollution-in-india-is-so-bad-that-it-kills-half-a-million-people-every-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Except that this isn't the Government doing anything - it's an externality of industry operating in the area. The Government would have to do something to prevent people from seeing the issue, which is the moral opposite of what you're suggesting - it's the Government tricking people into failing to see the results of industry.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    Are you really trying to exploit the distinction between government action vs. inaction here? It's trivial to modify my example: just replace "executing 1,000 people per day" with "purposefully not pursue safety standards that would save 1,000 lives per day". The position is insane.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      Except that they're not implementing safety standards - they're just making the problem less visible. It's like if, instead of implementing a reasonable Health & Safety organisation with teeth, they forced companies to hire people not related to the local community to kill by negligence instead, making the deaths less hurtful as they're mostly happening to "somebody else".
      - jessriedel 10y ago
        "Blow the deadly smog away from people who are dying" is the safety standard, which we can implement or not implement. This isn't just people's ability to notice, this is a huge, deadly, quality-of-life destroying phenomenon. The deaths don't happen to someone else! As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the number of death reduced by this policy is greater by many orders of magnitude than the number of deaths caused.
        vertex-four 10y ago
        I don't see where elsewhere in the thread this is stated, especially not with references to studies on similar ideas. Destroying the atmosphere by messing with it on a large scale kills people over time - implementing a solution to the problem of creating smog in the first place kills nobody. Perhaps this could be useful short term to prevent deaths now long enough to implement a better solution - but the fear is that it's not going to be short term at all.
        jessriedel 10y ago
        You're conflating smog and CO2! CO2 is invisible and a free molecular gas. Smog is mesoscopic particulate matter.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- bradjohnson 10y ago
  The way I see it is that you've got a garbage fire in your backyard and it smells bad and is making breathing difficult, so the government steps in with a giant fan to blow the bad smell away from you instead of working on finding a real solution. Maybe this will work in the short term, but I'm a bit worried that it will cause complacency with the current situation. If they said that they were moving away from coal-fired plants to look for better energy solutions in addition to this, I doubt anyone would have any complaints. This feels like a band-aid fix when they should be amputating the arm.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    Smog is different than carbon. Traffic deaths are different than carbon. We don't give up on reducing traffic deaths in order to disincentivize carbon. You're seriously suggesting allowing half a million people to die per year unnecessarily in order to incentivize them to adopt cleaner power plants.
    - bradjohnson 10y ago
      Why are you putting words in my mouth? I'm not suggesting anything like that. I'm suggesting that the government look into different solutions in addition to this. The CO2/kwh of coal is the highest of any modern energy source. If they're willing to spend money powering jet engines to shoot the smog higher into the atmosphere, why won't they transition to using a cleaner energy source that requires less money to maintain?
      - jessriedel 10y ago
        > I'm not suggesting anything like that. I'm suggesting that the government look into different solutions in addition to this. OK, then I am happy to withdraw my characterization of your comment. Your comment just adds nothing substantive to the discussion. > If they're willing to spend money powering jet engines to shoot the smog higher into the atmosphere, why won't they transition to using a cleaner energy source that requires less money to maintain? Because one is orders of magnitude more expensive than the other. It's as unrelated as bringing up carbon emissions by cars when people are discussing highway safety.

jessriedel 10y ago

You're making a general argument that we should impose injuries to people in order to incentivize them to not produce a negative externality. Not a transfer from them to someone else (like the government) in order to align their incentives, but literally a dead-weight loss, as if the government smashed your windshield in every 10k miles you drove in order to incentivize you to drive less. Actually, it would be more like the government randomly picked a thousand motorist on the road each day and executed them in order to disincentivize driving. Literally half a million people per year die of smog in India. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/11/air-pollution-in-india-is-so-bad-that-it-kills-half-a-million-people-every-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

vertex-four 10y ago
Except that this isn't the Government doing anything - it's an externality of industry operating in the area. The Government would have to do something to prevent people from seeing the issue, which is the moral opposite of what you're suggesting - it's the Government tricking people into failing to see the results of industry.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  Are you really trying to exploit the distinction between government action vs. inaction here? It's trivial to modify my example: just replace "executing 1,000 people per day" with "purposefully not pursue safety standards that would save 1,000 lives per day". The position is insane.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Except that they're not implementing safety standards - they're just making the problem less visible. It's like if, instead of implementing a reasonable Health & Safety organisation with teeth, they forced companies to hire people not related to the local community to kill by negligence instead, making the deaths less hurtful as they're mostly happening to "somebody else".
    - jessriedel 10y ago
      "Blow the deadly smog away from people who are dying" is the safety standard, which we can implement or not implement. This isn't just people's ability to notice, this is a huge, deadly, quality-of-life destroying phenomenon. The deaths don't happen to someone else! As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the number of death reduced by this policy is greater by many orders of magnitude than the number of deaths caused.
      - vertex-four 10y ago
        I don't see where elsewhere in the thread this is stated, especially not with references to studies on similar ideas. Destroying the atmosphere by messing with it on a large scale kills people over time - implementing a solution to the problem of creating smog in the first place kills nobody. Perhaps this could be useful short term to prevent deaths now long enough to implement a better solution - but the fear is that it's not going to be short term at all.
        jessriedel 10y ago
        You're conflating smog and CO2! CO2 is invisible and a free molecular gas. Smog is mesoscopic particulate matter.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
bradjohnson 10y ago
The way I see it is that you've got a garbage fire in your backyard and it smells bad and is making breathing difficult, so the government steps in with a giant fan to blow the bad smell away from you instead of working on finding a real solution. Maybe this will work in the short term, but I'm a bit worried that it will cause complacency with the current situation. If they said that they were moving away from coal-fired plants to look for better energy solutions in addition to this, I doubt anyone would have any complaints. This feels like a band-aid fix when they should be amputating the arm.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  Smog is different than carbon. Traffic deaths are different than carbon. We don't give up on reducing traffic deaths in order to disincentivize carbon. You're seriously suggesting allowing half a million people to die per year unnecessarily in order to incentivize them to adopt cleaner power plants.
  - bradjohnson 10y ago
    Why are you putting words in my mouth? I'm not suggesting anything like that. I'm suggesting that the government look into different solutions in addition to this. The CO2/kwh of coal is the highest of any modern energy source. If they're willing to spend money powering jet engines to shoot the smog higher into the atmosphere, why won't they transition to using a cleaner energy source that requires less money to maintain?
    - jessriedel 10y ago
      > I'm not suggesting anything like that. I'm suggesting that the government look into different solutions in addition to this. OK, then I am happy to withdraw my characterization of your comment. Your comment just adds nothing substantive to the discussion. > If they're willing to spend money powering jet engines to shoot the smog higher into the atmosphere, why won't they transition to using a cleaner energy source that requires less money to maintain? Because one is orders of magnitude more expensive than the other. It's as unrelated as bringing up carbon emissions by cars when people are discussing highway safety.