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Photos taken by the EPA reveal America before pollution was regulated
- dqpb 7y agoMake America great again
- JulianMorrison 7y agos/great/choke/
- vatys 7y agoAh yes, the good old days. When manufacturing jobs were plentiful and American production was second to none. It’s important to remember the cost of what made America “great” back then.
- alacombe 7y agoNothing changed, beside world-scale NIMBY'ism. The choice to be made is simple, either lower life standards to Bangladesh level (the only level sustainable at +7 billions inhabitants) or pay the unsustainable price. No amount of tech or virtue signaling is gonna change that fact. I made my choice.
- bjelkeman-again 7y agoWhich was?
- hanniabu 7y agoI have no idea what you're even saying or inferring.
- CamperBob2 7y agoHe's saying the same photos can be taken today, just not here.
- gameswithgo 7y agohe is saying the first world lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable with a multi billion person population on one earth sized planet and he is probably correct.
- jchw 7y agoWell, I think it’s clear that the prospect of deep lifestyle changes, specifically downgrades, will never prove very popular. Especially since upper class lifestyles are not likely to change nearly as much as working class. But also, measures to control population strike deeply dystopian chords, and result in similarly adverse reactions. I think most people realize things have long not been sustainable... but it isn’t obvious what to do about that. I think that’s why the focus has been on technology that can buy us more time. Anything else that could help is probably not gonna happen in short order...
- slfnflctd 7y agoAs long as so many people still consider it a personal affront to even hear the slightest suggestion that one of the easiest things they can do to contribute to a better world is simply eat less meat, I don't have a whole lot of hope.
- alacombe 7y agoReally subjective as well. It's just as easy to argue that calories dense meat/fat is more efficient that calories starved greens or fattening processed carbs.
- CamperBob2 7y agoThis problem will fix itself soon enough when synthmeat reaches its tipping point. At some point on the price/quality curve, social signal theory will kick in, and it will become unacceptable to kill actual animals for meat. We'll save a lot of water when that happens, which isn't a bad thing regardless of your position on animal rights. Civilization isn't a zero-sum game. Everyone, without exception, who has ever claimed otherwise, has been wrong. In order for someone living in the middle of Africa or India to live better, you and I don't have to live worse.
- fragsworth 7y agoThey're saying we moved the problem to India/China. And it's true, to some extent.
- Aeolun 7y agoPresumably the fact that we’re still consuming resources faster than the earth can replenish them. https://www.overshootday.org/ https://www.overshootday.org/
- benj111 7y agoI think we can do better than that. Healthcare doesn't have major impacts on the environment. Flushing toilets are probably a net benefit for the environment. This [1] suggests we can all live like China, but we can probably do a little better if we remove the coal power stations and use that co2 budget for something else. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33133712 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33133712
- jhayward 7y agoPlease provide some support for your assertion that environmental laws are the reason for the decline of US manufacturing. In my view this is just a right-wing talking point to try to destroy our ability to keep clean the commons in a working economic system.
- melling 7y agoI’m sure we could’ve had cleaner air and water with manufacturing jobs. However, we sent many of those jobs to Mexico and China where they have fewer environmental and safety regulations. We gutted blue collar jobs and created the current populist environment because we didn’t want to pay fair wages. In addition, the large increase in pollution and CO2 in China (largest producer by far) is because Europe and the US exported steel mills, factories, etc.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- markmark 7y agoEven if the US hadn't changed its environmental laws, your industry would have moved production to places with lower wages.
- AdrianB1 7y agoCities still produce a lot of waste each day. The theory of infinite growth on a finite planet is failed from birth, but there are still supporters of a 10-20 billion population. The result: lots of waste and pollution.
- hanniabu 7y agoI agree with you, granted there's many efficiencies that can be made that would likely make 10-20B doable.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago0.5-3x is a large range to talk about what's not doable.
- AdrianB1 7y agoIt is not about making it doable, the questions are: is it needed? is it worth it? what will be the quality of life in a world with 20 billion? Every big city has a housing crisis already, how is this solved for 20 billions? What about energy and waste?
- hanniabu 7y agoLike I said, there are many efficiencies that could be made. The burden wouldn't be that much different than now. The world is extremely inefficient.
- oezi 7y agoCheck out Hans Rosling's arguments why the population growth uncertainty is mostly over (he estimates that we won't go much over 11 billion).
- cryptoz 7y agoI am curious about the black swan events potentially changing this calculus; i.e. food replicators or tricorder-like medical help, or breakthroughs in life extension biotect, etc. Hans Rosling knows far more than I do about all this, but I'm curious how it will all play out. Maybe there will be no such black swan events affecting population growth.
- cheschire 7y agofor the longest time the only thing that ever came to mind for me about the EPA was that Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd called one of their employees “dickless.”
- FactolSarin 7y agoConsidering the Ghostbusters were operating an unlicensed nuclear reactor, I actually think the EPA was right in that movie.
- mytailorisrich 7y agoIs this true?
- codesushi42 7y agoYes sir, it's true. This man has no dick.
- persistent 7y agoGhostbusters was subtle Reaganomics propaganda. In the film the government is the enemy and the heros are libertarians, self-described operators of unlicensed particle accelerators.
- dvt 7y ago> None of the 35 photos are pretty (other than the film-photo haze), but it's worth remembering what US cities used to be like before we cared what we put into the air, soil, and water. IMO, this is disingenuous. I think that there's a very good argument made against federal agencies that are run by bureaucrats with zero skin in the game. These kinds of sytems are also ripe for corruption. The counter-claim that there's no way local governments could come together and offer a comparable solution is dubious. Fun fact: the EPA spends ~16 million tax dollars a day. As a side note, it's also interesting how HN has sort of politically migrated from moderate-center-libertarianism (when I first started reading it) to left-leaning-federalism.
- milquetoastaf 7y agoI'm pretty sure they have skin in the game as they live in this country
- YokoZar 7y ago> The argument that there's no way local governments could come together and offer a comparable solution is dubious. Local governments can't even agree on regional transportation or housing policies. Every one wants to cheat or have someone else pay for it.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> The counter-claim that there's no way local governments could come together and offer a comparable solution is dubious. If they could, why didn't they? The federal government wasn't exactly quick to react to the problem, though when it did it was reasonably effective.
- dvt 7y agoThey did. See, for example, the California Air Pollution Control District Act of 1947. I'm sure other states had similar laws passed. To argue that the EPA "fixed pollution" is very reductive, but I guess people believe whatever they want to believe.
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- baron816 7y agoWe look back at the suburbanization of America with such regret, but looking at these pictures, it’s hard to imagine sticking it out in these cities during that time. I question how anyone who was alive back then would want to return to this. Compare today to the 70s—an era with high inflation and unemployment—you’d think that generation would marvel at how low the cost of environmental protection has been. Yet, it seems it’s the younger generations who are most concerned with the environment.
- Insanity 7y agoThe younger generation will have to suffer longer than the older one.
- cosmodisk 7y agoThis is common across the world.Not sure if there's a special word within the books of psychology, however people somehow manage to manufacture memories of limited spectrum,aka only remembering the things they really like about that particular moment.Most of those, who rave how great 70's or 80's were, remember it when they were young. They remember relationships,parties,family stuff but not a factory chimney spitting out black fumes. When I ask my parents how they remember soviet occupation, my dad has very fond memories of it,as he was young, used to play music in local discotheques and had it very easy.My mother,on the other side,used to queue outside empty shops for hours with two little kids hoping they will sell something,so obviously she hated it then and she hates it now.
- ajmurmann 7y agoI wonder how much of this also might have to do that some bad things weren't noticed because most people were used to them and took them as given. If you always lived next to the giant, smoking chimney, are you going to get up every morning and be upset about the smoke ruining the air? It's different if it gets built after you've lived without it. Now we have many younger people growing up with decent environment around them and we see on TV how the polar bears are starving, the ice is melting and the coral reefs are being bleeched.
- cosmodisk 7y agoAbsolutely stunning pictures.The difference today is that we don't see all this anymore,as it's often happily exported to countries that are willing to take all the dump. Howeve, probably the best thing was the removal of large, polluting factories from cities,which had a huge impact on the quality of air.
- CryptoPunk 7y agoAir pollution was already being increasingly dealt with by municipal smog laws before the EPA was created.
- ncmncm 7y agoIn certain cities. Rivers and groundwater were totally undefended.
- notacoward 7y ago"Increasingly dealt with" only in the sense of having gone from not even having laws on the books to having laws on the books that did nothing. Unfortunately, air and water do not respect human political boundaries. Businesses can move, or threaten to move, either taking advantage of weaker regulation in the new location or keeping them weak in the old one (respectively). We still see these effects across national boundaries, even though both pollutants and jobs are less mobile between nations than they were between states. EPA was created because local efforts had almost completely failed time after time, and would have continued to fail for obvious reasons.
- kpU8efre7r 7y agoWhy were regulatory bodies needed? Why wasn't the market able to decide they don't want smog and pollution?
- aaron695 7y agoThe market was at work. That pollution and smog was and is an important part of growth. During that time life expectancy and happiness were increasing dramatically. It's not hard concept that since the industrial revolution each persons grandparents have had it a hell of lot hard than them. Then you hit a level where kids aren't dying and you can care about more superficial things like your environment. Then, like all free markets, you can start policing lesser issues. If a company pollutes your view lowing your land value you can punish them financially. Just like if a person murders you the cops will punish them.
- ncmncm 7y agoPolluting cost them nothing. It was the public who shouldered the cost, while they took all the profit. Same as CO2 today, but visible.
- YokoZar 7y agoPollution is the most obvious example of externalities leading to "market failure". Clean air, similarly, is the most basic example of a public good subject to the free rider problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
- dwaltrip 7y agoMarkets are not infallible tools. They are a pattern of human interaction that has certain pros and cons. It is a very powerful pattern, one that we should continue to use. But not blindly. One of the common modes failure for markets is situations with negative externalities. There is a negative outcome, a cost, that is not borne by the participants in a transaction. Thus, they have no economic incentive to do anything about it. The participants keep doing business, and the negative outcome keeps happening. Environmental damage is a very common example of negative externalities. E.g. groundwater poisoning, air pollution (which causes millions of deaths per year [1]), ecosystem destruction, climate change, and so on. [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/air_pollution.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/air_pollution.htm
- OrgNet 7y agosome of these photo with the smoke stacks could have been taken today... probably a lot of the others too