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Anecdotally, moving from India to North America really helped my health. I know this study is about long term effects but I believe even short term , it’s quite

by dagmx 4y ago

Anecdotally, moving from India to North America really helped my health. I know this study is about long term effects but I believe even short term , it’s quite noticeable. It’s why I find it perplexing why so many people in the US want to do away with EPA regulations. Not only was pollution rampant in many Americans lifetimes, it’s completely observable how bad pollution is elsewhere in the world for people.

ldh0011 4y ago
On a tangentially related note, it confuses me why so many people seem to think that the only reason to do away with fossil fuels as much as possible is climate change. Millions die prematurely from air pollution every year. Even if climate change was fake we should still be trying to use cleaner energy.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jrussino 4y ago
  "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_and_we_create_a_better_world_for_nothing%3F https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an...
  - soperj 4y ago
    I honestly feel that people have got away with one with this type of thinking. In my province (British Columbia), there's a few major issues that have all been attributed to climate change; forest fires, flooding & decline of the salmon populations. Since there's this big boogeyman that they can't solve themselves (climate change), they don't even have to look into their forest management practices (spraying round-up to kill Aspen - a firebreak species - to plant mono-culture round-up ready pine stands - a serotineous species), or their off-shore fish farms that are located at the mouth of some of the most important rivers for salmon (spread sea lice and disease) or power generation (almost exclusively hydro dams), or that they've drained lakes for farm land and when the levees can't keep up the land floods again. Great Barrier Reef is another prime example, pollution is causing a lot of issues, but you only hear of coral bleaching because of climate change.
    - VancouverMan 4y ago
      The government-imposed greenbelts around some major Canadian cities have also backfired. The reduced supply of land drives up prices within the urban area surrounded by the greenbelt. This in turn just encourages more sprawl on the outer edges of the greenbelt, where land can be cheaper. Those living in these new developments often commute into the urban area for work or other reasons, and now have to drive much farther each day as they pass through the greenbelt two (or more) times. Infrastructure development in and through the greenbelt becomes bureaucratically challenging, preventing public transit or more efficient road infrastructure from being built. Environmental regulations can too often have unanticipated (or ignored) environmental impacts that negate many of the supposed benefits.
      - ripley12 4y ago
        Ehh. The Agricultural Land Reserve really isn't the problem in Vancouver. Cities already have a ton of land where they can+should be allowing more housing but aren't (ex: the vast majority of residential land in Vancouver bans townhouses+apartments+condos). With the exception of maybe some parts of Richmond, I don't think there's much a case that the ALR is the problem here.
        elmalto 4y ago
        Agree. Just drive down main once and look at all the 2 story buildings… not even talking about the neighborhoods that are primarily detached. Vancouver is so expensive yet nobody is allowed to create denser housing. Nimbyism at its finest
        npc12345 4y ago
  - rayiner 4y ago
    This assumes there is no cost to the change.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      The real question is if the cost to change is less than the current or future costs of inaction. I find what you said a manipulate style of argument used frequently today. "What about lithium mines" ignoring the various oil disasters and the effects of drilling "What if the vaccine had a 2% chance of killing me" ignoring the probability of dying from covid (made up numbers here) I'm not claiming which side is right but these are often framed as the choice between the cost of the change and no cost.
      - rayiner 4y ago
        But the premise of the point made by @jrussino is that the avoided costs of mitigating climate change turn out to be less than anticipated. In that case, we will have spent a lot of money for little benefit. The snarky joke doesn’t make logical sense.
        themitigating 4y ago
        I replied to your comment of "This assumes there is no cost to the change." which is not nor is it ever the case.
        rayiner 4y ago
        Except it is the case in the joke I was replying to: > "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an... This joke asserts that climate change mitigation measures would be justified even if climate change was a hoax. And that joke only works if you assume that those measures are free, or at least very cheap.
        4y ago
  - refurb 4y ago
    That's not a great argument. There are limited resources. If we spend on X, it means we don't spend on Y. If it turns out Y is the bigger problem? Well, we missed a massive opportunity to make the world even better.
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    That is my new favorite quote.
- borissk 4y ago
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    In other words, you've not talked to many (any?) Trump supporters, and are just speculating about what evilly evil things they might evilly support for their own evil ends. Or something of the sort. The conservative end of the spectrum is generally more concerned with things like "a stable power grid with enough power at all times" than carbon emissions, though I know quite a few pretty hard conservatives with solar, hybrids, EVs, etc. And a good case can be made for all that stuff without bothering with carbon emissions at all. And then you see things like California, within a week or so, deciding to ban ICE car sales in some fairly near future, and having to send out power announcements about "Please don't charge your EV during these hours." It doesn't take a genius to do the math that, hey, more EVs charging while coal power plants are turned down, that might be a problem. I think it's a solvable one, but "shouting down anyone who points it down as a fossil fuel shill" (as happens in some circles of the internet - not here, but I've certainly been accused it for some nuanced arguments about power systems) doesn't help solve it. If coal with carbon capture has a future in the power grid... so be it.
    - jonstewart 4y ago
      > If coal with carbon capture has a future in the power grid... so be it. It doesn’t. Coal’s sinking like a lead balloon because it’s too expensive. It is far cheaper to build ridiculous overcapacity of wind and solar, with moderate storage, than to pursue other energy sources, like nuclear or coal. Live by the market, die by the market.
      - Syonyk 4y ago
        For now, certainly. We'll see what it looks like long term. Of course, we've let China dominate the production of wind and solar equipment... which won't come back to bite us as a trade war continues heating up. Of course, nobody is willing to have conversations about just using radically less energy. Can't have that...
- newsclues 4y ago
  As a bike riding hippie in the age of video meetings and streaming, explain to me why the world elite need to fly all over the world in private jets to discuss climate change? Can you tell me why my grocery store stopped giving out free plastic bags by charging for them, and now phasing them out for paper, but they still sell plastic garbage bags and I can't reuse the grocery store bag for my garbage bag now? Can you tell me why bunker fuel for cargo ships which is a major driver for pollution isn't being stopped? Seems like there are a limited number of large ships creating a massive amount of emissions that would be go after. Can you explain why the phrase "Climate Change" is a better mission that "reduce pollution", which seems easier to understand and get behind for everyone?
  - fragmede 4y ago
    I don't know about the others, but for the last one, "reduce pollution" only works if people, who aren't bike riding hippies by a large margin, see any point in reducing pollution. Why is pollution even bad, anyway? Seriously, factories have been working for centuries and nothing has gone wrong, so why should we regulate where they can pour their waste or make them pay for environmental nonsense like carbon capture? It's just this weird hippy tax that has no point since nothing has gone wrong. Climate change (because people were too stupid to use the phrase "global warming" without making fun of the "warming" part whenever it was remotely cold) encapsulates the need for people to care about pollution with the understanding that it may be future generations will reap the benefits in a way that "reduce pollution" does not.
    - maxbond 4y ago
      (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713513 ) > Seriously, factories have been working for centuries and nothing has gone wrong, so why should we regulate where they can pour their waste or make them pay for environmental nonsense like carbon capture? Pardon? Factories have caused all sorts of problems with discharge, intentional or unintentional. Here's some from the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster (mismanagement at a pesticide factory causes an explosion, poisoning many people and permanently contaminating the surrounding landscape). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease (a factory discharged mercury into the sea for years, where it interacted with anaerobic bacteria in the sediment to become incredibly deadly organic mercury and poisoned an entire town) Keep in mind, these are from the top of my head and I am a nonexpert; we have environmental regulations because people have been hurt or killed by pollution numerous times. Here's a quote that I hope will emphasize just how powerful pollution can be on an industrial scale: > Pollution was so heavy at the mouth of the wastewater canal, a figure of 2 kg of mercury per ton of sediment was measured: a level that would be economically viable to mine. Indeed, Chisso did later set up a subsidiary to reclaim and sell the mercury recovered from the sludge. They literally dumped enough mercury into the river to turn it into a mercury mine. If that doesn't convince you that factories haven't simply been operating with "nothing going wrong", then I don't know what to say.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  There was a reply to this comment, now deleted, which said "Should have cars add something to exhaust so humans can see/smell it--even if just for demo purposes. Might help people to understand." And I wanted to reply to that to say that we did used to be able to see exhaust fumes, and things were added so that we can't see them. I have often thought that "the school run" would be different if everyone could see the cars pumping out exhaust outside the school, but history suggests that what would be different is people wouldn't want to see it, rather than being inconvenienced by getting rid of it. And that's a pattern which comes over from elderly care problems, homelessness and mental health problems, poverty problems, where the actions taken are often closer to sweeping under the rug than trying to solve the root causes. > "Millions die prematurely from air pollution every year." Especially including the radiation in the emissions from coal burning power plants, which kills more people every year than any nuclear power plant accident.
  - MorrisMinor 4y ago
    Radiation from coal is probably not a problem: "These studies concluded that the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment" https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
  - legulere 4y ago
    > Especially including the radiation in the emissions from coal burning power plants, which kills more people every year than any nuclear power plant accident. I once did the maths, Chernobyl was on the order of 100 times Chinas current yearly nuclear emissions caused by coal burning. Particulate matter and nitrogen oxides are the real issue (and sulphur dioxide where it’s not filtered out yet).
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      There's one particular mine/set of generators in china that basically just burns low-grade uranium ore (the ash is more concentrated than Namibian and Nigerian mines). If you exclude that one 100x is about right. For the rest, yeah. Also La Hague emits about 1/20th of a chernobyl per year. CO2/NOx/SOx/particulates from coal are still worse.
- CrypticShift 4y ago
  Because major environmental actors (big NGOs...) are mostly engaging in a PR exercise to incite fear into our collective lizard brain. As Attenborough said: "saving our planet is now a communications challenge" Linking Climate to life-threatening scenarios like Hurricanes (that hit you in-your-face) and food crisis, are more apt to rattle us into panicky action. Slow, inconspicuous, decades-in-the-making ill-health (but not sudden death) inducing chemicals in our water, air and food will never make it through our current processes of media and political decision-making.
milesskorpen 4y ago
I think it is in large part because people don't appreciate how much worse it could be. The EPA has been so successful we've become complacent.
- njarboe 4y ago
  Other would say, "The EPA has been so successful, to keep their budget growing, they have become overzealous."
  - twojacobtwo 4y ago
    Are you able to provide an example that would support the claims of these others?
    - njarboe 4y ago
      I don't hold a strong opinion myself on the matter as I have not done any deep research, but the EPA enforces the Endangered Species Act and the Wetlands Protection and Restoration. Google either of these with the phrase "Abuse of " at the beginning and you will find many people and organization writing about it. I have read many of these type of articles in different types of publications. One example[1]. I also know a lawyer at the EPA and she tells stories about how, for example, she/EPA is suing 80-90 year old people that owned car washes in LA in the 60's and 70's and had contaminated the soil. I figured that is what Superfund funds were for but I guess those funds are just to clean up corporations that have disappeared, not individuals that owned a small business 50 years ago and can be tracked. [1]http://publiclandscouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/EndangeredSpecies_Onesheet.pdf http://publiclandscouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/End...
- warmwaffles 4y ago
  The other problem is, the EPA isn't also all sunshine and rainbows https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/09/us/colorado-epa-mine-river-spill https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/09/us/colorado-epa-mine-river-sp...
  - 4y ago
VancouverMan 4y ago
We too often see environmental regulations becoming pointless and costly burdens, or them even being used as bureaucratic weapons, rather than something that brings a net benefit to society. Even minor construction and infrastructure projects can end up needing costly environmental assessments or studies prepared by "qualified experts", for example, even when the environmental impact is obviously negligible. Activists and others opposed to development projects will sometimes raise specious environmental "concerns" to try to derail those developments by getting them tied up with red tape. Even something as simple as trimming or cutting down a tree on private property can become a huge hassle in some municipalities, requiring permits and other bureaucratic headaches. Of course reasonable people will push back against such regulation. The economic costs that are imposed often far outweigh the environmental benefits, if any benefits even actually exist.
- black_puppydog 4y ago
  ... they commented on a thread about an article proving exactly that benefit... :|
- defrost 4y ago
  - VancouverMan 4y ago
    I'm merely pointing out the way that many average Westerners directly experience environmental regulations, and why they may become opposed to the idea, even if such regulation may be beneficial in some cases. Having to go through a costly and time-consuming permit process merely to trim or remove a tree in one's front yard will leave a sour taste in one's mouth when it comes to environmental regulations in general. Sometimes the regulation process itself actually causes more environmental harm than it prevents. For example, somebody I know was telling me about how the environmental assessment process significantly delayed the replacement of a small, old, and poorly-maintained road bridge over a creek near the end of the rural road he lives on. That project, which could have been (and eventually was) easily finished within a week with minimal environmental disruption turned into a multi-year debacle thanks to environmental assessments. The bridge was closed to traffic the entire time, causing him and his neighbors to have to drive multiple additional miles each day to backtrack and detour around it, emitting far more vehicle exhaust and causing far more unnecessary wear-and-tear (including oil changes) than if the bridge has just been replaced without the delays that were imposed by environmental regulation bureaucracy.
mullingitover 4y ago
> It’s why I find it perplexing why so many people in the US want to do away with EPA regulations I don't think anyone in the US is pro-pollution. There are people who are against whatever the people they don't like are for, so if one side is for regulations controlling pollution, then by gosh they're against it. At one point in the early to mid-1900s most of the working class was united politically in one party against the ownership class. Sometime around the Civil Rights Era, the two party system in the US executed a maneuver which split the working class vote against itself by pitting working class prejudices against working class self-interest. One party is the party of the ownership class, and this party throws red meat to the working class prejudices, while the other party espouses policies that benefit the working class economically while supporting socially progressive policies that the broad sections of the working class hold in disdain. As a result we have big chunks of the working class enthusiastically voting against things that obviously serve them, like the right to clean air.
- et-al 4y ago
  Well there's also the basic issue of voting for a candidate that claims to provide job security by keeping certain industries (e.g. mining coal) running. A paycheck to put food on the table tomorrow is more important than avoiding the chance of black lung ten years from now. How many software engineers are doing mental gymnastics justifying their work in adtech so they can afford to live in the SF Bay Area?
- ch4s3 4y ago
  > At one point in the early to mid-1900s most of the working class was united politically Working class white people were in the Democratic Party… mostly. This was because of the New Deal which was very pro white labor, and also pushed women, children, blacks, and immigrants out of the labor market. The parties were slowly realigning after the new deal until the civil rights act finally cemented the realignment. Reading the annual party platforms from about 1910 to roughly 1964 is fascinating.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  What?
ergonaught 4y ago
I think most people haven't directly experienced the problems so they've forgotten the justifications, and other assorted cognitive biases/distortions. The city where I live was ranked the most polluted city in the USA a few decades ago, but people forget what it was like, and newer residents never knew what it was like, so they get very upset about Their Freedoms being encroached upon by EPA regulations and such.
superseeplus 4y ago
There was an interesting article in the NYT about how how very few people in India care about air quality enough to vote specifically for it even though poor air quality is a major contributor to mortality in India. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/world/asia/india-china-air-pollution.html?unlocked_article_code=KO_vEqh4RzCLULwcRhzhnVRqyzq33C8abCSu9H1wfgWNYBTh5rgIF7P7mvQOea0x3HdgfnNQsoG3MM3-KMb3e0-hCK57_4eeMQv8c6RgA7i_0g3ZEzwQ7dCcCTLhK7DXEOSy3r7h5NI015leSJMS5CxDIA_WfF-u_yYOTev62XIxomazbw_tsxVw2teCxFuHQmc_KJ1XmmaZOQnvYoH3FiH2Y52XK3Mv-ZlFx25fGvNhE055B9sAQr6F9Z9q6e0DV6nEjjdTV07h2mP9-YEmz0XSdQytCNJTMV88SogNx-hQuGXjpwTgiiaFbXInh1SwPXdf5_njxjv7vy0vY9Chy8dx9F9xkg&smid=share-url https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/world/asia/india-china-ai...
- ahaucnx 4y ago
  We offer air quality monitoring solutions and I talk to customers and people interested in air quality monitoring every day from many different countries. What I see is a very different knowledge on air pollution. For example there is a pretty high awareness on the dangers of PM2.5 in China and some South East Asian Countries (e.g. Singapore) but relatively low awareness in the Middle East and some Eastern European countries.
WalterBright 4y ago
In Washington State, there was heavy wildfire smoke across the Seattle area for about a month in Sept/Oct. It was awful. I developed eye irritation, a sore throat, and a persistent cough. I stayed indoors as much as possible, and attached smoke filters to a box fan. When the rain returned, all my symptoms disappeared. As for the EPA regulations, they go about it the wrong way, using what in engineering we call "bang bang valves". Bang bang valves are full on or full off, nothing in between. EPA regulations are the same - 100ppm is dangerous and illegal, 99ppm is legal and safe. This is just idiotic. The regulations also target the rate of pollution, i.e. ppm, not the amount of pollution. A person can emit 99ppm all day and be golden to the EPA, while another can emit 100ppm for 5 minutes and be illegal. The correct approach is to simply tax the total amount of pollution. For cars, this can be done with an annual emissions test. The rate of pollution in the test is multiplied by the number of miles driven in the last year, multiplied by the tax rate.
rayiner 4y ago
> It’s why I find it perplexing why so many people in the US want to do away with EPA regulations By and large, they don’t. Trump’s efforts, for example, were focused on repealing incremental efforts during the Obama administration that hadn’t been in effect for long, and risked disproportionate impact on coal, oil, cars, and farms. Very few people think we should get rid of rules that require factories to use emissions control technology. But rules that shut down coal plants in favor of renewables implicates a different set of political concerns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA Likewise, virtually nobody wants to go back to the days of factories dumping untreated waste into waterways. But many farmers are upset when they suddenly need an EPA permit because the EPA declared some pond on their property a protected water body: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/more-widespread-support-epa-and-armys-navigable-waters-protection-rule-new-definition https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/more-widespread-support-epa...
- vkou 4y ago
  As of this decade, we need disproportionate impact on coal, oil, and cars to have any chance to get to net-zero emissions. A country completely built around single-passenger ICE vehicles and burning coal for electricity is what's disproportionate, not the response to them. We wasted a decade in the 00s, we've mostly wasted a decade in the 10s, and we're starting off by wasting a decade in the 20s. You can keep ignoring late notices on your bills, but sooner or later, they do come due...
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Maybe, but my point is that the battleground on “EPA regulations” isn’t the stuff we have had in place for decades that makes our air cleaner than in New Delhi. Installing pollution control devices on emissions stacks doesn’t affect ordinary people. Getting rid of well paying jobs for non-college educated people in coal and oil & gas, or requiring them to live like Europeans in little houses driving little cars does affect ordinary people. That’s obviously going to provoke a different response.
jodrellblank 4y ago
This has been on HN before[1], https://dynomight.net/air/ https://dynomight.net/air/ arguing that "Better air quality is the easiest way not to die": "While most things that clearly improve health are well known, one is insanely underrated: Fixing your air. I suspect this is often the most effective health intervention, period. Nothing else is so important while also being so easy to address." [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=https%3A%2F%2Fdynomight.net%2Fairr&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
m463 4y ago
People in the US are not against pollution. However I don't think people know where the pollution comes from. I personally think smog was ONLY tackled because people could SEE it. Nowadays I think there might be more harmful pollution from car tires and jets flying overhead than tailpipes. also regulatory capture is a thing, and has a high ROI for big polluters.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
> so many people in the US want to do away with EPA regulations why do you say that?

by dagmx 4y ago

ldh0011 4y ago

On a tangentially related note, it confuses me why so many people seem to think that the only reason to do away with fossil fuels as much as possible is climate change. Millions die prematurely from air pollution every year. Even if climate change was fake we should still be trying to use cleaner energy.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jrussino 4y ago
"What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_and_we_create_a_better_world_for_nothing%3F https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an...
- soperj 4y ago
  I honestly feel that people have got away with one with this type of thinking. In my province (British Columbia), there's a few major issues that have all been attributed to climate change; forest fires, flooding & decline of the salmon populations. Since there's this big boogeyman that they can't solve themselves (climate change), they don't even have to look into their forest management practices (spraying round-up to kill Aspen - a firebreak species - to plant mono-culture round-up ready pine stands - a serotineous species), or their off-shore fish farms that are located at the mouth of some of the most important rivers for salmon (spread sea lice and disease) or power generation (almost exclusively hydro dams), or that they've drained lakes for farm land and when the levees can't keep up the land floods again. Great Barrier Reef is another prime example, pollution is causing a lot of issues, but you only hear of coral bleaching because of climate change.
  - VancouverMan 4y ago
    The government-imposed greenbelts around some major Canadian cities have also backfired. The reduced supply of land drives up prices within the urban area surrounded by the greenbelt. This in turn just encourages more sprawl on the outer edges of the greenbelt, where land can be cheaper. Those living in these new developments often commute into the urban area for work or other reasons, and now have to drive much farther each day as they pass through the greenbelt two (or more) times. Infrastructure development in and through the greenbelt becomes bureaucratically challenging, preventing public transit or more efficient road infrastructure from being built. Environmental regulations can too often have unanticipated (or ignored) environmental impacts that negate many of the supposed benefits.
    - ripley12 4y ago
      Ehh. The Agricultural Land Reserve really isn't the problem in Vancouver. Cities already have a ton of land where they can+should be allowing more housing but aren't (ex: the vast majority of residential land in Vancouver bans townhouses+apartments+condos). With the exception of maybe some parts of Richmond, I don't think there's much a case that the ALR is the problem here.
      - elmalto 4y ago
        Agree. Just drive down main once and look at all the 2 story buildings… not even talking about the neighborhoods that are primarily detached. Vancouver is so expensive yet nobody is allowed to create denser housing. Nimbyism at its finest
        npc12345 4y ago
- rayiner 4y ago
  This assumes there is no cost to the change.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    The real question is if the cost to change is less than the current or future costs of inaction. I find what you said a manipulate style of argument used frequently today. "What about lithium mines" ignoring the various oil disasters and the effects of drilling "What if the vaccine had a 2% chance of killing me" ignoring the probability of dying from covid (made up numbers here) I'm not claiming which side is right but these are often framed as the choice between the cost of the change and no cost.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      But the premise of the point made by @jrussino is that the avoided costs of mitigating climate change turn out to be less than anticipated. In that case, we will have spent a lot of money for little benefit. The snarky joke doesn’t make logical sense.
      - themitigating 4y ago
        I replied to your comment of "This assumes there is no cost to the change." which is not nor is it ever the case.
        rayiner 4y ago
        Except it is the case in the joke I was replying to: > "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an... This joke asserts that climate change mitigation measures would be justified even if climate change was a hoax. And that joke only works if you assume that those measures are free, or at least very cheap.
        4y ago
- refurb 4y ago
  That's not a great argument. There are limited resources. If we spend on X, it means we don't spend on Y. If it turns out Y is the bigger problem? Well, we missed a massive opportunity to make the world even better.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  That is my new favorite quote.
borissk 4y ago
- Syonyk 4y ago
  In other words, you've not talked to many (any?) Trump supporters, and are just speculating about what evilly evil things they might evilly support for their own evil ends. Or something of the sort. The conservative end of the spectrum is generally more concerned with things like "a stable power grid with enough power at all times" than carbon emissions, though I know quite a few pretty hard conservatives with solar, hybrids, EVs, etc. And a good case can be made for all that stuff without bothering with carbon emissions at all. And then you see things like California, within a week or so, deciding to ban ICE car sales in some fairly near future, and having to send out power announcements about "Please don't charge your EV during these hours." It doesn't take a genius to do the math that, hey, more EVs charging while coal power plants are turned down, that might be a problem. I think it's a solvable one, but "shouting down anyone who points it down as a fossil fuel shill" (as happens in some circles of the internet - not here, but I've certainly been accused it for some nuanced arguments about power systems) doesn't help solve it. If coal with carbon capture has a future in the power grid... so be it.
  - jonstewart 4y ago
    > If coal with carbon capture has a future in the power grid... so be it. It doesn’t. Coal’s sinking like a lead balloon because it’s too expensive. It is far cheaper to build ridiculous overcapacity of wind and solar, with moderate storage, than to pursue other energy sources, like nuclear or coal. Live by the market, die by the market.
    - Syonyk 4y ago
      For now, certainly. We'll see what it looks like long term. Of course, we've let China dominate the production of wind and solar equipment... which won't come back to bite us as a trade war continues heating up. Of course, nobody is willing to have conversations about just using radically less energy. Can't have that...
newsclues 4y ago
As a bike riding hippie in the age of video meetings and streaming, explain to me why the world elite need to fly all over the world in private jets to discuss climate change? Can you tell me why my grocery store stopped giving out free plastic bags by charging for them, and now phasing them out for paper, but they still sell plastic garbage bags and I can't reuse the grocery store bag for my garbage bag now? Can you tell me why bunker fuel for cargo ships which is a major driver for pollution isn't being stopped? Seems like there are a limited number of large ships creating a massive amount of emissions that would be go after. Can you explain why the phrase "Climate Change" is a better mission that "reduce pollution", which seems easier to understand and get behind for everyone?
- fragmede 4y ago
  I don't know about the others, but for the last one, "reduce pollution" only works if people, who aren't bike riding hippies by a large margin, see any point in reducing pollution. Why is pollution even bad, anyway? Seriously, factories have been working for centuries and nothing has gone wrong, so why should we regulate where they can pour their waste or make them pay for environmental nonsense like carbon capture? It's just this weird hippy tax that has no point since nothing has gone wrong. Climate change (because people were too stupid to use the phrase "global warming" without making fun of the "warming" part whenever it was remotely cold) encapsulates the need for people to care about pollution with the understanding that it may be future generations will reap the benefits in a way that "reduce pollution" does not.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713513 ) > Seriously, factories have been working for centuries and nothing has gone wrong, so why should we regulate where they can pour their waste or make them pay for environmental nonsense like carbon capture? Pardon? Factories have caused all sorts of problems with discharge, intentional or unintentional. Here's some from the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster (mismanagement at a pesticide factory causes an explosion, poisoning many people and permanently contaminating the surrounding landscape). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease (a factory discharged mercury into the sea for years, where it interacted with anaerobic bacteria in the sediment to become incredibly deadly organic mercury and poisoned an entire town) Keep in mind, these are from the top of my head and I am a nonexpert; we have environmental regulations because people have been hurt or killed by pollution numerous times. Here's a quote that I hope will emphasize just how powerful pollution can be on an industrial scale: > Pollution was so heavy at the mouth of the wastewater canal, a figure of 2 kg of mercury per ton of sediment was measured: a level that would be economically viable to mine. Indeed, Chisso did later set up a subsidiary to reclaim and sell the mercury recovered from the sludge. They literally dumped enough mercury into the river to turn it into a mercury mine. If that doesn't convince you that factories haven't simply been operating with "nothing going wrong", then I don't know what to say.
jodrellblank 4y ago
There was a reply to this comment, now deleted, which said "Should have cars add something to exhaust so humans can see/smell it--even if just for demo purposes. Might help people to understand." And I wanted to reply to that to say that we did used to be able to see exhaust fumes, and things were added so that we can't see them. I have often thought that "the school run" would be different if everyone could see the cars pumping out exhaust outside the school, but history suggests that what would be different is people wouldn't want to see it, rather than being inconvenienced by getting rid of it. And that's a pattern which comes over from elderly care problems, homelessness and mental health problems, poverty problems, where the actions taken are often closer to sweeping under the rug than trying to solve the root causes. > "Millions die prematurely from air pollution every year." Especially including the radiation in the emissions from coal burning power plants, which kills more people every year than any nuclear power plant accident.
- MorrisMinor 4y ago
  Radiation from coal is probably not a problem: "These studies concluded that the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment" https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
- legulere 4y ago
  > Especially including the radiation in the emissions from coal burning power plants, which kills more people every year than any nuclear power plant accident. I once did the maths, Chernobyl was on the order of 100 times Chinas current yearly nuclear emissions caused by coal burning. Particulate matter and nitrogen oxides are the real issue (and sulphur dioxide where it’s not filtered out yet).
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    There's one particular mine/set of generators in china that basically just burns low-grade uranium ore (the ash is more concentrated than Namibian and Nigerian mines). If you exclude that one 100x is about right. For the rest, yeah. Also La Hague emits about 1/20th of a chernobyl per year. CO2/NOx/SOx/particulates from coal are still worse.
CrypticShift 4y ago
Because major environmental actors (big NGOs...) are mostly engaging in a PR exercise to incite fear into our collective lizard brain. As Attenborough said: "saving our planet is now a communications challenge" Linking Climate to life-threatening scenarios like Hurricanes (that hit you in-your-face) and food crisis, are more apt to rattle us into panicky action. Slow, inconspicuous, decades-in-the-making ill-health (but not sudden death) inducing chemicals in our water, air and food will never make it through our current processes of media and political decision-making.

milesskorpen 4y ago

I think it is in large part because people don't appreciate how much worse it could be. The EPA has been so successful we've become complacent.

njarboe 4y ago
Other would say, "The EPA has been so successful, to keep their budget growing, they have become overzealous."
- twojacobtwo 4y ago
  Are you able to provide an example that would support the claims of these others?
  - njarboe 4y ago
    I don't hold a strong opinion myself on the matter as I have not done any deep research, but the EPA enforces the Endangered Species Act and the Wetlands Protection and Restoration. Google either of these with the phrase "Abuse of " at the beginning and you will find many people and organization writing about it. I have read many of these type of articles in different types of publications. One example[1]. I also know a lawyer at the EPA and she tells stories about how, for example, she/EPA is suing 80-90 year old people that owned car washes in LA in the 60's and 70's and had contaminated the soil. I figured that is what Superfund funds were for but I guess those funds are just to clean up corporations that have disappeared, not individuals that owned a small business 50 years ago and can be tracked. [1]http://publiclandscouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/EndangeredSpecies_Onesheet.pdf http://publiclandscouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/End...
warmwaffles 4y ago
The other problem is, the EPA isn't also all sunshine and rainbows https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/09/us/colorado-epa-mine-river-spill https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/09/us/colorado-epa-mine-river-sp...
- 4y ago

VancouverMan 4y ago

We too often see environmental regulations becoming pointless and costly burdens, or them even being used as bureaucratic weapons, rather than something that brings a net benefit to society. Even minor construction and infrastructure projects can end up needing costly environmental assessments or studies prepared by "qualified experts", for example, even when the environmental impact is obviously negligible. Activists and others opposed to development projects will sometimes raise specious environmental "concerns" to try to derail those developments by getting them tied up with red tape. Even something as simple as trimming or cutting down a tree on private property can become a huge hassle in some municipalities, requiring permits and other bureaucratic headaches. Of course reasonable people will push back against such regulation. The economic costs that are imposed often far outweigh the environmental benefits, if any benefits even actually exist.

black_puppydog 4y ago
... they commented on a thread about an article proving exactly that benefit... :|
defrost 4y ago
- VancouverMan 4y ago
  I'm merely pointing out the way that many average Westerners directly experience environmental regulations, and why they may become opposed to the idea, even if such regulation may be beneficial in some cases. Having to go through a costly and time-consuming permit process merely to trim or remove a tree in one's front yard will leave a sour taste in one's mouth when it comes to environmental regulations in general. Sometimes the regulation process itself actually causes more environmental harm than it prevents. For example, somebody I know was telling me about how the environmental assessment process significantly delayed the replacement of a small, old, and poorly-maintained road bridge over a creek near the end of the rural road he lives on. That project, which could have been (and eventually was) easily finished within a week with minimal environmental disruption turned into a multi-year debacle thanks to environmental assessments. The bridge was closed to traffic the entire time, causing him and his neighbors to have to drive multiple additional miles each day to backtrack and detour around it, emitting far more vehicle exhaust and causing far more unnecessary wear-and-tear (including oil changes) than if the bridge has just been replaced without the delays that were imposed by environmental regulation bureaucracy.

mullingitover 4y ago

> It’s why I find it perplexing why so many people in the US want to do away with EPA regulations I don't think anyone in the US is pro-pollution. There are people who are against whatever the people they don't like are for, so if one side is for regulations controlling pollution, then by gosh they're against it. At one point in the early to mid-1900s most of the working class was united politically in one party against the ownership class. Sometime around the Civil Rights Era, the two party system in the US executed a maneuver which split the working class vote against itself by pitting working class prejudices against working class self-interest. One party is the party of the ownership class, and this party throws red meat to the working class prejudices, while the other party espouses policies that benefit the working class economically while supporting socially progressive policies that the broad sections of the working class hold in disdain. As a result we have big chunks of the working class enthusiastically voting against things that obviously serve them, like the right to clean air.

et-al 4y ago
Well there's also the basic issue of voting for a candidate that claims to provide job security by keeping certain industries (e.g. mining coal) running. A paycheck to put food on the table tomorrow is more important than avoiding the chance of black lung ten years from now. How many software engineers are doing mental gymnastics justifying their work in adtech so they can afford to live in the SF Bay Area?
ch4s3 4y ago
> At one point in the early to mid-1900s most of the working class was united politically Working class white people were in the Democratic Party… mostly. This was because of the New Deal which was very pro white labor, and also pushed women, children, blacks, and immigrants out of the labor market. The parties were slowly realigning after the new deal until the civil rights act finally cemented the realignment. Reading the annual party platforms from about 1910 to roughly 1964 is fascinating.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
What?

ergonaught 4y ago

I think most people haven't directly experienced the problems so they've forgotten the justifications, and other assorted cognitive biases/distortions. The city where I live was ranked the most polluted city in the USA a few decades ago, but people forget what it was like, and newer residents never knew what it was like, so they get very upset about Their Freedoms being encroached upon by EPA regulations and such.

superseeplus 4y ago

There was an interesting article in the NYT about how how very few people in India care about air quality enough to vote specifically for it even though poor air quality is a major contributor to mortality in India. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/world/asia/india-china-air-pollution.html?unlocked_article_code=KO_vEqh4RzCLULwcRhzhnVRqyzq33C8abCSu9H1wfgWNYBTh5rgIF7P7mvQOea0x3HdgfnNQsoG3MM3-KMb3e0-hCK57_4eeMQv8c6RgA7i_0g3ZEzwQ7dCcCTLhK7DXEOSy3r7h5NI015leSJMS5CxDIA_WfF-u_yYOTev62XIxomazbw_tsxVw2teCxFuHQmc_KJ1XmmaZOQnvYoH3FiH2Y52XK3Mv-ZlFx25fGvNhE055B9sAQr6F9Z9q6e0DV6nEjjdTV07h2mP9-YEmz0XSdQytCNJTMV88SogNx-hQuGXjpwTgiiaFbXInh1SwPXdf5_njxjv7vy0vY9Chy8dx9F9xkg&smid=share-url https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/world/asia/india-china-ai...

ahaucnx 4y ago
We offer air quality monitoring solutions and I talk to customers and people interested in air quality monitoring every day from many different countries. What I see is a very different knowledge on air pollution. For example there is a pretty high awareness on the dangers of PM2.5 in China and some South East Asian Countries (e.g. Singapore) but relatively low awareness in the Middle East and some Eastern European countries.

WalterBright 4y ago

In Washington State, there was heavy wildfire smoke across the Seattle area for about a month in Sept/Oct. It was awful. I developed eye irritation, a sore throat, and a persistent cough. I stayed indoors as much as possible, and attached smoke filters to a box fan. When the rain returned, all my symptoms disappeared. As for the EPA regulations, they go about it the wrong way, using what in engineering we call "bang bang valves". Bang bang valves are full on or full off, nothing in between. EPA regulations are the same - 100ppm is dangerous and illegal, 99ppm is legal and safe. This is just idiotic. The regulations also target the rate of pollution, i.e. ppm, not the amount of pollution. A person can emit 99ppm all day and be golden to the EPA, while another can emit 100ppm for 5 minutes and be illegal. The correct approach is to simply tax the total amount of pollution. For cars, this can be done with an annual emissions test. The rate of pollution in the test is multiplied by the number of miles driven in the last year, multiplied by the tax rate.

rayiner 4y ago

> It’s why I find it perplexing why so many people in the US want to do away with EPA regulations By and large, they don’t. Trump’s efforts, for example, were focused on repealing incremental efforts during the Obama administration that hadn’t been in effect for long, and risked disproportionate impact on coal, oil, cars, and farms. Very few people think we should get rid of rules that require factories to use emissions control technology. But rules that shut down coal plants in favor of renewables implicates a different set of political concerns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA Likewise, virtually nobody wants to go back to the days of factories dumping untreated waste into waterways. But many farmers are upset when they suddenly need an EPA permit because the EPA declared some pond on their property a protected water body: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/more-widespread-support-epa-and-armys-navigable-waters-protection-rule-new-definition https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/more-widespread-support-epa...

vkou 4y ago
As of this decade, we need disproportionate impact on coal, oil, and cars to have any chance to get to net-zero emissions. A country completely built around single-passenger ICE vehicles and burning coal for electricity is what's disproportionate, not the response to them. We wasted a decade in the 00s, we've mostly wasted a decade in the 10s, and we're starting off by wasting a decade in the 20s. You can keep ignoring late notices on your bills, but sooner or later, they do come due...
- rayiner 4y ago
  Maybe, but my point is that the battleground on “EPA regulations” isn’t the stuff we have had in place for decades that makes our air cleaner than in New Delhi. Installing pollution control devices on emissions stacks doesn’t affect ordinary people. Getting rid of well paying jobs for non-college educated people in coal and oil & gas, or requiring them to live like Europeans in little houses driving little cars does affect ordinary people. That’s obviously going to provoke a different response.

jodrellblank 4y ago

This has been on HN before[1], https://dynomight.net/air/ https://dynomight.net/air/ arguing that "Better air quality is the easiest way not to die": "While most things that clearly improve health are well known, one is insanely underrated: Fixing your air. I suspect this is often the most effective health intervention, period. Nothing else is so important while also being so easy to address." [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=https%3A%2F%2Fdynomight.net%2Fairr&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

m463 4y ago

People in the US are not against pollution. However I don't think people know where the pollution comes from. I personally think smog was ONLY tackled because people could SEE it. Nowadays I think there might be more harmful pollution from car tires and jets flying overhead than tailpipes. also regulatory capture is a thing, and has a high ROI for big polluters.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

> so many people in the US want to do away with EPA regulations why do you say that?