6 ms·

"Taxpayers will likely have to cover much of the difference to ensure wells are plugged and not left to leak brine, toxic chemicals and climate-warming methane.

"Taxpayers will likely have to cover much of the difference to ensure wells are plugged and not left to leak brine, toxic chemicals and climate-warming methane." Sounds like they've solved the problem already.

dclowd9901 3y ago
As it’s always been. I cannot for the life of me figure out how we don’t have an amendment on the books that says “if you produce something in or from this country, you must see to its entire lifecycle”. Just kidding, I know exactly why we don’t have such an amendment.
- whitemary 3y ago
  >I know exactly why we don’t have such an amendment. Why?
  - abakker 3y ago
    Because the people making money from not having it can afford lobbyists to prevent having it. See: regulatory capture. Also see: politics as career.
  - weaksauce 3y ago
    are you kidding? it's because the monied interests almost never have to deal with negative externalities and the cleanup of direct negatives because they are the ones that pay the people voted into power with that money to make the laws that could do such a thing. california is about as progressive as it comes in that regard but even then the machine of progress inches. look at the pg&e dixie fire that had a cost of well over 1 billion dollars (1000 million dollars) and they got fined 55 million dollars so they could avoid criminal charges.
    - woleium 3y ago
      The Biden administration have just changed the rules about environmental assessments to include all future costs. It's a _big_ win. I'm sure there is a better source, but this covers it https://www.brookings.edu/research/overview-and-analysis-of-the-biden-administrations-recent-regulatory-review-and-analysis-changes/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/overview-and-analysis-of-...
      - weaksauce 3y ago
        that is big news. even as a really online person i didn't see that. though it's an executive order so it's not going to stand up to the next republican president whenever that is unfortunately... though if that comes to fruition with how it's trending we are not going to need to worry about negative externalities and environmental assessments. I do hope you are right that it's a big win in the long run but i do feel jaded.
      - notjulianjaynes 3y ago
        This sounds nice, but I'm struggling to imagine how it will be effective in practice. Could you offer any elaboration? > These changes undoubtedly reflect a more progressive view of regulation. Yet, they do not jettison cost-benefit analysis. Instead, they have a basis in recent academic research, and they appear to be designed with an eye toward helping agencies withstand court challenges to their cost-benefit analysis. As I understand it, a cost benefit analyses did not factor into the recent supreme court ruling against the EPA, nor the one from last summer.
    - hedora 3y ago
      In fairness, the corruption that led to PG&E accidentally burning down a city every few years occurred back in the 70’s, so those people are retired / dead, and the statute of limitations applies. We don’t know how many people their current blatant and widespread corruption will kill, so I guess we’ll need to wait and see, then prosecute the responsible parties in 50 years.
      - darthoctopus 3y ago
        should there be a statute of limitations on ecological catastrophe? that seems like it would strongly, and perversely, incentivise cover-ups and other nefarious weaponisations of information asymmetry against the interests of the commons.
  - tedunangst 3y ago
    Because amendments are very difficult to pass. It took more than 200 years to ratify the most recent amendment.
  - benreesman 3y ago
    Not adding much except maybe a tiny signal boost: capture. Capture is the root of all evil in the way that various ancient/sacred texts said that “money is the root of all evil”. President Truman was so poorly compensated by capture that they both increased the salary and created a pension because of how embarrassing it was that a President suffered personal financial hardship. We don’t worry about that sort of thing these days.
    - brightball 3y ago
      Fwiw, the quote is actually “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Essentially greed. If you really boil the root of evil down to its base, I think you’ll find pride is the true root. IMO pride is the root of greed itself too.
      - imtringued 3y ago
        This is kind of funny because Keynes' liquidity preference concept can be loosely translated into a "love for money" but it is about not wanting to let go of money rather than earning it.
- dopa42365 3y ago
  > amendment > a minor change or addition designed to improve a text, piece of legislation, etc. What went wrong in the USA for that word to become a synonym for "fundamental right"?
  - kaashif 3y ago
    The first ten amendments to the US Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights So if you want to enshrine a right in US law, the highest place to do it is as an amendment to the Constitution.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  Because such a rule would be far too vague (is, easy to subvert by special interests). Sometimes you have to do things the hard way, with long and detailed laws passed by legislatures and updated to account for technological developments.
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    I’m not really interested in bike shedding my comment. I think we could probably think of ways to narrow its definition to usefulness.
- vharuck 3y ago
  When it comes to oil wells, Pennsylvania has a law for that: The Oil and Gas Act of 1984. A lot of wells are still just abandoned¹ by companies (in the usual ways companies shirk responsibility). ¹ https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2021/10/18/orphaned-wells-are-a-problem-in-pennsylvania-and-there-are-more-of-them-than-we-thought/ https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2021/10/18/orphaned...
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    And yet we all just shrug when student loans are basically inescapable. There are ways to fix this. It’s just that the interests have always ensured an escape hatch.
GolfPopper 3y ago
I'm starting to think this may be the Great Filter. Get a system rolling that allows real costs to be ignored, then combine that with technological advancement that allows for planetary-scale damage and maybe it becomes inevitable that nascent Type I civilizations go back to banging rocks together, at best. It's the same result you get from an uncontrolled paper-clip maximizer, just with a lot more moving parts and flourishes.
- thephyber 3y ago
  “allows real costs to be ignored” Economists call these negative externalities. There are a handful of movies that involve the biggest tort litigations in the US: Erin Brockovich, Dark Water, A Civil Affair, the Rainmaker. It’s not clear that most of these businesses would exist if the actual cost of negative externalities was displayed on the accounting ledger with a dollar value.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    The positive externalities far outweigh the negative ones. Society can't function without cheap energy. It isn't even close, the negative externalities might add up to a couple of years of QoL life lost; and cheap energy enables all the other years. If we taxed based on negative externalities and rewarded based on positive ones oil companies would own literally everything. This cycloptic focus on downsides is also why we're still largely stuck on 1800s energy technology instead of moving to nuclear. People ought to be using cost-benefit logic to evaluate the power grid.
    - labster 3y ago
      > Society can't function without cheap energy. > stuck on 1800s energy technology instead of moving to nuclear. I really feel like your first paragraph refutes your second. Nuclear is a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. Possibly because nuclear production is forced to account for externalities while fossil fuels aren’t, but it’s not cheap.
      - 3y ago

dclowd9901 3y ago

As it’s always been. I cannot for the life of me figure out how we don’t have an amendment on the books that says “if you produce something in or from this country, you must see to its entire lifecycle”. Just kidding, I know exactly why we don’t have such an amendment.

whitemary 3y ago
>I know exactly why we don’t have such an amendment. Why?
- abakker 3y ago
  Because the people making money from not having it can afford lobbyists to prevent having it. See: regulatory capture. Also see: politics as career.
- weaksauce 3y ago
  are you kidding? it's because the monied interests almost never have to deal with negative externalities and the cleanup of direct negatives because they are the ones that pay the people voted into power with that money to make the laws that could do such a thing. california is about as progressive as it comes in that regard but even then the machine of progress inches. look at the pg&e dixie fire that had a cost of well over 1 billion dollars (1000 million dollars) and they got fined 55 million dollars so they could avoid criminal charges.
  - woleium 3y ago
    The Biden administration have just changed the rules about environmental assessments to include all future costs. It's a _big_ win. I'm sure there is a better source, but this covers it https://www.brookings.edu/research/overview-and-analysis-of-the-biden-administrations-recent-regulatory-review-and-analysis-changes/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/overview-and-analysis-of-...
    - weaksauce 3y ago
      that is big news. even as a really online person i didn't see that. though it's an executive order so it's not going to stand up to the next republican president whenever that is unfortunately... though if that comes to fruition with how it's trending we are not going to need to worry about negative externalities and environmental assessments. I do hope you are right that it's a big win in the long run but i do feel jaded.
    - notjulianjaynes 3y ago
      This sounds nice, but I'm struggling to imagine how it will be effective in practice. Could you offer any elaboration? > These changes undoubtedly reflect a more progressive view of regulation. Yet, they do not jettison cost-benefit analysis. Instead, they have a basis in recent academic research, and they appear to be designed with an eye toward helping agencies withstand court challenges to their cost-benefit analysis. As I understand it, a cost benefit analyses did not factor into the recent supreme court ruling against the EPA, nor the one from last summer.
  - hedora 3y ago
    In fairness, the corruption that led to PG&E accidentally burning down a city every few years occurred back in the 70’s, so those people are retired / dead, and the statute of limitations applies. We don’t know how many people their current blatant and widespread corruption will kill, so I guess we’ll need to wait and see, then prosecute the responsible parties in 50 years.
    - darthoctopus 3y ago
      should there be a statute of limitations on ecological catastrophe? that seems like it would strongly, and perversely, incentivise cover-ups and other nefarious weaponisations of information asymmetry against the interests of the commons.
- tedunangst 3y ago
  Because amendments are very difficult to pass. It took more than 200 years to ratify the most recent amendment.
- benreesman 3y ago
  Not adding much except maybe a tiny signal boost: capture. Capture is the root of all evil in the way that various ancient/sacred texts said that “money is the root of all evil”. President Truman was so poorly compensated by capture that they both increased the salary and created a pension because of how embarrassing it was that a President suffered personal financial hardship. We don’t worry about that sort of thing these days.
  - brightball 3y ago
    Fwiw, the quote is actually “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Essentially greed. If you really boil the root of evil down to its base, I think you’ll find pride is the true root. IMO pride is the root of greed itself too.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      This is kind of funny because Keynes' liquidity preference concept can be loosely translated into a "love for money" but it is about not wanting to let go of money rather than earning it.
dopa42365 3y ago
> amendment > a minor change or addition designed to improve a text, piece of legislation, etc. What went wrong in the USA for that word to become a synonym for "fundamental right"?
- kaashif 3y ago
  The first ten amendments to the US Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights So if you want to enshrine a right in US law, the highest place to do it is as an amendment to the Constitution.
Georgelemental 3y ago
Because such a rule would be far too vague (is, easy to subvert by special interests). Sometimes you have to do things the hard way, with long and detailed laws passed by legislatures and updated to account for technological developments.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  I’m not really interested in bike shedding my comment. I think we could probably think of ways to narrow its definition to usefulness.
vharuck 3y ago
When it comes to oil wells, Pennsylvania has a law for that: The Oil and Gas Act of 1984. A lot of wells are still just abandoned¹ by companies (in the usual ways companies shirk responsibility). ¹ https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2021/10/18/orphaned-wells-are-a-problem-in-pennsylvania-and-there-are-more-of-them-than-we-thought/ https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2021/10/18/orphaned...
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  And yet we all just shrug when student loans are basically inescapable. There are ways to fix this. It’s just that the interests have always ensured an escape hatch.

GolfPopper 3y ago

I'm starting to think this may be the Great Filter. Get a system rolling that allows real costs to be ignored, then combine that with technological advancement that allows for planetary-scale damage and maybe it becomes inevitable that nascent Type I civilizations go back to banging rocks together, at best. It's the same result you get from an uncontrolled paper-clip maximizer, just with a lot more moving parts and flourishes.

thephyber 3y ago
“allows real costs to be ignored” Economists call these negative externalities. There are a handful of movies that involve the biggest tort litigations in the US: Erin Brockovich, Dark Water, A Civil Affair, the Rainmaker. It’s not clear that most of these businesses would exist if the actual cost of negative externalities was displayed on the accounting ledger with a dollar value.
- roenxi 3y ago
  The positive externalities far outweigh the negative ones. Society can't function without cheap energy. It isn't even close, the negative externalities might add up to a couple of years of QoL life lost; and cheap energy enables all the other years. If we taxed based on negative externalities and rewarded based on positive ones oil companies would own literally everything. This cycloptic focus on downsides is also why we're still largely stuck on 1800s energy technology instead of moving to nuclear. People ought to be using cost-benefit logic to evaluate the power grid.
  - labster 3y ago
    > Society can't function without cheap energy. > stuck on 1800s energy technology instead of moving to nuclear. I really feel like your first paragraph refutes your second. Nuclear is a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. Possibly because nuclear production is forced to account for externalities while fossil fuels aren’t, but it’s not cheap.
    - 3y ago