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What America looked like before the EPA cleaned it up
- pavlov 3y agoRegulation bad, hero entrepreneur’s unbridled free market emissions good. Or, the tragedy of the commons is real, and you won’t escape it by flying to Mars with Musk.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- version_five 3y agoThere's a lot of "energy shortage" stuff in there, which was geopolitical right, it has nothing to do with the environment. Anyway, so the EPA, if you belive the implication here, was started with good intentions, and cleaned up a lot of stuff, and stopped practices that were causing harmful pollution. All of that is good. I don't see how that's relevant to the EPA today. The article says "now they want to shut it down" as if the fact that it did good work on the seventies is evidence to keep it going. Maybe it is still doing good work. Or maybe like almost all bureaucracies it's strayed into some bloated self sustaining thing that exists mostly to run itself. I really don't know. I just don't see any logic in the article's argument.
- ethanbond 3y agoThe opposing logic, I suppose, is that now there’s no incentive to handle toxic waste recklessly? Or that modern industrialists care about the environment more? Or what? All evidence points to industry trying to circumvent and negate environmental protections at every opportunity. So all evidence points to a regression if those protections are removed.
- version_five 3y agoI'm not talking about environmental protections at all, I'm talking specifically about the EPA. It would be interesting to see how it has grown over the last 50 years and the size of the administration vs people who do stuff (enforcement etc). If it's like most government agencies, a hard reset is not a bad idea.
- klyrs 3y ago> Maybe it is still doing good work. ... I really don't know. Nothingburger. You say you're ignorant, hand-wave an argument that government is generally bad, and conclude that a "hard reset" is not a bad idea. This line of reasoning screams "chesterson's fence."
- wefarrell 3y agoWhy do you think the good work that it did stopped after the seventies? Pollution didn’t end overnight, it took decades and it’s still in progress. Do you think that the environment is in a good enough shape now that we can start increasing pollution again?
- version_five 3y agoIt doesn't appear you understood my post.
- wefarrell 3y agoYou're implying that the agency is no longer effective, without making any explicit claims or providing evidence. What part did I misunderstand?
- LordShredda 3y agoYour comment makes zero sense to me. But the solution to the EPA being inefficient is fixing it, not shutting it down and reversing all the work it did since the 70s
- JamesLeonis 3y ago> There's a lot of "energy shortage" stuff in there, which was geopolitical right, it has nothing to do with the environment. The EPA spearheaded the push for fuel efficiency in cars as part of the Clean Air Act [0]. While the energy crisis was part of it, it was also a way to reduce smog in cities. The agency also brought in the first Smog Checks for cars, which brought the catalytic converter [1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter#History
- nitwit005 3y agoIt's not like environmental law began with the EPA. Like most such organizations, it initially consolidated a bunch of existing responsibilities under one roof. There was a direct predecessor organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Health_Divisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Health_Divisions What actually changed was that the public became more concerned about pollution, and politicians reacted to that.
- rufus_foreman 3y agoThe photo of a smoggy New York City is certainly timely, https://www.popsci.com/uploads/2019/03/18/IIM4LBZLUN4V4WKKLXRT7YTE5U.jpg https://www.popsci.com/uploads/2019/03/18/IIM4LBZLUN4V4WKKLX.... Yesterday: https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/nyc-smoke-023.jpg?resize=2048,1152&quality=90&strip=all https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/nyc-sm...
- Freedom2 3y agoInterestingly, conservatives don't think it's a health risk at all, actually. [1] I'm not entirely sure what to believe, as my I haven't kept up to date with what my fellow HNers are preaching. 1: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news-dismisses-wildfire-smoke-harmless-climate-change-1234766334/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 3y agoWhen your party line is the invariant, truth has to become the variant.
- KerrAvon 3y agoremember that sarcasm isn’t easy to read online, especially for people not well grounded in your idiom
- bequanna 3y agoArticles like this are incredibly disingenuous. Tying fossil fuel use to every weather event that deviates from the mean only causes people to tune out. If the goal is to have the words “climate change” to retain any meeting, they need to better pick their battles.
- pedalpete 3y agoI guess my expectations from popsci.com have been met. Yes, the 70s and into the 80s, things were pretty gross in the US. I grew up in LA, and I remember when I moved to Canada thinking it was strange how the sky didn't go from blue to brown. The smog was incredibly thick in LA. This was back in the days when gasoline still had lead in it. Unfortunately, photos don't really tell the story, as a smoggy day today still looks like an average day back then, and the colour of older photos makes everything look bad. You could go out today and find cars half buried if you went looking.
- dieselgate 3y agoSorry if this is pedantic but did you grow up in Louisiana or Los Angeles?
- jhbadger 3y agoAlmost assuredly Los Angeles. The OP is talking about smog, which was (and still is to a degree, although stricter emission limits on cars have helped) a major problem in the area as due to geography pollution gets trapped in the San Fernando Valley.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pedalpete 3y agoYup, LA. Though smog is still a problem, and I lived in Santiago which has similar geographic challenges, LA skies on the average day are considerably better than they were in the 70s.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deepsquirrelnet 3y agoEven in the 80s and 90s, growing up in Ohio near Lake Erie and the cuyahoga river, adults would always caution us about going in the water. We had all heard stories about the river catching fire or people getting sick from swimming in the lake. For a brief period of time, it seemed like the lake had improved. Now, I still read about toxic algal blooms from fertilizer runoff. It took a long time to correct the industrial waste that was dumped into the water. I only hope that whatever happens with the EPA, it doesn’t permit that level of environmental disaster to happen again.
- temporallobe 3y agoSame with the Kennebec river that flowed through Augusta, Maine throughout the 80s and 90s. We were dumb enough to swim in it for some reason, and I vividly remember bits of trash and paper swirling around in the brown, muddy soup. Contrast that with the crystal clear glacier lakes in the same region, and it’s hard to believe it was the same state government.
- derelicta 3y agoso thats what freedom looked like? /s
- carlmr 3y agoYou can't see freedom, it's more of a heavy feeling in your lungs.
- perrygeo 3y agoAccording to Popular Science, visual appearance is what matters when assessing pollution. Now that the aesthetics are fixed, it's clean! The EPA fixed it. No more pollution. That's a really tidy narrative. Meanwhile, back in objective reality, industrial pollution has been increasing rampantly. CO2 has been rising faster than our economic growth; now over 100 millions tons a day are being poured into the atmosphere. Take a minute to appreciate the sheer mass! But since it's invisible and non-noxious, it's easy to remain ignorant of it. The impacts are arguably worse than mid-1900s pollution in that the effects aren't just local, they're global and destabilizing our climate. If CO2 were visible, smelly, a solid, or liquid, we might view it much differently. But because we can't sense it directly, we just pretend it doesn't exist. Even scientific journalism falls for it apparently.