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In my opinion it is obvious and should be uncontroversial that some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while oth
by cfiggers 8mo ago
In my opinion it is obvious and should be uncontroversial that some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated.
Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights. It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped. Clearly, banning leaded gasoline has that kind of justification, and therefore I'm strongly in favor of maintaining that ban and extending it wherever it isn't in place yet. The same reasonable standard should be applied to other regulations across the board.
- soperj 8mo ago> while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated. Prove it.
- cfiggers 8mo agoI have proven it to my own satisfaction. It's a pretty trivial proof. I'm sure you could derive your own, if you tried. How's this: if, at some point, it seems to me that your agreement would benefit me or advance something I care about, I promise I'll consider trying to convince you.
- soperj 8mo ago"trust me bro"
- AdamN 8mo agoBasically everybody agrees with what you're saying which is what makes this an insidious comment. In general the pressure against regulation comes from narrow winners (oil industry for instance) whereas the pressure for regulations generally comes from people focused on the greater good (even if they are misled by other narrow winners, for instance compliance firms).
- gosub100 8mo agoThere are valid reasons to oppose regulations. They can be used to create barriers of entry for small businesses, for example. They constantly affect the poor more than the middle class.
- dfedbeef 8mo agoProtecting a small company's ability to pollute is not a valid reason.
- sunshinesnacks 8mo ago> They constantly affect the poor more than the middle class. That’s a very broad statement. I expect there are many cases where that is not true.
- abfan1127 8mo ago"greater good" is arguably the most broad statement with a large history of hurting many people based on the "greater good".
- sunshinesnacks 8mo agoMaybe. But the original context here is an article about removing lead from gasoline. Which I’m pretty sure that helped many people based on the “greater good”. There’s no copper sulfate in canned green beans or borax in beef. Those seem all around good. Let’s agree that impacts of regulations are nuanced, and not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic like, “regulations hurt poor people”.
- Braxton1980 8mo agoFor each instance did it help more than it hurt? Not to simplify but if you have to make a decision shouldn't you always decide to help the most people?
- 8mo ago
- throwway120385 8mo agoIt's really easy to sit and demand evidence before regulating something. But consider that if we waited for hard evidence to accumulate before banning lead in gasoline, we likely never would have banned it because the hard evidence wouldn't exist. I also don't agree on the principle that regulations are "harmful" or "helpful." Rather, you have to define who the regulation harms, and who it helps. For example antitrust enforcement harms shareholders and some employees of very large firms, but it helps many employees and arguably improves the landscape for competition between many smaller firms. So whether a regulation is preferable comes down to values. In the case of leaded gas, it harms basically everybody, but it helps fuel companies, so it was an easy thing to change.
- rayiner 8mo agoWe had research to support the EPA phase down of lead. Also, your assertion that lead “helps fuel companies” is fundamentally mistaken. Gasoline is a mass-produced commodity. Oil companies have single digit profit margins. These companies aren’t making Big Tech profit margins where they can absorb higher costs without passing them along to consumers. Cost savings from things like gasoline additives accrue to consumers at the gas pump.
- jhallenworld 8mo agoLead helped fuel company profits because it was cheaper than the other anti-knock additives, like ethanol.
- rayiner 8mo agoIn an industry where everyone sells a completely fungible product such cost savings generally are passed on to consumers. Oil companies can profit in the short term due to fluctuations in the price of oil and things like that, but not from something like lead additives, which everyone had been using for decades.
- zug_zug 8mo ago
- mktk1001 8mo agoWho is proposing for environment regulation without proper scientific evidence? You both sided the argument without giving any claims about environment regulation that turned out to be not helpful.
- lingrush4 8mo agoMaybe ten comments below you there is someone stating "environmental regulations are a win." No qualifiers whatsoever. All environmental regulations are good as far as this person is concerned.
- nxm 8mo agogood but at what cost is the issue and who bears that cost
- cfiggers 8mo agoAre you aware of scientific evidence that supports mandating paper drinking straws?
- wolvoleo 8mo agoYou mean the floating plastic islands in our oceans? Or microplastics found everywhere? The only thing I don't like about the paper straws is that they're worse, they're coated with pfas and they disintegrate while drinking causing it to be ingested where the previous straws didn't. In that particular case yes I think banning them was the wrong move, or at least the paper straws were the wrong replacement. But the need to reduce single use plastics, yeah that's crystal clear.
- cfiggers 8mo agoWe're literally talking about the capacity of vibes-based regulations to turn out doing more harm than good. "We need to reduce single use plastics" + "Banning plastic drinking straws reduces single use plastics" => "We need to ban plastic drinking straws" is a logic trap, and we've got to stop falling for it and ones that pattern match to it. Does it feel good? Does it have good optics? Will it get someone somewhere reelected? These are not scientific questions. Is this an effective thing to mandate? What does it actually do (as opposed to what it seems like it will do)? Is it literally even better than doing nothing instead? These are scientific questions. I believe policy decisions should be governed by the latter far more than by the former.
- andychase 8mo agoNote that the current administration closed its research and science office. https://www.science.org/content/article/blow-environment-epa-begins-dismantle-its-research-office https://www.science.org/content/article/blow-environment-epa...
- diego_moita 8mo ago> some environmental regulations work [...] while other [..] do more harm than good You are (deliberately?) overlooking the elephant in the room: lobbies with money can distort the discussion. Big tobacco knew for decades that smoking was bad but still managed to block restrictions in smoking. Oil companies knew lead was poisoning. Purdue knew Oxycontin was addicting. Facebook knows their product is toxic.
- rayiner 8mo agoLead is a textbook example of a good regulation. It’s something where the industry was doing something very harmful-aerosolizing lead and pumping it into the air—which had quite small economic benefits and was relatively easily replaced. Some regulation achieves this kind of improvement, and we’re probably under regulated in those areas. Particulate matter, for example, is extremely harmful. But many regulations do not have such clear cut costs and benefits.
- cassepipe 8mo agoCan you tell more about particulate matter ? You mean small particles in the air right, so air pollution right ?
- empyrrhicist 8mo agoYes, it's associated with cancer, heart disease, and dementia.
- stetrain 8mo agoRight but specifically solid particles in the air, not just gasses (CO2, NOX, etc.). For example smoke and soot from combustion or dust particles from tires and brakes.
- danlitt 8mo agoParticulate matter is relatively large particles, so far as air pollution goes. Think things like soot or smoke, rather than specific chemicals. Burning wood and coal produces far more particulates than, say, natural gas or gasoline-gas.
- freshpots 8mo agoThey're not necessarily large, and the worst for humans is small particulate which gets into the bloodstream through lungs, PM2.5. https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/indoors/air/pmq_a.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/indoors/air/pmq_a.ht... Breathing in unhealthy levels of PM2.5 can increase the risk of health problems like heart disease, asthma, and low birth weight. Unhealthy levels can also reduce visibility and cause the air to appear hazy. Outdoor sources include vehicle exhaust, burning wood, gas and other fuels, and fires. Particle pollution can also travel long distances from its source; for example from wildfires hundreds of miles away. Outdoor particle pollution levels are more likely to be higher on days with little or no wind or air mixing.
- ZeroGravitas 8mo agoYour tone suggests you think they are generally not based on science and given cost benefit analysis. Probably a reflection of your media intake. In 1981 Reagan made cost benefit analysis a requirement for EPA. For example in 1984: the EPA " estimates that the benefits of reducing lead in gasoline would exceed the costs by more than 300 percent.... These benefits include improved health of children and others" Trump has just scrapped the requirement to cost in human health. I wonder if removing lead would meet the new standard.
- LorenPechtel 8mo agoReagan got it half right. The problem is the cost of figuring out the cost/benefit doesn't get considered.
- FatherOfCurses 8mo agoIt should be uncontroversial that introducing shit into an environment where it doesn't belong is a bad idea, yet many people remain unconvinced that dumping tons of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere or tons of fertilizer by-products into the oceans is a bad idea.
- nxm 8mo agoIt's less that but rather the hypocrisy of promoting burdensome regulations and bans implemented in one county (e.g. Germany) which hurts domestic industry and raises costs for its citizens, all while being silent on countries like China and India continuing to massively build more and more coal fired power plants
- dlisboa 8mo agoUnfortunately there is hypocrisy to go around. Here's the argument China and India will use: "coal and fossil fuel always was for all its history and still is the largest portion of Germany's energy mix. It's hardly in a position to ask other countries to stop." "China and India have the right to industrialize themselves using the same tools Western countries have used. China is leading the world in alternative energy manufacturing making clean energy profitable and India is the 4th largest renewable energy producer."
- MuskIsAntidemo 8mo ago[dead]
- breakyerself 8mo ago1. Germany industrialized 100 years before China. It's been burning large quantities of coal for far longer. 2. Germany or at least the EU can and should impose a carbon fee on imports related to a given nations carbon emissions/reductions. 3. Economically transitioning to renewables is better for a nations economy than continuing to burn fossil fuels anyway. Renewables are cheaper. Pointing to another bad actor as an excuse to continue to be a bad actor we learn is not a moral position somewhere around 5 years old.
- css_apologist 8mo agogive me an example of EPA regulation that needs to be eliminated
- breakyerself 8mo agoAlmost every environmental regulation has come after it was already shown that there was some harm that needed to be mitigated. The worst environmental crisis in human history is going largely unchecked. I find it hard to take seriously any argument that environmental regulation has gone too far as opposed to not nearly far enough. If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good I'm cool with revisiting anything, but the common sense wisdom around environmental regulation has been corrupted by corporate public relations campaigns.
- davidw 8mo agoThere's certainly some "environmentalism" out there that's using the banner of the environment for other ends. Here's one example: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-uc-berkeley-ceqa-housing-environment https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-... I mostly agree with you, but it is worth paying attention to the details.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bevr1337 8mo agoThis article doesn't speak to me. What I read is, "Won't someone think of the poor UC system?" But the UC system is _massive_ > But Casa Joaquin’s neighboring, overwhelmingly white homeowners could have used CEQA to demand costly studies and multiple hearings before Berkeley officials. Important to note that white people are well-represented at UC Berkley too. https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts > More recently, a series of court rulings that culminated last year nearly forced Berkeley to withhold admission of thousands of high school seniors... Graduating high-school seniors are also known as incoming freshman or legal adults. > ... because the state’s judges agreed with NIMBY neighborhood groups that population growth is an inherent environmental impact under CEQA. Ok, let's see how big the UC school system is... > The University maintains approximately 6,000 buildings enclosing 137 million gross square feet on approximately 30,000 acres across its ten campuses, five medical centers, nine agricultural research and extension centers, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2017/chapters/chapter-13.html https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2017/chapt... I'm not seeing evidence that protestors were primarily NIMBYs and pesky white homeowners. I can find several articles citing _student_ protests. > “It’s students who set up People’s Park in the first place, so it’s our place to defend it,” said Athena Davis, a first-year student at UC Berkeley who spoke at the rally. “It’s up to students to reject the idea that our housing needs to come at the price of destroying green space and homes for the marginalized.” https://www.berkeleyside.org/2021/01/30/protesters-tear-down-fences-at-berkeley-rally-to-save-peoples-park https://www.berkeleyside.org/2021/01/30/protesters-tear-down...
- Braxton1980 8mo ago>Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected. I'm aware of political parties and politicians who make statements similar to "We have too many regulations" or "stop big government" I'm not aware of opposite.
- cfiggers 8mo agoYou've never heard a politician say, "When I'm Mayor/Governor/President, we're going to make [x] [stop/start] doing [y]"?
- loeg 8mo agoPut more broadly, we should, you know, enact good laws and repeal bad ones. No major political party has a monopoly on good, or bad, legislation.
- jcattle 8mo ago> It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped Here is a strawman for you: studies for regulation A show that it is successfull in improving habitat for endangered species. Studies also show that the regulation increases tax burden and decreases competitiveness of national agriculture. Should the regulation be chopped?
- cfiggers 8mo agoFrankly, that's a question of values, not of process. I'm not championing any particular set of values here (except, perhaps, that I'm implying the values of doing impartial science and of inclusive, rational public discourse). I'm saying that public debate ought to be had to litigate that question, and that hard data should feature prominently in that debate. That is not something we'll do if we assume in either direction that "environmental regulation is always good" or "environmental regulation is always bad." I'm saying both kinds exist, and that apart from hard data we can't confidently know one from the other, which means we have to assess and re-assess. I'm not pre-registering an opinion on which side of any particular debate should win, or why I think that instead of the opposite.
- MisterTea 8mo ago> while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated. Which "other" regulations are harmful and what harm are they doing?
- wat10000 8mo agoThis sounds nice, but in the context of actual politics it's completely meaningless. It's like saying that some people are dangerous criminals who need to be locked up, and other people are upstanding citizens who should be free to live their lives. Everybody would agree with this. The disagreement is in how you sort people. What category encompasses someone who belongs to the opposing political party? That sort of thing. Regulation should definitely be justified by scientific data. Who gets to determine what's enough? Who gets to determine what counts? Leaded gasoline is a great example. It was pretty well understood when it was introduced that lead was hazardous and dumping a bunch of it into the atmosphere was unwise. But this was evaded, denied, and suppressed for decades. Even today, it's not settled. Lead is still used in aviation gasoline in the US. It's being phased out, but it's been in the process of phasing out for a couple of decades and there seems to be no urgency in it. You'll find plenty of people disagreeing with pretty clearly beneficial environmental regulations because in their view those regulations are not supported by the data. They would completely agree with your statement, while saying that pollution from coal power plants is no big deal, climate change is a myth, etc.
- tjohns 8mo agoThere definitely is urgency to phase out leaded aviation gasoline. The FAA is proposing that we phase it out by 2030 - just 4 years from now - even though we still haven't agreed on which of the 3 competing gas blends to standardize on, the pumping infrastructure only exists at a small number of airports, and even though there's still open concerns about them causing engine damage. They just published a draft version of the transition plan here: https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/draft_docs/draft_unleaded_avgas_transition_plan https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/draft_docs/draft_unleaded_avgas...
- wat10000 8mo agoLeaded gasoline for cars started phasing out 52 years ago. It was fully banned 30 years ago. If there was any urgency behind getting rid of leaded avgas it would have been gone in that timeframe. The FAA started looking at it 14 years ago. They planned to finish phasing it out in 2023. Three years after that, leaded avgas remains ubiquitous, and there's a plan to finish phasing it out in six years. (The 2030 date excludes Alaska, which is planned for 2032.) That's not what urgency looks like.
- epistasis 8mo ago> In my opinion it is obvious and should be uncontroversial that some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated. This would be a reasonable centrist opinion, if there existed environmental regulations that do more harm than good! Actually, I do know of one, in California, that does both harm and good and the harmful parts need to be reigned in. CEQA in California was expanded by courts after it was passed to cover all sorts of things that weren't intended by the authors. CEQA is not so much an "environmental" law as it is a "perform some massive studies law" as it doesn't really regulate anything in particular. Mostly it serves as a route to use the courts to delay projects, largely housing in already-built-out areas. By delaying a project's approval with a court lawsuit for 2-3 years, the preliminary financing runs out, the cost of owning land without doing anything with it runs out, so projects can be scuttled without the validity of the lawsuit every being evaluated by courts. Instead of this sort of legal courtroom process that takes long and indeterminate amounts of time, CEQA should be replaced with strict and very clear definitions of harm, or at least move the more subjective parts into a science-based regulatory body that provides answers an a short timeline that can not be dragged on indefinitely. > Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights. This is a very weird turn of the phrase "corporations aren't people," because there actually are highly influential politicians that made the case that corporations are people. Nobody is saying that regulations are people. That's silly. The regulations we need to get rid of are not "environmental" regulations, they are "rent seeking" regulations that allow entrenched interests to prevent disruption by smaller interests. CEQA is not a problem because its an environmental regulation, it's a problem because it's a tool NIMBYs use to get results that are worse for the environment.
- LorenPechtel 8mo agoBut you are showing an example of an improper regulation.
- lo_zamoyski 8mo ago> It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped. This sounds good as a general default, but there are differences of approach. The US, for example, tends to be more permissive with new chemicals while the EU tends to take a more precautionary approach. Which is better on the whole, weighing the various competing goods, I don't know. I generally favor health over economic prowess, however. > a manipulative political maneuver Yes, under the pretext of concern for the environment. There are well-known cases where the political opposition will commission a bogus ecological studies to stifle construction projects they either don't agree with or as a petty way to simply make the ruling party appear less successful. And naturally, the ecological study will find something, as virtually no major construction project will leave the environment unaltered, which is not to say seriously or irretrievable damaged.
- tracerbulletx 8mo agoThat's why the people that would rather policy be based on their personal interests work so hard to discredit all data and the scientific method so that you can't even have that conversation.
- nayuki 8mo ago> some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated You're right. Off the top of my head, the stupidest environmental regulation I can think of right now is the banning of plastic straws. It's such a minuscule amount of plastic used compared to the mountains of bags and packaging used in general commerce and industry. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting our environment. I just believe in evidence-based policy and setting priorities correctly. After all, money, labor, and attention are finite resources.
- anigbrowl 8mo agoAren't you just waving a flag for less regulation by rushing to align yourself with this inarguable example of regulatory success? Rather than discussing the issue of what impact lead had, or how we might apply this longitudinal method to other other problems (making hair archives into a general environmental data resource), or develop longitudinal methods in general, You've chosen to issue a clarion calla gainst 'bad regulation'. Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected. ....nobody was arguing this. It's a classic straw man fallacy. Further, you're leveraging a lot of emotional terms while providing zero examples, inviting potential sympathetic readers to just project their feelings onto any regulations they happen to dislike rather than establish any sort of objective criteria or lay out any map/model of regulatory credibility that could be subject to challenge or criticism.
- cfiggers 8mo agoI'm not rushing anywhere or arguing for or against anything at all in concrete detail. I'm trying to refuse the "all or nothing" fallacy that, yes, some people are arguing, and no, is not a straw man (you can see sincere examples of that viewpoint expressed in this very thread). If I'm doing anything (and I'm self-consciously and intentionally doing next to nothing here), it is suggesting or reaffirming an extremely basic rational grid that, in my opinion, ought to apply across all aisles as universal, table-stakes context within which people who disagree with one another can try to reach rational, reality-informed compromise. If I'm issuing any clarion call, it is this and only this: Some environmental regulation is good, and some environmental regulation is bad, and we should use science to figure out which is which and then legislate based on the best good-faith interpretation of that science that we have access to. That's it. Re-read my parent comment, if you don't believe me. That's literally all it says. The reflexive contrary reaction, in this thread, against what I see as an extremely mild proposal justifies the (frankly quite minimal) effort I made in articulating it. This is not a universally accepted starting point for public policy discourse, though I think it should be (which is why I said so, in so many words). Rational people, like both you and me I hope, have to voice this perspective and insist upon its acceptance and application if it is to survive the political polarization we're enduring as a society right now.
- enaaem 8mo agoIt's better to over regulate than under regulate, if you look at it in terms of utility. The damage of under regulation can be catastrophic, like people getting cancer or irreversible loss of species. Based on examples I read here, overregulation is much easier to solve. For example, the weaponisation of environmental regulation to block new development is a political problem not a technical one, which is solvable if people really want to.
- Ma8ee 8mo agoIt is fair and reasonable to demand that releasing a substance with new and unknown effects into the environment justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data that it is safe, or else get chopped. I think people's health is more important than corporate profits. If corporations played fair, I'd be more tempted to agree with your formulation than with mine, but history has shown that that isn't the case. Take a current example like PFAS, where as soon there is enough evidence to prohibit one variety because it is harmful, the industry just starts using a very similar one that the legislature hasn't had time to collect evidence against.
- cfiggers 8mo agoI don't disagree at all in principle with what you're saying. And, some people think that over-regulation on the insecticide use of DDT (which, to be perfectly fair is a nasty chemical and pretty much confirmed carcinogen, also was having negative effects on birds who were eating the poisoned insects and thereby getting unintended higher doses of the stuff) directly facilitated a rebound in mosquito populations in Africa, downstream from that a rebound in mosquito-borne malaria, and downstream from that a death toll debatably as bad or worse in terms of loss of human life than might've been had DDT use been more controlled and less banned outright. Or think about how the banning of sulfur from cargo ship fuel in 2020 led to an 80% decrease in SO2 emissions... which is great for cutting harmful pollution around ports and such... But caused a measurable RISE in global temperatures because the sulfate aerosols had been reflecting sunlight off of the atmosphere, delaying global warming. I don't know man, I don't have all the answers and I'm not trying to shill for mustache-twirlingly evil corporations who would turn us all into Soylent Green if it meant ten basis points more profit this quarter. I am just saying that there's gotta be a balance, and we have to recognize that there's no automatic, turn-your-brain-off safe side to default to. We always need science to verify that what we thought would happen happened, and that nothing we didn't intend to happen did, and in cases where the unforseen second-order effects should cause us to revisit the policy decisions we've made, even if just to revise and improve them rather than completely reverse course, we should actually do that rather than let political momentum override scientific validation and feedback.