https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> "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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, nobody is willing to have conversations about just using radically less energy. Can't have that...
Coal plants, mind you, aren’t a good solution to the issue of active spikes demand, they take significant time to ramp up and down and have minimum loads they have to put out, it’s prohibitively expensive to turn them of and on.
EVs can, and likely will play a key role in demand management, that’s a good thing.
An absolute full of shit take. If that was the case, we would see conservatives pushing for more solar and wind to help cut the cost and reliance on foreign nations, no?
>I know quite a few pretty hard conservatives with solar
Those are some cool anecdotes, but generally speaking solar power has much less to do with the current overton window than literally everything else on the republican "platform".
It sounds more like you just know a bunch of weed-republicans who vote against their own self-interest, not that you know the republican voter base.
For me the best example is Thomas Massie: https://www.hobbyfarms.com/thomas-massie-off-grid/
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?
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.
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 (mismanagement at a pesticide factory causes an explosion, poisoning many people and permanently contaminating the surrounding landscape).
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.
https://history.com/news/epa-earth-day-cleveland-cuyahoga-ri...
I think climate change works better anyway, as global warming caused other changes, not just a rise in average temperatures
If the general public needs to be convinced of a project to save the planet climate change is not good messaging!
But a direct scientific link to ... well, almost all of those fears is totally acceptable because we love our cars?
The world... is insane.
Perhaps you could suggest a place where the pollution taxation approach has worked and the enforcement has teeth, which you would be happy to see implemented here even though it might come with short-term costs.
Taxing pollution, particularly consumer-facing taxes, has a long history of political failure, whereas subsidising clean technology has a long history of political and technical success.
The consumer should pay, because that will reduce demand.
It’s funny to see a government encourage a carbon tax to reduce fossil fuel use (high gas prices drive consumers to look for alternatives), then turn around this year and either cut gas tax or send out checks to consumers to offset higher gas prices.
Not sure any politician has the Will to follow through with it.
Then they'll be the ones overwhelmingly paying the pollution taxes.
And it doesn't mean the rich will be paying a fair share, just that they will be paying more than the poor.
You ever tried to put the drippy nasty stuff in a paper trash bag?
The cargo ship owning class of wealthy people don’t not care about laws.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-shipping-environment-imo-...
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.
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).
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.
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.
Do you agree?
I wish we treated people and government like baseball hit stats. Hitting above 600 is a win…
The EPA and other orgs are responsible for the cleanup of thousands of polluted areas and superfund sites created by negligent businesses who wantonly polluted and then abandoned their responsibilities leaving it up to their kids and their kids' kids to clean it up.
It's like blaming the dentist for scratching your gums while repairing a cavity. A big dose of, "Well sure, but if you had listened to them in the first place.. "
Terrible analogy. The EPA knew there was heavy contamination in that mine, and yet decided to drill into the side of the mountain regardless knowing full well the implications of the heavy water getting released. There were other ways they could have gone about measuring and keeping tabs on the toxic build up. Yet they chose the most expedient riskiest solution that backfired spectacularly.
In your analogy, this is akin to the dentist taking a 1/4 inch drill bit to the side of your tooth to measure the cavity damage.
I don't think it's unexpected that an agency in charge of cleanups like this is going to have some blunders. Should they have handled it better? Fine. But that's not much of a statement.
I think you'd have to make a claim about the EPA's net impact/value to say something interesting here.
But interesting, the mine wasn't polluted in the sense of the company dumped chemicals. The mining process simply exposed rock that when it reacts with water, turns acidic. It's a natural process that is simply amplified by the mining process.
The EPA is in charge of these horrible mines because the previous owners abandoned them to destroy the environment after the profitable stuff was pulled out of the ground.
That mine is an environmental disaster. Some entity needs to be tasked with containing it or mitigating it--doing nothing is NOT an option. That failure could have occurred whether the mine was under the auspices of the EPA, the Department of the Interior, or the Army Corps of Engineers.
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/End...
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.
Today that person is you.
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.
To be honest that sounds a great deal more like some kind of central north american home owners association BS than any actual effective environmental regulation regarding pollution, toxic waste, etc.
Although if it's an actual requirement to keep shade levels up in where ever you live in order to legitimately avoid the broader basin becoming some kind of tarmac heat sink then I can find myself on the side of the trees,
> 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.
This sounds very small beer - I'd hope you support the broader and large range of environmental protections regarding runoffs, spill containments, etc. and arn't merely grandstanding the petty stuff to white ant the general concept of environmental regulation.
Do you have any specifics on why, precisely, the old bridge replacement was delayed?
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.
How many software engineers are doing mental gymnastics to justify adtech so they can afford to live in the SF Bay Area?
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/world/asia/india-china-ai...
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.
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.
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
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...
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...
"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&qu...
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.
why do you say that?
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.