Re:Decades of Air Pollution Undermine the Immune System
by vkou on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @08:19PM
(#33713861)
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...
Re:Decades of Air Pollution Undermine the Immune System
by rayiner on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @08:40PM
(#33714024)
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.
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...