H.R.861 – To Terminate the Environmental Protection Agency

Why Delhi, Beijing, Chongqing? Why not ask the old-timers who grew up in LA ( cf. https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/las-smoggy-past-in-photos ), for instance? Or how about asking someone who was in Cleveland in June 1969, when the Ohio river caught fire? ( https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/63 )

Compare those times to today, and you can see the impact of the EPA. Right here, at home.

> Anyone in favor of this should have to spend a few months in Dehli, Beijing, Chongqing, or even worse, a true industrial city or district in either country.

I wish people understood something about environment concerns, the action of using cleaner methods is a 'cost', and this cost is only worth paying when the people behind it are willing to pay the cost.

These countries aren't dirty because they don't have an EPA, they are dirty because they are making their lives better and for the time being they don't care about spending huge cost on keeping things clean.

Consider it to be like writing tests for your code. Writing tests for your code is a cost and not every team is willing to pay it, even though they should. If govt creates a National Testing Agency in 1987 which forced teams to have certain code coverage and tests then it would have faced major opposition from most people. In 2007 even fewer teams wrote tests, and in 1997 very few teams wrote tests. Similarly in 2027 testing standards would be a lot bigger norm where the presumption would be that every component is fully covered and tested.

When West had its industrial revolution it was pretty dirty, but it was acceptable to most people because their standards of living were going up exponentially high. Sooner or later after reaching a plateau of progress, they realized that at this point they don't care about increase in standards of living via goods as much as they care about other things like cleaner environment etc.

People in India and China currently don't care so much about environment because of the magnitudes of progress they are seeing. Soon enough they will start valuing cleaner air and water.

We have to stop the republican party to save the planet. They will continue to allow oil companies and chemical companies to pollute and lie about it until we force them to change.

Don't panic yet. There's all sorts of fun bills that get introduced, chances are slim for any one to make it into law

There's also this https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/899?...

This is noise. My understanding is all kinds of crazy bills like this get introduced all the time by backbenchers, but they almost always never make it past the first few procedural steps.

The page states:

> Mr. Gaetz (for himself, Mr. Massie, Mr. Palazzo, and Mr. Loudermilk) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

If it actually gets traction in a committee, then that's a reasonable time to talk about it seriously.

It’s a shame you can’t sort the resolutions by number of Cosponsors, as that’d give a much better idea of which are viable.

I don’t have a solid number, but I get the impression a resolution is essentially dead out of the gate, if the number of Cosponsors is <50. It does seem to be an easy metric to get a rough idea of which bills have legs, and which are fluff.

Honestly you never know these days, but it's not a bill from an influential rep, has few cosponsors, and so far has no important movement, so right now it's unlikely. I suspect that the republicans in congress understand that the correct way to get what they want is to have the president order the EPA to roll back tons of regulations, not to literally undo hundreds of thousands at once without review.

Something many people (even Americans) don't realize about the US system is that thousands of bills get introduced every session that have zero chance of passing. They're just to score political points with the home crowd.

I can't pass because you'd need 60 votes in the senate (which the Republicans don't have).

I have met families in rural West Virginia who for generstions haven't ventured outside of the country. They trace their ancestry back to before 1776. The connection with the global community does not seem real to them. Take this as an extreme example of what some rual communities are like.