What America looked like before the EPA, in photos
kottke.org
kottke.org
First off, this is blogspam, the original Popular Science article is a bit better. There's a reason blogspam is discouraged by the guidelines.
More importantly, this is a particularly pernicious blogspam because the selected photos (atlas, burning boat, water glass) mostly illustrate problems that have comparables right now. It excludes the smog and coal burning illustrated in Popular Science that do a better job at illustrating both pollution and the EPA's achievements.
These problems make this article a poor fit for Hacker News. I think we should be all sad to see such an intellectually empty article ranked this highly.
In terms of text, the original article does not have much either, but at least you're treated to about 30 or so images. It actually gives the reader a glimpse of parts of the US pre-EPA.
Only in the mine water example do I see what the issue is clearly. The discussion seems to have gone straight to related political issues and the broader environment. Interesting, but the article isn't being discussed.
Paper mills are very polluting enterprises - the water you're seeing is a thin sheet with a mostly laminar flow. It is opaque. This is not normal. The level of waste solutes in the raw ejecta is absurdly high, and is comprised of decomposed organic material & high oxygen content which leads to algal blooms, bleaches, heavy metals, chelating agents, etc.
I think the burning barge is pretty self explanatory.
Is it? The photo doesn’t tell whether that was something that happened regularly, and stuff like that happens today, too.
https://www.fleetmon.com/maritime-news/?category=incidents taught me that the Maersk Honam (built in 2017; can hold over 15,000 TEU) caught fire on March 6 and was evacuated. Worse, that doesn’t seem to be that exceptionally. http://www.seatrade-maritime.com/news/europe/maersk-honam-jo... lists about one every year.
I mean, isn't the environment the prime example of a situation where externalities and the tragedy of the commons describe the problems for the free market to solve the problems at hand?
Further, free enterprises exist to maximise their own profit and not to protect the "market".
The only circumstance under which I expect the free market to freely solve any environmental issues is if the consumer demands more (truly) environmentally friendly products and services, moving the demand and hence the profit from polluting products.
Common land = public land. In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land. You producing pollution on your land that negatively affected mine would result in a lawsuit.
It is really the very existence of the legal-fiction of "public land" (ie. land that everyone owns), which gives rise to many of the real environmental abuses.
*typo
In a world where corporations buy land, pillage all of its natural resources, then sell off a smoking crater, the loser is always the environment, as corporations and people downcycle real estate constantly, extracting their profits, destroying what was there before, dodging externalities, and then often defrauding the next investor. Look what was there before and what is left over after the whole cycle. It's shit.
You should take a look at the forests of New Zealand and the movement to make logging on public lands illegal.
Does it mean that zero and negative numbers are morally bankrupt?
I can give more examples of B.) where corporations visit environmental destruction on lands they own (e.g. gold mines) and then sell off the leftover, ruined real estate, having still profited handsomely in the end.
> Common land = public land. In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land.
The state is the entity that owns all land - prior to states land was simply not owned - and state organs like the EPA are the advocates who care deeply about the environmental quality of public land.
You can't address environmental issues on a smaller scale - indeed even individual states are too small a scale be able to address inherently global problems like CO2 emissions. Any "private" owner of the entire planet, or even of a large enough region to address issues like fishery management or water table pollution, would have to function like a state and share the same problems (e.g. lack of competing alternatives).
Who owns the state?
If i'd own the river flowing by a big plant, would I care more about it's preservation than the polution-fee I could take from the company owner?
One last point: you call public land a legal-fiction - that's interesting, because I would call property rights a legal fiction, and "public ownership" the natural state of stuff (one could argue every legal concept is fiction, I'd tend to agree with that).
Nearly every culture that has ever existed has recognized that someone taking something from you by force is crime. Its a normative expectation for nearly 100% of all humans.
People like yourself, who don't see a value in others property (ie. think you are free to take it), are generally seen as very dangerous and inconsiderate people.
Property Rights exist, at best, as part of a human narrative that we have some interest in designating a legal owner for a piece of dirt. Without humans, the dirt is not owned. With humans, we say we own the dirt (but there is no actual, objective ownership).
>People like yourself, who don't see a value in others property
I don't think GP made that point, rather that until Humans come along, no ownership, ie, public ownership, is the default. The land is owned by nobody until someone buys it.
This can be shown with an example; Mars. Who, at this current moment, owns mars? All the dirt on mars must, by your argument, be owned by someone.
Property rights are the first level of abstraction above the physical layer of "might is right". "Public" land is usually a higher level of abstraction, because it almost always still limits who is the public: even indigenous people usually mean "public" land as land of our tribe, not their tribe.
Property rights are still not an inherent part of nature.
If you break down the universe into component parts and sift through it all, you won't find any part that says "Property rights" and rather stuff like "Gravity" or "Particle Weak Interaction" or "Wave-Particle Duality".
Yes, most cultures recognise some notion of property, few would agree with taking the clothes off someone's back. But the exact nature of these property systems is varied, and the idea that all things must necessarily have an owner, and anyone else using them is "taking them by force", is by no means universal.
Many cultures have some notion of public property, and indeed many of these public property rights were violated historically in order to establish the modern notion of private ownership.
None of this libertarian fantasy is remotely feasible, even after you assume that you can assign property rights to every molecule of the earth and have to sign contracts to take a breath.
Libertarianism and anti-statism are usually quite more nuanced than their typical strawmen, and many libertarians are OK with small state which would be in charge of law enforcement. However, such small state still has no reason to own any land (except for government buildings) or designate any land as "public".
You didn't address ZeroGravitas' first paragraph; how would you solve these issues?
> Be then frankly an entire anarchist and not a quarter anarchist, an eighth anarchist, or one-sixteenth anarchist, as one is a one-fourth, one-eighth or one-sixteenth partner in trade. Go beyond the abolition of contract to the abolition not only of the sword and of capital, but also of property and of authority in all its forms. Then you will have arrived at the anarchist community; that is to say, the social state where each one is free to produce or consume according to his will or his fancy without controlling, or being controlled by any other person whatever; where the balance of production and consumption is established naturally, no longer by the restrictive laws and arbitrary force of others, but by the free exercise of industry prompted by the needs and desires of each individual. The sea of humanity needs no dikes. Give its tides full sweep and each day they will find their level.
The argument against public ownership came first about a century after libertarianism was first conceived, with the rise of right-wing libertarianism, which took left wing libertarianism and turned it pretty much upside down by adding a focus on property right enforcement which is in direct opposition to the original principles of libertarianism.
A key point of Dejacques original libertarianism was the view that enforcement of property rights pretty much inherently deprives the public of liberty by using the state to add restraints on people that take away far more liberty than they grant.
Having grown up in Norway - one of a few countries with extensive freedom to roam [2] - I will tell you that nobody can convince me that strict enforcement of property rights is anything but theft from the public; once you are used to it, you feel the loss of that freedom deeply when you go elsewhere and are quite literally fenced in in situations where you'd previously be used to be able to roam free.
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t...
Nah, not even someone hip to the kool-aid they drowned in wouldn't have been able to predict something like
> every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land
No, you have it backwards. The "tragedy" was a fiction invented to justify the Acts of Enclosure in the UK, wherein public land (commons) was fenced off for sole use by the local lords.
Here's a good explanation: http://www.monbiot.com/1994/01/01/the-tragedy-of-enclosure/
In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land.
OK, here are two counterpoints:
First, if land is held in common, everybody has a share of ownership, including people who actually live there and therefore really do care deeply about the environmental quality.
Second, just look at the recent stories about Toys'R'Us. It was purchased in a leveraged buyout in 2005 -- meaning the buyers paid relatively little and the company was saddled with a massive debt. By your argument, wouldn't those new owners care deeply about the long-term health of the company? Instead they extracted as much cash as possible and left behind a bankrupt shell. I think the analogy to private land is pretty clear.
A commons is a piece of land supposedly used commonly and not owned by anyone. So Hardins theory is addressing tthings like the ocean and the air.
This article might as well be rebutting the theory of gravity because it only applies to objects with mass.
No, Hardin himself intended his theory to address land usage; it's this article that argues the theory doesn't actually work properly in that context.
I can prove it to you. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full
This is the original article by Hardin. Ctrl-F oceans. Then Ctrl-F pollution. You will see that Hardin directly references pollution and oceans as commons.
If you read the entire article you will see that he talks about population control more than he talks about land.
There are at least three categories, not just two (as Hardin clearly explains): common ownership, nationalized ownership, and private ownership.
The Monbiot article argues that common ownership doesn't necessarily mean a destructive free-for-all; often the people who actually live in a certain land do a good job of looking after it.
As for private ownership, free market fans tend to assume this is the best approach, but individual owners aren't always incentivized to make the best long-term use of land.
I don't think Monbiot is entirely against Hardin, he's saying more that Hardin is being misread as a justification for private ownership of land only. (I don't think Hardin takes a position on private vs nationalized; he's only concerned with commons vs owned.)
Commodore Business Machines for several decades had their plant in Westchester, PA, leak assorted chemical related to their chip manufacturing. When this was identified, they started some improvement work, but didn't fix the problem. The site was eventually sold to a company that bought it knowing it was contaminated, who continued to operate a chip manufacturing business there, until the demanded improvements made it impossible for them to operate.
Despite corporate ownership for years, nobody advocated or cared very deeply about the environmental quality of this land until they were forced to by the EPA, because it did not affect their business. Other people nearby would largely have remained unaffected for many years too, until chemicals started seeping out, at which point Commodore was in decline and eventually went bankrupt.
Here's one of the documents regarding this site: https://semspub.epa.gov/work/03/50245.pdf
I'm sure there are cases where the issue is that nobody has any direct legal interest in a piece of land, but a lot of serious environmental issues have explicitly happened or escalated because the owner did not care or could not afford to remedy the problems.
The bigger fiction is to think that the owner will always "care very deeply" about the environmental quality of their land.
I don't understand. How is the legal fiction of 'public land' more fictitious that the concept of 'private land'?
More importantly, how do you cope with the person who buys the entire amazon basin and decides that, actually logging it is going to be the best way to realise its immediate value.
Or maybe the tract is owned by my shell corporation. I extract millions, polluting the property and that of surrounding neighbors as well. A large swath of land lays in ruin. My neighbors sue the owner of my tract, ie the corporation, which promptly goes bankrupt. I don't care, I've already made my fortune and I'm protected by the corporate veil. If you say in such a case I shouldn't be protected, then you're arguing in favor of special penalties with respect to environmental issues.
Both of those examples mentioned above are right now being heavily polluted.
The tragedy of the commons is essentially this: The cost of me polluting the air by driving a car is much less then the cost of me not polluting the air and walking 20 miles to work instead. My pollution contribution to the air is minor when compared to walking 20 miles and therefore by choosing to drive i am acting logically. The phenomenon ghe theory addresses is that when everybody does this the aggregate contribution to pollution ends up destroying the commons.
Therein lies the tragedy: groups of people acting logically in picking the lesser evil end up destroying the commons.
Why do people even argue about this theory? It's readily apparent if you drive a car or use any form of non renewable energy.
> The only circumstance under which I expect the free market to freely solve any environmental issues is if the consumer demands more (truly) environmentally friendly products and services, moving the demand and hence the profit from polluting products.
I believe both you and GP are correct as there is very little incentive to protect externalities affecting current business model over extended periods.
This obviously means the company will quickly run out of resources and employees but depending on the severity of the deployed sacrifice, this can take decades, a time span that corporations have shown on several occasions to not care about.
Any agency brought up to protect the environment has per it's mission an incentive to protect the environment and doesn't suffer the problems of a corporation, namely limited funding. A government agency doesn't need to make profit to receive lots of funding if it's important enough.
> What if the bad actor owns half the land in the region and all the guns?
As far as I know the government has the biggest guns.
Not in the mythical libertarian paradise where all property is privately owned.
If there is one thing I've learned about the markets, it's this: Things move much more quickly or much more slowly than anyone ever expects.
There are many environmentally damaging actions that offer short-to-medium term gain, and many of the changes necessary for long term gain have costs in the short term so are not attractive to the short/medium term thinkers.
The problem isn't even constrained to issues that will come to a head after our lifespans. There are many issues that are going to start biting hard in our lifetime, but to "the market" even that is long term: companies are thinking about profits/costs over the next five or ten years and individuals are thinking about maximising what they can get out of their current company in the next year or two before they move on.
Heck, many (both companies and individuals) are just thinking about how they will maximise (or in some cases, simply survive) the next quarter and anything else is too far in the future.
Unfortunately there's so much propaganda that effectively argues that corporations should be allowed to do anything they want and it'll all work out for the best that the whole thing has been tainted.
Besides that I think that enterprises in some cases "dilute" ethics of individual beings.
Quote:”What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
And:“[The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”
That's the core mistake. It's often very profitable to damage the market.
Efficient markets NEED an efficient government to put down ground rules and enforce them.
There are even situations of negative externality[1] where the value of the externalized costs exceeds the profit gained so that the net productivity to the nation is negative. Since the company never need pay those costs and they're applied to society as a whole, however, the company is still motivated to do it.
I wonder what Adam Smith would have said about the tragedy of the commons.
I prefer a bigger government with a bigger social safety net with universal basic healthcare, etc. But I can understand conservative opposition to that; at least those don't produce tragedies of the commons. (They arguably do to a lesser extent: if people's basic needs are met, they're less likely to resort to crime to fulfill them. And a greater rate of crime is a tragedy for all; ask anyone who's paid a premium to live in a "safe" neighborhood.)
Democrats have the same problem by the way, it just manifests in different paradoxes (or "lies" if you want to be more direct)
If you care less about other people than Nixon, you should really ask yourself: “?How far have I strayed from the pack?”
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/02/to-noam-chomsky-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/revisio...
It frames the argument as either "the EPA, as it exists today and has been running" or "no EPA at all." There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of a lot of the EPA's activities and very few of those activities directly prevent what's shown in the photos.
Not at all, when conservatives who do come to power always immediately move to dismantle the EPA, as with the current administration. Not to mention that conservative politicians endlessly rail against the evils of the EPA in terms not even remotely nuanced.
I know, I know, "they're not really conservatives!".
Option 1: Demonize all conservatives, turning the environment into a partisan agenda
Option 2: Demonize elected officials that choose to side with lobbyists over their constituents
Personally, I would chose option 2, but I guess option 1 is good too if your goal is to cause divisiveness or even to push conservatives away from agreeing with you [2]
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/20/for-earth-da...
[2] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-05/conservatives-dont-ha...
> Option 2: Demonize elected officials that choose to side with lobbyists over their constituents
Sorry, could you remind me again who's electing those "elected officials that choose to side with lobbyists over their constituents"?
It's just so needlessly pointless to frame things this way. It'd be like posting pictures of people in bread lines in the USSR and saying, "this is what a country looks like with left-wing politicians in charge." I mean, yes, it's true, but it's straw-manning all left-wing politicians as full-blown communists.
Let's try to avoid straw-manning and demonizing political opponents and maybe we'll be able to improve the discourse a little.
> Not to mention that conservative politicians endlessly rail against the evils of the EPA in terms not even remotely nuanced.
Yes, sometimes politicians are a big exaggerated with their rhetoric. That's not unique to conservatives, though.
That’s exactly how you dismantle a large government agency. You cut budgets until the organization is so crippled it can’t do its job, then you point at how ineffective it is and use that to drum up enough political will to abolish it.
“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” - Grover Norquist
Can a bureaucracy ever get too big, or to the point that its negative effects outweigh its positives?
> “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” - Grover Norquist
This quote doesn't imply desire to destroy it, but capability. The desire of people being more powerful than their government is not a radical idea.
In a software project, you allocate $x per month during development, and only $(x/10) for maintenance after it has shipped. Is there a point where the EPA can say "mission accomplished" and downsize to maintenance/enforcement mode, or is this just a typical government organization that will happily consume as many tax dollars as it can get as long as it can?
That's just to cover previously made mistakes. Reducing enforcement is going to keep adding to that list, and reducing safety and quality of life for all Americans.
The vast majority (60-80%, Robert L. Glass) of costs for software is also in maintenance, as any of the classic software project management books will tell you.
What's the purpose of stating total costs when discussing monthly costs? Of course maintenance will end up costing more in total if the maintenance period is much longer than the development period. The per month cost is still much lower.
In a libertarian system, you’d simply ban pollution (I.e. ban the externalizations of environmental costs), and then let the market and the courts hash things out. If a company was found dumping pollutants into the water, people would sue them, and the costs of all of that would get properly priced into the company’s products.
But the environmental laws are all about the various ways in which companies are allowed to pollute. Companies can dump poison into rivers, so long as they conform the EPA limits. Those limits are, by design, not set any “correct” level (as above, the “correct” level is zero—forcing the externality to be fully internalized; from an economic efficiency point of view, all environmental externalities must be borne by parties to the transaction, either the company or its customers). Instead, the limits are of a “best effort” nature, and a “how to get there from here” nature. For example, the law requires air polluters to install “the best available control technology” on smoke stacks. What does that mean? Well, that requires continual review and revision.
The EPA doesn’t exist to enforce laws that prevent pollution. It exists to manage all the pollution that the law allows.
But that's wildly impractical. Hence the existence of the EPA, which is tasked with managing pollution, and using central planning to balance the benefits of productive activity against the harms of pollution.
The EPA's purpose is to determine how much pollution is allowed.
During the immediate period prior to the EPA, it wasn't so much it was legal, but the courts began to ignore property rights due to the pressures of what was believed to be common good to let industries thrive.
In some cases property rights are much stricter and can be better enforced, in other cases they are more difficult in areas such as air pollution.
By "immediate period" you mean a couple of hundred years before 1970. English courts started ignoring property rights (e.g. the right of downstream riparian users to undiminished water quality from upstream activities) in the 1700s or so during the first industrial revolution.
For anyone interested in a deep dive on the matter. A good reference book 'Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy'
$8bn per annum is a tiny sum of money to spend on environmental protection for a developed country the size of the United States.
I think a lot of Libertarians are coming around to have a view similar to your's. That the commons belongs to all of us and polluting and destroying it should be punished. Republican's on the other hand seem to thing liberty only applies to corporations.
In fact if you delete the part about wanting big government, I could have almost mistaken you for a Libertarian.
However, if you look at the Libertarian's who do support protecting the environment you will find there are ideas out there to address the issue without a huge centralized government organization like the EPA. Some might require changing our laws and our legal system so it is less of "whoever has the most money wins" but there are ways.
Like all political parties Libertarians have their extremists too (anarchists) but by and large I think they are reasonable people.
Edit: Those people in the Republican party that the media likes to call "Libertarians" are not. They cherry pick what liberties are important to them and what are not based on their moral code and special interests.
Edit 2: My original post has the word "not" where it should't have been. See bellow.
Did you really mean should not be punished here?
Yes, of course. The "not" shouldn't have been in that sentence. Polluters should have consequences.
It is perfectly reasonable this kind of reasoning apply to other types of killing or unjust aggression, such as poisoning the environment. So we have the NAP.
But the whole movement is being hijacked by people who either don't care about much else than not wanting to pay taxes, or people who are anarchists (which is decidedly not libertarian).
Perhaps we need to run away and invent a new word. I think you'll find a lot of libertarians agree more often with Greenwald than the Koch bros.
> But the whole movement is being hijacked by people who either don't care about much else than not wanting to pay taxes
Many of those people have moved to the Republican party. Often the same people who think that liberty only applies to you if you have the right income level, color skin, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. As I said in my first post, an dI'm sure you agree, you can't pick and chose who gets liberties.
Unfortunately the anarchist have chosen to use the Libertarian party to give themselves a voice. And while I agree they are not true Libertarians, they are the extremist in the party and are the party's demons to fight.
I grant you that most anarchists are not libertarians, but I fail to see how Anarcho-Capitalists are not.
> Perhaps we need to run away and invent a new word.
We've done that, several times. We were once "liberals", then "libertarians", and it feels like we're now fracturing into subgroups that take on various labels: "ancap", "minarchist", "classical liberal", etc.
It seems to me that conservatives often make the case that "The Federal Government should not do <foo>," but others instead hear, "we as a society don't need to do <foo>."
Civil suits failed to curb industrial emissions in built-up areas, which then spilled over everywhere else. The EPA was a godsend.
I didn't understand the problem until the first time I visited L.A. Wow, what a mess. The air was so thick. It was disgusting.
It's amazing the progress we have made. But the EPA, like so many other agencies (I'm looking at you, TSA) is an agency without a limiting factor. You come up with a devil, you pass a bunch of rules, then you spend the next few years issuing press releases about how you're saving the world.
What's happened to American politics in many areas is that there are no feedback loops. When I look at the smog in LA back in the day and how the skies look now? That's a feedback loop. My government is doing something I want them to do. But when they talk about parts per billion versus parts per trillion? It's not evidently clear to me as a voter that we're not just continuing to expand our empire, just like the rest of the agencies.
I love what the EPA has done and I support them. But without some kind of limiting feedback loop my support really doesn't mean much. It's just a platitude. I don't support any agency that just runs off on their own taking more and more control over things for reasons I don't understand (or reasons I do understand but disagree with.)
So sure, EPA yay! So what the hell does that actually mean?
ADD: No matter what the group, big corporate governance groups, local town councils, Non-profit boards, or federal agencies, political groups exist for political reasons. We may laud their goals and love some of the things they've done, but when you are chartered because politics, and you get funding because politics, and people love or hate you because politics -- your primary concern is political. That's not a knock on anybody, that's just the logic of how these things work.
You're right of course that industry isn't all bad; we just need the right balance. As long as the EPA's budget isn't expanding out of control, they're probably not simply empire-building.
It turns out that even things you can't see can be bad for your health. There are some extremely important climate change feedback loops involved.
Sure, but that's a little like promoting the election maps that focus on land areas instead of populations.
Sure, rural Colorado was still in pretty decent shape in the 1970s. A very large proportion of Americans live in the parts of America that were like this.
The last photo on that page shows Mary Workman holding a glass of well water that the Hanna Coal Company rendered undrinkable. Something to remember for those who pine for the days of "great coal jobs" and that unrestricted American entrepreneurial spirit of the 1950s.
And most of the money for cleanup comes from taxes. Its a nice roundabout/inefficient way to make citizens pay for the pollution of large interests.
In my opinion its more plausible that pollution has decreased due to citizen awareness and organization rather than the EPA.
"Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money."
This is the most important comment. This is what humans do when they are unfettered from regulation and enforcement. Yes, the EPA does enforcement. A long-time friend works there in that division. The work is endless.
Documentation project overview: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/542493
Archive contents: https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.parentNaId=54249...
Link to the original PopSci article: https://www.popsci.com/america-before-epa-photos
Traveling outside the US (been moving around for almost 5 years now) has opened my eyes to the value of some of the consumer/environmental/etc protection/safety agencies/laws in the US that I didn't appreciate before.
Some examples not necessarily related to the EPA:
- Auto emissions regulations (or lack thereof)
- Waste disposal (e.g. burning trash on the side of the road or dumping trash in public places)
- Worksite safety (ever see a worker on a commercial build site wearing flip-flops two stories up on a rickety wood scaffold held together by twine, welding with no protective gear?)
- Building codes, both for safety and accessibility
- Marketing spam (depending on location, I'll get a handful of marketing sms a day - I have a newfound appreciation for CAN-SPAM[1])
You can argue that certain regulations go too far or maybe they don't go far enough, and those are important question to ask.
However, and this photo-documentary project underlines this, I've personally come to the conclusion that the importance of environmental regulations can't be understated. It affects the lives of literally everyone, in a "the air I breathe" and "the water I drink" and "the food I eat" and "the space I occupy" kind of way.
Difficulty mixed with opportunity.
The EPA didn't create this mess. They did screw up handling it, however. What happened was that the EPA accidentally released the waste products from an abandoned mine that had been accumulating in a reservoir for decades all at once. What do you think would have happened without any regulation at all? That shit would already be everywhere.
What they did was not necessarily the "best" thing. The title of the post should have been "What America looked like before the enough Americans began caring for the environment, in photos".
PS: I grew up in a really polluted city.
A better approach is to speak in terms of paying for what you damage. The economy matters, and you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet... but you pay for anything you break.
So you end up charging a price, preferably to be paid to those who are affected, and the market responds by cutting pollution. It's almost like fine or cap-and-trade, but without the arbitrary limit that would cause offense. The result may even be better, since you won't always end up exactly at the limit.
Tainting and spoiling are usually bad to the conservative mindset, but watch out for property rights. You get to mess up your own stuff. If you bought it and you own it, you can ruin it. Arguing for restrictions that infringe on a person's property won't get you very far at all.
Sure, it's your land.
> What happens when 10 years later it starts leaching into the soil and poisoning nearby streams and farms?
Those impacted landowners now have a tort claim against you, which they should pursue.
> What about the animals who eat on my land and then run back into the forest where they get shot for someone else's dinner, and that someone else ends up consuming elevated levels of heavy metals?
They now have a tort claim against you, which they should pursue.
> What about the person who buys the land from me? Do I have to disclose the presence of the waste to them?
Yes, you should. If you don't, the purchaser now has a tort claim against you, which they should pursue.
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I know I'm being a bit trite with the above, but I mean no offense. The difference here is one of strategy, not base ideas. I (and other libertarians) believe that people who harm others through their action should be responsible for that harm. Proponents of the EPA believe that people should be limited by government regulation to a minimal level of harm.
I'll also grant that, prior to the EPA, the tort system in the US was ineffective at resolving these issues. I don't believe that was a problem with the process itself; it was (and remains) a problem with the courts.
I think it's also very inefficient to allow people to do things that we know for sure will be harmful. If all that stuff is allowed and ends up in court you will need a gigantic court system to handle all these cases.
2. Conservatives care about waste, fraud and abuse, and there have been many examples of abuse in programs to protect the environment
3. Steps taken in the name of protecting the environment often end up doing more harm than good. Conservatives are inherently skeptical of any large organizations ability to do what they say they will.
4. Environmentalism often has an unrealistic view of nature. It's dynamic, constantly evolving, and "preserving" it is a hopeless undertaking. I would recommend the books of Daniel Botkin on this issue: https://www.danielbbotkin.com/books/the-moon-in-the-nautilus...
5. We have a limited budget and fiscal responsibility requires not spending what you don't have. (This is an element of conservative ideology not represented in either of today's political parties)
As someone who is broadly centre left in outlook, I do actually agree that there is some truth to this. From what I've seen, many environmental campaigners do talk in terms of complete economic and political transformation. And they are often conflate environmental issues with other issues of social and economic justice, even when the actual links between them is questionable. For example, do we have to solve issues of gender, racial, and income inequality in order to stop climate change?
Personally, I think that these issues are not inextricably linked. I'd like to see improvements in all of them. But I also think that climate change is a more pressing issue, because while human-scale problems can always be fixed with more time, runaway climate change is likely a one way process, and one with a very narrow window of opportunity to address. I think many environmental campaigns would find a more receptive audience amongst conservatives if they focused more narrowly on the specific issues of pollution and climate change.
Of course, campaigners do have a answer for this. They argue that these issues are inextricably linked. That the capitalist system is incorrigibly rapacious, and all these different problems are really just products of the underlying dysfunction, and cannot be tackled in isolation. That "evolutionary" improvement is simply an emollient that cannot address the fundamentally catastrophic impact of the free market and the global supply chain on the biosphere, and as such, revolutionary change, even though very difficult, is the only solution that can work, and therefore the only thing worth campaigning for.
My take is that, while some of the fundamentals of modern capitalism are basically broken, with respect to environmental impact, they are still delivering results, in terms of general reduction of overall poverty and improvements to quality of life for the very poorest, and security for the richest. As such, it's not realistic to expect to achieve major changes through campaigns focused on policy. Instead, campaigns to influence policy should focus on specific issues that mitigate the worst of climate change and pollution. Their purpose should be to buy us enough time as a species to solve the other problems using technology. Technological change can deliver genuinely transformative changes to the economy, as we're seeing with the adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles, but not always fast enough.
As someone who left a part of the country that votes Republican to Dem 9:1, this is the mindset of most rural voters (where I'm from at least).
They think pollution and grime are "city problems" because city people are just "dirty sons of bitches". These are people who, once their car breaks down, they just put it into the woods/a creek and forget about it. Old tires? Do the same. Loads of plastic garbage? Slow burn it outside since they don't want to pay the monthly garbage fee. These people think they're clean, but they never stop talking about how it's getting dirtier these days because "those city people are buying up houses here and bringing their shit with em", and not that their waste has just accumulated. In my chunk of rural America, the only reason it's not a total wasteland is because the population density is so low. For how many people live in cities, they're pretty clean. If they were to adopt more rural lifestyles, waste would be everywhere.
To be frank, I just don't think it's as big a problem as GP. It doesn't hurt me if my neighbor has a pile of broken down pallets and yard waste in the corner of his yard - his property is not my problem. If I don't like the way it looks I'll build a fence.
I recently bought a house, and there's a concrete pad in one corner of the property that was once a basketball court. It's mostly buried in a thin layer of dirt now and there's everything from old plumping to odd pieces of granite from the previous owner's construction business piled on it. I'm looking forward to cleaning all of that up this spring and building a shop building on the pad.
Part of the reason for this is that it's quite expensive to deal with it. Even doing the work myself - collecting, hauling it to the dump, and unloading it there - it will still likely cost me a few hundred dollars to deal with it. People here don't have a few hundred dollars to spare for things that aren't necessities, so you end up with what are effectively personal/family dumps on every small piece of property.
Moderate changes here and there, while they may make you feel like your doing something, is merely a band aid on a mighty cut.
As an example, shale gas did more for US CO2 reductions than any policy ever did while at the same time providing cheap energy and to conservatives, cheap energy is just as important as clean environment some would even claim those two go hand in hand.
Coal should and will lose once there is a cheaper, cleaner, more reliable and more effective solution out there. Just like coal replaced the burning of trees and made it possible to provide energy from outside instead of people having to use a fireplace inside their homes (which was very unhealthy).
There actually are better solutions than coal one is nuclear yet an absurd amount of pushback from environmental organizations and too many politicians have kept coal around because of their unsubstantiated fearmongering. Another is shale gas which has reduced the CO2 of the US substantially but despite that is also getting a lot of pushback from environmental organizations and politicians
Neither wind nor solar can provide enough energy at scale and at a realistic price for the US let alone for the entire world yet that is what is being forced rather than the much better alternatives.
"The EPA" !== "environmental protection". It's a government agency, with all the baggage that goes along with it. One can be opposed to the very existence of the EPA while still being strongly supportive if its nominal mission.
The EPA is an expression of that and for a while when there were things that were objectively problematic in the USA it was a great organization.
Today I am not so sure as I think it's been too politicized.
There is an interesting debate about it here:
https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/climate-change...
Certainly the EPA performs a valid role, however that is not to say that any attempts to constrain its increasing creep of scope and overreach of power is automatically bad.
Is it possible to find pictures from the late 60s showing pristine beautiful nature shots?
Is it possible to find pictures from late 60s showing clean and tidy small town streets?
Is it possible to find pictures from 2018 showing residents holding dirty water (ie. Flint, Michigan)?
Is it possible to find pictures from 2018 of dirty filthy slums?
Therefore, whats really the message? Let me guess....someone wants more money for their budget?
https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/51780...
From my perspective, everything in government should get less money. It's not so much a statement against the EPA as it is a statement that the federal government in particular is an order of magnitude too large and powerful.
> it's not in the best interest of the general public, including future generations.
I get where you're coming from, and sympathize with your position - but you've not supported this statement. How would cutting the EPA budget hurt us long-term? Can those effects be mitigated through other, less costly policies?