EPA prepares weakening of mercury regulations | Hacker News Reader

EPA prepares weakening of mercury regulations

nytimes.com

53 pointsbigmit3721 comments

Typical NYT article.

Vague and handwringing up front.

Then the truth is buried at the bottom where nobody is going to find it.

Turns out, the rule was passed in 2011. It was challenged in court, and the Supreme Court upheld the challenge. It appears the Obama administration was using dubious logic to calculate the "co-benefits"... which is what everybody knows is going on anyway.

This is just a fancy justification to let the Obama administration kill coal power plants. I'm not for or against it, but it seems obvious.

If a previous administration passed a rule, I don't know what argument we can use to say that a future administration can't change that rule.

And anyone knows that it's pretty easy to lie with statistics and estimates, so the Obama administration surprisingly decided that the rule brought more benefits than costs, and the industry surprisingly says that the rule costs $1500 for every $1 in benefits. The truth is somewhere in between. I don't know what the truth is.

The only thing I know is that the NYT isn't helping us get there and appears to think the truth is irrelevant.

Economics killed coal, because of natural gas being so cheap, but now solar power and wind power and competitive. We shouldn't forget what the acid rain was doing before we started reducing sulfur emissions. Mercury is another thing we don't necessarily want more of. in you opinion, how should we approach controlling emissions of things like mercury that are known to be unhealthy in certain amounts. It's not like the obama admin invented this idea.

The sad thing is that the only thing that might save the higher tropic fish like tuna from extinction is increasing the mercury levels to make eating them so bad for human health that we quit eating them. Unfortunately, the the mercury level needed to keep the Japanese from having a nice sushi dinner may be higher than the lethal mercury level for tuna. Only time will tell I guess.

> If a previous administration passed a rule, I don't know what argument we can use to say that a future administration can't change that rule.

This is what's going through the courts now with the DACA program. It isn't a law but something the Obama administration came up with. Up til now the courts have said the current administration doesn't have good enough reasons to rescind it.

So there are a few legal arguments that prevent rule changes.

The fact that this administration is trying to roll back a lot of environmental policies is my number one concern. Environmental regulation has been such a huge success story over the least decades. It's just insane to roll this back.

Regulations have worked too well that people have forgotten just how bad the US was. The GOP’s anti-regulation campaign has been successful in getting the public to go against their own self-interest.

This also happens to systems administrators. If the network works well you get asked what you are doing the whole day since everything works fine. Time to cut support staff.

Depends on how you measure success.

If you care about the environment it’s a success.

If you care about creating jobs for blue collar workers regardless of how it impacts the environment then it was a relative failure.

Putting it into a binary 'environment/jobs' is one of the more silly ways of attempting to measure the success of these regulations.

Did mandating the removal of lead from gasoline affect businesses? Probably. But I imagine no one here would defend the use of leaded gasoline now knowing about the possible links between lead and crime. We should absolutely care about the environment because as it turns out, the environment affects the people and in turns affects our society.

That's an argument straight from the 1960s-1970s. Creating jobs 'at all costs' is definitely not the answer and should not even be an option.

What would create more jobs, running the same old coal power plant a couple more years or building a million new wind turbines? Or running the same old coal power plant or inventing, building and installing new filters and furnaces for existing plants? With the added benefit of having a great new technology to export and sell overseas if you're the world's first to have it (=require it)

Exactly. Maybe some companies would have higher cost but that money would flow to other companies making that equipment. In the end it may be a net positive.

How do you know that environmental regulation actually cost blue collar jobs? They always say that but what is based on?

>They always say that but what is based on?

Rhetoric from the current administration and 'news' agencies.

False dichotomy

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/regulat...

None of this should be a surprise, considering this is the same admin that also predicts that the planet will warm by about 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, but argues that any sort of environmental regulation won't help therefore we should just roll them back anyways [1].

Make no mistake, these rollbacks can and will hurt a lot of people. Not the people advocating for them though since they'll likely be dead and buried by the time we see the dire consequences for their actions.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/documents/ld...

> Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who is now the acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency

and

> The details of the rollback about to be proposed would also represent a victory for Mr. Wheeler’s former boss, Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of the Murray Energy Corporation, one of the nation’s largest coal companies. Mr. Murray, who was a major donor to President Trump’s inauguration fund, personally requested the rollback of the mercury rule soon after Mr. Trump took office, in a written “wish list” he handed to Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

It's difficult for me to imagine how this cartoon-level villainy could get any worse, but I guess I'm numb at this point.

> It's difficult for me to imagine how this cartoon-level villainy could get any worse, but I guess I'm numb at this point.

There are days when i feel like reality is trolling me

> It's difficult for me to imagine how this cartoon-level villainy could get any worse

You had to say something...

"Trump announces the new vice-chairman and the new head of the FDA: Walter White and Jeffrey Dahmer"

They are literally taking away the very fabric of a civilized society.

But think of all the shareholder value this creates! And since we live within a capitalistic society, creating shareholder value is the only thing that matters. So clearly Trump is the most greatest president to have ever lived.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com