Photos taken by the EPA reveal America before pollution was regulated | Hacker News Reader

Photos taken by the EPA reveal America before pollution was regulated

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157 pointskevinconaway62 comments

We look back at the suburbanization of America with such regret, but looking at these pictures, it’s hard to imagine sticking it out in these cities during that time.

I question how anyone who was alive back then would want to return to this. Compare today to the 70s—an era with high inflation and unemployment—you’d think that generation would marvel at how low the cost of environmental protection has been. Yet, it seems it’s the younger generations who are most concerned with the environment.

The younger generation will have to suffer longer than the older one.

This is common across the world.Not sure if there's a special word within the books of psychology, however people somehow manage to manufacture memories of limited spectrum,aka only remembering the things they really like about that particular moment.Most of those, who rave how great 70's or 80's were, remember it when they were young. They remember relationships,parties,family stuff but not a factory chimney spitting out black fumes. When I ask my parents how they remember soviet occupation, my dad has very fond memories of it,as he was young, used to play music in local discotheques and had it very easy.My mother,on the other side,used to queue outside empty shops for hours with two little kids hoping they will sell something,so obviously she hated it then and she hates it now.

I wonder how much of this also might have to do that some bad things weren't noticed because most people were used to them and took them as given. If you always lived next to the giant, smoking chimney, are you going to get up every morning and be upset about the smoke ruining the air? It's different if it gets built after you've lived without it.

Now we have many younger people growing up with decent environment around them and we see on TV how the polar bears are starving, the ice is melting and the coral reefs are being bleeched.

That's also a very valid point and is applicable across many fields. For instance, I did some shopping the other day. Went to Waitrose,which is essentially an upmarket food retailer in the UK.I bought some veg,including some tomatoes.The price was 2-3 times higher than in other places.They had a strong and pleasant natural smell,which is almost nonexistent when you buy cheaper tomatoes.Now if someone grew up in a large city and never had a chance to have an access to a private garden where vegetables grow, he's used to that lack of taste and thinks it's normal. However I know how a real tomatoe from your own garden tastes so it's easy to understand the difference. Hadn't I lived in a house in a small city,all these things would be Impossible to understand.The same applies to pollution- once you go outside your polluted city,you realise how fantastic the air can be in the middle of a forest.

Ah yes, the good old days. When manufacturing jobs were plentiful and American production was second to none.

It’s important to remember the cost of what made America “great” back then.

Nothing changed, beside world-scale NIMBY'ism. The choice to be made is simple, either lower life standards to Bangladesh level (the only level sustainable at +7 billions inhabitants) or pay the unsustainable price. No amount of tech or virtue signaling is gonna change that fact.

I made my choice.

Which was?

I have no idea what you're even saying or inferring.

He's saying the same photos can be taken today, just not here.

he is saying the first world lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable with a multi billion person population on one earth sized planet and he is probably correct.

Well, I think it’s clear that the prospect of deep lifestyle changes, specifically downgrades, will never prove very popular. Especially since upper class lifestyles are not likely to change nearly as much as working class.

But also, measures to control population strike deeply dystopian chords, and result in similarly adverse reactions.

I think most people realize things have long not been sustainable... but it isn’t obvious what to do about that. I think that’s why the focus has been on technology that can buy us more time. Anything else that could help is probably not gonna happen in short order...

As long as so many people still consider it a personal affront to even hear the slightest suggestion that one of the easiest things they can do to contribute to a better world is simply eat less meat, I don't have a whole lot of hope.

Really subjective as well. It's just as easy to argue that calories dense meat/fat is more efficient that calories starved greens or fattening processed carbs.

This problem will fix itself soon enough when synthmeat reaches its tipping point. At some point on the price/quality curve, social signal theory will kick in, and it will become unacceptable to kill actual animals for meat.

We'll save a lot of water when that happens, which isn't a bad thing regardless of your position on animal rights.

Civilization isn't a zero-sum game. Everyone, without exception, who has ever claimed otherwise, has been wrong. In order for someone living in the middle of Africa or India to live better, you and I don't have to live worse.

> measures to control population strike deeply dystopian chords

This is only a matter of time though. What happens when we hit 10B, then 15B? This idea will start to gain more appeal as time goes on.

To be fair: are we going to hit 15B? With the rate population growth is declining, I don’t think that is a guarantee anymore.

I’m not saying I disagree FWIW. Just saying I think the problem is nearly intractable; humanity as a whole may literally rather see the end of itself than make lifestyle concessions.

I think deep lifestyle changes are shortly to become very popular, in the same sense as drowning suddenly becomes in vogue when one’s neighborhood is hit by a tsunami.

They're saying we moved the problem to India/China. And it's true, to some extent.

Presumably the fact that we’re still consuming resources faster than the earth can replenish them.

https://www.overshootday.org/

I think we can do better than that.

Healthcare doesn't have major impacts on the environment.

Flushing toilets are probably a net benefit for the environment.

This [1] suggests we can all live like China, but we can probably do a little better if we remove the coal power stations and use that co2 budget for something else.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33133712

Please provide some support for your assertion that environmental laws are the reason for the decline of US manufacturing.

In my view this is just a right-wing talking point to try to destroy our ability to keep clean the commons in a working economic system.

I’m sure we could’ve had cleaner air and water with manufacturing jobs.

However, we sent many of those jobs to Mexico and China where they have fewer environmental and safety regulations.

We gutted blue collar jobs and created the current populist environment because we didn’t want to pay fair wages.

In addition, the large increase in pollution and CO2 in China (largest producer by far) is because Europe and the US exported steel mills, factories, etc.

Even if the US hadn't changed its environmental laws, your industry would have moved production to places with lower wages.

Absolutely stunning pictures.The difference today is that we don't see all this anymore,as it's often happily exported to countries that are willing to take all the dump. Howeve, probably the best thing was the removal of large, polluting factories from cities,which had a huge impact on the quality of air.

Why were regulatory bodies needed? Why wasn't the market able to decide they don't want smog and pollution?

Polluting cost them nothing.

It was the public who shouldered the cost, while they took all the profit. Same as CO2 today, but visible.

Pollution is the most obvious example of externalities leading to "market failure". Clean air, similarly, is the most basic example of a public good subject to the free rider problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

Markets are not infallible tools. They are a pattern of human interaction that has certain pros and cons. It is a very powerful pattern, one that we should continue to use. But not blindly.

One of the common modes failure for markets is situations with negative externalities. There is a negative outcome, a cost, that is not borne by the participants in a transaction. Thus, they have no economic incentive to do anything about it. The participants keep doing business, and the negative outcome keeps happening.

Environmental damage is a very common example of negative externalities. E.g. groundwater poisoning, air pollution (which causes millions of deaths per year [1]), ecosystem destruction, climate change, and so on.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/air_pollution.htm

some of these photo with the smoke stacks could have been taken today... probably a lot of the others too

for the longest time the only thing that ever came to mind for me about the EPA was that Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd called one of their employees “dickless.”

Considering the Ghostbusters were operating an unlicensed nuclear reactor, I actually think the EPA was right in that movie.

Is this true?

Yes sir, it's true. This man has no dick.

Ghostbusters was subtle Reaganomics propaganda. In the film the government is the enemy and the heros are libertarians, self-described operators of unlicensed particle accelerators.

Air pollution was already being increasingly dealt with by municipal smog laws before the EPA was created.

In certain cities.

Rivers and groundwater were totally undefended.

"Increasingly dealt with" only in the sense of having gone from not even having laws on the books to having laws on the books that did nothing. Unfortunately, air and water do not respect human political boundaries. Businesses can move, or threaten to move, either taking advantage of weaker regulation in the new location or keeping them weak in the old one (respectively). We still see these effects across national boundaries, even though both pollutants and jobs are less mobile between nations than they were between states. EPA was created because local efforts had almost completely failed time after time, and would have continued to fail for obvious reasons.

Cities still produce a lot of waste each day. The theory of infinite growth on a finite planet is failed from birth, but there are still supporters of a 10-20 billion population. The result: lots of waste and pollution.

I agree with you, granted there's many efficiencies that can be made that would likely make 10-20B doable.

0.5-3x is a large range to talk about what's not doable.

It is not about making it doable, the questions are: is it needed? is it worth it? what will be the quality of life in a world with 20 billion? Every big city has a housing crisis already, how is this solved for 20 billions? What about energy and waste?

Like I said, there are many efficiencies that could be made. The burden wouldn't be that much different than now. The world is extremely inefficient.

Check out Hans Rosling's arguments why the population growth uncertainty is mostly over (he estimates that we won't go much over 11 billion).

I am curious about the black swan events potentially changing this calculus; i.e. food replicators or tricorder-like medical help, or breakthroughs in life extension biotect, etc.

Hans Rosling knows far more than I do about all this, but I'm curious how it will all play out. Maybe there will be no such black swan events affecting population growth.

Make America great again

s/great/choke/

> None of the 35 photos are pretty (other than the film-photo haze), but it's worth remembering what US cities used to be like before we cared what we put into the air, soil, and water.

IMO, this is disingenuous. I think that there's a very good argument made against federal agencies that are run by bureaucrats with zero skin in the game. These kinds of sytems are also ripe for corruption. The counter-claim that there's no way local governments could come together and offer a comparable solution is dubious. Fun fact: the EPA spends ~16 million tax dollars a day.

As a side note, it's also interesting how HN has sort of politically migrated from moderate-center-libertarianism (when I first started reading it) to left-leaning-federalism.

> The argument that there's no way local governments could come together and offer a comparable solution is dubious.

Local governments can't even agree on regional transportation or housing policies. Every one wants to cheat or have someone else pay for it.

> The counter-claim that there's no way local governments could come together and offer a comparable solution is dubious.

If they could, why didn't they? The federal government wasn't exactly quick to react to the problem, though when it did it was reasonably effective.

They did. See, for example, the California Air Pollution Control District Act of 1947. I'm sure other states had similar laws passed. To argue that the EPA "fixed pollution" is very reductive, but I guess people believe whatever they want to believe.

These photos were taken almost thirty years afterwards. So either their attempts to fix the rampant pollution was an abject failure or it was lipservice.

Local governments are not immune to corruption either, especially when business incentives tend to have even stronger local ties. Plus, what if a city decides to be negligent and not fix the problem in the first place? What if that city's pollution starts crossing state lines? etc

This isn't something that can just be outsourced to local governments especially when there's plenty of evidence that they failed to control the problem.

Why use the daily cost of the EPA, unless you're trying (very obviously) to scaremonger?

To put that figure in perspective, it's $5.8B a year. This is much lower than most departments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_bud.... The DoD spends the EPA's yearly budget in about three and a half days.

The US spends $1.8B a day on defense?

Obviously I knew the budget was larger than any other nation, but this does put it into perpective.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_Unite...

It seems less implausible when you consider that essentially none of it is actually being spent on defense, as such.

5 US cents per day per citizen. A monthly subscription of $1.50.

Well, you know, that Spotify subscription doesn't look quite so cheap any more.

Even if there's a good argument to be made, I think the argument of having a larger body do the regulation still wins out. Local governments simply do not have the incentives to make many of the changes required. For example, it's very worth it for Indiana to dump steel mill runoff straight into the great lakes. Their slice of the lake is small and it saves lots of money. But the issue is that Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan all have a vested interest, and have to pay those externalities. When push comes to shove, Indiana isn't going to pay a bunch more money just because they were asked nicely by nearby governments.

Really, I think the argument is strongly in favor of the opposite direction. As the scale of problems increase, the oversight of the agency that deals with them needs to as well. Hence, why it's so hard to see any meaningful progress in worldwide cooperation on reducing emissions -- when it comes down to it, some countries just don't want to pay more money to pollute less. And who's gonna stop them?

>The counter-claim that there's no way local governments could come together and offer a comparable solution is dubious.

It's not so much that localities can't as it is they didn't. Besides, pollution often affects large areas and crosses state boundaries. That sounds like the federal government's concern.

I'm a pretty hard libertarian in most respects, a mechanism like the EPA is needed, even if you replace it with pollution taxes - I grew up in an area with heavy air pollution that has been cleaned up thru regulation, Americans deserve clean air, water and earth - no one has a right to force their pollution on someone else, and you either get the companies to clean up their own act voluntarily or force them thru law. period.

You're right in that there is a real issue with everyday Americans having too little recourse against the administrative state, unwinding all regulation isnt the way however to fix that.

I don't understand how that statement is disingenuous. It's completely true that smog, air quality, etc. were bigger problems before the establishment of the EPA and the passage of the Clean Air Act. There's a reason the EPA was established, and I think it is naive to claim that local stopgap legislation could have addressed the national/international problem, especially since they had failed to do so before the establishment of the EPA.

Pollution specifically is an economic issue that involves heavy externalities, so I believe it requires at least some centralized regulation to address. Of course, there's inefficiencies in government bureaucracy, and we should seek to eliminate inefficiencies when we find them. But I don't know if I'm willing to risk the climate where I live to local governments halfway across the country (or world).

I think the argument is that local politicians have too much skin in the game, namely their re-election. Their local laws affect surrounding communities as well. For example, to get re-elected Governor Bob declares all pollution levels dismissed. Manufacturing in the state booms, thousands of jobs are created and Bob handily wins re-election.

Coal ash and chemical run-off is dumped into all the rivers and lakes. Farmers pour on the phosphorus and algal blooms choke the bay killing the fishing for 3 neighboring states. Cancer rates soar not only in Bob's state but also adjoining ones.

The coal industry starts contributing to several PACs supporting Bob.

But jobs, jobs, jobs. Bob is pretty sure he is going to run for senator after he term limits out of Governor.

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