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Comment by spaetzleesser | Hacker News Reader

It’s very hard to understand why the current administration has such an urge to roll back environmental regulations. I grew up in a time when rivers were red or green depending on what type of leather the factory upstream was processing at the time. The only fish you could see were dead. Breathing in cities was hard. Environmental regulation is a big success story that improved the lives of countless people while companies could still make enormous profits. Why try to roll that back? If anything we should get even more clean.

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Because people helped by something not happening don't put huge amounts of money into Republican politics and companies that have to 'properly' [0] dispose of their toxic byproducts have money to spend.

It's a problem with collective action on a lot of climate problems in particular; the benefits are in the future and dilute while the costs are concentrated and immediate. Because of that there's a LOT of money available to push off imposing those costs and no direct money available to push for imposing them.

[0] Giant air quotes here because the approved disposal method is usually a poorly maintained pond that leeches into the water anyways.

Environmental harm should be one place where the corporate veil should be pierced and people should be held personally liable for their actions and decisions.

If someone dumped tons of deadly chemicals into a river for no reason, and those actions resulted in the long-term deaths of thousands, they'd go to jail. But if that person does the same thing for profit, as an executive of a massive conglomerate, nothing happens to them.

A big issue with pollution cases is it's hard to definitively prove that some pollution event cause a particular person's disease so there's always long drawn out suits where the corporations hold a majority of the power because they have so much more money.

As for piercing the veil it's rarely super clear that someone high up actually forced the pollution to happen. All the internal policies and emails usually say the right thing but the incentives, pressures and money all put pressure to people down the ladder to skirt the rules the inevitably leads to disaster.

The administration is trying to divorce us from much of our dependency on the global order. Part of this agenda comes with the (un?)fortunate fact that we can no longer economically farm out as many of the negative externalities of our consumption to the third world, if we want to mantain it.

From that perspective, deregulating areas which prevent us from competing in historically outsourced industries with large ecological footprints makes perfect sense to them.

I expect this to have a bet-negative impact on our ecosystems, and quality of life. But with any luck, our more informed public - faced with the real externalities of their lifestyles, will be more readily swayed to adjust their consumption patterns in order to make for a better world.

As someone who is quite anxious about climate change, your comment has done the most to give me hope with regards to these rollbacks. To add, if this brings manufacturing back to USA, maybe also the factories will be less polluting/ghg emitting than the factories they are replacing overseas.

My grandfather grew up on a farm and, late in life, retired to a farm. Well, a large portion of the property was a swamp, and if he had his way, he would have tiled that swamp, drained it, and grown corn. But the EPA wouldn't let him, since it was destroying wetlands. So he fulminated against the EPA for not letting him do what he wanted with his land.

And that's why there's a lot of people who hate regulations, especially environmental regulations. They have a very concrete harm from the regulations that they can see (they can't do certain actions), and the benefits are not so easily noticed. Labor regulations, where the benefits are much more easily visible and relatable are likely to have higher support, although I suspect that a large rural constituency wouldn't mind seeing child labor laws repealed.

There's a huge difference between controlling what people do on their own land, and controlling how people affect the broader ecosystem. Burning oil or gas and affecting the atmosphere for everyone is a much larger-scale issue than a local wetland.

(And if you're told you can't turn a swamp into a field, for example, you also ought to get paid for effectively having to maintain a public resource.)

What I don't understand is how that isn't a taking.

Why should the public have to pay you if you bought a farm knowing a lot of it wasn't usable as a farm?

The original comment didn't include that information; that came out later in the thread. The comment implied that the notification happened after it was already owned, as an added restriction.

They didn't pay him for the reduced value of his land, did he? I think that's a lot of the problem with these regulations - the government requires people to abide by them, but does not compensate for them.

The wetlands predated his ownership of the land, and I think the regulations also predated that as well too.

Actually, the local village did offer to buy all the wetlands and a bit more [for road access] to turn into parkland, but my grandparents turned the offer down.

So... he bought cheap land and got mad because he didn't think the rules should apply to him. And then he was too proud to admit that he was wrong. Yeah, that sense of entitlement is a big problem with politics in America.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that these politicians believe they are living in the end times. Whether that's theological end times, environmental end times, or political end times is up for debate, but nothing they do seems to have any kind of sustainability to it. They expect to be dead or out of power soon and are squeezing every last drop while they still can.

James Watt, Reagan's Sec of the Interior, was pretty explicit about this belief. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Watt

Given Watt's public pillorying, methinks the others learned to keep their apocalyptic beliefs on the down low. Mostly.

I really wish people on the "left" would learn that when people voice such beliefs to believe them, that they're not joking.

Edit: Oops. Just saw natch's reply. Sorry for dupe.

I'm not sure how old you are, but it's been a very long time since that was true. You're right that the Clean Water Act was as a big success, but those successes were mostly realized decades ago. At some point, the cost of ever-more stringent environmental regulation outweighs the benefit. In many contexts (e.g., air regulation), there are strong arguments that we are at that point. That is, the cost of incrementally more regulation is very, very high, and the benefit to anyone is very difficult to discern. Whether or not you believe that's true in the context of GHGs largely depends on your overall view of the benefit of mitigating climate change, but your comments seemed directed toward environmental regulation as a whole, and whether any regulation has gone too far.

I would believe that the costs of further clean air improvement are high as measured by annoyance to established people, but not necessarily cost. Where I live, the following would help particulate pollution:

- Eliminating existing grandfathered-in wood burning fireplaces. Costs almost nothing as measured by dollars.

- Emission controls on restaurant exhaust. This is currently required only for restaurants that chat-grill more than a certain amount of beef. Restaurants that smoke up whole blocks grilling pork, lamb, veggies, etc are exempt. These emission controls are not that expensive.

- Outdated fuel-burning devices such as 2-stroke leaf blowers and old cars. Electric leaf blowers are cheap now. Old cars are fun, and banning or taxing them would be unpopular but would cost almost zero dollars.

Where I live, the vast majority of pollution comes from shipping, not residential or light commercial uses. We have arguably the worst traffic in the U.S. in LA, but driving or other individual consumer activities is a drop in the bucket compared the the ecological scarring diesel trucks, LAX and especially the port of LA have done and will continue to do to the region for the foreseeable future, until we change how we fuel transocean shipping and air travel.

https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/6c4535d/214...

That’s a nitrogen oxide plot. NOx isn’t that dependent on how you fuel anything — it’s mostly a function of how you burn it. I don’t know how practical it would be for ships to use a less efficient low-NOx combustion mode when they’re near land.

I would imagine that the average restaurant grill emits very little NOx and a whole lot of PM2.5.

What do you think of PFAS and other "forever chemicals" contaminating many watersheds?

It's not that long ago. I live near by what used to be one of the dirtiest waterways in the the US. Even as recently as the mid-90s, sewage was dumped directly into the waterway and numerous landfills seeped toxic chemicals such as lead and various hydro-carbons into it. The river used to be so toxic that no life beyond worms could inhabit it.

The cleanup for it started in 2006 and is ongoing today. It's only within the past decade that fish finally started swimming in the river. And now the neighborhoods that it runs through are seeing huge increases in property values and new development as this former toxic waste dump is now converted into water-front bike trails and parks.

We absolutely still see the benefits of the Clean Water Act today.

It sounds like the benefit was in complying with the decades old regulations, not anything that had been added in 2006.

I am in my 50s, so not that crazy old. I also remember industry fighting very improvement, be it safety or environment, tooth and nail and warning of massive job losses. These losses never materialized but instead profits kept flowing and life improved massively for all citizens. To me it's total nonsense and FUD that the cost of tightening up standards is too high. It gets prized into the product and smart companies will find ways to adapt. Companies that refuse to adapt deserve to go under.

Actually it's quite easy to understand.

It all comes down to their ideology, which in a nutshell comes down to: maximizing profits and (perceived) short-term gains for its core constituency (i.e. business elites) - and where that's not quite possible, at least keep the illusion of an every-expanding, anything goes "free market" system chugging along for another year or two -- at the expense of everyone and everything else -- and all common sense to boot.

The demographics of voting are not so clear-cut (though income is correlated with votes), and the bigger gap is really between male and female voters.[1] There is also abundant evidence that people do not vote in their economic self-interest.[2]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/does-yo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter

The voters, for the most part, are treated as useful idiots [1]. The real constituents are the business community, which will make or break your candidacy, who not only vote, but more importantly, fund candidates in alignment their own self-interest.

Voting is actually the least effective means of democratic change (It is more effective then sitting at home, and complaining.) The second least effective means of democratic change is getting other people to vote. The most effective means of democratic change is picking the candidates that will be in the running - before voting happens - which can largely be done with dollars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

Money (generally) doesn't buy elections.[1][2]

[1] https://freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/does-money-really-buy-el...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter

Yes correlation != causation. As vkou noted, it's who gets to pick the candidates that matters, which leaves us to pick between a giant douche or a turd sandwich.

A lot of candidates are chosen via the primary not business elites sitting in back rooms choosing candidates.

Money doesn't decide elections, money picks the candidates that run for elections.

There's also the tried-and-true strategy of paying off both candidates, so that regardless who wins, they'll be beholden to you.

I wonder if it's really about that. My guess would rather be that they're trying everything they can to boost the economy for a political advantage. Anyone that comes after them that reintroduces regulations will likely see a reduction (or a smaller increase) in the economy, which would allow them to regain power.

Adam Serwer summed it up fairly succintly: "The Cruelty Is The Point"

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...

You're going to have to do a better job at steel-manning their argument before you can even hope to engage them on this issue.

Besides, post-2016 it appears the business elites have switched sides.

This is an utterly specious claim that overlooks the fact that the oil and gas industry is highly competitive and sells commodities. As a result, Exxon, for example, has a net profit margin well under 10%: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/XOM/exxon/profit-m.... (Compare Google at 20%+ https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/prof...) Because of commodification and competition, almost all cost reductions flow to consumers. If fracking causes the cost of natural gas to drop in half, the producers will capture some profits in the downswing, but most of the benefit will go to consumers who enjoy a large drop in prices. At the same time, oil and gas production creates well-paying jobs for skilled, non-college workers. All that makes policies that make oil and gas products cheaper popular with voters not just popular with "business elites." Indeed, energy prices are highly correlated with both employment rates and Presidential approval ratings: https://seekingalpha.com/article/252704-the-price-of-gas-and...

The "maximizing profits" trope simply doesn't explain why oil and gas has such an outsize influence. If profits are what mattered, the tech sector would have tremendous influence, but it doesn't. It doesn't, because unlike oil and gas it doesn't employ tons of non-college workers in swing states, and the cost of their products doesn't hit everyone in the wallet once a week. Profits are secondary or tertiary at best.

Eh, you basically just verified the point in my opinion..

You try to skirt around the issue saying the profits are maybe being passed down the consumer more than one thinks, ok valid. But the point still remains that everything that is being done is to maximize short term profits / cut short term consumer costs.

>policies that make oil and gas products cheaper popular with voters not just popular with "business elites."

Well.. so what? Of course 95% of people would generally say "MAKE THINGS CHEAPER!" That doesn't mean it should be done.

Besides, you are also making it sound like more people would rather have cheaper gas than a long-sustainable environment. Not so sure you are right on that one.

You linked profits to "short-term gains for its core constituency (i.e. business elites." The notion that voters might be thinking in a short-term way, preferring lower energy costs and lower unemployment in the short term to more sustainable energy policies in the long term, I would agree with that, but I think that's a different argument than what can be fairly derived from your post.

The "maximizing profits" trope simply doesn't explain why o1l and gas has such an outsize influence.

I agree that these kinds of supports (to certain industry sectors) don't always do all that much to maximize their profits (short, let alone long).

The real reason behind them is their symbolic effect. It's the idea of a limitless (and infinitely exploitable) "frontier" -- and the inherent, sacred right of private capital to manage that exploitation, unfettered by regulation -- that they seek to defend with these actions. (That, and the repudiation of basic science on general principles of course).

That some of their donors (who as I'm sure you know will individually benefit many magnitudes of order more than individual consumers will from the temporary increase in economic potential) is a nice plus (icing on the cake) as it were -- but it's not the main driver.

Not only that, as the article point out big companies like Exxon actually supported these methane restrictions - which just so happen to be much harder for their smaller competitors to comply with than the megacorps, meaning that the regulations will reduce competition. Now, of course Exxon insist that they're just doing this because they want to be green, but they not exactly going to come out and say that they like it because they expect it'll increase their profits are they?

> It all comes down to their ideology, which in a nutshell comes down to: maximizing profits and (perceived) short-term gains for its core constituency (i.e. business elites)

That's not it at all. It politics, not ideology.

The fossil fuel industries in the US are huge. They employ millions of people.

But those industries are rightly under attack for causing climate change and generally destroying the environment. If we did the right thing and priced carbon and prohibited pollution then they would be uncompetitive. Those forms of energy would cost more than solar or nuclear or something else and those people would lose their jobs.

Which is what needs to happen, but did you really think they'd go down without a fight? Any politician who wants to win an election in those districts is going to be under pressure to take the "screw the environment to save the oil industry" position. It happens that the oil and coal deposits are disproportionately in red states, so that's where those constituents live and those are the politicians saddled with that voting block.

This is a different motivation than an ideological preference for actual deregulation, which would have them e.g. refusing to regulate the tech industry rather than calling for some ridiculous anti-encryption nonsense.

To get rid of it you need to do one of two things. One option is that when the other team gets in they need to do a better job of completely smashing those industries into smithereens so they no longer represent a powerful constituency (e.g. Obama could have done this but didn't), but they pay a short term cost for doing that. They'd almost certainly lose the next election because in the short term the people whose jobs you just destroyed are going to be angry and resentful. You also run the risk that after you lose the election the other team comes in and undoes what you did.

The other option, and this is the really great one, is that you also pick some evil constituency of the other team and have everyone get together and destroy them both at once, so that politically it cancels out. But that requires a level of bipartisanship that isn't currently very common. It's everybody doing something which is good for the country even though it yields no partisan advantage, and that's not really how modern politicians think, so how do you get it to happen?

> It’s very hard to understand why the current administration has such an urge to roll back environmental regulations.

No, it's very easy. Environmental regulations cost money. Lots of money. It's much more profitable to keep these externalities.

Pretty much. It is annoying, but it is not difficult to understand.

Where does that money go?

To the 0.1%.

Ok Mr. Sanders.

I meant like literally. Where does the money that is spent meeting environmental regulations go? The money is not just being burnt up. It's going to a different segment of the economy, I'm just not versed in what that means or looks like.

Oh, you meant the environmental regulation money? I misread your question, I thought you were talking about the money saved by the oil and gas companies when they removed said regulation.

Anyway, that money is generally spent on equipment and processes to clean up after whatever the company is doing. Collection pods for contaminated water. Scrubbers on chimneys. Direct pay to inspectors to come out and make sure you aren't trying to cheat to save money. That sort of thing. It spreads out across the entire economy. Markets and industries are formed to support finding the cheapest way to keep the processes in question from damaging the environment and requiring much more expensive cleanup (think EPA superfund and class action lawsuits over medical conditions suffered by nearby communities) after the fact.

So it creates jobs? Someone has to build those collection ponds. Those chimney scrubbers don't just grow in the forest.

Why can't Democrats get that message across?

For some strange reason Fox News and AM Talk Radio never mention that part. So the message never reaches the base. The only people who would mention it are the untrustworthy lieberal media.

The Right is dominated in media silos. AM radio is almost exclusively right wing talk these days. FoxNews is 100% propaganda and almost all fiction. Avg people who support the GOP are encrusted inside this silo. They do not listen, watch, read or see any objective news. Its 100% partisan political propaganda. So getting the message through isnt possible. Its about as biased as anything in history. But they'll tell you that they're oppressed by the Liberal Media... Facts be damned.

So it takes a whole bunch of resources that could be used to produce other things and uses them to produce chimney scrubbers, collection ponds, etc. Not only people's time, but also a bunch of raw materials, equipment, etc, all of which then cannot be used for things other than emissions compliance.

You either pay for the cost up front or down the road when that environmental contamination catches up to you.

The EPA is rightfully tired of cleaning up industry messes and would much prefer that the pollution not happen in the first place. It's much easier and cheaper to clean up that way.

So these regulations are all about preventing companies from passing on the costs of cleanup to the general public. One way or another you're paying for it, and it's much less expensive in almost every case if you pay for it up front. The only problem is that the free market doesn't price in externalities unless you force it to (via regulation) so the pollute now and let the public clean it up later approach is always going to win in an unregulated market.

I'd say it goes further than that. With the polarisation of American politics, rolling back environmental regulations is politically popular with one cohort of voters just because it's unpopular with the "other" side.

Repealing regulations (not necessarily environmental ones) was popular enough to be a Trump campaign promise, after all.

I've seen someone's opinion basically summarized as "a lot of these [Trump / republican] supporters don't really reason through anything political beyond "fuck liberals". As long as it opposes the damn liberals and whatever they want, it's all good, no matter how illogical, self-harming, or clueless in any other regard.

When someone summarizes their political rivals' positions as "they're just nasty people who hate me and want to oppose anything I like", I don't think you should put a tremendous amount of stock in that.

That has literally been their stated position: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/own-libs-was-snide-way...

Opinion columns are not particularly strong support for any position. Other than some secondary references in the piece, I don't see anything factual there, just the writer's take on each side baiting the other.

This would be an easier argument to make if one side wasn't making an issue out of wearing masks, fighting for their right to spread a deadly disease to others, and in some cases actually attacking people for asking them to wear masks.

Or the other side trying to force funding marijuana legalization and abortion clinics by holding stimulus relief and supplemental unemployment benefits hostage.

Can you please link me to wear that holding up stimulus relief? The issue holding up relief as I understand the matter are

- Piles of money for military and FBI projects in the same bill

- Despite there being 5 unemployed for every free job not wanting to pay people so much that they will incentivized not to work

- Not waiting to provide additional funds to states to deal with the current crisis

Please. You surely are aware of the recent failed negotiation requirements of the house majority leader.

Nowhere in the democrats bill was there funding for marijuana legalization or abortion clinics. These are literally fake things people are passing around on Facebook. The republicans left people to twist because they are simply greedy.

I dunno. McConnell and Cruz are very proud of their obstructionism. Democrats continue to reach across the aisle, and for what? That doesn't get reciprocated anymore.

Someone on Fox News actually made a bit out of lying about Trump's stance on various things and people would say they agree with Trump's actual stance. I believe there are a number of people on either side that way. They believe the other side is evil and will take the opposite stance on many things just because of that.

See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/opinion/trump-beirut-poli...

Cheap energy is popular with everyone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uVGY3sIBsA

> No, it's very easy. Environmental regulations cost money. Lots of money. It's much more profitable to keep these externalities.

I don't think that's the whole story. You also have Zombie Reaganism, which has the Republicans reflexively aping 80s policy as the response to everything, even though it's not the 80s anymore.

They've profited handsomely from Reagan's policies. That's not exclusive to Republicans either; I think dems would be quite incensed about Hunter Biden in a different political context.

Money can't buy cures for many pollution causing diseases. We should require that those in charge of these regulations must periodically drink from the 'treated' water output which tests as most polluted. Likewise they must breath air samples from the communities that test as most polluted.

Once it's personal, and they can't buy their way out then improvements can be maintained.

> We should require that those in charge of these regulations must periodically drink from the 'treated' water output

Better yet, they and their spouses and children.

> ”Environmental regulations cost money. Lots of money.”

That’s a narrow-minded view. Sure, environmental regulations cost oil and gas companies money.

But this fails to consider the external costs to society: increased healthcare costs and reduced life expectancy due to air and water pollution, future costs of global heating including property damage to coastal cities from rising sea levels, agricultural regions becoming less productive, etc.

Secondly, reducing dependence on fossil fuels (many of which are imported, even in America) will improve energy security and reduce energy costs in the long term. Great economic benefits, as well as environmental ones.

The USA has been improving energy security by reducing net fossil fuel imports since 2005, just not by weaning off carbon-based fuels.[1]

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

the choir errupts in applause

Sure, but oil companies have the narrow view. External costs to society: they care not. Any cost they can pass on to you, they will.

Of course. But is it government’s role solely to boost oil company profits?

Or should they consider these against long-term costs incurred by everyone? Surely there is a middle ground that works for everyone. It’s not as if major oil companies are struggling to survive.

> But is it government’s role solely to boost oil company profits? Or should they consider these against long-term costs incurred by everyone?

We don't live in a world where we get to speculate on what the intended role of government ought to be.

Don't we live in the world where we're free to speculate on pretty much anything?

Sure, but if we're in a thread dealing with the real-life repercussions of keeping our heads in the clouds it feels a little gross.

Those long term costs will be a political disadvantage for liberals, as they will give the GOP plenty of talking points about how they want to take away good honest coal mining jobs. This is the long game in action. Force liberals to make the hard decisions to save the planet, then completely own them with propaganda about those decisions.

It's a winning strategy. Not only in the US, but across most of the Anglo sphere. As an added bonus it provides huge payoffs to billionaires at the cost of the poor and middle class.

”Not only in the US, but across most of the Anglo sphere.”

Not in the UK. Coal use has plummeted by 84% in 5 years (84 million tonnes in 2014 to 8 million tonnes in 2019), while renewable energy has been hugely expanded. All under “right wing” (Conservative) governments.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/09/is-this-...

Coal use has collapsed in the US too entirely for economic reasons, but it doesn't stop the politicians from making ads about how liberals are coming for your jobs because they hate your way of life and airing them constantly in rural areas.

The Right was smart to latch onto coal. It will never come back, so they can complain about it forever. We all know that they love to sell nostalgia.

And their target demographic isn't too interested in facts, so they'll never learn the reality that it was deregulation lead to a natural gas boom, which lead to the free market dealing the death blow to coal. So they can keep selling evil job killing regulations as the reason for the decline of everything great in this country.

Renewables get the headlines, but those coal plants are mostly being replaced with natural gas ones. The media reports "renewables overtake coal for the first time," which gives the false impression that solar and wind are displacing coal. But that's not what's really happening, which is that those former coal plants now burn natural gas because it's cheaper.

> "Renewables get the headlines, but those coal plants are mostly being replaced with natural gas ones."

Not true in the UK. Natural gas use has also declined, albeit only slightly, in recent years. There has also been a net loss of capacity in the past decade as more old NG plants have closed than new ones built.

Meanwhile, coal, which produced 42% of all UK electricity as recently as 2012, has almost gone to zero while renewables (the bulk of which is offshore wind) are at 37% - and growing every year.

Sorry, I thought it was clear that my comments were specific to the USA, where 103 out of 121 coal plants decommissioned since 2011 have been replaced with natural gas plants.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Natural-Gas-Has-Replaced-Ov...

While this specific one doesn't work in the UK, there is a wider thread of "regulation bad" in right-wing British politics; it was a major factor in the Brexit vote.

> That’s a narrow-minded view. Sure, environmental regulations cost oil and gas companies money.

And guess who is making donations, hiring nephews, and making up parts of portfolios. What the parent was saying is that externalities don't matter to these people because we don't value externalities as a society.

Yes, pollution regulation is a classic example of something which has a huge cost on one group (business) and a minor benefit to a large group (everyone else), but the minority is much more motivated. It is an unfortunate byproduct of our government with special interests.

Doesn't this imply that the regulation could never have been passed in the first place?

The major anti-pollution regulations were largely passed against a background of dead and extremely sick people, which concentrated the public's mind. Death and injury from pollution is now greatly reduced and less visible where it does occur, and it's less on peoples' minds, so there's a risk of backsliding.

tragically, markets have a way to settle, such that costs rise to match cash flows.. so the easy (and true) accusation "It's much more profitable to keep these externalities" is part of the story.. profit is sometimes over decades with low margins and upfront investment (coal) .. telling people that the coal barons are simply paying their long term loans and legally-mandated retirement benefits, is not as appealing to outrage the public..

I agree that it is apparently a bonding exercise among certain capital-crowds to dismantle and mock environmental protections. The real world works like that.

Resource extraction provides the cash that is the bread and butter of reactionary and conservative politics. Every penny of cost removed is a penny gained.

With an administration willing to do anything for a little grift, and demographic changes threatening the governing dynamic (non-hispanic whites will be ~50% of the population by 2030-2040), this is the time to cash in.

Follow the money.

I wonder are demographics a factor, here. While I'm not sure about the US, in this part of the world the worst visible impacts of pollution peaked in the 50s to early 60s (the Great Smog of London, which killed 4,000 people at the very least and likely over 10,000, was in 1952, for instance). Most voters today probably haven't seen significant personal impact from pollution, so it might not be as frightening.

That said, it also does seem like this narrative of "regulation is ruining everything", as a sort of objection to regulation as a concept without reference to what the regulation is regulation, has seen an uptick recently, between Trumpism and Brexit.

Money. It really is that simple. Any money that is used to clean or keep clean is not being returned to investors.

> It’s very hard to understand why the current administration has such an urge to roll back environmental regulations.

There's a part of it that's performative. Liberals care about the environment and want to impose regulations, ergo conservatives should disregard the environment and should roll back regulations.

Of course, this is a ridiculous line of reasoning. But it's not meant to convince anyone who would recognize how illogical that is.

It's not that hard.

Some regulations have low cost and high benefit. They should be kept.

Others have high cost and low benefit. They should be removed or reformed.

That takes care of all the low hanging fruit, then the real work begins. High cost and high benefit regulations are where it starts to get significantly more difficult to find the right balance. I would argue that if this balance doesn't at least lean towards the progress of long term environmental goals, then it is the wrong balance.

That would be wonderful. But it's harder than you think.

For regulations that have low cost and high benefit, the costs are often borne by few people, but the benefits are spread among many. Those who bear the costs scream loudly; those who reap the benefits may be mildly grateful. And those who bear the costs try very hard to make this regulation look like it is high-cost and low-benefit.

And the same is true in reverse for regulations that are high-cost and low-benefit. Those who receive the benefit try very hard (and very loudly) to make it seem that the regulation is low-cost and high-benefit.

This can make it hard to determine which kind of regulation is which, even if you genuinely want to. But regulations are political, and politicians care about votes, not necessarily about costs and benefits. As long as the narrow interests care deeply (and vote accordingly), the politicians are not likely to care about the wider interests.

To those pointing out problems with this position I’d say. The real issue is that no politicians even attempt to take this position. We lack a worthwhile Conservative party.

In short because it's an easy to people who are acutely harmed by this stuff (even while experiencing unseen long-term benefits).

I have an early-90s Volkswagen van. It came with a very underpowered and fuel-thirsty gas engine. Eventually it could barely make it up the hills around here, and was prohibitively expensive (not to mention unreliable) to use practically.

I replaced the old engine with a modern TDI that gets ~33mpg and is undoubtably cleaner than the 80s-era technology that powered it before. It gave the van a renewed life, keeping it from being crushed and precluding the environmental cost of building a new car. And above all, it solved my problem in a mentally engaging way.

For this I have been rewarded with constant red tape from the state department of air quality and EPA. They test tailpipe opacity while driving it on a set of rollers (if I can find a tech that knows how to drive stick shift). The standard to beat is 20% opaque, which would choke out the room. Despite the LED/opto pair usually measuring less than 1% opaque, it once measured 100% opaque. Think about that for a minute.

I am not the only one to have done something like this, much less the only one to have EPA-mandated portable gas container designs break & spill, EPA-mandated sensor systems break and cost hundreds, etc. I'm not the only one who's been annoyed by land closures (despite having a permit) due to the EPA's concerns of dust entering the air. This is to say nothing of e.g. the farmers who have had increased compliance costs and fines for operating on their own land. A politician coming out against the EPA is an immediate emotional appeal to many people who are somewhat likely to support Trump's ideas to begin with. These people feel they have been hamstrung by the man, and apparently think that mining for uranium in the Grand Canyon is a reasonable price to pay to beat back the EPA a little.

The answer, of course, is to be more sensible in the way that the environment is regulated. No, people should not mine the Grand Canyon (at least not in any way mining is currently conducted). No, a yearly tailpipe opacity test is not an effective way of regulating diesel emissions. But unfortunately, politics turns everything into an emotional appeal that leads to both sides talking past one another. I think the best thing we can do as individuals is honestly try to be better.

Not if you pay attention at all to national politics, it isn't.

Most companies are not going to go backwards because they know that a second a Democrat is in charge, they're going to be tasked with sticking to tougher regulations. They're not going to backfall after this much time and energy has been spent on the issue.

Trumpism isn't about doing what's smart, though. It's about smiting those who disagree with you and dismantling the regulatory state while strengthening the administrative state by stacking the courts so that Congress is locked out of decision making. They aren't doing it because it's the smart thing to do. They're doing it because Democrats hate it.

If its good for the masses, Trump will almost certainly do the polar opposite. He has proven to be one of the worst people in our country's history and yet somehow, 100million American's support the guy and his actions. Odd since 99/100 are in direct contrast to their actual needs...

History will not be kind to Trump or to his followers. The coming economic shift with automation are going to eat the last of their jobs and their future. To them, as long as it makes the Left cry, its totally worth destroying everything along the way...

Ignorance is not a virtue as one cannot eat, drink or breath money.

To begin let me caveat that I'm a huge proponent of environmental regulation. That said, most of the regulations Trump is rolling back aren't longstanding ones that produced the cleanups you observed. They're ones the Obama administration rushed through in the last year or two of his presidency, which often had quite sweeping effects or federalized things that had previously been regulated at the state level.

These methane regulations are a good example. Every state that has oil & gas drilling already regulates methane emissions as part of the necessary permits. The Obama EPA enacted a rule to federalize those standards that took effect in March of 2016. It's a duplicative rule that's been operative for about five minutes.

I like Obama a lot, but on the environmental front, he was willing to spend zero political capital to achieve consensus on environmental reforms. To the contrary, he won reelection on a pro-coal and pro-fracking platform! Here is Obama criticizing Romney for standing in front of a coal plant (as Governor) and saying "this plant kills": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXRmlxBDjfE. Here is Obama talking about the how great fracking is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uVGY3sIBsA. He somehow found environmental Jesus around 2015 and rushed through a bunch of regulations at the last minute. But, as such, his successor is perfectly entitled to reverse them just as quickly and easily.

It's very easy to understand if you know what "coal rolling" is. As with many of the administration's actions, this is just Executive-level coal rolling.

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