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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

> ”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.

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> 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.

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.

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...

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.

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