EPA declines to tighten soot pollution standards | Hacker News Reader

EPA declines to tighten soot pollution standards

axios.com

122 pointshhs107 comments

> The move is "backed by chemical, oil and other industry groups that bear the costs of implementing the higher standards," the Journal writes.

I'm bothered by this description. The polluters are not paying for their external costs (i.e., the pollution they're putting into the atmosphere). Those costs have serious effects beyond their bottom lines, like 12,000 additional deaths per year.

I think this is a more accurate desciption:

> The move is backed by chemical, oil and other industry groups that are benefiting financially by foisting the costs of their pollution on society.

Or in economic terms, these companies currently benefit from unpriced and unmitigated externalities and to nobody's surprise would like things to stay that way.

Chemical, oil, etc., are competitive markets where cost increases rapidly get passed into consumers. So the most accurate description would be:

> The move is backed by chemical, oil, and other industry groups that bear the immediate costs of implementing higher standards, and whose customers (which is almost everybody) enjoy lower prices by dealing with the pollution generated by these activities.

Except that while everyone might enjoy the lower prices, the poor and minorities bear the brunt of pollution externalities.

Are minorities more susceptible to environmental pollution?

Poor folks can't afford fancy air quality monitors, filtering, well-built houses without leaks, or houses on the clean-air side of town. They are more likely to work outside.

Poor communities are almost always on the east side of town because (in the Northern Hemisphere) prevailing west winds usually blow the town's pollution east. This is also how the "right" and "wrong" side of the tracks came about.

It bears similarities to heat waves, which mainly kill the poor. You never see headlines about how the last heat wave killed twenty-three investment bankers in their penthouses.

You're talking about poor people, not minorities, though there's an overlap. There's also an overlap with white people. Actually, the focus should be on people that are disproportionately affected by pollution, regardless of their skin tone. There are towns around refineries and heavy industry that are predominantly white. Are you implying we should care less about them?

No, but they tend disproportionately to live in areas near pollution sources.

You mean poor people tend to live closer to sources of pollution.

That is also true.

You say that as if it's a bad thing, but making pollution more expensive for the consumer is a good thing. Pricing pollution into the cost of the product will induce some consumers to spend their limited resources on less polluting options, which is exactly what we want them to do.

Find a politician who wants to raises taxes for everybody in their current term. That's why so many countries are announcing they are banning ICE cars in a decade or more. By that time everybody would have forgotten which politician enacted it, if they are even still in a political career.

You’re insufficiently cynical. By the time these ICE car bans go into effect, politicians whose terms it will fall on will grant “temporary extension” until after their term, rinse and repeat.

I suspect that many are hoping that ICE cars will be more expensive and less popular by the time their ban rolls around.

Activists, maybe, but politician's only hopes are about reelection, not environment.

Politicians really hope that too; that way if they're still in power the technical ban will be nothing more than an interesting note than anything that actually needs to be done.

> You say that as if it's a bad thing, but making pollution more expensive for the consumer is a good thing.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing. We should make polluting activities more expensive. But the accurate version of the statement shows why we won’t do it: most of the increased costs will be passed onto voters. Not only that, but higher gas prices dampen consumer spending and slow economic growth: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/how-higher-gas-prices-hur...

Focusing on “big evil oil companies” makes for a neat narrative, but it blinds us to reality. There is a reason Obama attacked Romney in 2012 for wanting to shut down a coal plant: https://www.politico.com/blogs/politico44/2012/08/new-obama-... (“New Obama ad hits Romney on coal 'kills people' remarks”). There is a reason Obama still proudly takes credit for fracking: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/nov/28/obama-takes.... He’s not doing this to appease the Exxon. He’s doing it because making polluting activities cheap is politically necessary.

> Yes, but: The agency's scientists in a report last year said studies support a new limit between 8 and 10 micrograms, which they said could potentially save more than 12,000 lives a year.

> But officials noted that U.S. particulate matter levels are 20% lower than in France, Germany and Great Britain, and five times below the world average, per WSJ.

I'm floored. I think this is the most informative article describing an EPA rule I've seen in years. Our discourse would be so much more fruitful if we compared what we're doing to what folks are doing in our counterpart developed countries.

Those countries probably have a much higher population density than the US. To make a valid comparison, I think you need to level that difference.

The comparison with “the world” includes places like Mongolia and other large places with little soot pollution.

Mongolia is probably not the exampke you are looking for... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/mongo...

Ha, good point! But I imagine they still have very low overall soot pollution when averaged over the entire country. Who knows... but thanks for educating me.

I’m wondering if it's more to do with diesel passenger vehicles.

You have to work really hard to even find a diesel passenger car in the States. Whereas, at least for right now, they’re ubiquitous in the EU. (I mean an every day consumer vehicle you buy at a car dealership, ranging from a hatchback to an SUV.)

Which was ostensibly good for carbon emissions, given the fuel efficiency of contemporary diesel engines. Except, oops, they were lying through their teeth about non-CO2 emissions, and they kick out a godawful amount of pollution.

Right. Diesel is filthy and thankfully never became very popular in the US except for tractor/trailers and railroads.

I believe wood burning fires and trash fires also contribute.

Hence my comment tying soot to population density.

And to check myself…

https://www.dieselforum.org/diesel-drivers/clean-diesel-vehi...

Yup, outside of heavy-duty body-on-frame trucks and SUVs, they are gone now.

Although I swore the Mazda CX-5 had a diesel option…

> outside of heavy-duty body-on-frame trucks and SUVs

But aren’t the best selling cars in the US exactly heavy-duty body-on-frame trucks and SUVs?

The most popular car in the US for the last 30 years is the F-150.

Yes…but even in that class, they sell a teeny, tiny percentage as diesels.

https://www.dieselforum.org/vehiclesales/u-s-vehicle-sales-d...

And though I cannot find a citation, I swear I have heard the best-selling F-150 engine is the turbocharged gasoline V6.

I didn't realize this until 10 years after I started feeling these feelings, but diesel exhaust elicits a strong feeling of nostalgia in me from my travels throughout Europe. I would be occasionally reminded of it in the United States but I never knew what it was until I stood next to an idling 18 wheeler

Sigh, oh, that lovely passage in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time when he writes of diesel exhaust…

Diesel exhaust smells like ice cream to me. I assume it's an association from diesel ice cream vans as a kid.

I have similar association between bottled propane smell and cotton candy — cotton candy vendors around here used gas powered machines, which must have leaked during operation.

I have the exact same nostalgia from that smell, although I was fortunate enough to know what it was at the time (“exhaust” not diesel specifically).

Diesel is definitely part of the story. High fuel taxes in the EU help lead to more diesel given their superior fuel efficiency. But more diesels mean more particulate matter.

Those countries do have higher population density, but air quality in US cities is still better than air quality in European cities.

Which actually makes it worse from a human perspective, since there are more people there to actually breathe in that particulate matter.

It's informative, but if everyone used this logic, nobody would improve. Suppose all nations on Earth had particulate level X, which instead of 12,000 deaths, caused 10 times as many.

We could pat ourselves on the back for doing great compared to our peers. That's not how one innovates.

Pollution of almost all forms should eventually be made illegal. There is no reason the broader population should have to suffer from the externalities of profit seeking companies.

What other countries are doing in this regard is irrelevant. The U.S. is largely considered the leader of the free world. We need to start acting like it and set examples the rest of the world can follow.

> The U.S. is largely considered the leader of the free world.

I can assure you the rest of the world doesn't see it that way.

The rest of the free world would be investing a bit more into defense if what you say is true.

"To lead" has nothing to do with that metal, "lead".

The US hegemony has always relied on science and culture more than brute force. Proof: during the Cold War, both sides had about equal militaries. Or, at least, equal for all practical purposes, i. e. killing everyone and everything 20-times over.

And yet it were eastern regimes that had to build walls to keep their citizens from stampeding westwards. Nobody in West Germany was prosecuted for watching the East German TV channel. Not just because it wasn't illegal, but mostly because it was done rarely, and mostly ironically. The reverse landed quite a few people in jail.

Judging by peoples' actions immediately after the fall of the wall, they weren't afraid of anything American. Or else it's hard to explain how about half of them used their first trip across the border to get a Big Mac.

Are you saying it has more to do with chairing meetings?

No idea what you're insinuating. I believe most international meetings are run with rotating chairs.

The concept is called "soft power". Practically, it means that when the US asked for something before, say, 2016, they'd get their wish, as long as it wasn't entirely unreasonable and/or didn't cost others too much.

Nowadays, they have trouble getting other countries to pick up the phone.

And while that is likely to improve somewhat within a month or so, it isn't ever going to go back to where it was.

You think you can get the French to agree to, say, extended copyright terms that benefit Disney and Microsoft with military threats? How does that work, exactly? Even born-again christians are going to have a hard time to justify mass murder with some marginal economic utility.

> Pollution of almost all forms should eventually be made illegal.

You can’t do anything without generating pollution. None of the things that enable this interaction on HN exist without pollution.

> There is no reason the broader population should have to suffer from the externalities of profit seeking companies.

Sure—the reason is that nearly everyone uses the things that are produced as a byproduct of this pollution. And these industries are highly competitive. Just as rising prices of crude oil quickly get passed along to consumers, so do the rising costs of environments compliance. Rising environmental standards also accelerate the exodus of manufacturing jobs to places like China with less stringent regulations.

> What other countries are doing in this regard is irrelevant. The U.S. is largely considered the leader of the free world. We need to start acting like it and set examples the rest of the world can follow.

Governance isn’t an exercise in moral posturing. It’s about making various trade-odds in a finite world governed by brutal laws of physics and economics. When you increase pollution standards, you save some lives, but increase people’s cost of living, and push more jobs to China. How other countries make these trade-offs is highly relevant.

>>> You can’t do anything without generating pollution. None of the things that enable this interaction on HN exist without pollution.

Uh, you can absolutely be pollution neutral. You can be carbon neutral, and I don't buy for one microsecond that there are 0 technologies that could filter soot from smokestacks. In fact, we could recapture all of it.

If you read about the history of pollution, you'll see that the "informed tradeoffs" is a complete fairy-tale. It's mostly ignorance and abuse of the poor by the wealthy (who put polluting factories in poor areas like West Virginia).

Some reading: https://www.ehn.org/dupont-c8-parkersburg-2644262065.html

> Uh, you can absolutely be pollution neutral. You can be carbon neutral, and I don't buy for one microsecond that there are 0 technologies that could filter soot from smokestacks. In fact, we could recapture all of it.

You said “pollution” should be banned. That includes a whole lot more than soot. And no, you can’t recapture “all” of the soot from a smokestack. Filtering particulates out of flue-gas stacks is a whole field of engineering. And that’s just one source. PM2.5 is produced by a huge variety of human activity: https://www.pca.state.mn.us/air/sources-air-pollution-most-i.... The dominant source is actually residential wood burning.

> If you read about the history of pollution, you'll see that the "informed tradeoffs" is a complete fairy-tale. It's mostly ignorance and abuse of the poor by the wealthy (who put polluting factories in poor areas like West Virginia).

I focused on environmental policy in law school. It is absolutely about informed trade-offs, within an economic framework. Equity is one part of policy, but the field is not “mostly” about that. Of course that aspect of it gets a lot of press, because it makes for easy narratives for liberal arts major journalists who have trouble with science and economics.

The future is clean energy and clean manufacturing. We can either embrace it and reap the rewards or we can cede the market opportunities to China and others.

The laws of physics are irrelevant, we already have the technology to accomplish most of what we need. And regarding the laws of economics, we are in a period of record low inflation (according to the fed) despite record low interest rates. As such, this would be a prefect time to make the transition to clean tech. There is tons of capital floating around desperately seeking returns, and a little inflation would be very welcome right now.

Diesel cars are much more popular in Europe, so it's not a great measure.

Luckily, coal is becoming less and less profitable compared to renewables. Not saying the decision is good, but pure economics will hopefully solve this problem in the long run.

Coal isn't even all of the problem. "Rolling Coal" is a personal political statement of thousands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

Greenland once had a booming ecotourism industry, driving people across the ice sheet in diesel powered trucks. That is, until the diesel soot particulates destroyed the routes across the ice sheet.

That's actually easy to regulate at the state level, if states were on board. Simply failing inspection would take them off the road.

Usually they have a hidden switch to toggle the mode. I guess the best method would be dash cam evidence

Why not have officers pull them over and fine them?

We have fines for littering and broken tail lights. Egregious pollution could be included.

I doubt idiots in modified trucks are a major component of our problem here.

You'd be wrong. One of those trucks can emit hundreds of times more particulate matter than a compliant vehicle.

Even when they aren't shooting visible smoke they are outputting a massively excess amount of pollution.

I'm sure that's true. There just aren't enough of them to matter that much.

>The owners and operators of more than half a million diesel pickup trucks have been illegally disabling their vehicles’ emissions control technology over the past decade, allowing excess emissions equivalent to 9 million extra trucks on the road, a new federal report has concluded.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/climate/diesel-trucks-air...

The emissions technology significantly increases the TCO of the vehicle so it's not exactly surprising that people disable it.

It just moves the TCO to the lungs of everyone else.

Looks like this is a problem to be solved with the application of law and order. If a few extrajudicial executions happen along the way, it's just the price we pay for an orderly society.

After all, all lives matter.

Isn't it a little hypocritical to call for law and order and condone vigilantism in the same sentence?

Obviously I'm being sarcastic. The extrajudicial executions are administered by the police, in case that wasn't clear.

How much does it increase the TCO?

From a European perspective pretty much any diesel car here that has done over 200,000km will have had the DPF removed. In most countries it's illegal, but it's also not tested as part of the emissions tests (particulate matter in general is not tested, other than 'is there black or white smoke? nope, you pass').

Above this mileage it will become clogged and need to be replaced. If it isn't it will increase fuel consumption, reduce power, and damage the engine if left long enough. They are not off-the-shelf parts you can buy (not that they couldn't be, but nobody buys them), so you need to get a 'reconditioned' one which isn't going to last anywhere near as long. For €2500 or more for parts and labour it doesn't make financial sense, especially when your car is probably valued at a similar amount.

I live in a city center next to a relatively busy road and whenever I replace the filters in my apartment ventilation system every 3-6 months they are always thick black. We don't really have any heavy industry in this city, so I assume most of that is from vehicles.

Why is it impossible to say <thing happens> without everyone around here reading it as <thing happens and I approve>?

My comment intentionally no value judgement yet everyone assumed one.

I live in a small town, population around 9,000. There are several dozen trucks rolling coal here.

How many small towns are there in the USA, each one of these trucks belching soot equvalent to over a hundred vehicles?

Even if there are only twenty five thousand small towns, that's a quarter million additional soot stacks on the road.

Apparently, there are 310 cities and nearly 19,500 total number of incorporated cities, towns, villages and boroughs across the U.S. Twenty five thousand small towns is a reasonable estimate.

https://www.reference.com/geography/many-cities-united-state...

That's a bit misleading as it's going by the actual city population and not the metro area. For instance, SF proper is only about 850k, but the metro is 5M... 9M if you count Oakland, etc.

OKay, how many trucks are rolling coal in SF and Oalkand?

Then it'll be easy to round them all up and prosecute them based on new laws.

A questiom that I had is whether the tax cuts from Trump helped the renewable sector, or it's just a coincidence that Tesla's price went up so much at the same time for example? What would have happened with the democrats? I guess we'll see in the next 4 years though..

Things which drive TSLA's price are myriad. Assigning it to a single policy of the current administration is unlikely to be right. A good indication that there is something else at play would be if TSLA shot up much more than other stocks in the renewable market.

The Electric Vehicle Tax Credit and the ITC (solar tax credit) were passed by Democrats. Tesla benefited greatly from both. Tesla also received a massive loan from Obama's DOE during the great recession, without which it may not have survived. Meanwhile Trump has been doing everything in his power to prop up the dying coal industry, reduce vehicle efficiency requirements, and expand oil and gas drilling. All of these efforts indirectly harm Tesla by benefiting Tesla's competitors.

It's very interesting how Tesla could come out so well from all those policies. Of course the factory in China was crucial...it was a lucky timing that Tesla got the license from China just in time to be productive during and in spite of the pandemic.

The major component of the Trump Tax Cut was lowering the tax on corporate profits.

Telsa barely makes any profit, making that change mostly useless for them.

I believe capital gains taxes were also lowered, which may have been helpful for their stock price. But that in itself is helpful to Elon Musk and other stockholders, not the company itself.

Tax cuts came years before Tesla’s stock started soaring, so probably an unrelated happening. It’s pretty much only this year where Tesla’s stock started to rise so dramatically.

Who could have possibly seen this coming

On a related note:

Special Report: U.S. air monitors routinely miss pollution - even refinery explosions [1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-pollution-airmonitors-sp...

IMHO, a title like "EPA declines... " assigns too much, er, agency to an Agency that, IIUC, has none. "Trump administration continues to pour gasoline on tire fires while they still can... " might be more accurate.

Apologies if this was inflammatory. It's been a day.

Another skirmish in Trump's war on America.

Just wait. Biden is going to reverse a lot of this stuff.

Which will end up at SCOTUS and we will see the Chevron doctrine overturned

Which is an acceptable risk (and could happen regardless of policies challenging pollution prevention), as long as the temporary executive order (or agency policy) forces industry changes in the interim that can’t or won’t be reversed post SCOTUS decision.

Observe how legacy automakers have dropped their support for EPA efforts to remove California CARB authority, and have gotten onboard with tighter emission standards now that the new administration is onboarding [1] [2]. This is not altruism, but “reading the room.”

Regulation need not stick long term to be effective. Are automakers going to retool back to combustion vehicle production from EV production as we approach deadlines for combustion vehicle bans if those bans evaporate? Coal plants rebuilt? Electric busses scrapped for diesel buses? Unlikely. The capital will have already been committed, and domain expertise retired. The ruling then rings hollow.

This is not to discount the challenges we face with the current SCOTUS composition, but to triage and prioritize climate change efforts until the composition can be improved. “Technical debt”, if you will.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/climate/general-motors-tr...

[2] https://carbuzz.com/news/nissans-bold-decision-was-inspired-...

I think that maybe I'm too much of a leftist to think that Biden will accomplish any meaningful change. Plenty of exploratory committees, investigations, and deep dives. But fundamentally, I don't expect him to do much beyond maintain the status quo that centrist dems like Obama and Clinton have been pushing for decades.

He'll put out a few executive orders and maybe get us back into a climate accord, but he's still deeply a capitalist and fossil fuel backing candidate at heart.

And in other news San Francisco bans the cleanest energy around.

Pm2.5 is a major pollutant and irritant. It's linked to all sorts of naughty things.

But sure, let's not worry about it.

One question is how much tightening soot pollution standards would really help. For example, a lot of the country this past year had horrible air quality, not from industrial pollution, but from wildfires. Are we really able to achieve that level of pollution, even when we include natural sources like wildfires?

This is confusing to me. You're saying that there are other sources of particulate pollution (a cumulatively dangerous pollutant), therefore we should NOT regulate human-caused sources? That seems backwards.

A lot has to do with percentages. Let’s say you cut back human produced levels from 12 to 8, a 50% reduction. However, if the average non-human level was say 100, you would actually be cutting the total level 4% which may or may not show a difference in health, however the cost of a 50% reduction in human produced levels may be a lot.

8 is not 50% of 12. But we're talking about massive numbers here. If that "100" is 1,000,000 tons of soot, reducing human-produced soot from 12 to 8 is taking 40,000 tons of soot out of the environment. And that's likely not uniformly distributed across the country: you're far more likely to have hot spots of human-produced soot, which adds up to tens of thousands of kids who don't end up getting (or are affected less by) asthma, thousands of adults whose lifespans are materially lengthened, and greatly reduced healthcare costs.

As noted in the article, the EPA estimated this rule change would have saved 12,000 lives per year.

For reference, 30,000 people are killed by drivers every year. 50,000 people die from suicide. So changing this rule is equivalent to reducing suicide rates by 25% or auto fatalities by over 30%.

> EPA officials said they decided to keep the 12-micrograms-per-cubic-meter limit after review by a scientific advisory committee and considering public comments, per WSJ.

So we get to inhale particulates of soot but god forbid if I want a plastic bag or straw.

I don't think the EPA is the entity responsible for banning those items.

No, it is a little kid who went all over TV having discovered a turtle with a straw lodged in its nose.

I agree with you that we should limit both plastic straws and soot pollution.

I do not support the ban of plastic straws. Paper straws just aren't functional, and I need to use em. I bring my own plastic ones now.

You could bring your own steel straws instead of plastic. There are those who bring their own cutlery as well.

Due to growing demand, people are innovating in this space and are covering aspects such as reuse, sturdiness, ability to clean, storage, aesthetics.

I thought metal straws were a fine idea until I heard about the failure mode:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/world/europe/metal-straws...

Is there truly a risk here? The article opens with a discussion of a person predisposed to falls falling while holding a sufficiently sharp straw. The same could have happened with a knife or a pair of scissors or a fork. Hell, it could have happened with a sufficiently stiff plastic straw or bamboo straw—even a bubble tea straw.

The Starbucks recall the article mentions relates to a product defect unrelated to the above incident. The same recall could have been issued for _any_ utensil, thermos, or other durable item that Starbucks sells.

The article also cites dental risks, and almost parodies itself: “Just like we tell people not to chew on pens.” Well, yeah. I could also chew on my silverware and I'm certain my dentist would disapprove. The note about failing to clean the straws is probably the biggest risk to the average consumer, but the same risk exists with literally any reusable utensil or cup.

That article feels like it's trying hard to fish for a reason to be concerned about metal straws.

I think the thing is if you remembered to bring your own straws you would just bring your own drink. That’s not really a bad thing either. I recently purchased a small backpack large enough for just my drink bottle at a sports store which makes it very convenient to bring water everywhere.

Better for my health, wallet and the environment but it is more effort than leaving care free and grabbing a drink later.

> I think the thing is if you remembered to bring your own straws you would just bring your own drink.

Unless getting the drink was the point (e.g. going out for a milkshake or Starbucks). Or you didn't want to haul a big ol' drink around.

My new local coffee shop is package-free. No disposable cups, no straws, no lids. They have mugs to use if you’re outside drinking coffee, but they encourage you to bring or buy a reusable thermos.

Which requires a very slight bit of adaptation, because you have to remember to bring your own mug, but you get used to it. (Helps that they ran a “buy a thermos, get 4 free coffes” deal.) I could easily get used to it at other take-out places.

…why do you need to use straws?

There's a variety of medical conditions for which that's the case.

Out of curiosity, why do you need a straw when drinking?

Other than milk tea with pearls I can't really think of a drink that requires straws to drink.

Some restaurants serve soft drinks with ice that is divided into very small chunks instead of decent sized cubes (probably to get more surface area for faster cooling).

Many find it annoying to drink those without a straw.

Ah good point, hadn't thought of margaritas and slushies.

As someone who has picked up literally thousands of plastic straws on beaches on every continent in the world and waterways across the United States, I absolutely and totally support a ban on all one-time use plastics.

As someone who has never gone out their way to pick up plastic straws anywhere, but is generally and vaguely aware of the damage they cause, I too would support a general ban on single use plastics.

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