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Comment by htek | Hacker News Reader

Jesus, this story is going to have all the bad takes. People's main takeaway from the article is, "it's just the way cities grow," "it's the zoning board's fault," "people moved near a cancer cluster, it's their fault," "you should be able to pollute an area you pay for."

Seriously? The problem is the government allowing private corporations to poison the environment to benefit the bottom line of the corporations. I don't care if someone moved next door to an industrial plant or a pig farm, if they are spewing toxins into the air we breathe, the water we drink, the ground someone else will eventually purchase, they are responsible for damaging the environment as well as harming, and in the long run, killing people and that should absolutely be illegal and stopped. We're not talking about a bad smell or loud noise, we're talking about people getting leukemia or Parkinson's and so on. Are you sociopaths?

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Absolutely! I have started a project to encourage municipalities to use land use to protect their water and other sensitive spots from service stations.

The EPA has all sorts of silly guidelines like saying setback a gas station 500 feet from school or wetlands if they pump over 3.6MM gallons a year. Under that? 25 feet.

https://postpump.org is the project so far.

A crazy thing I learned recently is the cost of cleanups for underground storage tanks is not really tracked or published publicly. I started requesting information a few weeks ago. https://postpump.org/oregon

This is solid work. I appreciate it.

> The problem is the government allowing private corporations to poison the environment to benefit the bottom line of the corporations.

Thank you, a voice of reason! This really needed to be said on this thread.

Property rights. Why can you spew your toxin into my air/land?

Exactly. This isn’t some sort of weird environmental topic. This is a human rights violation. The foundation of a huge swath of our law is “no one has a right to encroach on a person or their property.” (Examples being murder and theft.) Pollution is a violation of that principle on a massive scale and it should be treated that way.

yes, internalize externalities first, starting with the most dangerous and egregious. most other ‘solutions’ are apologist distractions from this primary mitigation.

> The problem is the government allowing private corporations to poison the environment to benefit the bottom line of the corporations.

I disagree with the notion that regulations are inherently harmful to corporate profits. Foreign competitors do generally exist in other countries with different regulations, which complicates the matter in the real world; but in a healthy, homogeneously regulated market, a new regulation should increase the operating costs of all suppliers more or less equally. Assuming that there's a sufficient amount of competition to keep profit margins reasonably thin, the increased cost of regulatory compliance should be passed onto customers in the form of higher prices.

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