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Comment by dclowd9901 | Hacker News Reader

As it’s always been.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how we don’t have an amendment on the books that says “if you produce something in or from this country, you must see to its entire lifecycle”.

Just kidding, I know exactly why we don’t have such an amendment.

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Because such a rule would be far too vague (is, easy to subvert by special interests). Sometimes you have to do things the hard way, with long and detailed laws passed by legislatures and updated to account for technological developments.

I’m not really interested in bike shedding my comment. I think we could probably think of ways to narrow its definition to usefulness.

When it comes to oil wells, Pennsylvania has a law for that: The Oil and Gas Act of 1984. A lot of wells are still just abandoned¹ by companies (in the usual ways companies shirk responsibility).

¹ https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2021/10/18/orphaned...

And yet we all just shrug when student loans are basically inescapable.

There are ways to fix this. It’s just that the interests have always ensured an escape hatch.

> amendment

> a minor change or addition designed to improve a text, piece of legislation, etc.

What went wrong in the USA for that word to become a synonym for "fundamental right"?

The first ten amendments to the US Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights

So if you want to enshrine a right in US law, the highest place to do it is as an amendment to the Constitution.

>I know exactly why we don’t have such an amendment.

Why?

Because the people making money from not having it can afford lobbyists to prevent having it.

See: regulatory capture.

Also see: politics as career.

are you kidding? it's because the monied interests almost never have to deal with negative externalities and the cleanup of direct negatives because they are the ones that pay the people voted into power with that money to make the laws that could do such a thing. california is about as progressive as it comes in that regard but even then the machine of progress inches.

look at the pg&e dixie fire that had a cost of well over 1 billion dollars (1000 million dollars) and they got fined 55 million dollars so they could avoid criminal charges.

The Biden administration have just changed the rules about environmental assessments to include all future costs. It's a _big_ win.

I'm sure there is a better source, but this covers it https://www.brookings.edu/research/overview-and-analysis-of-...

that is big news. even as a really online person i didn't see that. though it's an executive order so it's not going to stand up to the next republican president whenever that is unfortunately... though if that comes to fruition with how it's trending we are not going to need to worry about negative externalities and environmental assessments. I do hope you are right that it's a big win in the long run but i do feel jaded.

This sounds nice, but I'm struggling to imagine how it will be effective in practice. Could you offer any elaboration?

> These changes undoubtedly reflect a more progressive view of regulation. Yet, they do not jettison cost-benefit analysis. Instead, they have a basis in recent academic research, and they appear to be designed with an eye toward helping agencies withstand court challenges to their cost-benefit analysis.

As I understand it, a cost benefit analyses did not factor into the recent supreme court ruling against the EPA, nor the one from last summer.

In fairness, the corruption that led to PG&E accidentally burning down a city every few years occurred back in the 70’s, so those people are retired / dead, and the statute of limitations applies.

We don’t know how many people their current blatant and widespread corruption will kill, so I guess we’ll need to wait and see, then prosecute the responsible parties in 50 years.

should there be a statute of limitations on ecological catastrophe? that seems like it would strongly, and perversely, incentivise cover-ups and other nefarious weaponisations of information asymmetry against the interests of the commons.

Because amendments are very difficult to pass. It took more than 200 years to ratify the most recent amendment.

Not adding much except maybe a tiny signal boost: capture.

Capture is the root of all evil in the way that various ancient/sacred texts said that “money is the root of all evil”.

President Truman was so poorly compensated by capture that they both increased the salary and created a pension because of how embarrassing it was that a President suffered personal financial hardship.

We don’t worry about that sort of thing these days.

Fwiw, the quote is actually “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.”

Essentially greed. If you really boil the root of evil down to its base, I think you’ll find pride is the true root. IMO pride is the root of greed itself too.

This is kind of funny because Keynes' liquidity preference concept can be loosely translated into a "love for money" but it is about not wanting to let go of money rather than earning it.

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