What America looked like before the EPA cleaned it up | Hacker News Reader

What America looked like before the EPA cleaned it up

popsci.com

74 pointspradn25 comments

I guess my expectations from popsci.com have been met.

Yes, the 70s and into the 80s, things were pretty gross in the US. I grew up in LA, and I remember when I moved to Canada thinking it was strange how the sky didn't go from blue to brown. The smog was incredibly thick in LA. This was back in the days when gasoline still had lead in it.

Unfortunately, photos don't really tell the story, as a smoggy day today still looks like an average day back then, and the colour of older photos makes everything look bad.

You could go out today and find cars half buried if you went looking.

Sorry if this is pedantic but did you grow up in Louisiana or Los Angeles?

Almost assuredly Los Angeles. The OP is talking about smog, which was (and still is to a degree, although stricter emission limits on cars have helped) a major problem in the area as due to geography pollution gets trapped in the San Fernando Valley.

Yup, LA. Though smog is still a problem, and I lived in Santiago which has similar geographic challenges, LA skies on the average day are considerably better than they were in the 70s.

It's not like environmental law began with the EPA. Like most such organizations, it initially consolidated a bunch of existing responsibilities under one roof.

There was a direct predecessor organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Health_Divisions

What actually changed was that the public became more concerned about pollution, and politicians reacted to that.

The photo of a smoggy New York City is certainly timely, https://www.popsci.com/uploads/2019/03/18/IIM4LBZLUN4V4WKKLX....

Yesterday: https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/nyc-sm...

Interestingly, conservatives don't think it's a health risk at all, actually. [1]

I'm not entirely sure what to believe, as my I haven't kept up to date with what my fellow HNers are preaching.

1: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news...

When your party line is the invariant, truth has to become the variant.

remember that sarcasm isn’t easy to read online, especially for people not well grounded in your idiom

Articles like this are incredibly disingenuous.

Tying fossil fuel use to every weather event that deviates from the mean only causes people to tune out.

If the goal is to have the words “climate change” to retain any meeting, they need to better pick their battles.

Even in the 80s and 90s, growing up in Ohio near Lake Erie and the cuyahoga river, adults would always caution us about going in the water. We had all heard stories about the river catching fire or people getting sick from swimming in the lake.

For a brief period of time, it seemed like the lake had improved. Now, I still read about toxic algal blooms from fertilizer runoff.

It took a long time to correct the industrial waste that was dumped into the water. I only hope that whatever happens with the EPA, it doesn’t permit that level of environmental disaster to happen again.

Same with the Kennebec river that flowed through Augusta, Maine throughout the 80s and 90s. We were dumb enough to swim in it for some reason, and I vividly remember bits of trash and paper swirling around in the brown, muddy soup. Contrast that with the crystal clear glacier lakes in the same region, and it’s hard to believe it was the same state government.

Regulation bad, hero entrepreneur’s unbridled free market emissions good.

Or, the tragedy of the commons is real, and you won’t escape it by flying to Mars with Musk.

so thats what freedom looked like? /s

You can't see freedom, it's more of a heavy feeling in your lungs.

According to Popular Science, visual appearance is what matters when assessing pollution. Now that the aesthetics are fixed, it's clean! The EPA fixed it. No more pollution. That's a really tidy narrative.

Meanwhile, back in objective reality, industrial pollution has been increasing rampantly. CO2 has been rising faster than our economic growth; now over 100 millions tons a day are being poured into the atmosphere. Take a minute to appreciate the sheer mass! But since it's invisible and non-noxious, it's easy to remain ignorant of it. The impacts are arguably worse than mid-1900s pollution in that the effects aren't just local, they're global and destabilizing our climate. If CO2 were visible, smelly, a solid, or liquid, we might view it much differently. But because we can't sense it directly, we just pretend it doesn't exist. Even scientific journalism falls for it apparently.

There's a lot of "energy shortage" stuff in there, which was geopolitical right, it has nothing to do with the environment.

Anyway, so the EPA, if you belive the implication here, was started with good intentions, and cleaned up a lot of stuff, and stopped practices that were causing harmful pollution. All of that is good.

I don't see how that's relevant to the EPA today. The article says "now they want to shut it down" as if the fact that it did good work on the seventies is evidence to keep it going. Maybe it is still doing good work. Or maybe like almost all bureaucracies it's strayed into some bloated self sustaining thing that exists mostly to run itself. I really don't know. I just don't see any logic in the article's argument.

The opposing logic, I suppose, is that now there’s no incentive to handle toxic waste recklessly? Or that modern industrialists care about the environment more? Or what?

All evidence points to industry trying to circumvent and negate environmental protections at every opportunity. So all evidence points to a regression if those protections are removed.

I'm not talking about environmental protections at all, I'm talking specifically about the EPA. It would be interesting to see how it has grown over the last 50 years and the size of the administration vs people who do stuff (enforcement etc). If it's like most government agencies, a hard reset is not a bad idea.

> Maybe it is still doing good work. ... I really don't know.

Nothingburger. You say you're ignorant, hand-wave an argument that government is generally bad, and conclude that a "hard reset" is not a bad idea. This line of reasoning screams "chesterson's fence."

Why do you think the good work that it did stopped after the seventies? Pollution didn’t end overnight, it took decades and it’s still in progress. Do you think that the environment is in a good enough shape now that we can start increasing pollution again?

It doesn't appear you understood my post.

You're implying that the agency is no longer effective, without making any explicit claims or providing evidence. What part did I misunderstand?

Your comment makes zero sense to me. But the solution to the EPA being inefficient is fixing it, not shutting it down and reversing all the work it did since the 70s

> There's a lot of "energy shortage" stuff in there, which was geopolitical right, it has nothing to do with the environment.

The EPA spearheaded the push for fuel efficiency in cars as part of the Clean Air Act [0]. While the energy crisis was part of it, it was also a way to reduce smog in cities. The agency also brought in the first Smog Checks for cars, which brought the catalytic converter [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter#History

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