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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

> 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

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

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