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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

If you learn to see the world the way capital sees it, it makes some sense.

If you tell a chemical company that it can't make X but it doesn't have a factory to make X, they are not going to be so sore about it.

If they've borrowed from the bank to make a factory that makes X and then you tell them they have to shut it down they are going to be a lot more upset. The EPA can't discharge their bank loan, for one thing.

In the case of CFCs,

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

there was a ban on the most wasteful uses of CFC, but the main effect was that people quit building new CFC factories, it took almost two decades to shut those factories down.

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But why can't they just fail for making a bad bet like the rest of us?

In the case of CFCs the dangers were hypothetical in the 1970s. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1980s that the ozone hole was documented and the chemistry of how it happens really understood. (I was doing a student project analyzing satellite observations of chemical species in the atmosphere around this time.)

It is also telling that the aerosol spray can ban was in 1978 and Dupont’s patents for CFCs ran out in 1979. Dupont was a CFC advocate up until 1986 when they had patents for HCFCs, at that point they thought a ban was a great idea.

We’ve been through a regulatory treadmill since then where now the first generation of HCFCs are known to be powerful global warming gases and those are getting banned so these are being replaced by newer patented substances. Asthma inhalers that would have been cheap have been expensive because they’ve either getting filled with new F-gases or are dry power inhalers, either way they are still under patent.

Someone has to be the advocate for the thing the government is trying to regulate/ban, we have an adversarial court/justice/law system in this country. Of course the party with the most to lose is going to be the one on the side of against it and of course that party is going to stop advocating when they no longer have that interest.

It's a good thing that people with something to lose can influence the government and make their voices heard. It's the job of the regulators to take that information and correctly weigh it against the interests of the people they represent. The problem is and has always been the regulators.

You're painting Dupont as the bad guy for advocating for themselves while giving a pass (passively) to the people who are supposed to be advocating for us.

Because businesses can rent-seek congress through lobbying sometimes much more effectively than groups of citizens.

See this

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

if you want to get depressed about the prospect of "the left."

Seems like a good lens through which to view California politics, which is often dominated for better and worse by special interests like the trial lawyers, firefighters, etc…

They do, it just takes a while.

- cigarettes

- asbestos

- leaded paints

- now pfas

Not many of these companies around anymore, and the flow of new capital has dropped to near-zero

They can, but like many of us, they’ll go down kicking and screaming due to sunk cost. The difference is that they’re operating at the scope of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So they’re willing to kick and scream accordingly.

Because the line only goes up!!!

You know damn well why

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