America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
They tend to be a pretty hardcore MAGA bunch, but also don't like pollution because it messes up their sport. When you ask them about stuff like this (how can you support someone who pretty openly wants to mess up your pastime?), they get mad or change the subject.
I get it - people are complicated and can care about many things at once. Nobody likes it when someone is seemingly poking at their belief systems. Still - you'd think it'd give them some kind of pause.
Like the reptile brain gets enabled if you loose the overview.
That seems like an unfair conclusion not rooted in empirical evidence. How do you explain the numerous democratically elected female heads of state? What does "strong" mean here? Do you think that current US leadership is "strong" or merely "loud"?
> the stronger male person
raises an interesting point (ignoring the "male" part) -- there isn't any real consensus on what attributes indicate "strength" (for instance, there are a lot of people who consider Trump strong, and a lot of people who equally consider him weak).
So the hypothesis could be true, but not terribly enlightening.
It’s also strange to single out MAGA on cognitive dissonance- everyone, regardless of political affiliation has it.
At the end of the day blame the two party system. There are hundreds of thousands of people who voted for Obama and Trump, Biden and then Trump again. Let that sink in.
If I talk about people in Brooklyn broadly is it not a generalization because it’s my community? lol
No wonder political discourse is completely broken.
The talking point about Brooklyn is about as dumb a "Gotcha" as you'd expect in:
> political discourse is completely broken.
I would not be surprised if smoking also makes a comeback as MAGA types continue down the anti-science crusade and pour scorn on the link between smoking and lung cancer and other types of health outcomes.
He's actively unwinding decades of environmental policy and protections, destaffing and defunding national parks, and opening up logging 100MM acres which will be gone in no time at all.
He's the kind of guy that says "we are going to have the cleanest air and water" and then literally does the opposite policy wise.
We can wipe all of that out and then wait 20 years.
This project explores the changing meaning of hunting in American political and cultural life from 1945 to the present by mapping the evolution of the ideas, vocabulary, and values legible on the pages of nationally circulated outdoor magazines. These sources suggest that huntingÆs public significance transformed in both character and intensity over the second half of the twentieth century. In the immediate postwar decades, the political culture forged and propagated in these magazines reflected a faith in government, in collective engagement, and in public life. However, in the 1970s, the ideas and principles articulated by many hunters and outdoor writers increasingly privileged individual rights, questioned the utility of state action, and defended private prerogatives. Concurrently, the degree to which hunting gave shape to the identity of American sportsmen heightened dramatically during this pivotal decade.
Pre 1970s the NRA was very much a hobby gun club meant mostly to keep american boys/men using guns for war readiness, along with promoting hunting/outdoor recreation. Then, in the 1970s, the NRA changed tune. After a big leadership shakeup the organization became very proactive in promoting anti-government, 2nd amendment, and "patriot" ideals. This likely stems from the Nixon impeachment, wherein republicans felt "wronged" and actively started seeking out revenge.
The federalist society was also born out of this same period and sentiment. The sentiment is that nixon's impeachment was a hit job. That's when we saw the advent of conservative media and the idea that "emotions are more important than fact" started to get some traction.
There's a great This American Life episode on the NRA's transformation from a hobby group to a lobbying group. I think this is it, https://radiolab.org/podcast/radiolab-presents-more-perfect-... . Great episode, highly recommend. It really puts the whole 2a movement into perspective.
Your question (as phrased here) is clearly provocative rather than curious and represents your biases (eg, “openly wants to mess up your pastime”). You don’t consider the two obvious answers, in that they see it differently or they have higher priorities, and are using extreme language.
Are you really surprised people are annoyed by that behavior?
The essence of the question is why do people who love the outdoors vote for politicians who want to repeal laws to protect the outdoors?
I presume that a reasonable person can easily answer this question and defend their position. I can think of several reasonable explanations and I’m opposed to hunting and am in favor of strong environmental regulations.
Because they don't believe that most of those laws are having meaningful benefits. The law of diminishing returns applies to everything, including ever-increasing regulations.
There are clear benefits. They just refuse to see them. You can show a mountain of evidence based on peer reviewed research and they'll hand waive it away and say "Private enterprise could do it better" or some nonsense.
The Trump GOP has no reflexive opposition to government. Trump won the nomination in 2016 because he abandoned the GOP orthodoxy on free markets and declared there would be no cuts to Medicare or Social Security benefits. https://www.vox.com/2015/8/15/9159117/donald-trump-moderate
Tariffs are government. Border security is government. Police are government. The Trump GOP supports all those things.
On the environment, Trump is an incrementalist. He’s not proposing on repealing the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act. But in the 50-60 years since those laws, we have adopted numerous rules and regulations that don’t provide the same level of benefit. In his first term, he was focused on rolling back those regulations.
This is not a president that’s afraid of blowing things up. If he wanted to defund the EPA he would.
I think you’re answering your own question about why people don’t engage in discussions with you.
Also I didn’t call anyone a snowflake. I said the response was a snowflake reaction. I used that term deliberately since it was in fashion for some time for conservatives to use it.
Lastly, it’s a bad look for you to engage with me while pointing out why people don’t engage with me. I think it would be better to just move on and ignore what I said.
> You don’t consider the two obvious answers, in that they see it differently or they have higher priorities, and are using extreme language.
Rather than asking the question. It's deeply curious how making assumptions instead of asking questions is called out as incurious. If you were motivated to inquire, how would you approach it?
The same people that described themselves as "hard-core free speech absolutists" are perfectly fine with innocent men getting deported to El Salvador with no due process, or foreign scientists getting detained at the border for having criticized the president on social media.
This country is fucked, half of its inhabitants now live with Fox News induced cognitive dissonance and are literally "ride or die" with the GOP. There's nothing Trump or his administration could do that would make them reconsider their support.
This is a bit of an overstatement. In 2024, Trump received 49.8% of the vote on 64.1% turnout, which is only 31.9% of eligible voters and of course doesn't include millions of people who are ineligible to vote, mostly due to age. And some of Trump's total, relatively small yet crucial, consisted of nonpartisan "swing" voters who are not loyal to Trump or the GOP. The way our electoral system works, small differences are greatly magnified.
As with distributed systems, coherence is hard and expensive. Being rational about something, as opposed to just rationalizing, is long, slow work. We don't live in an age of patience. But perhaps one will come again, and until then we can at least try to be exceptions.
I also cannot build trains or houses, but I am an ardent supporter of a rain-proof roof.
One sentient being paying another stronger sentient being to exploit a weaker non consenting sentient being for “pleasure” the first sentient being with no concern for the experience of the exploited.
I know comparisons are a tempting tool, since they're a very effective way of communicating a lot of information and, more importantly, an impression very economically. But part of what made the holocaust so horrible is that people were being treated like animals. It's like trying to argue that dogs should be kept inside by saying "What if you made your toddler sleep outside in a dog house?", it's a comparison that defeats itself.
If your goal is to feel righteous on the internet and demonstrate your strong love for animals, by all means proceed. If your goal is to change hearts and minds, reconsider your rhetoric; you'll have much more luck if you tune it to people that don't already agree with you,
> part of what made the holocaust so horrible is that people were being treated like animals. It's like trying to argue that dogs should be kept inside by saying "What if you made your toddler sleep outside in a dog house?", it's a comparison that defeats itself.
"In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka"
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
"I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale".
– Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz
I also said, "I like animals and I eat meat." I thought that was pretty clear, but if you'd like me to beat the point to death, the cognitive dissonance is between my fondness for animals, cows included, who I would never personally hurt and don't want to see killed, and my fondness for a good cheeseburger.
Could I come up with some contrived rationalization which somehow includes both? Sure, I have in the past, and many meat-eaters do. But ultimately I saw through my own bullshit here. Cows aren't essentially different than horses or dogs, but I eat cow while I'd be horrified to eat horse or dog. This doesn't make any logical or moral sense; it's just what I grew up with and am used to. When I think about it, I experience cognitive dissonance. For some that dissonance resolves into becoming vegetarians; for others they just refuse to think about it, or become dickish anti-vegetarians. I'm only different in that I have worked to get more comfortable with that sort of dissonance, as it's important to me to see things as clearly as I can.
Horse is good, and while they are noble and majestic, so are cows (which are also cute to boot). I think the same of fish, and while less cuddly, I still feel a tiny bit conflicted about taking one's life just to eat when I do it.
Dogs are family for me. I'd probably be OK with wolf or coyote or similar.
I don't begrudge anyone how they want to align their morals with how and what they eat.
With context, it’s simply “we should not eat animals we keep as pets”, where “we” needs to be contextualized to the person and culture. I keep dogs as pets, and therefore should not eat them. Other people don’t keep dogs as pets and are free to eat them.
More generally, we shouldn’t kill things we love. Pets are loved, and shouldn’t be killed for food. Farmed animals are a means to an end, not an object of affection.
Other contexts apply too, for the pedantic. Starvation is a context that would make eating pets okay, so on and so forth.
A lot of morality is contextual. If a good friend is going through a break up, I should care and be supportive. If a stranger like Taylor Swift is going through a break up, I have no moral obligation to care or be supportive (though it would be kind to do so anyways). Morality is contextualized by my relationship to that person.
Why? I'm not advocating for killing humans but before the modern era it was common for people to own chicken which the kids would love as pets but you gotta eat, so the beloved chicken would get killed and eaten.
Sounds more like a modern luxury rather than a ground truth.
I've read a few accounts of farmers who didn't feel that way and talked about how sad they were sending the animals for slaughter, but they still did it.
There was a TV show ages ago where this guy decided to film one cow for it's life and then cook the meat. They showed the film and then he was just crying and the chef was starting to cook and be sympathetic.
Or something like https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-50986683
I'm not a vegetation but I feel like I am really pushing something out of my mind to eat meat, so it is a cognitive dissonance.
You have to eat. If a burger is the best choice in front of you, it is reasonable to make that choice. Likewise, if a certain party is the best choice in front of you during an election, it is equally reasonable to choose it. Such decisions always require making tradeoffs.
However, the original comment seems to imply that it is not only a case of voting for a party, but also carrying out activism for that party. This is akin to you eating a burger while protesting with PETA proclaiming the evils of killing cattle. That may be still cognitive dissonance, but to a very different degree.
Ok. Now try that sentence with "leg of a dog". Does that still feel reasonable? I think the difference isn't that one is more moral, it's that one is more familiar.
I also don't think he was talking about activists. There are plenty of "hardcore MAGA" types who are pretty passive about it. And even there that doesn't necessarily involve cognitive dissonance. I know plenty of people who vote for Democrats that are able to oppose it on certain particulars while still deciding it's the best voting option. But I think MAGA in particular is a cult of personality, which is very hard to justify intellectually.
Yes. If dog legs are readily available in the store then sure.
It was kinda too weird to do it at home, but he was really curious.
If you'd like a different example that gets the same feeling, try substituting something else considered treif in your culture, like "roasted eyeballs" or "a human hand". My point being that people who are used to eating some kinds of meat see it as perfectly reasonable, but that has a lot to do with what they've been socialized to. In contrast, raised in vegetarian cultures often find eating any meat equally horrific. Which is the position I find intellectually most rational.
My goal is to get others to realize that cognitive dissonance is not an us vs them thing. I freely grant that MAGA followers, as part of a cult of personality, are notably worse. But it's a human problem.
Does that clear it up for you?
Just running with Americans here, because that's what I'm most familiar with, but Americans are happy to eat burgers and would be horrified to eat dog. They are also happy to eat burgers but would generally be horrified by the killing of the cow. This is not because there's any major difference between cattle and dogs; they're both cute, sociable mammals that raise adorable young. This isn't a rational position, and Americans who think at all about it experience cognitive dissonance.
There is a major difference: Dogs have been deemed workers, thus eating them is seen as a threat to one's livelihood. Same reason Americans won't eat horses. You can't plow the fields tomorrow if you eat the horse tonight, so to speak. It has been an imperative that these animals be off limits for consumption. In other parts of the world where the working animals differ, they have no qualms about eating dogs and horses, but may not eat other animals.
Historically, ~100%. I considered caveating that while it is far less true today, the transition is still relatively recent and cultural norms haven't caught up yet, but I assumed you would have the capacity to figure that out on your own. My bad for assuming.
If that's the best choice in front of me, sure. I'm not going to starve to death just because it is dog. Are you?
> I also don't think he was talking about activists.
There was said to be support. That requires activism of some sort. You don't have to gather in the streets in mass promotion, wear certain colored hats, or fly party flags, but there has to be some kind of activity to suggest that the support is there. That isn't someone quietly eating a burger (or dog leg) in the corner.
We were talking about making tradeoffs amid the choices available to you, where a burger was supposed, for the sake of discussion, to be the best choice available. I assume you haven't randomly changed the subject.
If you can choose between a hamburger and a dog leg, then, sure, a hamburger, at least to my taste, would be the better choice. I would choose it. But that doesn't mean I would never eat a dog leg. Where the dog leg is the best choice, why wouldn't you eat it?
My point is that everybody experiences cognitive dissonance. Eating meat is a convenient example, because almost nobody reading this has no other choice, and almost nobody here hates animals (or at least will admit to it).
I'm not interested in pursing weird desert-island hypotheticals where eating a dog is the "best choice". If you are, godspeed, but it's unrelated to the point I was making.
That is what I was talking about. You replied to it. Why would you reply if you had nothing to add to it?
> My point is that everybody experiences cognitive dissonance.
That point was already made earlier in this thread. For what reason does it need to be pointed out again?
> I'm not interested in pursing weird desert-island hypotheticals where eating a dog is the "best choice".
You submitted the idea of the dog leg. Why would you introduce it if you don't want to talk about it?
Because you replied to me in a spirit of contradiction while apparently missing my point. I had some hope of clearing that up, but I see now that was a mistake.
For the sake of my understanding, are you trying to suggest that you didn't make a point by, counterintuitively and contradictorily, telling us that you made a point? Or what is it that you are trying to do here?
Most people in developed countries are not in a situation where if they do not eat the food in front of them now, they will starve. Nearly every grocery store should have things like tofu, lentil, beans, etc easily available. It may be most convenient, or most delicious, or something like that but vegetarianism and plant based are both very viable options for most of the developed world at this point.
Voting for a candidate in a 2 party system is not comparable, as there is literally not another viable choice in most cases.
Meaning that after you've weighed all the tradeoffs, you determine one of the available choices is your best option. Making tradeoffs was already spoken to. I don't think that is a foreign concept to the HN crowd, is it? Engineering is all about managing tradeoffs.
> Nearly every grocery store should have things like tofu, lentil, beans, etc easily available.
None of them are perfectly equivalent to the burger, thus tradeoffs have to be made if you choose tofu over a burger. If satiation is your only goal, then it may not matter, but most people don't eat in that kind of vacuum. They will have a long list of properties they want to fulfill with their food, with no food item perfectly satisfying all of them, hence the need to determine what one is willing to give up.
> Voting for a candidate in a 2 party system is not comparable, as there is literally not another viable choice in most cases.
I guess I don't see how your math is mathing. In my world, 2 implies that you have at least two choices (you could argue that not voting, spoiling the ballot, etc. are also choices, but we can ignore them for now). That means one of the choices you can deem as the best choice.
> In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions.
Well I recognize the issue and still experience a feeling of dissonance. Indeed, I work to be able to be tolerant of that feeling, because I think it's important in pursuing deeper understanding.
If you have a better term I'm all for it. But I think the "unknowingly" there is meant more as the general case rather than an absolute limit on the term.
It used to mean having behavior that contradicts your stated beliefs.
Now it seems to mean an apparent contradiction between behavior and belief if you ignore real distinctions.
I don't like because it weakens the word and loses an important concept -- we don't have a good way to express real hypocrisy vs. fallaciously construed hypocrisy.
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
-- W B Yeats, "To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing"There isn't the option to micromanage gov policies, there are two options taken as package deals - red or blue.
MAGA react to questions like this as Dems react to questions like "what is a woman?".
EDIT: to be clear, they react as if the inconvenient question is in bad faith.
What exactly is meant to be a similar problem here that exists depending on the answer to that question?
I don't know what you are asking here.
"What is a woman?" Should be a fair question if "trans women are women" is taken to be true.
> What exactly is meant to be a similar problem here that exists depending on the answer to that question?
The point is the when the question is asked, it isn't answered, and treated as being asked in bad faith.
The reason is any answer given is likely to be a problem (i.e. offend someone) so it's simply avoided.
It's maybe reasonable to avoid "gotcha" questions, but some questions (i.e. on the basic premise of your position) shouldn't be so.
"I believe we should protect the environment" "But your supported political candidate wants to rollback legislation which would specifically protect the waterways and forests you claim are important from industrial dumping of toxic chemicals" is rather more relevant. Like that's a question which needs an answer, because the positions are mutually contradictory.
What contradictory position is being not answered by "what is a woman?"
"What is a woman?" Should be a fair question if "trans women are women" is taken to be true.
> For example, "we're building a bridge"
This ("What is a woman?") is a famous question, so I thought the context was well known.
Sen. Blackburn asked it of a Supreme Court nominee, and there is a documentary of the same name and topic.
> Like that's a question which needs an answer, because the positions are mutually contradictory.
The positions yes, but to quote myself:
"there are two options taken as package deals - red or blue"
> What contradictory position is being not answered by "what is a woman?"
have you followed the context of why this is brought up?:
> MAGA react to questions like this as Dems react to questions like "what is a woman?".
> EDIT: to be clear, they react as if the inconvenient question is in bad faith.
In other words, they support whatever their candidate does, whether their positions actually agree with it or not.
A person can vote for a party while not agreeing with every one of their platform points. They can also vote for a party and then criticize it later for not following through. As long as they're honest about the divergence and can justify it as an overall better choice, it's not hypocrisy, just being an adult.
The hypocrisy comes in when somebody claims to hold beliefs, votes for a party, and then either ignores a contradiction or spouts the new party line.
This has only increased as public discourse is replaced with unyielding rhetoric and asymmetric slogan-flinging.
There’s nothing wrong with fundamentally valuing life but also consuming it for sustenance. I’m guessing you wouldn’t vote for a law to torture cows while also saying you value a cow’s life.
That is essentially what the outdoorsmen are doing when voting for a politician that’s trying to remove environmental protections.
Likewise, I am pro cleaning shit out of places. I prefer when someone else does it.
Or you could look at why you wouldn't kill a cow. For me, I would feel pretty awful about it. I think, for example, about the time I had to take a dog in to be put down. It was necessary, and there was no other choice. But it was fucking awful to take that dog in and have it killed. Cows are lovely animals in person, and I would feel like I was betraying one to kill it.
So for me there would be a lot of cognitive dissonance generated by killing a cow to get food when I have plenty of less murdery ways to get food. I avoid a lot of that dissonance by outsourcing the job, but some of it's still there.
The author was writing about a specific region of louisiana that is all three of farther right than the norm even for a US rural area, more polluted than almost anywhere, and having a local culture that prizes connection to the land and natural systems present there.
It's very good! The author approaches these contradictions with more curiosity and care than you're going to find on HN even on its best days. https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land
Re the christian thing though, it was unsettling to read about their understanding of right relationship between humans and creation being essentially (and uncharitably) "god put us in charge of it to do what we want with it." Which is maybe a natural extension of historical european/north american christian doctrine on the subject but that still I had never really heard a contemporary christian state clearly and proudly like that. I'm also christian and it's pretty foreign to my tradition.
Also, fishing is most definitely not a "sport".
Many divisive topics, such as catch and release or eating young fish ("bucket heads"), barbless hooks, etc. Hell, even fly fishermen get into internet slap fights over certain kinds of flies.
For example, this article is about air pollution. Trump rolled back a number of Obama-era air pollution rules in 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/04/trump-em.... But there was no corresponding increase in air pollution in the subsequent six years: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=c2....
So your friends simply don't believe that rolling back particular environmental regulations will meaningfully reduce the quality of the environment. It's similar to how liberals downplay how much reshoring of industry will result from the Trump administration's tariffs.
I haven't seen a coherent explanation or estimate of impact made by the administration. If a strategy that estimates the amount of reshoring exists, I'd love to see it. The constant back-and-forth on tariffs makes it seems more like the whims of one individual rather than a coherent plan for "reshoring of industry."
In your comments, you seem to continually give one side the benefit of the doubt, but use a completely different set of rules when discussing the other side.
It even seems to come out in your analysis as your source shows that 2023 saw the most days of unhealthy PM2.5 levels since 2012. It went from 724 in 2017, to 822 in 2023. That is a 13.5% increase. It appears you might be falling into the same trap you warn everyone else about.
Edited to add: On tariffs, Republican Senator Ron Johnson admits, “I still don’t know exactly what his total strategy is.” [0] Yet, you expect everyday liberals to have some nuanced view of the policy.
One set of rules for thee, different set for everyone else.
All those pesky rules and regulations are just getting in the way.
Go sit in a bar in hunting country during deer season. You won't hear people talking about how peaceful, relaxing, or enjoyable it was. You either hear (1) them bragging about how big of deer they got (2) how big the deer was that "got away".
Not at all, the "hunter" types in the US typically are unfiltered and direct and don't hide their thoughts and beliefs.
>Because either way, you can always go in the nature, and so many people go at least here in Switzerland, and just... go in the nature, spend time in that peaceful environment, period.
The fishing/hunting types spend much more time in nature without a gun than with one from what I've been told and seen. There are only a few weeks/months where it is legal to hunt in the US.
I like to go into nature for all sorts of reasons, sometimes it is to enjoy peace, sometimes it is to enjoy peace with a gun and a dead squirrel. sometimes it is to enjoy a challenge with a gun and a dead squirrel, and I don't care about peace. These ideas aren't in competition, they are synergistic.
With fishing, I've observed a similar trend. There's plenty of people who just really love to geek out about fish (I am one of these), and keep detailed notes of the species they catch, where they caught them, the conditions, the baits/lures used, reading up on their ranges, behaviors, feeding habits, etc. There's other people who really love eating fresh fish, and they aren't into the process and community as much. There's a few ladies in my Chicago fishing group like this (one of whom is a high powered lawyer, as I understand it).
Some of the trophy fishermen want more rules and regulations, these tend to be the Musky fisherman who want their bodies of water to be mandated catch-and-release only.
The MAGA leaning fishermen seem like they can come in any of the above (and more) flavors. I'd be hard pressed to put a number on what % of fishermen I've run into are which types as well, regardless of their politics.
There is nothing wrong with this. Its isn't mutually exclusive with a love and appreciation and respect for nature.
Yes there is an ego component, and that is OK too. It is a challenge and people derive satisfaction from success and accomplishment. How is it different than people excited about how productive their garden is or how many sweaters they knit for family.
I caught a big fish last weekend. I put in time, thought, and effort and paid off. I was happy and my friends were excited for my success (and dinner).
That doesn't mean I'm some nature hating egomaniac.
There's something in here about how low density people don't share values with high density people, because different situations cause problems.
Rural americans have insanely high pollution rates per capita because most of their lifestyle is really resource intensive, which just doesn't scale.
Not everyone can drive a ford f850 superduty deisel to go get groceries. Not everyone can eat beef 3x/day. Not everyone can live on a few acres. Not everyone can hunt. Not everyone can have livestock. Not everyone can have 5 kids. Etc, etc.
A lot of rural americans just don't understand this, or don't care. To them it's "out of sight, out of mind". Then, once it comes to their back yard they lose their minds reacting to it because it finally affects them. When it happens to other people, those people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. When it happens to them, then it's a national emergency.
I grew up in a rural area, hometown of 500 people. I grew up thinking this way. It's a pretty big mind shift.
But instead, they want the '50's back. The 1850's. I'll leave it at that.
California banned the diesel engines being used by the fishing boat I went out on. Without 300k to retrofit, the charter went out of business and everyone lost their jobs.
Of course not. Thats the kind of lack of nuance that I object to.
I support high reward changes that protect or revitalize the environment. Banning several diesel boats instead of phasing them out at the end life/next upgrade isn't going to save the planet. It just makes the outdoors and environment inaccessible.
There are so many thoughtless and net negative policies.
At some point you have to draw a line and say, we're not going to allow something that spits out this much pollution just to make catching fish as cheap as it used to be.
There are clear benefits to banning diesel engines in freshwater. That's why so many places are doing it. Lots of people support these measures because it's a very clear benefit.
If a business can't afford to operate without being subsidized by the environment, they shouldn't be allowed to operate. When you use those diesel engines, you're taking out a loan using the environment. That loan needs to be repaid, and it gets repaid in the from of destruction rebuild costs. So when you complain about how "it would cost blah blah to do this safely", what you're really saying is "I want to destroy the environment for some cheap fun" which is deeply, deeply selfish. When you hear the total cost of disasters, think about it in the form of debt being repaid. That $1 billion because of so and so fire, that's the environment coming to collect the debt we racked up because we wanted cheap stuff and recreation.
Remember, your freedom ends where mine begins.
The benefits may be clear, but that still side steps the question of to whom the cost and benefits accrue.
>Remember, your freedom ends where mine begins.
Yes, and this boundary is perpetually in dispute. The question is always who draws the line and how change is managed.
Texas —> +85,267
North Carolina —> +82,288
South Carolina —> +68,043
Florida —> +64,017
Tennessee —> +48,476
These 5 states saw the biggest net domestic migration DECREASE between July 2023 and July 2024:
California —> -239,575
New York —> -120,917
Illinois —> -56,235
New Jersey —> -35,554
Massachusetts —> -27,480
And they think you put your hobby above other people's lungs. shrugs
I'm sorry about the charter going out of business. A better bill would've made provisions to help businesses with upgrade costs.
Think of everyone's point of view. Not just "my hobby" and "they're doing stuff to me". If you don't care about others they won't care about you. That's what society is.
I do care about other people, I just dont think that some exhaust discharged into the water from a fishing boat on the ocean is really harming people's lungs.
My understanding is the issue was NOx emissions as they relate to climate, but I think there is a lot more meaningful and low hanging fruit than banning a few dozen vessels.
> If you don't care about others they won't care about you. That's what society is.
Society is others not caring about you, no matter what you do. Society doesn't tailor its treatment to individuals based on their thoughts or actions. They are invisible.
The concern is more about particulate pollution when the boats are in dock.
> I think there is a lot more meaningful and low hanging fruit than banning a few dozen vessels
Quite possibly. I don't know the issue as well as you.
> Society is others not caring about you, no matter what you do
Not sure where you got that idea...
> Society doesn't tailor its treatment to individuals based on their thoughts or actions
What on earth are you talking about?
My impression is the exact opposite. Society doesn't care if you're the best person in the world if you're in the way of something it wants.
It is happy to put a freeway through your house to save a few bucks or minutes, even if it ruins your life.
Regulation is an even more attractive way to do this because society doesn't have to pay some low ball eminent domain.
Nobody cares if someone has spent their life building a fishing business and 300K loan on boat, the social consensus is haha, sucks to suck loser.
I guess there's a ton of overlap between "society" as an abstract idea and "the state" when it comes to regulations.
Opposing environmental regulations by saying "this is bad for my hobby" won't gain much sympathy, golden-rule-wise.
> Nobody cares if someone has spent their life building a fishing business and 300K loan on boat, the social consensus is haha, sucks to suck loser.
Hard to say what happened in this case. But usually business interests tend to win out over environmental concerns.
In my experience, small businesses, farmers, and sole proprietors almost never win out over environmental concerns. Big business gets a pass.
I think hunters and outdoorspeople are often positioned to see the hypocrisy of all this. They see a few tiny fishing boats being banned from California harbors, while massive container ships chug through the bay endlessly full of single use garbage.
They see fishing restrictions while entire municipalities discharge wastewater into the rivers and factory ships dragnet the ocean to sell at Safeway.
Dems and Republicans alike support carbon emitting methods of power generating that result in over a million deaths a year worldwide. Voting for Trmp vs Bden probably doesn't have any real appreciable effect on worldwide pollution levels.
When conservative and rural and rejecting (some) modernity, I would expect one to appreciate and want to conserve nature as well as a lifestyle close to nature. Also, from an economic point of view, the conversion to sustainability is massive employment opportunity.
But no, the exact opposite is true.
https://en.ndrc.gov.cn/policies/202303/P02023042539857072035...
Per-capita emissions is the only metric that has any meaning, since it isn't altered by historical happenstance as to whether a country is large or was split into multiple countries due to historical events.
If China split into two countries tomorrow, suddenly they would be doing better on this deceitful metric but the ground truth has not changed one bit.
In absence of truth, its just trolling and abuse. I think for some of the followers, this is what they really want. They have lives devoid of meaning and subjectivity as they are long numb, and so watching someone troll / hurt others (including them at times) helps them feel anything.
1. Implement a mechanism domestically to reduce pollution. [1][2]
2. Then implement a "carbon/pollution tariff" on any imports[3] so that foreigners are hit the same way domestics folks are (perhaps with allowances for developing companies that are too poor for advanced pollution control).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.–Canada_Air_Quality_Agreem...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Carbon_Border_Adjustment_Me...
Why do they keep trying the doomsday messaging?
Its too far into the future, hence irrelevant for most current consumers. And even if they thought it relevant, if you take it at face value: whatever you're doing won't solve the issue anyway, because it's a global issue.
The messaging has to go back to local effects. Literally everything you should do for the climate has a lot of positive effects short term... I e. don't try to outlaw ICE vehicles in cities because of climate... Massively tax them because the they reduce the air quality and cause noise pollution
That's the even crazier part - the savings in health benefits. Not sure what it takes to motivate even the most selfish out there.
Maybe this is also highlighting a different problem.
Pretty sure this is why they are dismantling Medicaid and Medicare now.
It’s all aligned to put us back into 1890s when billionaires ran everything and people lived in tenement housing.
The evidence points to saving lives is not a priority, or they're just clueless.
https://revealnews.org/article/trumps-air-pollution-adviser-...
Making a career out of making the case for air pollution. I hope the money is worth it. This guy should have to live and raise his kids next to a coal plant.
Last year, the US nearly stopped installing fossil fuels on a net basis thanks to Wright's Law price declines and federal incentives (IRA).
Add in that oil is dropping in price to the point where many wells are going to be shut down because it isn't profitable to operate them, and this is going to have the opposite effect. ~$60/barrel seems to be that point right now. We're trading at/around $60 right now.
Oil and Gas are going to become less attractive to investors because of this. Solar and wind are already dirt cheap, tariffs aren't really going to change that THAT much. They'll still be cheaper and a better investment than Oil/Coal/Gas.
I’d like to see the FOIA request results listing those businesses.
News media ran this exact story back in 2019. E.g. https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-air-quality-declines-years-impr.... This particular article is a gem, because it portrayed a 5.5% increase from 2016-2018 is a regression. There was no follow-up article when air pollution decreased more than 40% the next year. Nor was there an article when pollution spiked 76% from the Trump-administration low during the Biden administration.
We showed that we could substantially reduce emissions with behavior changes. Then we went right back to business as usual and actually increased emissions.
So, can we do it? Absolutely. Are we going to? Absolutely not.
Did you read the article? It prefaces with Trump's false claim and provides proof of his lying.
> There was no follow-up article when air pollution decreased more than 40% the next year.
Perhaps Trump did not repeat that specific lie next year?
> Nor was there an article when pollution spiked 76% from the Trump-administration low during the Biden administration.
I've seen plenty of articles about how air pollution was at record lows during COVID.
And please look carefully at the chart I linked. Air pollution was not at record lows during COVID. The spike happened in 2023, while the economy reopened in 2021.
None of this is valid analysis. None of this is meaningful -- this is just a pile of snide bullshitting on the back of a random article.
What about forest fires in the years measured? Hurricane activity? Humidity and wind patterns? What was the data like in Chicago vs Seattle vs Houston, what were the state and municipal policies?
You're just posturing for your team here.
Yeah, exactly! I’m not saying Biden caused air quality to get worse in 2023. That was probably the Canadian forest fires that year. My point is that the reporting on this is bullshit. Lots of outlets ran stories about the 5% increase from 2016 to 2018 in this air quality metric. But then they ignored the much bigger fluctuations that came after.
I’m not saying the opposite happened, my point is that you cant trust the media any farther than you can throw it.
A national price on carbon was introduced (money was collected, but then refunded to individual annually/quarterly), but provinces could implement something different if it met the same goals (Quebec and (at first) Ontario went with cap-and-trade). The federal Liberals were attacked for a tax grab (even though monies were refunded, and the SCOC ruled it was not a tax):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada
Those that attacked the federal Liberals were generally [Cc]onservatives… never mind that folks like Milton Friedman thought putting a price/tax on pollution was a good 'market based' mechanism:
> In 1979, Friedman expressed support for environmental taxes in general in an interview on The Phil Donahue Show, saying "the best way to [deal with pollution] is to impose a tax on the cost of the pollutants emitted by a car and make an incentive for car manufacturers and for consumers to keep down the amount of pollution."[157] In Free to Choose, Friedman reiterated his support for environmental taxes as compared with increased environmental regulation, stating "The preservation of the environment and the avoidance of undue pollution are real problems and they are problems concerning which the government has an important role to play. ... Most economists agree that a far better way to control pollution than the present method of specific regulation and supervision is to introduce market discipline by imposing effluent charges."[158][159]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman#Governmental_i...
And folks like Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker recommended something similar for the US:
* https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...
Some provincial leaders looked at other options to carbon pricing and found the alternatives would cost more:
* https://nationalpost.com/news/scott-moe-says-saskatchewan-co...