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What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

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Re: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

#101

Post by rayiner »

swebs wrote: post #93
zhyder wrote: post #68

It's unfortunate that the EPA is under attack by conservatives who want limited government. If you start from first principles about what the min viable government should do, a big part of its charter would be to prevent major tragedies of the commons. And the environment is a textbook example of something that'd suffer the tragedy of the commons without government oversight. I prefer a bigger government with a bigge…

On the other hand, does the EPA really require 8 billion dollars per year when the protection laws have already been passed and improvements have already been made? In a software project, you allocate $x per month during development, and only $(x/10) for maintenance after it has shipped. Is there a point where the EPA can say "mission accomplished" and downsize to maintenance/enforcement mode, or is this just a typic…

Yes it does, due to the structure of the environmental laws.

In a libertarian system, you’d simply ban pollution (I.e. ban the externalizations of environmental costs), and then let the market and the courts hash things out. If a company was found dumping pollutants into the water, people would sue them, and the costs of all of that would get properly priced into the company’s products.

But the environmental laws are all about the various ways in which companies are allowed to pollute. Companies can dump poison into rivers, so long as they conform the EPA limits. Those limits are, by design, not set any “correct” level (as above, the “correct” level is zero—forcing the externality to be fully internalized; from an economic efficiency point of view, all environmental externalities must be borne by parties to the transaction, either the company or its customers). Instead, the limits are of a “best effort” nature, and a “how to get there from here” nature. For example, the law requires air polluters to install “the best available control technology” on smoke stacks. What does that mean? Well, that requires continual review and revision.

The EPA doesn’t exist to enforce laws that prevent pollution. It exists to manage all the pollution that the law allows.

Re: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

#102

Post by swebs »

Androider wrote: post #98
swebs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, does the EPA really require 8 billion dollars per year when the protection laws have already been passed and improvements have already been made? In a software project, you allocate $x per month during development, and only $(x/10) for maintenance after it has shipped. Is there a point where the EPA can say "mission accomplished" and downsize to maintenance/enforcement mode, or is this just a typic…

EPA could do nothing but spend 100% of that 8 billion on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites for the next 20 years and it wouldn't be enough to cover it. That's just to cover previously made mistakes. Reducing enforcement is going to keep adding to that list, and reducing safety and quality of life for all Americans. The vast majority (60-80%, Robert L. Glass) of costs for software is also in mainte…

>The vast majority (60-80%, Robert L. Glass) of costs for software is also in maintenance, as any of the classic software project management books will tell you.

What's the purpose of stating total costs when discussing monthly costs? Of course maintenance will end up costing more in total if the maintenance period is much longer than the development period. The per month cost is still much lower.

Re: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

#103

Post by da_chicken »

hliyan wrote: post #2

When I was younger, I honestly believed in the explanation that left to their own devices, free enterprise will work to protect the environment, as anything that hurts the market will hurt profits. What I didn't take into account was that this argument doesn't work for enterprises run by beings with limited lifespans. All except the most empathic humans will not incur any cost to avoid consequences that are beyond th…

It's not so much that humans have limited lifespans, it's just that corporations have profit incentives to offload costs. Treating toxic byproducts is massively more expensive than dumping them in the wilderness, and if management doesn't live near the dumping ground they're less likely to care about the costs. There's even a name for this type of behavior: negative cost externalization.

There are even situations of negative externality[1] where the value of the externalized costs exceeds the profit gained so that the net productivity to the nation is negative. Since the company never need pay those costs and they're applied to society as a whole, however, the company is still motivated to do it.

I wonder what Adam Smith would have said about the tragedy of the commons.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

Re: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

#104

Post by ceejayoz »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #27

It's important to tell a balanced story. Parts of America was like this. Most of it was not. Civil suits failed to curb industrial emissions in built-up areas, which then spilled over everywhere else. The EPA was a godsend. I didn't understand the problem until the first time I visited L.A. Wow, what a mess. The air was so thick. It was disgusting. It's amazing the progress we have made. But the EPA, like so many oth…

> Parts of America was like this. Most of it was not.

Sure, but that's a little like promoting the election maps that focus on land areas instead of populations.

Sure, rural Colorado was still in pretty decent shape in the 1970s. A very large proportion of Americans live in the parts of America that were like this.

Re: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

#105

Post by bobwaycott »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #96
zhyder wrote: post #68

It's unfortunate that the EPA is under attack by conservatives who want limited government. If you start from first principles about what the min viable government should do, a big part of its charter would be to prevent major tragedies of the commons. And the environment is a textbook example of something that'd suffer the tragedy of the commons without government oversight. I prefer a bigger government with a bigge…

It really is a shame that is considered a "conservative" view. I think a lot of Libertarians are coming around to have a view similar to your's. That the commons belongs to all of us and polluting and destroying it should be punished. Republican's on the other hand seem to thing liberty only applies to corporations. In fact if you delete the part about wanting big government, I could have almost mistaken you for a Li…

> That the commons belongs to all of us and polluting and destroying it should not be punished.

Did you really mean should not be punished here?

Re: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

#106

Post by throwaway2016a »

bobwaycott wrote: post #105
throwaway2016a wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a shame that is considered a "conservative" view. I think a lot of Libertarians are coming around to have a view similar to your's. That the commons belongs to all of us and polluting and destroying it should be punished. Republican's on the other hand seem to thing liberty only applies to corporations. In fact if you delete the part about wanting big government, I could have almost mistaken you for a Li…

> That the commons belongs to all of us and polluting and destroying it should not be punished. Did you really mean should not be punished here?

I fixed it before you posted that comment but didn't put an "edit" note because I thought I edited it quick enough for people not to notice. I was writing quickly and moved some words around that changed the meaning in a bad way :(

Yes, of course. The "not" shouldn't have been in that sentence. Polluters should have consequences.

Re: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

#107

Post by celeritascelery »

rayiner wrote: post #101
swebs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, does the EPA really require 8 billion dollars per year when the protection laws have already been passed and improvements have already been made? In a software project, you allocate $x per month during development, and only $(x/10) for maintenance after it has shipped. Is there a point where the EPA can say "mission accomplished" and downsize to maintenance/enforcement mode, or is this just a typic…

Yes it does, due to the structure of the environmental laws. In a libertarian system, you’d simply ban pollution (I.e. ban the externalizations of environmental costs), and then let the market and the courts hash things out. If a company was found dumping pollutants into the water, people would sue them, and the costs of all of that would get properly priced into the company’s products. But the environmental laws are…

“Banning” pollution is not realistic. Any economy of this scale is going to produce pollution. And while some technologies like fossil fuels are worse then others, there is no pollution solution. So the best the EPA can do it manange the pollution we do create to mitigate the harms.

Re: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

#108

Post by kochb »

Hey all, we need to go meta for a sec and talk about why this article doesn't belong here, and how culturally this is a step in the wrong direction for HN.

First off, this is blogspam, the original Popular Science article is a bit better. There's a reason blogspam is discouraged by the guidelines.

More importantly, this is a particularly pernicious blogspam because the selected photos (atlas, burning boat, water glass) mostly illustrate problems that have comparables right now. It excludes the smog and coal burning illustrated in Popular Science that do a better job at illustrating both pollution and the EPA's achievements.

These problems make this article a poor fit for Hacker News. I think we should be all sad to see such an intellectually empty article ranked this highly.

Re: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

#109

Post by coloredtopbar »

golergka wrote: post #53
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this truly private system, who owns the river that runs through the parcel of land? Who owns the fish that swim upstream from the ocean to spawn every year? Who owns the air? What organisation decides who wins when the factory in one parcel of land upstream pumps poison into the water and the air. Who judges exactly how much monetary damages are due from destroying an ecosystem? None of this libertarian fantasy is…

No fantasy that takes an ideology and tries to implement it without any nuance and compromise with reality is feasible, period. Libertarianism and anti-statism are usually quite more nuanced than their typical strawmen, and many libertarians are OK with small state which would be in charge of law enforcement. However, such small state still has no reason to own any land (except for government buildings) or designate…

> Libertarianism and anti-statism are usually quite more nuanced than their typical strawmen

Nah, not even someone hip to the kool-aid they drowned in wouldn't have been able to predict something like

> every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land

Re: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

#110

Post by swebs »

Sangermaine wrote: post #99
moduspol wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This straw-mans common conservative views, though. It frames the argument as either "the EPA, as it exists today and has been running" or "no EPA at all." There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of a lot of the EPA's activities and very few of those activities directly prevent what's shown in the photos.

>This straw-mans common conservative views, though. Not at all, when conservatives who do come to power always immediately move to dismantle the EPA, as with the current administration. Not to mention that conservative politicians endlessly rail against the evils of the EPA in terms not even remotely nuanced. I know, I know, "they're not really conservatives!".

So we have the issue where the majority of conservative voters think the country must do whatever it takes to protect the environment [1], but elected conservative officials think otherwise. How do you think this should be handled?

Option 1: Demonize all conservatives, turning the environment into a partisan agenda

Option 2: Demonize elected officials that choose to side with lobbyists over their constituents

Personally, I would chose option 2, but I guess option 1 is good too if your goal is to cause divisiveness or even to push conservatives away from agreeing with you [2]

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/20/for-earth-da...

[2] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-05/conservatives-dont-ha...

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