461–470 of 524 posts
As a reminder, the British water treatment system was privatised in the 1960s and has been a huge joke ever since. When they were still in the European Union, common environmental and health regulations prevented the worst from happening. But as an example, one of the first actions taken after Brexit was to stop monitoring and treating sewage discharges into the English Channel. - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europ…
Rainfall over all of the UK has been increasing since 1840 accord to the Met Office [1]. How is a drought a clear signal of collapse if they've been happening since before the industrial revolution? [2]
[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/...
[2] https://iahs.info/uploads/dms/13708.88-483-489-81-308-Cole-F...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That never happens because the appointed regulator has no incentive to efficiently and effectively regulate, either.
In this case, the core issue is still not the privatization intrinsically, but the mechanisms of corruption and competing interests with some other areas. I'm not a free market absolutist or a privatization zealot, but I'm curious about the fact that England cannot come up with a privatization model that ensures clawback and exit clauses, measurable goals, and a clear investment plan for it. Even Brazil 5 years ago m…
Ironically, this is also the argument for privatization in the first place - that corruption and competing interests lead to government inefficiency, that the private sector is incentivised to cut out the bloat in a way that governments cannot, and therefore something that intrinsically is a public rather than private concern should regardless be privatized.
> The point that I want to make here, is that the biggest issue might be the lack of enforcement and regulatory effectiveness, plus bad legal framework and contracts.
Absolutely. I didn't think that this was even up for debate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized The post office in the United States is not privatized and yet has been able to set prices in a way that sustains the business for centuries. You can't simply assume that all public entities will ignore fiscal reality. In fact you may run into the opposite problem: when a utility is public, their debts appear on the government b…
Yes, in theory nationalized companies can set prices rationally and turn a profit. In practice they rarely manage this for long because sooner or later a populist comes along and forces them to lower prices in order to win votes. It's not just water where the UK has a problem with this. Transport for London has also been forced to underprice its services for years by London's socialist mayor, it's a big part of how h…
The reasons why Western systems often don't recoup even operating expenses, let alone capital costs, from fares are because transit is a public service with public externalities. Drivers on the road contribute to pollution and congestion, especially relevant in dense areas like London. Some level of subsidy is appropriate to account for the positive externalities of discouraging these negative outcomes while still encouraging regional mobility.
This is not to say TfL is as efficient as it could be; there is a well-documented capital costs crisis in the Anglosphere, particularly when it comes to transit. The issues here are more complex, though, than vote buying from an allegedly "socialist" mayor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we did this to ourselves I would argue that a small minority of the human race did this to the rest. > the lack of foresight Everybody on the planet is well aware of what is happening and why. Its not lack of foresight, it is pure ignorance and apathy of those who are making money off the backs of these tragedies.
This really isn't true. Most people aren't even close to reckoning with what net zero would involve. Most people haven't even got a stock vs flow model of carbon and think that lowering co2 emissions means reducing global warming. (As opposed to reducing the speed of the increase). You yourself haven't got a model. If we stop using fossil fuels today, billions die. The energy from fossil fuels has generated widesprea…
It's been obvious we're trying to commit mass suicide for a long time now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such a pedantic point. How does it add anything to the conversation?
If a sewer system can be designed such that dumping sewage need never occur, you can earmark some of the budget for gradually introducing this property into your sewer system. The more such improvements you make, the less often you'll have to dump sewage, until you never have to. Thames Water could have done this.
That’s true for all organizations.
As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992. So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of i…
There's a magician's trick done when people talk about a problem directly attributable to massive population growth and instead of looking at cause, they look at effect.
I wondered if anyone would point this out. England's population has risen 25% in my lifetime. Worse, the (perfectly adequate for this level of population) water infrastructure in in the wrong place... It's all in the North East in order to supply steel mills that are no longer there!
This is something that was intentionally done and the argument was had and, agree or not, people didn't want it to happen. It happened anyways. Of course, the policy can be reversed.
As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992. So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of i…
When it comes to things like utilities every penny of profit comes at the expense of the public. Either prices are raised so that a small number of people can stuff their pockets with extra cash above what it costs to deliver the service and maintain the system or they get that extra money by failing to deliver the service or they do it by failing to maintain the system itself. I think the neglect and failure to inve…
I too am a customer of PG&E.