In Louisana there’s a stretch around all the refineries nicknamed Cancer Alley. The locals work the plants. Everyone gets sick. And they vote for expansion because it brings in more jobs. You need the regulations.
Yeah, but I bet the executives and lawyers don’t live anywhere near there, and they probably visit those sites as little as possible. In the thought experiment that wouldn’t be allowed.
I live in Cancer Alley and people down here drink the koolaid. Cut to Midgely pouring TEL all over his hands.
Basically everybody agrees with what you're saying which is what makes this an insidious comment. In general the pressure against regulation comes from narrow winners (oil industry for instance) whereas the pressure for regulations generally comes from people focused on the greater good (even if they are misled by other narrow winners, for instance compliance firms).
There are valid reasons to oppose regulations. They can be used to create barriers of entry for small businesses, for example. They constantly affect the poor more than the middle class.
We're talking about environmental regulations. It is no more good for a small business to pollute than a large one, and it's precisely the poor who are most harmed by environmental pollution.
It's really easy to sit and demand evidence before regulating something. But consider that if we waited for hard evidence to accumulate before banning lead in gasoline, we likely never would have banned it because the hard evidence wouldn't exist. I also don't agree on the principle that regulations are "harmful" or "helpful." Rather, you have to define who the regulation harms, and who it helps. For example antitrus…
We had research to support the EPA phase down of lead. Also, your assertion that lead “helps fuel companies” is fundamentally mistaken. Gasoline is a mass-produced commodity. Oil companies have single digit profit margins. These companies aren’t making Big Tech profit margins where they can absorb higher costs without passing them along to consumers. Cost savings from things like gasoline additives accrue to consumer…
Until the price of gas starts to remotely reflect the medium to long term costs of climate change I basically always celebrate anything that increases gas or carbon-based energy prices. Like, it sucks... but there's lots of data that consumers respond to these prices in their choices.
The way I think about it, the entirety of global civilization is massively, massively subsidizing carbon emission.
We had research to support the EPA phase down of lead. Also, your assertion that lead “helps fuel companies” is fundamentally mistaken. Gasoline is a mass-produced commodity. Oil companies have single digit profit margins. These companies aren’t making Big Tech profit margins where they can absorb higher costs without passing them along to consumers. Cost savings from things like gasoline additives accrue to consumer…
Lead helped fuel company profits because it was cheaper than the other anti-knock additives, like ethanol.
In an industry where everyone sells a completely fungible product such cost savings generally are passed on to consumers. Oil companies can profit in the short term due to fluctuations in the price of oil and things like that, but not from something like lead additives, which everyone had been using for decades.
In my opinion it is obvious and should be uncontroversial that some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated. Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be force…
give me an example of EPA regulation that needs to be eliminated
Lead is a textbook example of a good regulation. It’s something where the industry was doing something very harmful-aerosolizing lead and pumping it into the air—which had quite small economic benefits and was relatively easily replaced. Some regulation achieves this kind of improvement, and we’re probably under regulated in those areas. Particulate matter, for example, is extremely harmful. But many regulations do n…
Can you tell more about particulate matter ? You mean small particles in the air right, so air pollution right ?
Yes, it's associated with cancer, heart disease, and dementia.
You used to be able to buy leaded 110 gas as Sunoco in the early 2000's. It would make your exhaust tips turn white and had a sort of candy like smell when combusted.
AFAIK that's why leaded paint is bad for children: it tastes sweet so they continue licking it/eating the chips of paint that fall off the wall
Burning coal is a huge and easy win. Artisinal and small scale gold mining should be high on the list too, even though it's a much harder problem: https://www.unep.org/globalmercurypartnership/what-we-do/art...
You do mean banning rather than burning, right?
I think they meant [Targeting the] burning [of] coal.
It should be uncontroversial that introducing shit into an environment where it doesn't belong is a bad idea, yet many people remain unconvinced that dumping tons of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere or tons of fertilizer by-products into the oceans is a bad idea.
It's less that but rather the hypocrisy of promoting burdensome regulations and bans implemented in one county (e.g. Germany) which hurts domestic industry and raises costs for its citizens, all while being silent on countries like China and India continuing to massively build more and more coal fired power plants
Unfortunately there is hypocrisy to go around. Here's the argument China and India will use: "coal and fossil fuel always was for all its history and still is the largest portion of Germany's energy mix. It's hardly in a position to ask other countries to stop."
"China and India have the right to industrialize themselves using the same tools Western countries have used. China is leading the world in alternative energy manufacturing making clean energy profitable and India is the 4th largest renewable energy producer."
We had research to support the EPA phase down of lead. Also, your assertion that lead “helps fuel companies” is fundamentally mistaken. Gasoline is a mass-produced commodity. Oil companies have single digit profit margins. These companies aren’t making Big Tech profit margins where they can absorb higher costs without passing them along to consumers. Cost savings from things like gasoline additives accrue to consumer…
Lead helped fuel company profits because it was cheaper than the other anti-knock additives, like ethanol.
That's true, and without any legislation or such prohibiting lead they would most likely have continued to use it as anyone who would have phased out lead would have been at a competitive disadvantage. But once it was banned, everybody was again on an even playing field, and as OP explained fuel is a commodity so the higher cost just flowed through to the end user prices, refinery margins stayed about where they were.