Maybe the worst part of the over regulation is that it hasn’t even been particularly successful on this point. The rivers aren’t flaming but in more than a few places tap water is and even if it isn’t flaming it’s not drinkable and the microplastics in everything are probably worse than the specter of acid raid.
No I don’t want more regulation, my point was that the mountain of regulation hasn’t even accomplished the basic things it set out to accomplish in the first place. Clearly regulation isn’t the best way to accomplish the goals of having clean air and clear water. There might be a pro heavy regulation argument if the regulations actually accomplished what they set out to accomplish, but they don’t.
Tara: Actually our (US) air and water are far cleaner and more healthy than before the clean air and water acts were passed in the 1970’s. Yes there is far more work to be done on issues like plastics and climate change. I don’t see the next four years as making much progress in those areas. Do you?
You are making a lot of assumptions. For one you are assuming that the environmental improvements are due to regulation and not due to societal and cultural change and technological advancements. I challenge that presupposition. Terms like “cleaner” and “healthier” are completely useless, there is no metric by which you can measure cleanliness or healthiness. Instead what you have to do is measure particular measurements or units and look at changes in those units over time, but it’s impossible to compare across units. An improvement in one area may be undone by changes in another area, these are complex systems we have no understanding of.
For example when I was in college I lived near a small “lake” that was really more of a large pond. You could claim that lake was healthier in 2005 than it was in 1955 because in the 1950s there was a certain amount of agricultural chemical and raw sewage runoff in that lake and by 2005 those numbers were next to zero. So see healthier water. But I could have pointed out that the ecosystem in 2005 was in terrible shape compared to in the 1950s and what we had just figured out was that while our fancy wastewater treatment systems are good at removing certain things from the water they can’t remove things like hormones. The treated wastewater from the local mental hospital was pumped into the lake and for decades all the female inhabitants of the hospital were on hormonal birth control which results in the body excreting more female hormones through urine. It turns out decades of pumping estrogens into the water has adverse effects on local wildlife populations. So you could look at that lake as an environmental success because the chemicals are out but I’m looking at an ecological disaster.
That’s one of the difficult parts of trying to decide which technologies are “best” for the environment. Wind energy might be great unless you’re a bat or bird that lives anywhere near a wind farm, so what’s more important renewable energy or wildlife populations?
If we stopped pumping industrial waste chemicals into the ocean but we are filling it with plastic, microplastic, hormones, and wildlife killing wind farms have we really benefitted the environment?
I don’t accept your presupposition that climate change is anything that is human driven or that humans can do anything about. One large volcanic eruption will undo even the most aggressive carbon reduction plan on top of emitting large amounts of radiation and a plethora of other chemicals and air pollution. So you will have to forgive me if I don’t spend any time wringing my hands over climate change.
That said I really do think we will take great strides in the future in better stewardship of our planet, it’s going to take more than four years but four years can give us a good start. There is an incredible amount of innovation that is being done that is being stifled and stymied by regulation and bureaucratic corruption. There have been several different devices and mechanisms developed to get rid of the plastics and microplastics in the ocean for example that should have been largely adopted but that have been stalled out by a variety of government agencies. Numerous advances in cleaner fuels and engines have been stopped. Obama’s goal of high speed trains was effectively killed by the FAA and they have to be better for the environment than airplane travel. There’s a variety of best practices in agriculture that are adversely impacted by government overreach.
When it comes to getting people to do the right thing you can use a carrot or a stick. Since the fifties if not before we’ve used the stick and that means that you are constantly having to find a bigger stick or someone bigger to wield the stick. As long as regulation is the method by which we try and improve the lives of people there will be people aggressively looking to get around the rules, to get away with breaking them, or to buy lobbyists to create loopholes so they can ignore them.
Now is the time to intrinsically motivate people. It’s not hard to get people to care about the environment. It’s not hard to get people to care about their health and the health of their friends and neighbors. But you have to be able to present reasonable steps toward a healthier future and you can’t lie to people about it.
I was beaten over the head since childhood about the importance of recycling. Went out of my way for years to do it. Then found out that all that recycling I spent so much time on got sold to Chinese companies and dumped in the ocean. Makes it hard to take any “environmentalists” very seriously. It’s even harder to take them seriously when their solution is to make it illegal to sell something to China or to pretend we can control what China does in the ocean. The solution is we need to be able to recycle plastics here at home, and the only way to do that is to cut the mountain of regulations that prevent people from doing that.
I often get frustrated with environmental-related issues because they are complex multi variable problems and inevitably we have to make trade-offs. Instead, people talk in single variables and absolutist terms. For example, I was incredibly frustrated, though not surprised, that a local birders club opted to ignore the effect of windmills on birds migrating across the prairies and instead swear allegiance to the threat of climate change and the declining numbers of these same birds—with climate change being the single variable. It’s wrong, dumb, and exasperating.
I also worry about the way environmental disasters (e.g. large environmental spills such as East Palestine) get covered in the media. Of course they need to be avoided, there should be accountability for failures, and so forth, but we need to develop a more nuanced understanding that there will always be trade-offs. By no means am I downplaying the harm of such disasters. If they aren’t happening here, though, then they are happening somewhere else. (Manufacturing has largely been off-shored to places like China with not only cheaper labor costs, but also more lax environmental regulations.) It seems like a lot of people think if we just switch to electric cars then no more pollution.
“We don’t want flaming rivers or acid rain…”. No we don’t.
XXXX
Maybe the worst part of the over regulation is that it hasn’t even been particularly successful on this point. The rivers aren’t flaming but in more than a few places tap water is and even if it isn’t flaming it’s not drinkable and the microplastics in everything are probably worse than the specter of acid raid.
Tara: So you want more regulation or what? Be specific.
No I don’t want more regulation, my point was that the mountain of regulation hasn’t even accomplished the basic things it set out to accomplish in the first place. Clearly regulation isn’t the best way to accomplish the goals of having clean air and clear water. There might be a pro heavy regulation argument if the regulations actually accomplished what they set out to accomplish, but they don’t.
Tara: Actually our (US) air and water are far cleaner and more healthy than before the clean air and water acts were passed in the 1970’s. Yes there is far more work to be done on issues like plastics and climate change. I don’t see the next four years as making much progress in those areas. Do you?
XXX
You are making a lot of assumptions. For one you are assuming that the environmental improvements are due to regulation and not due to societal and cultural change and technological advancements. I challenge that presupposition. Terms like “cleaner” and “healthier” are completely useless, there is no metric by which you can measure cleanliness or healthiness. Instead what you have to do is measure particular measurements or units and look at changes in those units over time, but it’s impossible to compare across units. An improvement in one area may be undone by changes in another area, these are complex systems we have no understanding of.
For example when I was in college I lived near a small “lake” that was really more of a large pond. You could claim that lake was healthier in 2005 than it was in 1955 because in the 1950s there was a certain amount of agricultural chemical and raw sewage runoff in that lake and by 2005 those numbers were next to zero. So see healthier water. But I could have pointed out that the ecosystem in 2005 was in terrible shape compared to in the 1950s and what we had just figured out was that while our fancy wastewater treatment systems are good at removing certain things from the water they can’t remove things like hormones. The treated wastewater from the local mental hospital was pumped into the lake and for decades all the female inhabitants of the hospital were on hormonal birth control which results in the body excreting more female hormones through urine. It turns out decades of pumping estrogens into the water has adverse effects on local wildlife populations. So you could look at that lake as an environmental success because the chemicals are out but I’m looking at an ecological disaster.
That’s one of the difficult parts of trying to decide which technologies are “best” for the environment. Wind energy might be great unless you’re a bat or bird that lives anywhere near a wind farm, so what’s more important renewable energy or wildlife populations?
If we stopped pumping industrial waste chemicals into the ocean but we are filling it with plastic, microplastic, hormones, and wildlife killing wind farms have we really benefitted the environment?
I don’t accept your presupposition that climate change is anything that is human driven or that humans can do anything about. One large volcanic eruption will undo even the most aggressive carbon reduction plan on top of emitting large amounts of radiation and a plethora of other chemicals and air pollution. So you will have to forgive me if I don’t spend any time wringing my hands over climate change.
That said I really do think we will take great strides in the future in better stewardship of our planet, it’s going to take more than four years but four years can give us a good start. There is an incredible amount of innovation that is being done that is being stifled and stymied by regulation and bureaucratic corruption. There have been several different devices and mechanisms developed to get rid of the plastics and microplastics in the ocean for example that should have been largely adopted but that have been stalled out by a variety of government agencies. Numerous advances in cleaner fuels and engines have been stopped. Obama’s goal of high speed trains was effectively killed by the FAA and they have to be better for the environment than airplane travel. There’s a variety of best practices in agriculture that are adversely impacted by government overreach.
When it comes to getting people to do the right thing you can use a carrot or a stick. Since the fifties if not before we’ve used the stick and that means that you are constantly having to find a bigger stick or someone bigger to wield the stick. As long as regulation is the method by which we try and improve the lives of people there will be people aggressively looking to get around the rules, to get away with breaking them, or to buy lobbyists to create loopholes so they can ignore them.
Now is the time to intrinsically motivate people. It’s not hard to get people to care about the environment. It’s not hard to get people to care about their health and the health of their friends and neighbors. But you have to be able to present reasonable steps toward a healthier future and you can’t lie to people about it.
I was beaten over the head since childhood about the importance of recycling. Went out of my way for years to do it. Then found out that all that recycling I spent so much time on got sold to Chinese companies and dumped in the ocean. Makes it hard to take any “environmentalists” very seriously. It’s even harder to take them seriously when their solution is to make it illegal to sell something to China or to pretend we can control what China does in the ocean. The solution is we need to be able to recycle plastics here at home, and the only way to do that is to cut the mountain of regulations that prevent people from doing that.
Great examples and insights!
I often get frustrated with environmental-related issues because they are complex multi variable problems and inevitably we have to make trade-offs. Instead, people talk in single variables and absolutist terms. For example, I was incredibly frustrated, though not surprised, that a local birders club opted to ignore the effect of windmills on birds migrating across the prairies and instead swear allegiance to the threat of climate change and the declining numbers of these same birds—with climate change being the single variable. It’s wrong, dumb, and exasperating.
I also worry about the way environmental disasters (e.g. large environmental spills such as East Palestine) get covered in the media. Of course they need to be avoided, there should be accountability for failures, and so forth, but we need to develop a more nuanced understanding that there will always be trade-offs. By no means am I downplaying the harm of such disasters. If they aren’t happening here, though, then they are happening somewhere else. (Manufacturing has largely been off-shored to places like China with not only cheaper labor costs, but also more lax environmental regulations.) It seems like a lot of people think if we just switch to electric cars then no more pollution.