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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 forcefully rejected.

Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights. It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped. Clearly, banning leaded gasoline has that kind of justification, and therefore I'm strongly in favor of maintaining that ban and extending it wherever it isn't in place yet. The same reasonable standard should be applied to other regulations across the board.

Almost every environmental regulation has come after it was already shown that there was some harm that needed to be mitigated.

The worst environmental crisis in human history is going largely unchecked. I find it hard to take seriously any argument that environmental regulation has gone too far as opposed to not nearly far enough.

If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good I'm cool with revisiting anything, but the common sense wisdom around environmental regulation has been corrupted by corporate public relations campaigns.

CEQA in California is very often used to block apartments in existing urban areas.

So, instead, California continues to mostly build single family housing sprawl into natural habitats.

A clear example of environmental regulation hurting the environment and the climate. And of course the affordability of housing.

CEQA itself is a mixed bag. I want to be clear that there are very important things the CEQA does to improve our environmental conditions[0]! The very real issue of CEQA being “weaponized”[1] stems from how environmental complaints have to be re-litigated in their entirety every time one is filed. Say there’s a coalition of neighbors who do not want something built. They can each file a lawsuit alleging environmental issues and each will have to be handled in isolation

*I am not going into immense detail here. It is admittedly a bit more complex than this, but this is a reasonable summary

[0] https://youtu.be/TKN7Cl6finE?si=CR4SjVK5_ojk-OKq [1] https://www.planningreport.com/2015/12/21/new-ceqa-study-rev...

I don't know if its still true, but I recall reading once that CEQA had never been used to actually prevent or even slow the building of a dam or a mine or something. It had only ever been used to hobble otherwise neutral development. Its a good idea in theory, but I feel like the plaintiff ought to be able to articulate what environmental impact they are concerned about and maybe require a study from them in support of that claim too.

Thank you for mentioning this, it was the first thing I thought of in this conversation thread!

Government should be active and in charge of urban planning. It is a matter of the common good.

One of the biggest problems today is that urban planning has basically evaporated. Local and state governments don't plan towns anymore. Things are left to developers who have no other concern than to run a street off a major road and plop a few houses down, sell, and move on to the next project. No thought is given to traffic or public services or walkability or public transportation. No care is given to integration with existing urban structures. Instead of mixed-use zoning or building houses around a common public space, which are historically the more common and sensible form of urban planning, we end up with car-dependent suburban dead zones, suburban sprawl.

This should be receiving more attention from environmentalists, as urban planning is intimately related to environmental issues.

I don't know where you live, and this is going to be very dependent on where you live, but in most places that are experiencing these issues I think you actually have the problem backwards. For any given parcel of land, building upwards would be the more profitable move. Local governments deliberately legislate planning that prioritizes single-family homes, cars, and sprawl; developers are then forced to operate within these constraints. They'd rather be building density!

And all of the harsh chemicals that get released when that new construction burns up in wildfires...

Yeah I'm not in favor of sprawl. It sounds like it needs to be amended, but do you want to go back to polluted air and water just because a small minority of regulations need to be repealed or amended? Wouldn't it make more sense to just revisit whatever regulations are having unintended consequences?

>do you want to go back to polluted air and water just because a small minority of regulations need to be repealed or amended?

>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 forcefully rejected.

When I say they're mostly good, but we should fix what's broken and people start hitting me with examples of broken regulation I can only interpret that as an example for why environmental regulation should be opposed by default. So I respond accordingly.

I've never said all environmental regulation is good. That would be stupid, but you should have evidence based reasons for wanting to repeal or modify a regulation.

Existing regulation was put in place for a reason and those reasons likely still matter. Even if the regulation is falling short of having unintended consequences.

current environmental regulations act to slow progress on solar power installation

we should either delete the regulations, or add exemptions for the infrastructure we need to build to avoid climate disaster

this is a time sensitive issue for our environment. every day spent debating regulatory nuance is a day wasted

at this point I prefer drastic decisive action over continued inaction: delete the regulations and re-introduce them

All of the regulations that are used to "limit sprawl" in the US functionally prohibit the construction of new dense city blocks even moreso, and this in turn forces suburban sprawl to occur.

I'd argue that environmental regulations that impede building modern nuclear power plants to replace coal power plants are net harmful. Nuclear power safety has advanced a lot since Chernobyl.

Chernobyl design was never in use in the US, but nuclear went through a long period of near universal public opposition to its expansion because of the high profile disasters that it caused.

Now the cost of solar and storage are dropping at a rate I doubt nuclear is ever going to make a significant comeback. I'm not opposed to it, but I wonder if the economics will ever be favorable even with regulatory reform.

> Chernobyl design was never in use in the US

Commercially. Several early test reactors were essentially just graphite moderated piles not unlike Chernobyl, but they were abandoned for a reason.

Graphite moderated reactors are broadly fine, the problem was with some technical specifics of that specific reactor design, and the operational culture that surrounded it. After Chernobyl, those flaws were corrected and operation of other RBMK reactors has continued to this very day, with no repeats.

That's good additional clarification, I only meant to point out that graphite moderated, water cooled reactors had existed in the US and UK.

Chernobyl may have done a lot to inflame cultural imagination of what could happen in the worst cases, but the US still had its own high profile disasters like Three Mile Island.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

I would hesitate to call Three Mile Island a disaster, it was certainly a nuclear accident. A reactor was damaged, but no one was injured and an absolutely miniscule amount of radiation was released. The other units at the plant continued to operate until quite recently (and might actually be starting up again).

It would. People are still building some natural gas plants even despite renewables being cheaper and nuclear is far cheaper over its lifecycle than that and, other than regulatory issues, is basically better in every way.

There will continue to be new gas plants as long as there are coal plants which will be converted, usually around the time a major overhaul would need to be taken anyway.

Nuclear might be better and cheaper over it's entire lifecycle; but given that the starting costs are so high, the time to build is so long, and the US has serious problems with cost overruns in public projects, as well as the fickleness of both government and public opinion, I don't expect another plant to be built.

> nuclear is far cheaper over its lifecycle than that

That is the case for base load generation, where the plant can operate near 100% capacity all the time. But that isn't were gas is usually being deployed; it being used for reserve generation. The economics of nuclear isn't as favourable in that application as it costs more or less the same to run at partial generation, or even no generation, as it does when it is going full blast.

The closest I've gotten to somebody finding environmental regulations that were driving up the cost of nuclear was with some of the latest stuff with people trying to get rid of the LNT model of how radiation affects people.

Getting rid of LNT would allow higher doses to workers, and the way it makes nuclear cheaper is by having less shielding around the reactor.

But if you look at how recent reactors like the AP1000 failed, it's not so much because of the mere quantity of concrete. In fact, one of the big advantages of the AP1000 is that it used a fraction of the concrete and steel of prior designs. The real problem at Vogtle were construction logistics, matching up design to constructible plans, and doing that all in an efficient manner.

The construction process didn't run over budget and over timeline because of environmental regulations, that happened because we don't know how to build big things anymore, in combination with leadership asking for regulatory favors like starting construction before everything has been fully designed, which gave them more rope to hang themselves with.

I don't know the specifics of why France forgot how to build, at Flamanville and Olkiluoto, but I imagine it's a similar tale as in the US. High labor costs, poor logistics, projects dragged out, and having to pay interest on the loan for years and years extra with every delay.

If there's somebody with more specifics on how unnecessary regulation is killing nuclear, I'd love to see it. But after watching attentively and with great interest since ~2005, I've become so disillusioned with nuclear that I doubt we'll ever see it have success in the West again. Factories and manufacturing have seen productivity go through the roof over the past 50 years, while construction productivity is stagnant. Playing to our strengths, and using our very limited construction capacity on building factories rather than building generators, seems far wiser on the macroeconomic scale.

The £700M (960M USD) spent on fish protection measures at Hinkley Point C would be a topical example [1]. It's expected to save an average of a few hundred twaite shad, six river lamprey, and eighteen allis shad per year, plus one salmon every twelve years, and a trout every thirty-six years.

https://www.salmonbusiness.com/nuclear-plants-new-700-millio...

The article you linked says "According to a government-commissioned review, Hinkley Point C’s suite of “fish protection measures” will cost more than £700 million".

I spent 10 minutes and have not been able to find said "government-commissioned review". Is this even true?

There's certainly some "environmentalism" out there that's using the banner of the environment for other ends.

Here's one example: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-...

I mostly agree with you, but it is worth paying attention to the details.

This article doesn't speak to me. What I read is, "Won't someone think of the poor UC system?" But the UC system is _massive_

> But Casa Joaquin’s neighboring, overwhelmingly white homeowners could have used CEQA to demand costly studies and multiple hearings before Berkeley officials.

Important to note that white people are well-represented at UC Berkley too. https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts

> More recently, a series of court rulings that culminated last year nearly forced Berkeley to withhold admission of thousands of high school seniors...

Graduating high-school seniors are also known as incoming freshman or legal adults.

> ... because the state’s judges agreed with NIMBY neighborhood groups that population growth is an inherent environmental impact under CEQA.

Ok, let's see how big the UC school system is...

> The University maintains approximately 6,000 buildings enclosing 137 million gross square feet on approximately 30,000 acres across its ten campuses, five medical centers, nine agricultural research and extension centers, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2017/chapt...

I'm not seeing evidence that protestors were primarily NIMBYs and pesky white homeowners. I can find several articles citing _student_ protests.

> “It’s students who set up People’s Park in the first place, so it’s our place to defend it,” said Athena Davis, a first-year student at UC Berkeley who spoke at the rally. “It’s up to students to reject the idea that our housing needs to come at the price of destroying green space and homes for the marginalized.”

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2021/01/30/protesters-tear-down...

They're talking about using environmental rules to block homes for people to live in, inside cities.

Using land efficiently in walkable places is one of the most environmentally friendly things we can be doing, and supposed "environmentalists" sought to block it using "environmental" rules!

If that's not NIMBYism to you, you have blinders on.

I didn't say there was NO NIMBYs, but that this article suggests NIMBYs were the primary protestors. That doesn't seem truthful. Additionally, the UC system does have a large impact on the environment.

I'm sure there are better examples to illustrate your point

> homes for people to live in

Student housing. Which likely means partially-furnished studios with shared bathrooms and a kitchenette at best. This isn't the useful housing folks are asking for.

It's pretty useful to the students!

That kind of "wait, no, not THAT kind of housing, not HERE" is textbook NIMBYism.

There may have been some student protestors, but the money behind the legal challenges were all wealthy local NIMBYs.

I would just say that NIMBYS that weaponize environmental regulation for purposes it wasn't written for aren't environmentalists.

That's a great hypothetical, but it's not supported by the article. There are claims that NIMBYs are doing this or that, but follow the links to the supplementary articles and it's baseless. I only find evidence that students and homeless protested. Those aren't NIMBY homeowners.

To me, it seems UC wants to bulldoze a park famous for homeless camps and replace it with student housing. Pro-development is trying to cast the UC expansion in the same light as folks asking for affordable housing. But, UC is not providing useful housing for residents of Berkley.

Fortunately, this egregious nonsense lead to the CEQA rules being modified so that NIMBYs like these can't weaponize them so easily in situations like this.

https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-developmen...

CEQA is pretty universally considered a disaster.

The alternative is not to have no environmental regulation. California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.

>California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.

Says whom?

California has a huge population. California has a massive water shortage problem. California has wide areas vulnerable to wildfires. California has piles of small ecosystems that are fragile and can be easily wiped out.

Saying California could copy some states like Iowas regulations makes negative sense.

The major problems with CEQA are:

- the extreme cost and time spent on mandatory Environmental Impact Reports

- it allows pretty much anyone to sue projects over just about anything, which can also add many years before projects can start

None of this has anything to do with California specific environmental concerns

> If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good

In Massachusetts you can't clear shoreline. Specifically, if you buy waterfront property on a pond / lake, you can't clear the shoreline to make a beach in your backyard. You can only use what used to be there before the law was passed. There's even restrictions on building close to shorelines, so if you want to build, you need to find an existing building and renovate.

Now, I'm not a wetland expert, so maybe someone will chime in and tell me why every inch of freshwater shoreline must be undisturbed. But I like freshwater swimming and suspect that we can allocate some space for human recreation.

>Almost every environmental regulation has come after it was already shown that there was some harm that needed to be mitigated.

Ok, strong example here: the long term efforts to stop forest fires caused build up of fuel that should have burned up in small fires which then instead burned up ecosystems which evolved for small forest fires and instead were destroyed in large ones.

That's a well intentioned environmental policy that had terrible effects.

Fuel efficiency programs with the goal of reducing emissions with exceptions for work vehicles killed small trucks and meant a ton of people who do approximately 0 work drive around enormous vehicles that were designed big to match the exception criteria.

That's another one.

Ethanol to replace gasoline is also an enormous negative consequence waste that started as an environmental program.

Things don't just work because you want them to and programs aren't automatically right because of what they intend to do.

Far too many people argue for things they don't understand at all because of the surface intention of them and treat discussion about them blasphemy. (I chose uncontroversial negative examples because I don't want to get sidetracked into arguments about my examples with zealots)

what kind of common sense wisdom are we talking about here, can you give an example? understanding the impact of regulation designed to impact both the environment and the economy, two incredibly complex systems our experts are only beginning to understand, isn't generally a matter of common sense

The common sense wisdom I'm referring to is that environmental regulation is in general bad or does more harm than good.

That's an opinion I encounter constantly and it's a meme that was manufactured in PR company meeting rooms, right wing think tanks, and neo-classical economists theoretical models of how the world works.

Nah some environmental regulation is batshit.

Literally, in the UK you can’t build if there’s a protected bat species in the area.

This is not true, there is just a specific protocol you have follow to do the building work. Yes it increases costs, but it doesn't explicitly prevent them.

Why do you think that is batshit?

Guano

How do you explain the bug up its ass that the EPA has about auto racing?

Congress should pass the RPM act and exempt race cars from the clean air act. I never said you can't cherry pick individual problems with environmental regulation.

I just don't like the general attitude that because you can find something to disagree with that environmental regulation as a general rule is bad. It isn't.

There are thousands and thousands of pages of environmental regulations. Obviously people are going to be able to find some things that need to be revisited, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Nothing should be repealed without evidence and in many cases amendments are more prudent than repeals.

At the same time I'm sick of people facing no consequences for modifying their diesel pickups to blow black clouds of smoke on their fellow citizens.

Bro I can't go out without some diesel pickup rolling coal. If anything auto standards need to be higher because people aren't adult enough to follow the 'not for public roads use' model.

Except, you know, NEPA.

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 antitrust enforcement harms shareholders and some employees of very large firms, but it helps many employees and arguably improves the landscape for competition between many smaller firms. So whether a regulation is preferable comes down to values.

In the case of leaded gas, it harms basically everybody, but it helps fuel companies, so it was an easy thing to change.

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 consumers at the gas pump.

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.

I agree. I’m just addressing the notion raised in the post above that oil companies will bear cost increases in an industry where everyone sells an identical product and consumers can just cross the street to save $0.10 a gallon.

Do you know of any research or calculations of what that number ought to be?

If you wanted to pay for direct air capture of CO2 to directly "undo" your climate effect of driving, the cost would currently be about $6 per gallon. Price comes from [1], found [2] looking for a second opinion on current direct air capture cost.

[1] https://theclimatecapitalist.com/articles/gas-should-cost-13... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/phildeluna/2024/11/29/will-dire...

I wonder whether those methods scale at those prices to the theoretical demand of undoing burning gasoline. I doubt it.

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.

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.

If the end product ends up marginally cheaper, the company will be able to sell more of it, and this will lead to more profit. And sure, when you ignore the cost of the pollution, this certainly benefits the consumer, by allowing them to afford more energy and energy-based products (i.e., just about everything).

But then we come back to ignoring the cost of the pollution. It certainly gets paid for eventually, but by who? Also, it's cheaper for everyone if the pollution is eliminated to begin with rather than being cleaned up later (which is certainly a more energy intensive endeavor).

I think you're missing the point -- the point is that gasoline companies KNEW ABOUT alternative lead-free substitutes for anti-knock (such as ethanol) and chose lead because they perceived it was less profitable. [1] Specifically because ethanol wasn't patentable and TEL was, and ultimately it WAS patented.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-...

It is more than that - lead and ethanol have other properties that engines that use them need to handle. Lead also acted as a lubricant and parts designed for engines that assumed lead fuel were designed with softer valve seats - switch to unleaded with otherwise equal octane and your will destroy the engine. (though experience shows that unless you were driving your car on a race trace most cars worked fine for longer than the car lasted). Ethanol will destroy some forms of rubber and so you need to use different seals in some parts.

TEL was patentable, but those patents were long expired before there was a big push to eliminate leaded gas.

Also, TEL being patented by Dow (which isn’t an oil company) actually was a reason oil companies would want to use an alternative, if possible. Why would they want to pay Dow to use a patented product, all else being equal?

They picked lead because it was the cheapest additive, not because it was more profitable for the industry as a whole. Those two things aren’t the same. In the oil industry, the products are identical and companies compete only on price. If you use the $0.10 per gallon additive when everyone else is using the $0.05 per gallon additive, then your sales collapse because customers just cross the street to save $0.05 per gallon. But if every company switches to the $0.05 gallon additive, that doesn’t mean the companies pocket the extra $0.05 per gallon. Most of that goes to the consumer, because, again, consumers can just cross the street to get the better price.

It’s really a collective action problem. Nobody wants their gasoline to be more expensive than other companies’. So everyone has the incentive to use the cheapest ingredient. If you ban that ingredient, prices go up. But since everyone's prices will go up, you remove the competitive disadvantage.

I think you're missing the point. Without a market-coordinating motivation (i.e., legislation), any company that adopted a more expensive anti-knock would be competed out of the market.

Ethanol has a propensity to suck up ambient moisture and is more demanding of rubbers and happily attacks aluminum.

In an age of natural rubber components, poorly sealed fuel systems with steel tanks and aluminum carburetors pretty much anything other than ethanol is the "right choice".

And once they ruled out ethanol they settled on lead because it was cheap/profitable. Obviously they chose wrong, they should've picked something more expensive but less terrible.

These weren't cartoon villains with monocles twirling their mustaches. They were normal humans making pragmatic decisions based on the constraints they faced. Without knowing the details people cannot understand what future similar fact patterns may look like.

That said, it should be no surprise to anyone that nobody wants to talk about "well we don't know how bad the harm of leaded exhaust is, we know it's not good, but it's diffuse and undefined so we'll round it to zero/negligible" type decision making, for that sort of unknown rounds to zero logic underpins in whole or part all manner of modern policy discourse.

>Ethanol has a propensity to suck up ambient moisture and is more demanding of rubbers and happily attacks aluminum.

Actually, moisture problems are from using things like homemade alcohol or alcohol from unknown sources, where the likelihood of it already containing a sizable percentage of water has been a problem since the Model T days.

And if that water has a bit of an aggressive pH, it can have an effect on aluminum components.

This is just not a problem with gasoline-alcohol blends from reputable suppliers unless there is serious failure in the supply chain after that, where any fuel would have been contaminated by water regardless. The fuel-grade alcohol is tested before it is added, then the finished gasoline fully analyzed afterward.

Neither moisture nor corrosion is a problem with fuel ethanol or methanol, and when you see convincing information to the contrary (like from a pro mechanic) it often originates from misguided sources, "old wives' tales" for which actual evidence existed without being well-understood. But sometimes the most professional are the ones who don't take any chances, whether "common knowledge" is factual or not, if it doesn't hurt, no big deal.

Miscellaneous polymer compounds were the real question for cars that were not originally made for modern alcohol mixtures.

Ethanol just doesn't absorb moisture into your fuel tank by itself, even from a very humid environment.

Not any more than plain hydrocarbon fuel. In old ventilated fuel tanks, extreme temperature cycling under very humid conditions draws moist air into the tank when the fuel shrinks or is consumed. Kilos of cold fuel and cold metal can continue to condense moisture from the air, when the dew point is greater than the temperature of the tank. After a while you can get grams or ounces of water rolling around in the bottom of the tank. This could build up and stall out the vehicle or keep it from starting.

If it was only an ounce or two of water at the bottom of the tank full of all hydrocarbons, it would actually help to add a gallon of plain (good) alcohol to help dissolve the separated water into the gasoline so it can pass through harmlessly like it always has since gasoline has always had trace amounts of water anyway. Condensation is about as clean as rainwater so it's nothing the engine hasn't seen.

When most mechanics see something like this it has already gotten way out of hand, and there have been waves of anti-alcohol propaganda disseminated through time which reinforce the superstitious component.

Another problem from the '80's was when you do first start using alcohol-containing gasoline in an older car, it can break up varnish that has built up in the tank for years which never would come off until some alcohol came along. This could be a few grams, end up clogging the fuel filter, and the car stalls out no different than from water in the fuel line. Direct cause-and-effect relationship undeniably due to the use of alcohol, with many independent observations. Not a water problem, but who's keeping score.

Just not any more of a problem in the 21st century, similar conditions are so rarely encountered now.

The kinda are/were

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

tetra-ethyl lead helped significantly increase octane, allowing a lower-cost fuel to be used in gasoline engines.

>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.

We already knew lead was toxic before we started putting it in gasoline. Even the guy that invented it got sick from exposure and people died from exposure in their plants in the first years of operation. The problem is that we somehow require evidence that something is unsafe but don't require any evidence that its safe in the first place.

So we should legislate evidence free based on the vibes of whichever tribe is currently in power?

We're doomed.

Note that the current administration closed its research and science office.

https://www.science.org/content/article/blow-environment-epa...

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.

That is usually the opposite because the absence of regulations usually put the smallest players in a state of dependence of some huge monopolistic groups.

Think pesticides and genetically modified plants for example.

> They constantly affect the poor more than the middle class.

That’s a very broad statement. I expect there are many cases where that is not true.

"greater good" is arguably the most broad statement with a large history of hurting many people based on the "greater good".

Maybe. But the original context here is an article about removing lead from gasoline. Which I’m pretty sure that helped many people based on the “greater good”.

There’s no copper sulfate in canned green beans or borax in beef. Those seem all around good.

Let’s agree that impacts of regulations are nuanced, and not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic like, “regulations hurt poor people”.

When left to their own cigaret companies tell congress cigarettes are safe and non addictive. Left alone companies pay in scrip only usable at the company store.

The 'greater good' has arguably PREVENTED much more hurt of people than it has ever hurt. Meanwhile companies have PROVEN time and time again that they WILL hurt people when left to their own devices. In environmental policies. In pay policies. In employment policies. In EVERY aspect possible.

This is the extreme, and it shows how far some (most?) people would go. There are many examples, and more being minted, it can be a drag.

Yes, not just environmental, all kinds of money stuff. The more money can be how it gets on steroids.

But this says a lot here:

>not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic

With greed involved you can follow the money to an extent, you find lobbyists on both sides of every controversy, sometimes chalking up wins, other times losses. But they stay in business and grow by compromising the greater good with as little profit loss from those paying them the most.

They might switch roles when they lobby in favor of ordinary citizens one time, and squarely against in a future campaign. But they never actually switch sides, the least costly thing to compromise is the "greater good", which ideally from their point of view is intangible, versus actual money, which their clients are usually counting before they have earned any.

It's politics, all regulations are hard to pass, but as lobbying has increased, the difficulty of having good legislation in favor of the greater good is becoming less possible.

It just costs too much to have a seat at the table.

If people want to have good things, it might become completely dependent on older regulations which were in their favor before it got too expensive to do that any more.

For each instance did it help more than it hurt?

Not to simplify but if you have to make a decision shouldn't you always decide to help the most people?

> shouldn't you always decide to help the most people?

no.

Why?

Hundreds of book on utilitarianism have been published since Bentham (ca 1800) first argued 'why'. They argue the matter from evey perspective ad nauseam.

Check your public library.

Protecting a small company's ability to pollute is not a valid reason.

Ah the old "it takes longer to learn how to cut hair than it does to become a cop".

There are valid reasons to oppose specific regulations not all.

Imagine I open a auto repair center and I perform oil changes. It would cost me money to have used oil hauled away or I could dump it down the drain. You probably support a requirement that I pay for the service.

I'm sure there are regulations that cause actual harm to small businesses that have little or no value but I wonder what percentage it would be of the total.

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.

the largest unaccounted for victims of environmental degradation are our children and their children. given that we can't even keep from poisoning our own well water for our own uses today, it really does like on the whole we're failing to regulate sufficiently.

which isn't to argue that they shouldn't make sense. or that they should be used to tilt the playing field due to corruption, but on the balance claiming that we are currently overregulated is pretty indefensible.

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 not have such clear cut costs and benefits.

>was relatively easily replaced.

It wasn't easily replaced. For many decades there weren't any alternatives for anti-knock additives.

"…there weren't any alternatives for anti-knock additives.".

Presumably, you mean there weren't any alternatives for anti-knock additives for around the same price as tetraethyllead.

Octane ratings can be increased sans Pb if needed. Trouble is the extra refining and reduced yield increases costs which consumers weren't prepared to pay for.

Can you tell more about particulate matter ? You mean small particles in the air right, so air pollution right ?

Right but specifically solid particles in the air, not just gasses (CO2, NOX, etc.).

For example smoke and soot from combustion or dust particles from tires and brakes.

Sibling comments are good. I'll add that the biggest concern is PM2.5 (particulates smaller than 2.5 micrometers). They're thought to be responsible for 70,000 excess deaths in the U.S. annually, more than homicides or drug overdoses: https://www.stateofglobalair.org/health/pm

Particulate matter is relatively large particles, so far as air pollution goes. Think things like soot or smoke, rather than specific chemicals. Burning wood and coal produces far more particulates than, say, natural gas or gasoline-gas.

They're not necessarily large, and the worst for humans is small particulate which gets into the bloodstream through lungs, PM2.5.

https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/indoors/air/pmq_a.ht...

Breathing in unhealthy levels of PM2.5 can increase the risk of health problems like heart disease, asthma, and low birth weight. Unhealthy levels can also reduce visibility and cause the air to appear hazy.

Outdoor sources include vehicle exhaust, burning wood, gas and other fuels, and fires. Particle pollution can also travel long distances from its source; for example from wildfires hundreds of miles away. Outdoor particle pollution levels are more likely to be higher on days with little or no wind or air mixing.

I agree with everything you wrote. I meant to contrast them with "chemical" air pollution, and 2.5 μm is much larger than a molecule!

Yes, it's associated with cancer, heart disease, and dementia.

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

China's carbon emissions decreased last year. They build more renewables than anyone else.

If India and China build coal plants, it's because they have coal. If they had natural gas, like the US, they'd build natural gas plants.

We saw this happen with the Montreal Protocol over CFCs/greehouse gases when everyone went mad and banned just about every fluorocarbon known to science.

This was a case of zealotry and overregulation egged on by puritanical ideologs without full consideration of the consequences.

We correctly banned fluorocarbons as refrigerants in systems where they would not be properly recycled, such as domestic refrigerators, air-conditioning systems incuding those in vehicles, and like. This made for good regulation, and it made sense.

The volume of CFCs with other specislist applications was miniscule by comparison, and for most of these recovery, capture and recycle systems along with protocols for use could have been implemented.

Instead, we stupidy put an outright ban on just about every CFC in sight, many of which have no direct equivalents that are anywhere near as effective as CFCs, and many are dangerous and inflammable and form explosive mixtures with air.

Right, in one fell swoop we banned many of the most useful chemicals ever invented. Little wonder these's now a backlash to overregulation. If Montreal were to be repeated today the zealots would have to take more of a backseat.

1. Germany industrialized 100 years before China. It's been burning large quantities of coal for far longer.

2. Germany or at least the EU can and should impose a carbon fee on imports related to a given nations carbon emissions/reductions.

3. Economically transitioning to renewables is better for a nations economy than continuing to burn fossil fuels anyway. Renewables are cheaper.

Pointing to another bad actor as an excuse to continue to be a bad actor we learn is not a moral position somewhere around 5 years old.

I will say on point one, the rate which a country can scale usage throws this off. For example the first 50 years of Germany's usage likely represents far less than a current Chinese year of usage.

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."

China is also building more renewables than everyone else combined.

[dead]

You've just shifted the disagreement into a debate about whether the particular shit does or does not belong in the particular place.

Who is proposing for environment regulation without proper scientific evidence? You both sided the argument without giving any claims about environment regulation that turned out to be not helpful.

Maybe ten comments below you there is someone stating "environmental regulations are a win."

No qualifiers whatsoever. All environmental regulations are good as far as this person is concerned.

good but at what cost is the issue and who bears that cost

Aren't you just waving a flag for less regulation by rushing to align yourself with this inarguable example of regulatory success? Rather than discussing the issue of what impact lead had, or how we might apply this longitudinal method to other other problems (making hair archives into a general environmental data resource), or develop longitudinal methods in general, You've chosen to issue a clarion calla gainst 'bad regulation'.

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 forcefully rejected.

....nobody was arguing this. It's a classic straw man fallacy. Further, you're leveraging a lot of emotional terms while providing zero examples, inviting potential sympathetic readers to just project their feelings onto any regulations they happen to dislike rather than establish any sort of objective criteria or lay out any map/model of regulatory credibility that could be subject to challenge or criticism.

That's why the people that would rather policy be based on their personal interests work so hard to discredit all data and the scientific method so that you can't even have that conversation.

> while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated.

Prove it.

I have proven it to my own satisfaction. It's a pretty trivial proof. I'm sure you could derive your own, if you tried.

How's this: if, at some point, it seems to me that your agreement would benefit me or advance something I care about, I promise I'll consider trying to convince you.

"trust me bro"

Your tone suggests you think they are generally not based on science and given cost benefit analysis. Probably a reflection of your media intake.

In 1981 Reagan made cost benefit analysis a requirement for EPA.

For example in 1984: the EPA " estimates that the benefits of reducing lead in gasoline would exceed the costs by more than 300 percent.... These benefits include improved health of children and others"

Trump has just scrapped the requirement to cost in human health.

I wonder if removing lead would meet the new standard.

> while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated.

Which "other" regulations are harmful and what harm are they doing?

> 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

You're right. Off the top of my head, the stupidest environmental regulation I can think of right now is the banning of plastic straws. It's such a minuscule amount of plastic used compared to the mountains of bags and packaging used in general commerce and industry.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting our environment. I just believe in evidence-based policy and setting priorities correctly. After all, money, labor, and attention are finite resources.

> 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.

This would be a reasonable centrist opinion, if there existed environmental regulations that do more harm than good!

Actually, I do know of one, in California, that does both harm and good and the harmful parts need to be reigned in. CEQA in California was expanded by courts after it was passed to cover all sorts of things that weren't intended by the authors. CEQA is not so much an "environmental" law as it is a "perform some massive studies law" as it doesn't really regulate anything in particular.

Mostly it serves as a route to use the courts to delay projects, largely housing in already-built-out areas. By delaying a project's approval with a court lawsuit for 2-3 years, the preliminary financing runs out, the cost of owning land without doing anything with it runs out, so projects can be scuttled without the validity of the lawsuit every being evaluated by courts.

Instead of this sort of legal courtroom process that takes long and indeterminate amounts of time, CEQA should be replaced with strict and very clear definitions of harm, or at least move the more subjective parts into a science-based regulatory body that provides answers an a short timeline that can not be dragged on indefinitely.

> Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights.

This is a very weird turn of the phrase "corporations aren't people," because there actually are highly influential politicians that made the case that corporations are people. Nobody is saying that regulations are people. That's silly.

The regulations we need to get rid of are not "environmental" regulations, they are "rent seeking" regulations that allow entrenched interests to prevent disruption by smaller interests. CEQA is not a problem because its an environmental regulation, it's a problem because it's a tool NIMBYs use to get results that are worse for the environment.

give me an example of EPA regulation that needs to be eliminated

> It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped

Here is a strawman for you: studies for regulation A show that it is successfull in improving habitat for endangered species. Studies also show that the regulation increases tax burden and decreases competitiveness of national agriculture.

Should the regulation be chopped?

Put more broadly, we should, you know, enact good laws and repeal bad ones. No major political party has a monopoly on good, or bad, legislation.

> It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped.

This sounds good as a general default, but there are differences of approach. The US, for example, tends to be more permissive with new chemicals while the EU tends to take a more precautionary approach. Which is better on the whole, weighing the various competing goods, I don't know. I generally favor health over economic prowess, however.

> a manipulative political maneuver

Yes, under the pretext of concern for the environment. There are well-known cases where the political opposition will commission a bogus ecological studies to stifle construction projects they either don't agree with or as a petty way to simply make the ruling party appear less successful. And naturally, the ecological study will find something, as virtually no major construction project will leave the environment unaltered, which is not to say seriously or irretrievable damaged.

This sounds nice, but in the context of actual politics it's completely meaningless.

It's like saying that some people are dangerous criminals who need to be locked up, and other people are upstanding citizens who should be free to live their lives. Everybody would agree with this. The disagreement is in how you sort people. What category encompasses someone who belongs to the opposing political party? That sort of thing.

Regulation should definitely be justified by scientific data. Who gets to determine what's enough? Who gets to determine what counts? Leaded gasoline is a great example. It was pretty well understood when it was introduced that lead was hazardous and dumping a bunch of it into the atmosphere was unwise. But this was evaded, denied, and suppressed for decades.

Even today, it's not settled. Lead is still used in aviation gasoline in the US. It's being phased out, but it's been in the process of phasing out for a couple of decades and there seems to be no urgency in it.

You'll find plenty of people disagreeing with pretty clearly beneficial environmental regulations because in their view those regulations are not supported by the data. They would completely agree with your statement, while saying that pollution from coal power plants is no big deal, climate change is a myth, etc.

There definitely is urgency to phase out leaded aviation gasoline. The FAA is proposing that we phase it out by 2030 - just 4 years from now - even though we still haven't agreed on which of the 3 competing gas blends to standardize on, the pumping infrastructure only exists at a small number of airports, and even though there's still open concerns about them causing engine damage.

They just published a draft version of the transition plan here: https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/draft_docs/draft_unleaded_avgas...

Leaded gasoline for cars started phasing out 52 years ago. It was fully banned 30 years ago. If there was any urgency behind getting rid of leaded avgas it would have been gone in that timeframe.

The FAA started looking at it 14 years ago. They planned to finish phasing it out in 2023. Three years after that, leaded avgas remains ubiquitous, and there's a plan to finish phasing it out in six years. (The 2030 date excludes Alaska, which is planned for 2032.) That's not what urgency looks like.

Cars don't need high octane fuel, aircraft do. Outside of the absolute smallest aircraft, you can't get enough power out of automobile gasoline.

They started looking at it 14 years ago, but there's been tons of bureaucratic roadblocks that have impeded progress. (Depending on who you ask, the petroleum companies were responsible for some of these.)

Even today, there are reports that the new unleaded avgas formulations cause engine damage, and we don't entirely know why that's happening. So there's still technical issues to work out. (But it's important, so folks are trying to solve them as quickly as possible.)

>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 forcefully rejected.

I'm aware of political parties and politicians who make statements similar to "We have too many regulations" or "stop big government" I'm not aware of opposite.

You've never heard a politician say, "When I'm Mayor/Governor/President, we're going to make [x] [stop/start] doing [y]"?

> some environmental regulations work [...] while other [..] do more harm than good

You are (deliberately?) overlooking the elephant in the room: lobbies with money can distort the discussion.

Big tobacco knew for decades that smoking was bad but still managed to block restrictions in smoking. Oil companies knew lead was poisoning. Purdue knew Oxycontin was addicting. Facebook knows their product is toxic.

I remember going to LA in the late 80's and my eyes watering (I also remember the pants-less man on the side of the strode but that is a different story). Environmental regulations are a win. Unfortunately there is a large segment of the population that doesn't believe something until it happens to them directly. That makes it a challenge to maintain environmental, or any regulations for that matter, over generations. It isn't practical, but it would be interesting to create 'pollution cities' where the regulations were loose so long as the entire company drew its workforce (including management) from the local population (like within a mile) and a significant portion of their drinking water and foods must also be sourced locally. Go ahead, pollute your own drinking water. I bet cities like this would be cleaner than ones with stricter regulations.

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 grew up in Cancer Alley. Here's my old neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/3DZbiz8Bgyx5tx7v9

That wedge surrounded by green is a neighborhood that was created by landfilling a patch of swamp and building a levee around it. The northeast side of the wedge is the "nice" part of the neighborhood. You can see the houses are much bigger and there is a golf course running through it. There's a country club and lot of very nice houses. That's where a lot of upper level oil company employees live. (We lived here, my stepfather was a research chemist at DuPont.)

The southwest side of the neighborhood (much of it literally on "the other side of the tracks") is the cheaper houses and some apartments where a lot of blue collar employees work.

Zoom out a bit and you see Shell Norco to the northwest, the very heart of (and cause of) Cancer Alley. Ormond Estates was basically created to be a commuter neighborhood for Shell. Across the river is Dow Chemical. Look east and you see the IMTT St. Rose chemical plant. Keep going upriver and you get to DuPont and the Marathon Refinery.

Most of the executives responsible for cancer here do live in the area. People of all stripes have an impressive ability to maintain cognitive dissonance and live in denial when they are incentivized to do so.

Southern Louisiana is an intense microcosm of this. Seafood is one of the biggest industries there and you would think the local culture would be intensely protective of the environment, especially after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But environmentalism is woven into liberal culture that is in opposition to the religious conservative culture of the area, so it often gets actively rejected even though poor people in Louisiana are the ones who suffer for their choice.

"Strangers in Their Own Land" is an excellent social science book if you want to know more about the area.

I live in Cancer Alley and people down here drink the koolaid. Cut to Midgely pouring TEL all over his hands.

Yeah, Thomas Midgley Jr., from Wikipedia [1]:

"…played a major role in developing leaded gasoline and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons…; both products were later banned from common use due to their harmful impact on human health and the environment. He was granted more than 100 patents over the course of his career."

As someone else said, this guy's work was so toxic to the planet we ought to ban everything else he ever invented—just in case.

(And weirdly, one of his own machines took his life as well—whether by design or not.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

In the bay area you can throw a rock from one super fund site and hit another yet it's full of libertarians saying 'stop over regulating'.

> You need the regulations.

This is fixing the symptom instead of the problems. Elites are allowed to be rich because the cost of failure is supposed to be extremely (historically, their life) expensive to them. We got rid of the latter without the adjusting the former.

> I bet cities like this would be cleaner than ones with stricter regulations.

I would almost always take the opposite side of this bet. Once responsibility becomes diffuse enough, people would actively poison themselves as they see no alternative.

Yet, there are ample cases of the workers living near a factory and constantly getting cancer. PG&E in Hinckley, CA comes to mind as the most well known, due to the media/movie about Erin Brockovich.

But their CEOs don't live next to the factories. My, completely impossible, thought experiment would have all management living near the plant. I bet if the CEO lived with the water near the factory they would make sure it was clean.

Did you intend to write "stroad" (street + road used to decry car-centric city design) ?

yep. If any city embodies the strode it is LA.

There was a pretty substantial length of time between the beginning of the industrial revolution and the development of transportation infrastructure that allowed people to live far from where they worked, and get most of their food from distant lands. Your experiment was done many times. The result was not clean cities.

> Environmental regulations are a win. Unfortunately there is a large segment of the population that doesn't believe something ...

You aren't wrong, but let's be honest that a lot of that is manufacturing just moved to China and moved the pollution. Specific to lead in gas, yes it's great we no longer do this.

Manufacturing output hit an all time high in the US in 2024.

There's less manufacturing jobs and it's less of the total economy as other sectors grew but it would presumably need to be genuinely cleaner in order to offset that growth if industrial pollution just remained flat.

The switch from coal to gas would be a major cleanup for any process that uses electricity, for example.

Related to the OP comment about LA, are you suggesting that moving manufacturing to China had little impact on manufacturing and pollution in the US?

Hopefully next we can help fix mercury in fish, the number one contributor right now is burning coal. Seems like it would be a easy decision.

Coal is mostly sticking around in the US because of federal overreach to keep unprofitable and ancient coal generators going long after anybody wants to pay for the high maintenance.

Last week, a Colorado utility was "respectfully" asking to be able to close a plant:

> TTri-State Generation and partner Platte River Power Authority had a “respectful” but emphatic response late Thursday to the Trump administration ordering them to keep Craig’s Unit 1 coal-fired plant open past the New Year:

> They don’t need it, they don’t want it, and their inflation-strapped consumers can’t afford the higher bills. Plus, the federal order is unconstitutional.

https://coloradosun.com/2026/01/30/craig-tri-state-petition-...

TVA has also been begging to close a money losing coal plant for a while now, writing letters to FERC about it, but I can't find the link now.

New coal is far too expensive to build anymore too. Handling big amounts of solid material is expensive, and big old unresponsive baseload is undesirable for achieving economic efficiency.

Even China, which is still building new coal plants, is lessening their coal usage. Personally I think they'll keep some around to continue economic influence on Australia, which is one their primary countries for experimenting with methods to increase their soft power.

There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.

> There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.

For anyone wanting a slightly ranty but also informed description of why, I enjoyed this Hank Green video on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms&pp=ygUPaGFuayBnc...

Technology Connections also released a great rant on it (and more) recently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

Thank you for such a thoughtful comment. There's politics that gets flagged on this site, and there's politics that makes me think about things with more clarity. Yours is obviously the latter.

Collective decisions are unavoidably political, and grid electricity has to be a collective decision! My hope is that we can take the partisan aspect out of the politics, however, and reduce it to a discussion of the tradeoff of values: cost, reliability, climate, and any other values that we need to include. Fortunately I think that for nearly any value set, the answer is very similar.

> to keep unprofitable and ancient coal generators going long after anybody wants to pay for the high maintenance.

In EU 90% of expenses of running coal plants are taxes, yet it can still compete with subsidized green energy! It would be in everybody best interest, to allow building modern coal plants, to replace toxic inefficient stuff from 1960ties.

But with the overregulated and overtaxes industry, we have the worst from all options.

In the US, natural gas is extremely cheap, far cheaper than in the EU, and it will remain that way as long as we are still extracting oil via fracking.

Replacing existing coal with natural gas is better, cheaper, etc. etc. and it's just downright "dumb" to build coal as explained in a parallel comment that links to youtube.

But even new natural gas is likely to end up as stranded capital. Solar and wind are cheaper already, and backing that with storage, today, is nipping at the cost of most new natural gas plants. And in 3, 5, 10 years? Price trends are going to make even the cheap cost of natural gas as a fuel more expensive than using solar and storage.

I'd be very surprised if 90% of the expense of coal was tax, as that would make taxes 9x higher than fuel. Not surprised because it wouldn't make scientific sense, the negative externalities of coal are massive and any hard-nosed free marketer should be advocating for putting a price on those negative externalities, but surprised because the politics of Europe allow that!

Also, if taxes on coal or >9x the cost of the fuel, wouldn't that start to make natural gas much more cost effective too, even in Europe? Or does natural gas have similar taxes?

> There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.

A quick look at the PJM interconnect data would disagree with you. About a quarter of the live power is coal.

https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx

That serves 65+ Million people in the north east and is keeping them from dying of cold this past week, including today (Temp outside in the mid-hudson valley is 15F / -9C), and overnight will be 8F / -13C).

Just for context - electricity somehow powers everything in most homes. Your oil or propane furnace needs a power hookup to ignite.

Coal is the most expensive form of energy. We need the energy those coal plants are producing, but we don't need the energy to come from coal and the sooner we replace those coal plants the sooner the people getting that energy can get a break on energy costs. Assuming data centers don't offset the reductions via creating excessive demand.

PJM probably isn't a great example, it's been famously slow to approve new generation, hasn't it? And the rates aren't exactly super cheap.

We shouldn't get rid of coal without having something to replace it (ideally nuclear/solar/wind, but realistically probably gas), but I think the point was just that nobody would build a new coal plant today or keep them running for longer than they need to. They're inefficient and fairly expensive.

As much as it is fun to imagine you believing the false dilemma you've presented, I don't think the OP was suggesting not providing another option.

We could have and should have replaced all coal with nuclear but no, we couldn't do that.

It could have been replaced by almost anything, there is nothing particularly special about nuclear in this context (except its extremely high price).

Coal and nuclear are both dispatchable electricity sources. It is much easier to replace a dispatchable source with another dispatchable source.

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...

I'm skeptical that it's easier. On the numbers alone, artisanal and small scale gold mining (apparently) accounts for 15-20% of global gold production. But coal accounts for 35% of total electricity generation.

You do mean banning rather than burning, right?

I think they meant [Targeting the] burning [of] coal.

Not with Captain Planet tier cartoon villains in power.

you mean like the german environmentalists who singlehandedly kicked up german atmospheric mercury emissions?

Can you identify when exactly the German environmentalists did this thing you refer to? I'm assuming it's something coal related.

Total and per capita coal usage for Germany and a few other peer nations:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...

I can see a bump in early 1980s but I see the same in other nations, possibly a response to oil embargoes, possibly just economic growth.

Arguably Germany should have turned off a few lignite plants and kept their nuclear power a little bit longer.

Did you know that Captain Planet was straight up created to be pro environmentalist and anti-oil propaganda?

>Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–1996) was a pioneering animated series designed by Ted Turner and producer Barbara Pyle as environmental, pro-social "edutainment" to influence children towards ecological activism. It aimed to combat pollution and encourage environmental stewardship, often using over-the-top, stereotypical villains to represent corporate greed and ecological destruction.

Our parents let us get brainwashed by hippies and corporations as kids haha

The only problem with captain planet was the lack of nuance. Most people driving environmental degredation aren't over the top villains. Just executives acting in the best interest of their shareholders, but in general influencing kids to care about the environment is a pretty positive/pro-social thing to do.

I mean that’s what I meant by my comment. The government now are literally cartoon villains like the over the top characters on Captain Planet.

> Did you know that Captain Planet was straight up created to be pro environmentalist and anti-oil propaganda?

Well, yes, it isn't subtle.

It turns out that some propaganda is just correct, however.

Captain Planet always bothered me as a kid, even though I was (and continue to be) supportive of environmental protection. There was too much evil for the sake of evil. People don't destroy the environment because they want to. The destroy it because they don't care. They don't care because they are driven by greed, or some other motivation that is ultimately damaging to the environment, society, and civilization.

Yes, that's an entirely fair criticism. Media for children often has this kind of non-realism, and I think it's mostly for the worse.

Strangely enough, I was raised with quite a bit of environmental responsibility, but only a relatively dim awareness of the show existing.

It's a cartoon meant to sell merch. It wasn't exactly meant to be a nuanced reflection of reality.

This. Most cartoons produced on the 80's/90's were made to sell merch like toys. You can thank Gi-Joe. The irony here is a TV show about environmentalism generated pollution in the process of making plastic action figures and branded clothing which mostly wind up in the dump.

Next you tell me that teaching children not to piss in the pool is propaganda.

>Our parents let us get brainwashed by hippies and corporations as kids haha

Yes, well the alternative, where the entire media system that might offer a cartoon like Captain Planet is owned by one side, is working out super well and in no way slants anyone's view of anything. Good God, my dad still fights weird battles like this tiny skirmish without ever being able to see the larger picture and how immaterial this is.

Brainwashing has the connotation of going through cult programming. Captain Planet doesn't involve the kind of tight control over your interpersonal relationships that requires. To the extent any of us were "brainwashed" it would have been because the people around us were largely in agreement with the messaging in that show. I submit that many people still are.

Also "brainwashing" generally implies an efficacy that we didn't see in real world results. The generation raised on shows like Captain Planet don't seem that much more "eco-conscious" than those before or after that period of children's programming. If anything, villains from that show being elected to the highest offices in the US decades later seems to directly refute that it was anything like "brainwashing".

(ETA: Not to mention that the biggest takeaways from such shows was that individual action was sometimes more important than corporate or regulatory action, a message itself designed by the oil companies to avoid responsibility. If there was propaganda in those shows, it may not have been the heroes winning, but the idea that all we need are a few magic heroes rather than government regulations.)

I wish we had more “propaganda” like this.

Sesame Street is still putting out new episodes. Turns out the "learn to count" and "be nice to your neighbors" industry wields a lot more power than anyone thought.

That's good to hear. I was somehow under the impression that the show was cancelled.

We live in opposite-world where the way it is, is the exact opposite of how it should be

Don’t worry, we can get our lead from spices and every food that includes them. Lead is cheaper to get than cinnamon and even cocoa, so it ends up being favored adulterant to increase weight at sale.

Considering what lead does to people, there should be jail time for everyone involved. Even store managers should do time if products on their shelves turn up positive.

The punchline being:

  The findings, which appear in PNAS, underscore the vital role of environmental regulations in protecting public health.

  The study notes lead rules are now being weakened by the Trump administration in a wide-ranging move to ease environmental protections.

  “We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,”

Also: Preserved hair reveals just how bad lead exposure was in the 20th century (livescience.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872282

Fun fact - leaded petrol isn't actually banned in the UK, you can legally buy it and use it. The legislation at the time of bans just made it so that leaded petrol could only be a small % of overall petrol sales by any given fuel station, arguing that it allowed time for owners of unleaded-incompatible cars to purchase it.

And....it worked pretty much exactly as designed - initially only the largest stations carried it because they could justify the storage costs, and eventually it disappeared from almost everywhere. Just before covid there were still 3 small garages selling leaded petrol by the drum, but afaik they all stopped doing so.

And regardless - you can stil buy actual real Tetraethyl Lead fuel additive which turns your petrol into actual real 4-star leaded petrol, just like in the old days:

https://www.demon-tweeks.com/tetraboost-e-guard-15-fuel-addi...

I recall there's one factory on the planet still producing TEL, so once they decide it's no longer profitable it's over.

Aviation gasoline is probably the one market that still keeps it afloat, when/if piston aviation switches over the remaining market is small and insignificant.

At least in the US, the current proposed plan is to phase out leaded avgas by 2030: https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/draft_docs/draft_unleaded_avgas...

Light aircraft still run on leaded avgas.

Sounds like the government is being lax. From the aircraft owners and pilots association:

>So the Government's indifference is not going to help us in the UK if the *supply of leaded AVGAS is stopped, the UK CAA have not appoved new fuels, there is no infrastucture or supply chain in the UK. We keep beating the doors at the CAA and DfT...

I wish someone would do a large RCT of water fluoridation in pregnant women looking at long term cognitive outcomes if fetuses. It would be an easy study to do (just randomize each group to receive free deliveries of either fluoridated or not fluoridated water) and then look at their offspring’s scores on cognitive tests every few years. I think reputable scientists don’t touch this because they’re afraid of being labelled kooky.

I really want to see elimination of lead (projectiles, lead styphnate primers, etc.) in firearms next.

When I go to the range, every once in a while, I'll see one of the older marksmen who's there with his squirrel hunting rifle, chambered in .22 LR. I've noticed that he seems to have a tremor in his hands when he's loading his magazines. Essential tremor is linked to lead exposure [0]

Most .22 LR projectiles are either just lead or have a copper "wash" over the lead, not a proper jacket like you see on other rounds.

I wonder, if you shoot those loads for long enough, and breathe in enough gunsmoke, do you get that problem?

As for the proof being in our hair... well, not mine. Chrome dome over here XD

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1241711/

I completely agree. I do everything I can to avoid leaded ammunition. I do not want lead touching the meat I harvest. It can be really tricky to find lead-free ammo of certain sizes. I mostly use waterfowl ammo for upland bird and rabbit - and it works fine. But even ordering ammo online it is quite hard to get .270 solid copper. And in a store? Forget about it

Why would lead be in the gunsmoke? Everything leaded should be coming out the business end of the firearm, and it should be coming out with some gusto.

Are you proposing that the base of the bullet which is exposed to the burning propellant magically remains at room temperature, and none of the lead in the base of the bullet is vaporized? What about the process of forcing the projectile into the barrel's spiral grooves at very high speed, leaving grooves in the side of the bullet. Where do you suppose that displaced and/or vaporized material ends up? What about the lead styphante that is combusted in the primer? I am not aware of any firearm that has a muzzle filter that removes primer residue from the combusted gunsmoke.

I am directly questioning whether the .22LR bullet creates more lead vapor than any other round as per OP statement.

I haven't measured this but all the ingredients are there: they're unjacketed or copper washed, and they are made from soft lead rather than a hard-cast alloy. You can get a polymer-coated or pure copper round but that's pretty unusual since it goes against the cheap plinking purpose most people are using the .22 for.

The base of the bullet is lead (with jacketed pistol rounds, that's often true even if it's a "full metal jacket" and some brands are trying to draw a distinction there with "total metal jacket" branding) and it's exposed to the explosion when the round fires. There's some vaporized lead, most if it will move downrange and some of it won't. Airborne lead is potentially more of a problem at an indoor range.

Copper, polymer-coated, or total metal jacket rounds will also result in less lead on the firearm, I'd think, and less on the user's hands. One old guy I know who had lead poisoning at one time believes the real risk is getting the lead on one's hands and then handling a cigarette.

Because the heat and pressure from the propellant and rifling vaporizes or rubs off some of that lead. A very small percentage, granted, but still.

Particularly for unjacketed bullets like 22LR. Even jacketed bullets tend to not be jacketed at the base.

The material that burns in primers is often lead styphnate. This burns and sends lead particles throughout the air.

With rounds that aren't well jacketed like those 22s that are just bare lead, you also get some of the round scraping in the barrels that comes off as dust.

There's tons of lead in the air at shooting ranges.

There was a big case in Berlin where policemen got sick after shooting at a range with insufficient ventilation.

> The Utah part of this is so interesting because of the way people keep track of their family history.

Definitively interesting that they could get so many old hair samples with good provenance.

It's interesting that the paper doesn't mention this, but the answer here is Latter Day Saints. They have a very strong culture of genealogy and preserving family history. The study authors are all in Salt Lake City, which is the Mormon capital of the world.

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

You’re conjuring an image of children licking walls, but just the dust from the flaking paint chips is harmful.

https://www.cdc.gov/lead-prevention/prevention/paint.html

Water from lead pipes must have tasted amazing

Ancient Romans used lead as a sweetener.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sugar-of-lead-a-...

It’s why they added it to wine

I remember people with various "tunes" at the racetrack would run this stuff. It definitely smelled like candy!

You can buy it online from Sunoco

https://petroleumservicecompany.com/sunoco-supreme-112-octan...

I think they only sell the unleaded race gas at the pumps now but I may be wrong.

Wait 'til you learn about avgas!

You can still buy the same stuff at an airport or race track.

unless you live next to an airport or even remotely close to it

then lead is being sprayed all over you, your car and home, daily

for THREE DECADES NOW

no rush, not like it's poison or does permanent damage to your health/IQ

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...

There is unleaded airplane fuel, although leaded fuel is still used. What I have been told is that it would take some time for the unleaded airplane fuel (which is compatible with the existing airplanes that use leaded fuel) to be distributed to enough places to be commonly available enough, which it isn't yet.

Acknowledging that there is no safe amount of lead exposure, the amount of lead that "is being sprayed all over you" from a tiny handful of piston airplanes is minuscule compared to what we were all exposed to prior to the mid 70s. Like many orders of magnitude. I'd be concerned if I worked at the airport pumping gas or something.

Yeah it's absurd how aviation is somehow exempt from these rules, especially since piston engine aircraft carry virtually no vital role in anything except people flying them for fun. There have been viable alternatives for a long long time now.

I guess people who have money for personal airplanes also have the money to lobby when it matters for their interests. Pricks, I hope they die of dementia.

Wow, very angry and uninformed comment. No airplane owners are lobbying for lead. As a pilot with a personal airplane that runs on avgas, we all want lead to go away too. But it's a problem with FAA regulations, and an infrastructure problem where every airport nationwide needs to have separate fuel tanks/trucks with leaded fuel and the newer lead-free alternatives simultaneously, which is a massive expense. Plus, there is no consensus on which lead-free alternative is safest for old engines, so we're still waiting on data.

California has a few airports that are stocking the lead-free alternatives, but that's about it.

But yes, blame the small aircraft owners if it makes you feel better.

> "piston engine aircraft carry virtually no vital role in anything except people flying them for fun"

I guess we just shouldn't train new pilots then.

Yeah well, I'm sure you know what's also a massive expense in aviation? Everything. If a regulation was made that required it, people would do it regardless of how much it costs and it would finally become a reliable option if it was widely available. No regular car gas station would stock lead free if it wasn't mandated.

And well it's fine by me if you want to literally breathe lead every time you fly, you do you, but who the fuck gives you the right to poison everyone else around you? Like if anyone did what you do they'd justifiably spend their life in prison.

I find it horrid that there is even a debate around lead free alternatives. Oh woe is me, my 80s engine will last 100 hours less! Jesus fucking christ. You sound like a 3M lawyer advocating for PFAS. "The alternatives are inconvenient and expensive so we're gonna keep poisoning everyone until they aren't because we can."

> I guess we just shouldn't train new pilots then.

There are literally countless options man. There's even electrics now, you don't exactly need long range for training and small turboprop jet-a options for long hauls. I know the lead is making it hard to think, but for the sake of people breathing your exhaust please do try.

Piston aircraft are vital to training new pilots. Without the piston fleet, you wouldn't have anybody flying anything larger.

Not to mention they're frequently used for air ambulance flights, survey work, and law enforcement. The "satellite" view on most online mapping tools is recorded from a piston aircraft.

Also, the current proposed plan is to migrate off of leaded gasoline for most of the country by 2030, which is actually quite ambitious given that acceptable alternative fuels didn't exist until literally a few years ago.

They can run in regular gas reliably enough for training, they can run on jet-a, they can run on batteries. Anything vital can run on jet-a without any barriers.

Excuses are made because it requires retiring or refitting old aircraft, and people need to be forced to do it. Simple as. I will die on this hill.

> The "satellite" view on most online mapping tools is recorded from a piston aircraft.

It is not. You're thinking of lidar.

No, piston aircraft cannot run on Jet-A. That would cause detonation and the engine would quite literally self-destruct within minutes - likely during takeoff when the engine is at highest power.

There's been some trials of battery-powered trainer aircraft. The last I checked, they still don't have enough range to do the "long" cross country that's legally required.

And I assure you it's not because of old aircraft. Some flights schools have fleets of brand new 2025/26 models - all of them still run on leaded avgas.

Wait, you think workhorse aircraft today can run on batteries?

I know a Velis Electro can fly for an hour, that's plenty of time for flight school. I'm sure there's better options now too. If something needs to take longer than that and is worth doing, then do it with a turboprop.

That's besides the fact that there are genuine certified unleaded alternative fuels for piston aircraft now. Fucking "we oh can't do it" lead apologists smh.

One hour really isn't enough time. You can spend 30-40 minutes just getting in/out of busy terminal airspace, which would only leave 20-30 minutes for instruction - which is nothing. Most flight lessons are closer to 1.5 hours for a reason.

You're also legally required to maintain 30-45 minutes of emergency reserve, longer if you're flying IFR.

And again, this isn't even touching on the "long" cross-country flights that are legally required for training.

"One hour is plenty of time for flight school" is not doing you any favours in coming across as knowing what you're talking about lol. Good freaking luck completing cross-country flights for an instrument rating with that endurance, never mind your certainty that there are "better options" as if the laws of physics have changed dramatically between 2020 and today.

And I mentioned workhorse aircraft for a reason, considering that the Velis Electro has a payload of...172 kilograms. Turboprops (gas turbines in general) are far more expensive and far less fuel efficient at low altitudes than their piston engine counterparts, which is precisely why piston engines still exist.

The fact that alternative fuels now exist for piston engines does not make the blatantly wrong nonsense you've been throwing out any more correct, such as your suggestion that you can "just run" piston engines on Jet-A. That is something that anyone who actually knows anything about internal combustion engines can tell you for free causes regular piston engines to detonate/knock. Your assertion that piston-engine aircraft have virtually no vital role was similarly ignorant.

And that's besides the fact that black-and-white "if you don't agree with whatever half-assed or plainly incorrect crap I say in support of The Cause™ you're an apologist" nonsense lost its efficacy years ago; you might want to find a better soapboxing tactic for 2026.

Piston-engine aircraft both have much more vital roles than people flying them for fun (for example they form practically all of "last mile" air service as well as pretty much all of ag flying) and very much do not have viable alternatives as far as both cost and operational efficiency go.

I would argue it worked, but not fast enough. I think the current American politics run by 50-80 year olds with significant lead poisoning.

I am so grateful that much of my childhood was in a town rather than a city.

no one has mentioned "The Secret History of Lead" published by The Nation in March 2000. The long and detailed article exposed the deliberate and long-standing cover-up of leaded gasoline's dangers by major corporations. Villians include General Motors, Du Pont, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon).

The concerning thing is how lead, arsenic are being found in things they are not reported in or labelled as being safe.

I wonder how big a factor this is in creating podcast bros/tech bros. Is there actually a pipeline from 'get guy to start working out' to becoming a dumb bro?

https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-sha...

Seems to be a regularish occurrence far beyond the podcast/tech crowd in many areas.

Blind doubting of things can be as bad as blindly believing they're safe, if we don't know who's, or if anyone is keeping the safety honest. Capitalism can too often lean towards optimizing profit.

Testing for lead, etc can be done independently pretty easily and consistently enough to get a statistically high enough correlation of what's going on.

I get the stereotypes - but consuming anything in an unbalanced way will lead to being out of balance. Food, caffiene, alcohol, supplements.

During the past year I have discovered that almost all retailers here in Sweden have voluntarily replaced their usual Teflon/polytetrafluoroethylene/PTFE frying pan coatings with something called 'ceramic'. (This includes IKEA globally, I assume.)

The thing is - it's simply not as good. The worst case is probably frying frozen gyoza. They will get stuck when they get gelatinous on that 'ceramic' surface.

I ended up looking up some slightly offbrand stores to get the pan that I wanted.

Humans were able to successfully fry food for hundreds of years before Teflon was invented.

I still like non-stick pans for eggs, but for almost everything else, I prefer stainless steel, cast iron, or enameled cast iron. You do have to pay a little more attention to technique (knowing what temperature to heat the pan to before you put food on, etc.), but the end result is just about as good as a non-stick pan with many advantages:

* You don't have to be obsessive about never letting a metal utensil scratch the pan. (I hope you aren't using a metal spatula or fork with your non-stick!)

* You can scrape the hell out of the pan while you cook and get all that delicious crispy fond into what you're making. If I'm doing a pan sauce, it's always in the Dutch oven so I can get that fond into the gravy.

* They last a lot longer. Even if you are careful, a non-stick pan will lose its coating and need to be replaced after a handful of years. I got my cast iron skillet for $15 at an antique store. It's older than me and will outlive me.

* You're not, you know, eating forever chemicals.

I remember seeing a bunch of research showing that any teflon you ate was just pooped out, so to speak.

This ceramic pan I bought from IKEA lasted like 3-5 months until I was unhappy with it. Historically, the teflon pans I have bought from there have lasted 12-18 months easily.

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Explains a great deal, honestly.

like what? are there more intelligent people? I've anecdotally heard this is a cause for crime reduction as people are less impulsive than they were, in conflict resolution? overall?

don't really know what takeaway I'm supposed to know about

Are you really calling into question the well documented developmental effects of lead in human cognition and behavior

No, he’s asking for someone to expand on their five word sentence that is so generic it can be interpreted to support almost any thesis you want.

I don’t know anything about the effect of lead on human cognition and behavior, I’m asking you to tell me about it

If that’s even what their comment was about

How does that effect work?

your assumption wasn’t a “lead free” response, am I doing it right?

Lead exposure gives you brain damage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning. If you damage your frontal lobes, you generally become more impulsive and less measured in your response to things. Ergo, chronic lead poisoning causes populations to become more aggressive and more likely to engage in crime.

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If someone in the admin reads this, there is a chance this will be reversed and lead will be allowed in gas again :)

That is expected. The problem is that people are not getting healthier, or more intelligent, quite the opposite.

Obviously there is an absolutely massive problem that you're missing as you're congratulating yourself on "succeeding" with a massive effort with no clear result.

Good experiment… I guess turn the lead back on and we’ll see!

Well, at the very least you need to agree that its effect was smaller than the harm done by whatever the actual problem is.