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.
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amended, but do you want to go back to polluted air and water just because a small minority of regulations need to be repealed or amended?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do you want to go back to polluted air and water just because a small minority of regulations need to be repealed or amended?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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It should be uncontroversial that introducing shit into an environment where it doesn't belong is a bad idea, yet many people remain unconvinced that dumping tons of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere or tons of fertilizer by-products into the oceans is a bad idea.
It's less that but rather the hypocrisy of promoting burdensome regulations and bans implemented in one county (e.g. Germany) which hurts domestic industry and raises costs for its citizens, all while being silent on countries like China and India continuing to massively build more and more coal fired power plants
Unfortunately there is hypocrisy to go around. Here's the argument China and India will use: "coal and fossil fuel always was for all its history and still is the largest portion of Germany's energy mix. It's hardly in a position to ask other countries to stop."
"China and India have the right to industrialize themselves using the same tools Western countries have used. China is leading the world in alternative energy manufacturing making clean energy profitable and India is the 4th largest renewable energy producer."
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 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.
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,”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Nah some environmental regulation is batshit.
Literally, in the UK you can’t build if there’s a protected bat species in the area.
Why do you think that is batshit?
Guano
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Protecting a small company's ability to pollute is not a valid reason.
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.
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.
Ah the old "it takes longer to learn how to cut hair than it does to become a cop".
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it's associated with cancer, heart disease, and dementia.
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
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
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.
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.
> 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?
> while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated.
Prove it.
> 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?
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.
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.
give me an example of EPA regulation that needs to be 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.
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.
> 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 live in Cancer Alley and people down here drink the koolaid. Cut to Midgely pouring TEL all over his hands.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
Also: Preserved hair reveals just how bad lead exposure was in the 20th century (livescience.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872282
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
Next you tell me that teaching children not to piss in the pool is propaganda.
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.
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.
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).
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.
We live in opposite-world where the way it is, is the exact opposite of how it should be
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.
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...
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 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.
The punchline being:
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
It’s why they added it to wine
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-...
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.
You can still buy the same stuff at an airport or race track.
I remember people with various "tunes" at the racetrack would run this stuff. It definitely smelled like candy!
Wait 'til you learn about avgas!
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
There was a big case in Berlin where policemen got sick after shooting at a range with insufficient ventilation.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
Lead in gas is responsible for the maga mental health crisis
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).
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.