
Photos taken by the EPA reveal America before pollution was regulated - kevinconaway
https://www.insider.com/what-us-cities-looked-like-before-epa-regulated-pollution-2019-8
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baron816
We look back at the suburbanization of America with such regret, but looking
at these pictures, it’s hard to imagine sticking it out in these cities during
that time.

I question how anyone who was alive back then would want to return to this.
Compare today to the 70s—an era with high inflation and unemployment—you’d
think that generation would marvel at how low the cost of environmental
protection has been. Yet, it seems it’s the younger generations who are most
concerned with the environment.

~~~
cosmodisk
This is common across the world.Not sure if there's a special word within the
books of psychology, however people somehow manage to manufacture memories of
limited spectrum,aka only remembering the things they really like about that
particular moment.Most of those, who rave how great 70's or 80's were,
remember it when they were young. They remember relationships,parties,family
stuff but not a factory chimney spitting out black fumes. When I ask my
parents how they remember soviet occupation, my dad has very fond memories of
it,as he was young, used to play music in local discotheques and had it very
easy.My mother,on the other side,used to queue outside empty shops for hours
with two little kids hoping they will sell something,so obviously she hated it
then and she hates it now.

~~~
ajmurmann
I wonder how much of this also might have to do that some bad things weren't
noticed because most people were used to them and took them as given. If you
always lived next to the giant, smoking chimney, are you going to get up every
morning and be upset about the smoke ruining the air? It's different if it
gets built after you've lived without it.

Now we have many younger people growing up with decent environment around them
and we see on TV how the polar bears are starving, the ice is melting and the
coral reefs are being bleeched.

~~~
cosmodisk
That's also a very valid point and is applicable across many fields. For
instance, I did some shopping the other day. Went to Waitrose,which is
essentially an upmarket food retailer in the UK.I bought some veg,including
some tomatoes.The price was 2-3 times higher than in other places.They had a
strong and pleasant natural smell,which is almost nonexistent when you buy
cheaper tomatoes.Now if someone grew up in a large city and never had a chance
to have an access to a private garden where vegetables grow, he's used to that
lack of taste and thinks it's normal. However I know how a real tomatoe from
your own garden tastes so it's easy to understand the difference. Hadn't I
lived in a house in a small city,all these things would be Impossible to
understand.The same applies to pollution- once you go outside your polluted
city,you realise how fantastic the air can be in the middle of a forest.

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vatys
Ah yes, the good old days. When manufacturing jobs were plentiful and American
production was second to none.

It’s important to remember the cost of what made America “great” back then.

~~~
alacombe
Nothing changed, beside world-scale NIMBY'ism. The choice to be made is
simple, either lower life standards to Bangladesh level (the only level
sustainable at +7 billions inhabitants) or pay the unsustainable price. No
amount of tech or virtue signaling is gonna change that fact.

I made my choice.

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hanniabu
I have no idea what you're even saying or inferring.

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gameswithgo
he is saying the first world lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable with a
multi billion person population on one earth sized planet and he is probably
correct.

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jchw
Well, I think it’s clear that the prospect of deep lifestyle changes,
specifically downgrades, will never prove very popular. Especially since upper
class lifestyles are not likely to change nearly as much as working class.

But also, measures to control population strike deeply dystopian chords, and
result in similarly adverse reactions.

I think most people realize things have long not been sustainable... but it
isn’t obvious what to do about that. I think that’s why the focus has been on
technology that can buy us more time. Anything else that could help is
probably not gonna happen in short order...

~~~
slfnflctd
As long as so many people still consider it a personal affront to even hear
the slightest suggestion that one of the easiest things they can do to
contribute to a better world is simply eat less meat, I don't have a whole lot
of hope.

~~~
CamperBob2
This problem will fix itself soon enough when synthmeat reaches its tipping
point. At some point on the price/quality curve, social signal theory will
kick in, and it will become unacceptable to kill actual animals for meat.

We'll save a lot of water when that happens, which isn't a bad thing
regardless of your position on animal rights.

Civilization isn't a zero-sum game. _Everyone_ , without exception, who has
_ever_ claimed otherwise, has been wrong. In order for someone living in the
middle of Africa or India to live better, you and I don't have to live worse.

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cosmodisk
Absolutely stunning pictures.The difference today is that we don't see all
this anymore,as it's often happily exported to countries that are willing to
take all the dump. Howeve, probably the best thing was the removal of large,
polluting factories from cities,which had a huge impact on the quality of air.

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kpU8efre7r
Why were regulatory bodies needed? Why wasn't the market able to decide they
don't want smog and pollution?

~~~
dwaltrip
Markets are not infallible tools. They are a pattern of human interaction that
has certain pros and cons. It is a very powerful pattern, one that we should
continue to use. But not blindly.

One of the common modes failure for markets is situations with negative
externalities. There is a negative outcome, a cost, that is not borne by the
participants in a transaction. Thus, they have no economic incentive to do
anything about it. The participants keep doing business, and the negative
outcome keeps happening.

Environmental damage is a very common example of negative externalities. E.g.
groundwater poisoning, air pollution (which causes millions of deaths per year
[1]), ecosystem destruction, climate change, and so on.

[1]
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/air_pollution.htm](https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/air_pollution.htm)

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OrgNet
some of these photo with the smoke stacks could have been taken today...
probably a lot of the others too

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cheschire
for the longest time the only thing that ever came to mind for me about the
EPA was that Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd called one of their employees
“dickless.”

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mytailorisrich
Is this true?

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codesushi42
Yes sir, it's true. This man has no dick.

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CryptoPunk
Air pollution was already being increasingly dealt with by municipal smog laws
before the EPA was created.

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notacoward
"Increasingly dealt with" only in the sense of having gone from not even
having laws on the books to having laws on the books that did nothing.
Unfortunately, air and water do not respect human political boundaries.
Businesses can move, or threaten to move, either taking advantage of weaker
regulation in the new location or keeping them weak in the old one
(respectively). We still see these effects across national boundaries, even
though both pollutants and jobs are less mobile between nations than they were
between states. EPA was created because local efforts had almost completely
failed time after time, and would have continued to fail for obvious reasons.

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AdrianB1
Cities still produce a lot of waste each day. The theory of infinite growth on
a finite planet is failed from birth, but there are still supporters of a
10-20 billion population. The result: lots of waste and pollution.

~~~
hanniabu
I agree with you, granted there's many efficiencies that can be made that
would likely make 10-20B doable.

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AdrianB1
It is not about making it doable, the questions are: is it needed? is it worth
it? what will be the quality of life in a world with 20 billion? Every big
city has a housing crisis already, how is this solved for 20 billions? What
about energy and waste?

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hanniabu
Like I said, there are many efficiencies that could be made. The burden
wouldn't be that much different than now. The world is extremely inefficient.

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dqpb
Make America great again

~~~
JulianMorrison
s/great/choke/

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dvt
> None of the 35 photos are pretty (other than the film-photo haze), but it's
> worth remembering what US cities used to be like before we cared what we put
> into the air, soil, and water.

IMO, this is disingenuous. I think that there's a very good argument made
against federal agencies that are run by bureaucrats with zero skin in the
game. These kinds of sytems are also ripe for corruption. The counter-claim
that there's no way local governments could come together and offer a
comparable solution is dubious. Fun fact: the EPA spends ~16 million tax
dollars a _day_.

As a side note, it's also interesting how HN has sort of politically migrated
from moderate-center-libertarianism (when I first started reading it) to left-
leaning-federalism.

~~~
mayniac
Why use the daily cost of the EPA, unless you're trying (very obviously) to
scaremonger?

To put that figure in perspective, it's $5.8B a year. This is much lower than
most departments:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_bud...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_budget).
The DoD spends the EPA's yearly budget in about three and a half days.

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Aeolun
The US spends $1.8B _a day_ on defense?

Obviously I knew the budget was larger than any other nation, but this does
put it into perpective.

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cosmodisk
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_Unite...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States)

