I think the EPA, and most executive agencies should not be allowed to write policy. They should be broken up into an independent advisory group, and an enforcement group which would be part of the FBI. The advisory group would advise congress on environmental concerns, and congress should write laws accordingly, balancing all other concerns. Before you come at me for being for deregulation, I think punishments should be extreme for breaking environmental laws. In my world C-Level/Board members of a company willfully polluting to save money would be executed. I just don't think its ok to have bureaucrats writing detailed policies that have the same power as law.
Agreed. The problem is that many of these decisions are not exclusively "science." They involve policy-making, and agenda-driven organizations are masking their preferred policy choices as "science." Toxic risk assessments are a perfect example. Toxicity assessments are famously arbitrary (e.g., adjusting acceptable dosages by orders of magnitude on the basis of uncertainty when one could argue for any other uncertainty factor).
The challenge being is that Congress doesn’t want to go through all the trouble to do that, and frankly would probably be too slow even if they did.
Say Congress writes a law saying it’s illegal to dump toxic waste in a river. Pretty clear cut, right?
Well, law rolls out, and now you have an enforcement problem with all the edge cases. For instance, what counts as a river? Does the drainage ditch behind the building count? Does the creek? Does it matter if it has water in it right now, or will have water in it later?
Also, what counts as toxic waste? If a substance is poisonous at say 100ppm and considered toxic - what happens if we dilute it so it’s 100ppb. Still toxic waste? What if the background level in the tap water in the area is 100ppb?
Is it dumping if a building containing the waste catches on fire and falls in the river? Does it have the same penalties? What if it was arson?
These edge cases come up during the regular course of enforcing these laws, and at some point someone has to decide what the right thing to do is. Situations can change too - say a dry river wasn’t considered a river - until a massive conglomerate used that ‘loophole’ and started dumping massive amounts of toxic waste into dry river beds, that then flooded and poisoned a bunch of people. Do you want to wait for congress to get it’s act together, or do you want an agency to step in and follow the intent of the law, clarifying the prior ‘dry rivers are not rivers’ stance to ‘a channel that has, or will have, predictable seasonal water flow’?
The rule making process is designed to give visibility, and predictability into this process. It used to be people would just do whatever and never formalize these decisons, or formalize them internally and never publish them so people could challenge them.
It's the difference between the "legacy" government (your traditionally elected public officials), and the "efficiency" government of bureaucracy. The legislature in the US has offloaded the power to make law to a multitude of bureaucratic agencies through the use of administrative law, as distinct from legislative law. Through the acts that establish these agencies, they are granted the power to create and enforce these administrative laws, which often leave the law-breaker with little recourse other than capitulation. The book National Security and Double Government by Michael Glennon is a fantastic resource for those interested in learning more.
I had this very discussion just a few days ago. Agencies like the EPA cannot satisfy their objectives by advising alone. Administration and case-handling is the bread and butter of executing any strategy, and laws alone won’t cut it.
It is inevitable to have some sort of policy-making involved, even for an agency, because the very strategy they choose to reach a certain goal (set by politicians) or enforce a law (set by politicians) may itself be a choice between political alternatives.
I would agree with you, except for the application of capital punishment. Prison time, absolutely. Hefty fines, absolutely. Lifetime ban from any executive positions, absolutely. Murder? No way.
I agree with you regarding punishments for polluters (although I do find execution a bit on the harsh edge).
However, your idea of agencies not writing policies... is not gonna last long. Congress is already ineffective and broken and there is not much on the horizon to change the reasons behind its dysfunctionality. There's a sad reason for the steady expansion of executive rights, and as long as this isn't fixed it is foolish IMO to force the executive to rein these in.
Edit: not to mention that, unlike government agencies, Congress is extremely corrupt. What is to prevent polluters from simply buying off Congress?
The problem is not that bureaucrats are writing these laws (at some level this needs to happen), but the immoral relationship between these agencies and private interests. Everyone knows about the revolving doors between industry and government. This needs to be stopped by congress.
Policies don't have the same power of law, they do however include incentives for compliance.
My cable company doesn't have to go through Congress to pass legislation to have me comply in paying my bill. They can choose to give me late fees and ultimately cut my service, incentivizing me to comply. Does that mean that corporate middle managers, who were not democratically appointed, are regulating my behavior on par with the governing body of the US? This may seem like a dissimilar comparison, but corporate entities establish policies that effect consumer behavior all the time. Most decisions in general aren't made democratically, given the need for specialized knowledge and effective/time-sensitive execution for many decisions. Congress still makes the laws, agencies, and pretty much every private/public organizations, make policy. The assumption Congress would be better because they'd "balance all other concerns" has no bearing on reality.
Congress has been deadlocked for the past two decades, where even the least contentious pieces of legislature can't make it through the senate filibuster.
If your goal is to freeze all environmental law at where it is today, I agree, neutering the EPA is the best way to accomplish that.
If your goal is to have democratic oversight over the EPA, you already have that - by virtue of voting for the executive. You're essentially grousing that the executive has more power than you'd like them to have in a scenario where their main check-and-balance - the legislature - is busy playing golf and arguing over suit colors. Okay, sure, that's definitely an argument you can make, but that's not going to change as long as the legislature remains deadlocked, and unwilling to legislate.
If the legislature wanted to, it could trivially overturn policies, by passing new laws. It doesn't, though. Your democratic oversight is already here - its just that the representatives you voted for disagree with you on whether or not they should do anything.
In a battle between regulatory policy and regulatory law, law will win nine times out of ten. Your lawmakers aren't fighting that battle, though. This is not a problem with your system, this is a problem with your lawmakers. Democracy is giving us exactly what we've asked for.
3M and DuPont knew 30 years ago about the PFAS-dangers, yet here we are still using it and the "replacement" GenX is not a bit less problematic (try to Google that. Apparently someone doesn't want you to find that...)
I'm reading Exposure by the lawyer who helped blow the case open, Robert Bilott, portrayed in the movie Dark Waters, which I recommend -- the book and movie.
What DuPont knowingly did, sacrificing our health for their profit, would be unbelievable except that it happened.
Over 99 percent of us have these known carcinogens and causers of birth defect in our blood. As they knew, our bodies don't know how to get rid of them nor process them into anything benign.
And that's just one class of known-to-be-dangerous but profitable chemicals they create and dump. If they had to pay the externalities, Teflon would cost . . . well, what price do you put on testicular cancer, or a baby born with half a nose or eyes in the wrong place?
Am I the only one who thinks you can't separate science and politics when it comes to deciding policy?
I agree 100% we should not be fudging the science. If the LD50 of a chemical is 10mg, we shouldn't be playing with the number to make it 20mg to say it's safe.
But translating an LD50 of 10mg to government policy is of course fraught with political bias and interference. Scientists might say "that pesticide is toxic we should ban it", but they know one side of the equation. What's the economic impact? What's the impact on jobs? What if there is one industry that has to shutdown if it's banned? What if it's need in the defense industry?
Anyone who says "just follow the science" is inferring that science will give you one answer, and only one answer, and every other answer is undeniably wrong. That's rarely the case. It's usually probabilities, other theories are likely wrong, but maybe not. The world isn't black and white. Even in science.
From what I understand reading through the memorandum, knowing a bit about how these agencies operate, and understanding how policy is made, what you want is what is happening here. Remember hurricane forecasts where Trump or one of his minions literally labeled his own projected path in with a sharpie? That's the nonsense we don't want to see.
The point of the memorandum and actions are that in the previous administration, in order to influence policy, the scientific evidence was ignored, manipulated, cherry picked, etc. to match a policy decision that was already made. This is trying to protect against that sort of action. They were producing false information and labeling it scientific evidence undermining trust in government and federally funded scientific research.
It's one thing to say: here's the evidence, but unfortunately we can't do that for reason X. It's another thing to say: outcome X needs to happen, here's some fringe science that supports us doing X.
Policy will still be made weighing in other factors going forward, it's just nice to know the evidence preceeds the decision and you can hopefully better trust the evidence to know if there are mistakes, it's not likely due to political pressure of say the current POTUS.
You are right in your intuition that government and science are not the same thing. Politics deals with power and subjective perception of values. Safety versus liberty is not something you can prove one way or the other, different people have different expectations from society and we try to develop political and leadership systems that account for those preferences.
When you go overboard is using politics to decide on issues other than values. For example, we have widely decided that poisoning people is bad. Some amount of harm is inevitable in the real world, and we have set (purely political) limits on acceptable risk, say, one in a million that you get cancer.
Once that value decision is made, the job of politics stops, 1 in a million cancer risk from Asbestos is the same as 1 in a million from second hand cigarette smoke. It's irrelevant how many people work in the cigarette industry, it's importance to the GPD, how well connected politically are the cigarette manufacturers etc. The risk becomes a pure scientific fact that is not amenable to political negotiations.
I agree with you - the complexity is that the division between 'doing science' and 'making decisions based on science and other factors' isn't necessarily clear. The simplest expression of this is choosing which of (possibly conflicting) papers to listen to. Drug companies have their version of this where they cherry pick clinical trials with results they like.
100% agree, science provides information about causal relationships, that's all. It doesn't make decisions for you, it doesnt reflect the will of people.
The decision making / consensus building should be the job of politicians. Saying science tells us we need to do x is a lazy shortcut.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. This is a correct stance. It is also important to note that two different branches of science can lead us to opposing outcomes. For instance much of the trash that is harmful and damaging to the environment was developed by material scientist seeking a cheap, human safe, and reliable storage solution for water (water bottles). This took a lot of very smart scientist incredible amounts of time. Of course environmental scientists rue the day these bottles ended up in the ocean. Science doesn’t lead us one place, it leads us all over the place.
> What if there is one industry that has to shutdown if it's banned?
Then the world is improved and we should all feel relieved. Seems pretty straightforward.
Just because someone found a way to profit while damaging society doesn't mean they have some right to keep profiting once society realizes what is going on.
I took it a step further, I had been using a large (roughly 1L in size) sink-attaching filter (think of a standing filter with its on spigot that attaches to your sink with a bypass/selector knob). $75 on amazon so not bad.
While that was a great improvement over tap I really worried about all the stuff it couldn't get, so I purchased a home distiller. I fill the distiller with filtered water for maintenance reasons (way less effort to clean out of the distiller), and it can make a gallon in about 3 hours. I add 1/4 tea spoon of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and a pinch of pink salt for minerals to each gallon and shake well. I dump each gallon into a borosilicate glass container w/304 stainless dispenser nozzle in the fridge that holds 3 gallons.
It is by far the best tasting water I have ever had, no bottled water even comes close. You can tweak the baking soda and added salt to your personal taste, total cost around $350
Didn’t the EPA burst open an old gold mine and poison a huge swath of a Colorado River tributary? Not sure they need help in making a mockery of their name.
The context to this is the EPA's toxicity assessment on PFAS chemicals ("forever chemicals"), which are a family of chemicals shown to stay in the environment and human body for extremely long periods of time. Under the Trump administration, the EPA's toxicity assessment on PFAS essentially provided polluters leniency on how much they could release.
Consequently, these chemicals are showing up in significant numbers in drinking water & food. Since they are proven to have damaging effects on human health, this assessment is now being reevaluated. The lesson from all this is that depending on where you are and how you use tap water, the regulations might not line up with what's good for you. Use a water filter.
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _brnu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazide|5 years ago|reply
Say Congress writes a law saying it’s illegal to dump toxic waste in a river. Pretty clear cut, right?
Well, law rolls out, and now you have an enforcement problem with all the edge cases. For instance, what counts as a river? Does the drainage ditch behind the building count? Does the creek? Does it matter if it has water in it right now, or will have water in it later?
Also, what counts as toxic waste? If a substance is poisonous at say 100ppm and considered toxic - what happens if we dilute it so it’s 100ppb. Still toxic waste? What if the background level in the tap water in the area is 100ppb?
Is it dumping if a building containing the waste catches on fire and falls in the river? Does it have the same penalties? What if it was arson?
These edge cases come up during the regular course of enforcing these laws, and at some point someone has to decide what the right thing to do is. Situations can change too - say a dry river wasn’t considered a river - until a massive conglomerate used that ‘loophole’ and started dumping massive amounts of toxic waste into dry river beds, that then flooded and poisoned a bunch of people. Do you want to wait for congress to get it’s act together, or do you want an agency to step in and follow the intent of the law, clarifying the prior ‘dry rivers are not rivers’ stance to ‘a channel that has, or will have, predictable seasonal water flow’?
The rule making process is designed to give visibility, and predictability into this process. It used to be people would just do whatever and never formalize these decisons, or formalize them internally and never publish them so people could challenge them.
[+] [-] black6|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acover|5 years ago|reply
Congress can always override the agency if needed. If you think congress is incapable of oversight then you are just for complete deregulation.
[+] [-] gotstad|5 years ago|reply
It is inevitable to have some sort of policy-making involved, even for an agency, because the very strategy they choose to reach a certain goal (set by politicians) or enforce a law (set by politicians) may itself be a choice between political alternatives.
[+] [-] LocalH|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|5 years ago|reply
However, your idea of agencies not writing policies... is not gonna last long. Congress is already ineffective and broken and there is not much on the horizon to change the reasons behind its dysfunctionality. There's a sad reason for the steady expansion of executive rights, and as long as this isn't fixed it is foolish IMO to force the executive to rein these in.
Edit: not to mention that, unlike government agencies, Congress is extremely corrupt. What is to prevent polluters from simply buying off Congress?
[+] [-] jjoonathan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coliveira|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garmaine|5 years ago|reply
I... what? I’m glad I don’t live in that dystopia.
[+] [-] boh|5 years ago|reply
My cable company doesn't have to go through Congress to pass legislation to have me comply in paying my bill. They can choose to give me late fees and ultimately cut my service, incentivizing me to comply. Does that mean that corporate middle managers, who were not democratically appointed, are regulating my behavior on par with the governing body of the US? This may seem like a dissimilar comparison, but corporate entities establish policies that effect consumer behavior all the time. Most decisions in general aren't made democratically, given the need for specialized knowledge and effective/time-sensitive execution for many decisions. Congress still makes the laws, agencies, and pretty much every private/public organizations, make policy. The assumption Congress would be better because they'd "balance all other concerns" has no bearing on reality.
[+] [-] vkou|5 years ago|reply
If your goal is to freeze all environmental law at where it is today, I agree, neutering the EPA is the best way to accomplish that.
If your goal is to have democratic oversight over the EPA, you already have that - by virtue of voting for the executive. You're essentially grousing that the executive has more power than you'd like them to have in a scenario where their main check-and-balance - the legislature - is busy playing golf and arguing over suit colors. Okay, sure, that's definitely an argument you can make, but that's not going to change as long as the legislature remains deadlocked, and unwilling to legislate.
If the legislature wanted to, it could trivially overturn policies, by passing new laws. It doesn't, though. Your democratic oversight is already here - its just that the representatives you voted for disagree with you on whether or not they should do anything.
In a battle between regulatory policy and regulatory law, law will win nine times out of ten. Your lawmakers aren't fighting that battle, though. This is not a problem with your system, this is a problem with your lawmakers. Democracy is giving us exactly what we've asked for.
[+] [-] fock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spodek|5 years ago|reply
I'm reading Exposure by the lawyer who helped blow the case open, Robert Bilott, portrayed in the movie Dark Waters, which I recommend -- the book and movie.
What DuPont knowingly did, sacrificing our health for their profit, would be unbelievable except that it happened.
Over 99 percent of us have these known carcinogens and causers of birth defect in our blood. As they knew, our bodies don't know how to get rid of them nor process them into anything benign.
And that's just one class of known-to-be-dangerous but profitable chemicals they create and dump. If they had to pay the externalities, Teflon would cost . . . well, what price do you put on testicular cancer, or a baby born with half a nose or eyes in the wrong place?
[+] [-] klyrs|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/anna-reade/epa-finds-replacemen...
[+] [-] zepto|5 years ago|reply
Do you mean Generation X, or is this a reference to some chemical?
[+] [-] minikites|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
I agree 100% we should not be fudging the science. If the LD50 of a chemical is 10mg, we shouldn't be playing with the number to make it 20mg to say it's safe.
But translating an LD50 of 10mg to government policy is of course fraught with political bias and interference. Scientists might say "that pesticide is toxic we should ban it", but they know one side of the equation. What's the economic impact? What's the impact on jobs? What if there is one industry that has to shutdown if it's banned? What if it's need in the defense industry?
Anyone who says "just follow the science" is inferring that science will give you one answer, and only one answer, and every other answer is undeniably wrong. That's rarely the case. It's usually probabilities, other theories are likely wrong, but maybe not. The world isn't black and white. Even in science.
[+] [-] Frost1x|5 years ago|reply
The point of the memorandum and actions are that in the previous administration, in order to influence policy, the scientific evidence was ignored, manipulated, cherry picked, etc. to match a policy decision that was already made. This is trying to protect against that sort of action. They were producing false information and labeling it scientific evidence undermining trust in government and federally funded scientific research.
It's one thing to say: here's the evidence, but unfortunately we can't do that for reason X. It's another thing to say: outcome X needs to happen, here's some fringe science that supports us doing X.
Policy will still be made weighing in other factors going forward, it's just nice to know the evidence preceeds the decision and you can hopefully better trust the evidence to know if there are mistakes, it's not likely due to political pressure of say the current POTUS.
[+] [-] yholio|5 years ago|reply
When you go overboard is using politics to decide on issues other than values. For example, we have widely decided that poisoning people is bad. Some amount of harm is inevitable in the real world, and we have set (purely political) limits on acceptable risk, say, one in a million that you get cancer.
Once that value decision is made, the job of politics stops, 1 in a million cancer risk from Asbestos is the same as 1 in a million from second hand cigarette smoke. It's irrelevant how many people work in the cigarette industry, it's importance to the GPD, how well connected politically are the cigarette manufacturers etc. The risk becomes a pure scientific fact that is not amenable to political negotiations.
[+] [-] rkangel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iujjkfjdkkdkf|5 years ago|reply
The decision making / consensus building should be the job of politicians. Saying science tells us we need to do x is a lazy shortcut.
[+] [-] other_function|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
The usual question is "what if the industry in question has made campaign or PAC donations? what if it's located in an electorally marginal state?"
Or, these days, "what if the government is dependent for its support on a weird youtube-based cult that thinks that 5G causes viruses?"
[+] [-] josephorjoe|5 years ago|reply
Then the world is improved and we should all feel relieved. Seems pretty straightforward.
Just because someone found a way to profit while damaging society doesn't mean they have some right to keep profiting once society realizes what is going on.
[+] [-] arthurcolle|5 years ago|reply
Glad to see the core maintainers are reviewing pull requests again
[+] [-] meddlepal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TedDoesntTalk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zionic|5 years ago|reply
While that was a great improvement over tap I really worried about all the stuff it couldn't get, so I purchased a home distiller. I fill the distiller with filtered water for maintenance reasons (way less effort to clean out of the distiller), and it can make a gallon in about 3 hours. I add 1/4 tea spoon of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and a pinch of pink salt for minerals to each gallon and shake well. I dump each gallon into a borosilicate glass container w/304 stainless dispenser nozzle in the fridge that holds 3 gallons.
It is by far the best tasting water I have ever had, no bottled water even comes close. You can tweak the baking soda and added salt to your personal taste, total cost around $350
[+] [-] jwr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HonestOp001|5 years ago|reply
If you think a presidency has an effect on the agency, then please look at the dam burst and the ridiculous Detroit water issue.
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nexthash|5 years ago|reply
Consequently, these chemicals are showing up in significant numbers in drinking water & food. Since they are proven to have damaging effects on human health, this assessment is now being reevaluated. The lesson from all this is that depending on where you are and how you use tap water, the regulations might not line up with what's good for you. Use a water filter.
[+] [-] kryogen1c|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] samizdis|5 years ago|reply
https://www.axios.com/epa-trump-political-intereference-toxi...
[+] [-] driverdan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jinkyu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eqdw|5 years ago|reply