I remember going to LA in the late 80's and my eyes watering (I also remember the pants-less man on the side of the strode but that is a different story). Environmental regulations are a win. Unfortunately there is a large segment of the population that doesn't believe something until it happens to them directly. That makes it a challenge to maintain environmental, or any regulations for that matter, over generations. It isn't practical, but it would be interesting to create 'pollution cities' where the regulations were loose so long as the entire company drew its workforce (including management) from the local population (like within a mile) and a significant portion of their drinking water and foods must also be sourced locally. Go ahead, pollute your own drinking water. I bet cities like this would be cleaner than ones with stricter regulations.
In Louisana there’s a stretch around all the refineries nicknamed Cancer Alley. The locals work the plants. Everyone gets sick. And they vote for expansion because it brings in more jobs. You need the regulations.
Yeah, but I bet the executives and lawyers don’t live anywhere near there, and they probably visit those sites as little as possible. In the thought experiment that wouldn’t be allowed.
I grew up in Cancer Alley. Here's my old neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/3DZbiz8Bgyx5tx7v9
That wedge surrounded by green is a neighborhood that was created by landfilling a patch of swamp and building a levee around it. The northeast side of the wedge is the "nice" part of the neighborhood. You can see the houses are much bigger and there is a golf course running through it. There's a country club and lot of very nice houses. That's where a lot of upper level oil company employees live. (We lived here, my stepfather was a research chemist at DuPont.)
The southwest side of the neighborhood (much of it literally on "the other side of the tracks") is the cheaper houses and some apartments where a lot of blue collar employees work.
Zoom out a bit and you see Shell Norco to the northwest, the very heart of (and cause of) Cancer Alley. Ormond Estates was basically created to be a commuter neighborhood for Shell. Across the river is Dow Chemical. Look east and you see the IMTT St. Rose chemical plant. Keep going upriver and you get to DuPont and the Marathon Refinery.
Most of the executives responsible for cancer here do live in the area. People of all stripes have an impressive ability to maintain cognitive dissonance and live in denial when they are incentivized to do so.
Southern Louisiana is an intense microcosm of this. Seafood is one of the biggest industries there and you would think the local culture would be intensely protective of the environment, especially after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But environmentalism is woven into liberal culture that is in opposition to the religious conservative culture of the area, so it often gets actively rejected even though poor people in Louisiana are the ones who suffer for their choice.
"Strangers in Their Own Land" is an excellent social science book if you want to know more about the area.
Points taken. After seeing this and other similar posts I suspect my thought experiment would fail and the areas would be highly polluted. Maybe instead we need pollution parks? The big point is we need some sort of constant reminder of how bad things were and could be again if we don't keep our guard up. We are victims of our success. People look around and see reasonable water and breath reasonable air and get mad when you tell them 'rolling coal' exhaust systems should be a felony that puts you in jail for a year in addition to a fine. Basically, what will get people to listen and remember?
> People look around and see reasonable water and breath reasonable air
In Louisiana after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, people could literally see crude oil washing up on the same shores where they went out to catch redfish and bring it home for dinner.
And yet those same people voted for the exact same politicians that enabled that stuff to happen.
It's not a simple visibility problem. It's a complex cultural issue that relates to the interests of the elites, communication systems, religion, etc.
I agree the problem has more than one aspect, but we made real progress that we are now backtracking on nationally. Local problems will always be local. Go to a <insert industrial town here> town and they will likely be pro that industry but as a nation we recognized local pollution didn't stay local and created things like the EPA and implemented regulations that worked. Now we are backtracking because, I think, people haven't felt the problems themselves. I remember burning eyes and amazing sunsets, others don't. How can we get those that never experienced inoculated so they will keep the regulations that made things better?
Man, I honestly don't know.
A big part of why I left Louisiana is because the culture there is so deeply broken that the best solution I could come up with is to escape.
I hope you found a place that feels like home!
I did! :D
I live in Cancer Alley and people down here drink the koolaid. Cut to Midgely pouring TEL all over his hands.
Yeah, Thomas Midgley Jr., from Wikipedia [1]:
"…played a major role in developing leaded gasoline and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons…; both products were later banned from common use due to their harmful impact on human health and the environment. He was granted more than 100 patents over the course of his career."
As someone else said, this guy's work was so toxic to the planet we ought to ban everything else he ever invented—just in case.
(And weirdly, one of his own machines took his life as well—whether by design or not.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
In the bay area you can throw a rock from one super fund site and hit another yet it's full of libertarians saying 'stop over regulating'.
> You need the regulations.
This is fixing the symptom instead of the problems. Elites are allowed to be rich because the cost of failure is supposed to be extremely (historically, their life) expensive to them. We got rid of the latter without the adjusting the former.
> I bet cities like this would be cleaner than ones with stricter regulations.
I would almost always take the opposite side of this bet. Once responsibility becomes diffuse enough, people would actively poison themselves as they see no alternative.
Yet, there are ample cases of the workers living near a factory and constantly getting cancer. PG&E in Hinckley, CA comes to mind as the most well known, due to the media/movie about Erin Brockovich.
But their CEOs don't live next to the factories. My, completely impossible, thought experiment would have all management living near the plant. I bet if the CEO lived with the water near the factory they would make sure it was clean.
Did you intend to write "stroad" (street + road used to decry car-centric city design) ?
yep. If any city embodies the strode it is LA.
There was a pretty substantial length of time between the beginning of the industrial revolution and the development of transportation infrastructure that allowed people to live far from where they worked, and get most of their food from distant lands. Your experiment was done many times. The result was not clean cities.
> Environmental regulations are a win. Unfortunately there is a large segment of the population that doesn't believe something ...
You aren't wrong, but let's be honest that a lot of that is manufacturing just moved to China and moved the pollution. Specific to lead in gas, yes it's great we no longer do this.
Manufacturing output hit an all time high in the US in 2024.
There's less manufacturing jobs and it's less of the total economy as other sectors grew but it would presumably need to be genuinely cleaner in order to offset that growth if industrial pollution just remained flat.
The switch from coal to gas would be a major cleanup for any process that uses electricity, for example.
Related to the OP comment about LA, are you suggesting that moving manufacturing to China had little impact on manufacturing and pollution in the US?