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amended, but do you want to go back to polluted air and water just because a small minority of regulations need to be repealed or amended?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

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.

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...

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.

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.

Why do you think that is batshit?

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.

Lead helped fuel company profits because it was cheaper than the other anti-knock additives, like ethanol.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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