Comment by yellottyellott
16 hours ago
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?
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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.