Comment by breakyerself
15 hours ago
Almost every environmental regulation has come after it was already shown that there was some harm that needed to be mitigated.
The worst environmental crisis in human history is going largely unchecked. I find it hard to take seriously any argument that environmental regulation has gone too far as opposed to not nearly far enough.
If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good I'm cool with revisiting anything, but the common sense wisdom around environmental regulation has been corrupted by corporate public relations campaigns.
CEQA in California is very often used to block apartments in existing urban areas.
So, instead, California continues to mostly build single family housing sprawl into natural habitats.
A clear example of environmental regulation hurting the environment and the climate. And of course the affordability of housing.
CEQA itself is a mixed bag. I want to be clear that there are very important things the CEQA does to improve our environmental conditions[0]! The very real issue of CEQA being “weaponized”[1] stems from how environmental complaints have to be re-litigated in their entirety every time one is filed. Say there’s a coalition of neighbors who do not want something built. They can each file a lawsuit alleging environmental issues and each will have to be handled in isolation
*I am not going into immense detail here. It is admittedly a bit more complex than this, but this is a reasonable summary
[0] https://youtu.be/TKN7Cl6finE?si=CR4SjVK5_ojk-OKq [1] https://www.planningreport.com/2015/12/21/new-ceqa-study-rev...
> there are very important things the CEQA does to improve our environmental conditions
Which fits with OP’s assertion that it does “more harm than good.” (Fortunately, restricting the private right of action would curtail a lot of the harm. On the national level I’m pretty much at the point of wanting NEPA repealed.)
I don't know if its still true, but I recall reading once that CEQA had never been used to actually prevent or even slow the building of a dam or a mine or something. It had only ever been used to hobble otherwise neutral development. Its a good idea in theory, but I feel like the plaintiff ought to be able to articulate what environmental impact they are concerned about and maybe require a study from them in support of that claim too.
Thank you for mentioning this, it was the first thing I thought of in this conversation thread!
Government should be active and in charge of urban planning. It is a matter of the common good.
One of the biggest problems today is that urban planning has basically evaporated. Local and state governments don't plan towns anymore. Things are left to developers who have no other concern than to run a street off a major road and plop a few houses down, sell, and move on to the next project. No thought is given to traffic or public services or walkability or public transportation. No care is given to integration with existing urban structures. Instead of mixed-use zoning or building houses around a common public space, which are historically the more common and sensible form of urban planning, we end up with car-dependent suburban dead zones, suburban sprawl.
This should be receiving more attention from environmentalists, as urban planning is intimately related to environmental issues.
I don't know where you live, and this is going to be very dependent on where you live, but in most places that are experiencing these issues I think you actually have the problem backwards. For any given parcel of land, building upwards would be the more profitable move. Local governments deliberately legislate planning that prioritizes single-family homes, cars, and sprawl; developers are then forced to operate within these constraints. They'd rather be building density!
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?
>do you want to go back to polluted air and water just because a small minority of regulations need to be repealed or amended?
>Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
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All of the regulations that are used to "limit sprawl" in the US functionally prohibit the construction of new dense city blocks even moreso, and this in turn forces suburban sprawl to occur.
I'd argue that environmental regulations that impede building modern nuclear power plants to replace coal power plants are net harmful. Nuclear power safety has advanced a lot since Chernobyl.
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.
> Chernobyl design was never in use in the US
Commercially. Several early test reactors were essentially just graphite moderated piles not unlike Chernobyl, but they were abandoned for a reason.
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Chernobyl may have done a lot to inflame cultural imagination of what could happen in the worst cases, but the US still had its own high profile disasters like Three Mile Island.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
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It would. People are still building some natural gas plants even despite renewables being cheaper and nuclear is far cheaper over its lifecycle than that and, other than regulatory issues, is basically better in every way.
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The closest I've gotten to somebody finding environmental regulations that were driving up the cost of nuclear was with some of the latest stuff with people trying to get rid of the LNT model of how radiation affects people.
Getting rid of LNT would allow higher doses to workers, and the way it makes nuclear cheaper is by having less shielding around the reactor.
But if you look at how recent reactors like the AP1000 failed, it's not so much because of the mere quantity of concrete. In fact, one of the big advantages of the AP1000 is that it used a fraction of the concrete and steel of prior designs. The real problem at Vogtle were construction logistics, matching up design to constructible plans, and doing that all in an efficient manner.
The construction process didn't run over budget and over timeline because of environmental regulations, that happened because we don't know how to build big things anymore, in combination with leadership asking for regulatory favors like starting construction before everything has been fully designed, which gave them more rope to hang themselves with.
I don't know the specifics of why France forgot how to build, at Flamanville and Olkiluoto, but I imagine it's a similar tale as in the US. High labor costs, poor logistics, projects dragged out, and having to pay interest on the loan for years and years extra with every delay.
If there's somebody with more specifics on how unnecessary regulation is killing nuclear, I'd love to see it. But after watching attentively and with great interest since ~2005, I've become so disillusioned with nuclear that I doubt we'll ever see it have success in the West again. Factories and manufacturing have seen productivity go through the roof over the past 50 years, while construction productivity is stagnant. Playing to our strengths, and using our very limited construction capacity on building factories rather than building generators, seems far wiser on the macroeconomic scale.
The £700M (960M USD) spent on fish protection measures at Hinkley Point C would be a topical example [1]. It's expected to save an average of a few hundred twaite shad, six river lamprey, and eighteen allis shad per year, plus one salmon every twelve years, and a trout every thirty-six years.
https://www.salmonbusiness.com/nuclear-plants-new-700-millio...
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There's certainly some "environmentalism" out there that's using the banner of the environment for other ends.
Here's one example: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-...
I mostly agree with you, but it is worth paying attention to the details.
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...
They're talking about using environmental rules to block homes for people to live in, inside cities.
Using land efficiently in walkable places is one of the most environmentally friendly things we can be doing, and supposed "environmentalists" sought to block it using "environmental" rules!
If that's not NIMBYism to you, you have blinders on.
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CEQA is pretty universally considered a disaster.
The alternative is not to have no environmental regulation. California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.
>California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.
Says whom?
California has a huge population. California has a massive water shortage problem. California has wide areas vulnerable to wildfires. California has piles of small ecosystems that are fragile and can be easily wiped out.
Saying California could copy some states like Iowas regulations makes negative sense.
The major problems with CEQA are:
- the extreme cost and time spent on mandatory Environmental Impact Reports
- it allows pretty much anyone to sue projects over just about anything, which can also add many years before projects can start
None of this has anything to do with California specific environmental concerns
> If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good
In Massachusetts you can't clear shoreline. Specifically, if you buy waterfront property on a pond / lake, you can't clear the shoreline to make a beach in your backyard. You can only use what used to be there before the law was passed. There's even restrictions on building close to shorelines, so if you want to build, you need to find an existing building and renovate.
Now, I'm not a wetland expert, so maybe someone will chime in and tell me why every inch of freshwater shoreline must be undisturbed. But I like freshwater swimming and suspect that we can allocate some space for human recreation.
> Now, I'm not a wetland expert, so maybe someone will chime in and tell me why every inch of freshwater shoreline must be undisturbed. But I like freshwater swimming and suspect that we can allocate some space for human recreation.
Are you prevented from fresh water swimming because you can't fabricate a beach for yourself, even if you own the property next to it? Seems like a strange complaint
>Almost every environmental regulation has come after it was already shown that there was some harm that needed to be mitigated.
Ok, strong example here: the long term efforts to stop forest fires caused build up of fuel that should have burned up in small fires which then instead burned up ecosystems which evolved for small forest fires and instead were destroyed in large ones.
That's a well intentioned environmental policy that had terrible effects.
Fuel efficiency programs with the goal of reducing emissions with exceptions for work vehicles killed small trucks and meant a ton of people who do approximately 0 work drive around enormous vehicles that were designed big to match the exception criteria.
That's another one.
Ethanol to replace gasoline is also an enormous negative consequence waste that started as an environmental program.
Things don't just work because you want them to and programs aren't automatically right because of what they intend to do.
Far too many people argue for things they don't understand at all because of the surface intention of them and treat discussion about them blasphemy. (I chose uncontroversial negative examples because I don't want to get sidetracked into arguments about my examples with zealots)
what kind of common sense wisdom are we talking about here, can you give an example? understanding the impact of regulation designed to impact both the environment and the economy, two incredibly complex systems our experts are only beginning to understand, isn't generally a matter of common sense
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.
Nah some environmental regulation is batshit.
Literally, in the UK you can’t build if there’s a protected bat species in the area.
This is not true, there is just a specific protocol you have follow to do the building work. Yes it increases costs, but it doesn't explicitly prevent them.
Why do you think that is batshit?
Guano
How do you explain the bug up its ass that the EPA has about auto racing?
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.
Bro I can't go out without some diesel pickup rolling coal. If anything auto standards need to be higher because people aren't adult enough to follow the 'not for public roads use' model.
Except, you know, NEPA.