https://www.science.org/content/article/blow-environment-epa...

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.

....nobody was arguing this. It's a classic straw man fallacy. Further, you're leveraging a lot of emotional terms while providing zero examples, inviting potential sympathetic readers to just project their feelings onto any regulations they happen to dislike rather than establish any sort of objective criteria or lay out any map/model of regulatory credibility that could be subject to challenge or criticism.

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.

Last week, a Colorado utility was "respectfully" asking to be able to close a plant:

> TTri-State Generation and partner Platte River Power Authority had a “respectful” but emphatic response late Thursday to the Trump administration ordering them to keep Craig’s Unit 1 coal-fired plant open past the New Year:

> They don’t need it, they don’t want it, and their inflation-strapped consumers can’t afford the higher bills. Plus, the federal order is unconstitutional.

https://coloradosun.com/2026/01/30/craig-tri-state-petition-...

TVA has also been begging to close a money losing coal plant for a while now, writing letters to FERC about it, but I can't find the link now.

New coal is far too expensive to build anymore too. Handling big amounts of solid material is expensive, and big old unresponsive baseload is undesirable for achieving economic efficiency.

Even China, which is still building new coal plants, is lessening their coal usage. Personally I think they'll keep some around to continue economic influence on Australia, which is one their primary countries for experimenting with methods to increase their soft power.

There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.

https://www.unep.org/globalmercurypartnership/what-we-do/art...

In 1981 Reagan made cost benefit analysis a requirement for EPA.

For example in 1984: the EPA " estimates that the benefits of reducing lead in gasoline would exceed the costs by more than 300 percent.... These benefits include improved health of children and others"

Trump has just scrapped the requirement to cost in human health.

I wonder if removing lead would meet the new standard.

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.

Sounds like the government is being lax. From the aircraft owners and pilots association:

>So the Government's indifference is not going to help us in the UK if the *supply of leaded AVGAS is stopped, the UK CAA have not appoved new fuels, there is no infrastucture or supply chain in the UK. We keep beating the doors at the CAA and DfT...

In general the pressure against regulation comes from narrow winners (oil industry for instance) whereas the pressure for regulations generally comes from people focused on the greater good (even if they are misled by other narrow winners, for instance compliance firms).

I also don't agree on the principle that regulations are "harmful" or "helpful." Rather, you have to define who the regulation harms, and who it helps. For example antitrust enforcement harms shareholders and some employees of very large firms, but it helps many employees and arguably improves the landscape for competition between many smaller firms. So whether a regulation is preferable comes down to values.

In the case of leaded gas, it harms basically everybody, but it helps fuel companies, so it was an easy thing to change.

Some regulation achieves this kind of improvement, and we’re probably under regulated in those areas. Particulate matter, for example, is extremely harmful. But many regulations do not have such clear cut costs and benefits.

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.

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.

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.

don't really know what takeaway I'm supposed to know about

Aviation gasoline is probably the one market that still keeps it afloat, when/if piston aviation switches over the remaining market is small and insignificant.

I still like non-stick pans for eggs, but for almost everything else, I prefer stainless steel, cast iron, or enameled cast iron. You do have to pay a little more attention to technique (knowing what temperature to heat the pan to before you put food on, etc.), but the end result is just about as good as a non-stick pan with many advantages:

* You don't have to be obsessive about never letting a metal utensil scratch the pan. (I hope you aren't using a metal spatula or fork with your non-stick!)

* You can scrape the hell out of the pan while you cook and get all that delicious crispy fond into what you're making. If I'm doing a pan sauce, it's always in the Dutch oven so I can get that fond into the gravy.

* They last a lot longer. Even if you are careful, a non-stick pan will lose its coating and need to be replaced after a handful of years. I got my cast iron skillet for $15 at an antique store. It's older than me and will outlive me.

* You're not, you know, eating forever chemicals.

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)

I guess people who have money for personal airplanes also have the money to lobby when it matters for their interests. Pricks, I hope they die of dementia.

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.

Literally, in the UK you can’t build if there’s a protected bat species in the area.

We already knew lead was toxic before we started putting it in gasoline. Even the guy that invented it got sick from exposure and people died from exposure in their plants in the first years of operation. The problem is that we somehow require evidence that something is unsafe but don't require any evidence that its safe in the first place.

We're doomed.

https://www.cdc.gov/lead-prevention/prevention/paint.html

No qualifiers whatsoever. All environmental regulations are good as far as this person is concerned.

Also, your assertion that lead “helps fuel companies” is fundamentally mistaken. Gasoline is a mass-produced commodity. Oil companies have single digit profit margins. These companies aren’t making Big Tech profit margins where they can absorb higher costs without passing them along to consumers. Cost savings from things like gasoline additives accrue to consumers at the gas pump.

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.

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.

*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...

> 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...

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.

For anyone wanting a slightly ranty but also informed description of why, I enjoyed this Hank Green video on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms&pp=ygUPaGFuayBnc...

In EU 90% of expenses of running coal plants are taxes, yet it can still compete with subsidized green energy! It would be in everybody best interest, to allow building modern coal plants, to replace toxic inefficient stuff from 1960ties.

But with the overregulated and overtaxes industry, we have the worst from all options.

>Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–1996) was a pioneering animated series designed by Ted Turner and producer Barbara Pyle as environmental, pro-social "edutainment" to influence children towards ecological activism. It aimed to combat pollution and encourage environmental stewardship, often using over-the-top, stereotypical villains to represent corporate greed and ecological destruction.

Our parents let us get brainwashed by hippies and corporations as kids haha

A quick look at the PJM interconnect data would disagree with you. About a quarter of the live power is coal.

https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx

That serves 65+ Million people in the north east and is keeping them from dying of cold this past week, including today (Temp outside in the mid-hudson valley is 15F / -9C), and overnight will be 8F / -13C).

Just for context - electricity somehow powers everything in most homes. Your oil or propane furnace needs a power hookup to ignite.

https://petroleumservicecompany.com/sunoco-supreme-112-octan...

I think they only sell the unleaded race gas at the pumps now but I may be wrong.

Particularly for unjacketed bullets like 22LR. Even jacketed bullets tend to not be jacketed at the base.

Copper, polymer-coated, or total metal jacket rounds will also result in less lead on the firearm, I'd think, and less on the user's hands. One old guy I know who had lead poisoning at one time believes the real risk is getting the lead on one's hands and then handling a cigarette.

With rounds that aren't well jacketed like those 22s that are just bare lead, you also get some of the round scraping in the barrels that comes off as dust.

There's tons of lead in the air at shooting ranges.

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.

Think pesticides and genetically modified plants for example.

It wasn't easily replaced. For many decades there weren't any alternatives for anti-knock additives.

This ceramic pan I bought from IKEA lasted like 3-5 months until I was unhappy with it. Historically, the teflon pans I have bought from there have lasted 12-18 months easily.

That’s a very broad statement. I expect there are many cases where that is not true.

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.

For example smoke and soot from combustion or dust particles from tires and brakes.

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.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

Replacing existing coal with natural gas is better, cheaper, etc. etc. and it's just downright "dumb" to build coal as explained in a parallel comment that links to youtube.

But even new natural gas is likely to end up as stranded capital. Solar and wind are cheaper already, and backing that with storage, today, is nipping at the cost of most new natural gas plants. And in 3, 5, 10 years? Price trends are going to make even the cheap cost of natural gas as a fuel more expensive than using solar and storage.

I'd be very surprised if 90% of the expense of coal was tax, as that would make taxes 9x higher than fuel. Not surprised because it wouldn't make scientific sense, the negative externalities of coal are massive and any hard-nosed free marketer should be advocating for putting a price on those negative externalities, but surprised because the politics of Europe allow that!

Also, if taxes on coal or >9x the cost of the fuel, wouldn't that start to make natural gas much more cost effective too, even in Europe? Or does natural gas have similar taxes?

Presumably, you mean there weren't any alternatives for anti-knock additives for around the same price as tetraethyllead.

Octane ratings can be increased sans Pb if needed. Trouble is the extra refining and reduced yield increases costs which consumers weren't prepared to pay for.

"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."

This was a case of zealotry and overregulation egged on by puritanical ideologs without full consideration of the consequences.

We correctly banned fluorocarbons as refrigerants in systems where they would not be properly recycled, such as domestic refrigerators, air-conditioning systems incuding those in vehicles, and like. This made for good regulation, and it made sense.

The volume of CFCs with other specislist applications was miniscule by comparison, and for most of these recovery, capture and recycle systems along with protocols for use could have been implemented.

Instead, we stupidy put an outright ban on just about every CFC in sight, many of which have no direct equivalents that are anywhere near as effective as CFCs, and many are dangerous and inflammable and form explosive mixtures with air.

Right, in one fell swoop we banned many of the most useful chemicals ever invented. Little wonder these's now a backlash to overregulation. If Montreal were to be repeated today the zealots would have to take more of a backseat.

If India and China build coal plants, it's because they have coal. If they had natural gas, like the US, they'd build natural gas plants.

The way I think about it, the entirety of global civilization is massively, massively subsidizing carbon emission.

Not to mention they're frequently used for air ambulance flights, survey work, and law enforcement. The "satellite" view on most online mapping tools is recorded from a piston aircraft.

Also, the current proposed plan is to migrate off of leaded gasoline for most of the country by 2030, which is actually quite ambitious given that acceptable alternative fuels didn't exist until literally a few years ago.

California has a few airports that are stocking the lead-free alternatives, but that's about it.

But yes, blame the small aircraft owners if it makes you feel better.

> "piston engine aircraft carry virtually no vital role in anything except people flying them for fun"

I guess we just shouldn't train new pilots then.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sugar-of-lead-a-...

Yes, well the alternative, where the entire media system that might offer a cartoon like Captain Planet is owned by one side, is working out super well and in no way slants anyone's view of anything. Good God, my dad still fights weird battles like this tiny skirmish without ever being able to see the larger picture and how immaterial this is.

We shouldn't get rid of coal without having something to replace it (ideally nuclear/solar/wind, but realistically probably gas), but I think the point was just that nobody would build a new coal plant today or keep them running for longer than they need to. They're inefficient and fairly expensive.

If that’s even what their comment was about

How does that effect work?

your assumption wasn’t a “lead free” response, am I doing it right?

* I don't know how old my cast iron skillet is because I literally bought it from an antique store but I've had it for over a decade and it's in better shape than ever.

* My $60 Lodge Dutch oven is over a decade old and has been used hundreds of times.

* My stainless steel All-Clad skillet is relatively new at 5-6 years but is no worse than the day I got it.

Well, yes, it isn't subtle.

It turns out that some propaganda is just correct, however.

And well it's fine by me if you want to literally breathe lead every time you fly, you do you, but who the fuck gives you the right to poison everyone else around you? Like if anyone did what you do they'd justifiably spend their life in prison.

I find it horrid that there is even a debate around lead free alternatives. Oh woe is me, my 80s engine will last 100 hours less! Jesus fucking christ. You sound like a 3M lawyer advocating for PFAS. "The alternatives are inconvenient and expensive so we're gonna keep poisoning everyone until they aren't because we can."

> I guess we just shouldn't train new pilots then.

There are literally countless options man. There's even electrics now, you don't exactly need long range for training and small turboprop jet-a options for long hauls. I know the lead is making it hard to think, but for the sake of people breathing your exhaust please do try.

Total and per capita coal usage for Germany and a few other peer nations:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...

I can see a bump in early 1980s but I see the same in other nations, possibly a response to oil embargoes, possibly just economic growth.

Excuses are made because it requires retiring or refitting old aircraft, and people need to be forced to do it. Simple as. I will die on this hill.

> The "satellite" view on most online mapping tools is recorded from a piston aircraft.

It is not. You're thinking of lidar.

https://www.salmonbusiness.com/nuclear-plants-new-700-millio...

Commercially. Several early test reactors were essentially just graphite moderated piles not unlike Chernobyl, but they were abandoned for a reason.

I'm sure there are better examples to illustrate your point

> homes for people to live in

Student housing. Which likely means partially-furnished studios with shared bathrooms and a kitchenette at best. This isn't the useful housing folks are asking for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

- 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

There’s no copper sulfate in canned green beans or borax in beef. Those seem all around good.

Let’s agree that impacts of regulations are nuanced, and not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic like, “regulations hurt poor people”.

I think my main complaint is with e.g. IKEA changing their default frying pan coating dramatically without clear communication.

(ETA: Not to mention that the biggest takeaways from such shows was that individual action was sometimes more important than corporate or regulatory action, a message itself designed by the oil companies to avoid responsibility. If there was propaganda in those shows, it may not have been the heroes winning, but the idea that all we need are a few magic heroes rather than government regulations.)

I've never said all environmental regulation is good. That would be stupid, but you should have evidence based reasons for wanting to repeal or modify a regulation.

Existing regulation was put in place for a reason and those reasons likely still matter. Even if the regulation is falling short of having unintended consequences.

https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/indoors/air/pmq_a.ht...

Breathing in unhealthy levels of PM2.5 can increase the risk of health problems like heart disease, asthma, and low birth weight. Unhealthy levels can also reduce visibility and cause the air to appear hazy.

Outdoor sources include vehicle exhaust, burning wood, gas and other fuels, and fires. Particle pollution can also travel long distances from its source; for example from wildfires hundreds of miles away. Outdoor particle pollution levels are more likely to be higher on days with little or no wind or air mixing.

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.

Not to simplify but if you have to make a decision shouldn't you always decide to help the most people?

The 'greater good' has arguably PREVENTED much more hurt of people than it has ever hurt. Meanwhile companies have PROVEN time and time again that they WILL hurt people when left to their own devices. In environmental policies. In pay policies. In employment policies. In EVERY aspect possible.

But then we come back to ignoring the cost of the pollution. It certainly gets paid for eventually, but by who? Also, it's cheaper for everyone if the pollution is eliminated to begin with rather than being cleaned up later (which is certainly a more energy intensive endeavor).

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-...

[1] https://theclimatecapitalist.com/articles/gas-should-cost-13... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/phildeluna/2024/11/29/will-dire...

There's been some trials of battery-powered trainer aircraft. The last I checked, they still don't have enough range to do the "long" cross country that's legally required.

And I assure you it's not because of old aircraft. Some flights schools have fleets of brand new 2025/26 models - all of them still run on leaded avgas.

That is the case for base load generation, where the plant can operate near 100% capacity all the time. But that isn't were gas is usually being deployed; it being used for reserve generation. The economics of nuclear isn't as favourable in that application as it costs more or less the same to run at partial generation, or even no generation, as it does when it is going full blast.

That kind of "wait, no, not THAT kind of housing, not HERE" is textbook NIMBYism.

There may have been some student protestors, but the money behind the legal challenges were all wealthy local NIMBYs.

we should either delete the regulations, or add exemptions for the infrastructure we need to build to avoid climate disaster

this is a time sensitive issue for our environment. every day spent debating regulatory nuance is a day wasted

at this point I prefer drastic decisive action over continued inaction: delete the regulations and re-introduce them

"…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.

Strangely enough, I was raised with quite a bit of environmental responsibility, but only a relatively dim awareness of the show existing.

Yes, not just environmental, all kinds of money stuff. The more money can be how it gets on steroids.

But this says a lot here:

>not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic

With greed involved you can follow the money to an extent, you find lobbyists on both sides of every controversy, sometimes chalking up wins, other times losses. But they stay in business and grow by compromising the greater good with as little profit loss from those paying them the most.

They might switch roles when they lobby in favor of ordinary citizens one time, and squarely against in a future campaign. But they never actually switch sides, the least costly thing to compromise is the "greater good", which ideally from their point of view is intangible, versus actual money, which their clients are usually counting before they have earned any.

It's politics, all regulations are hard to pass, but as lobbying has increased, the difficulty of having good legislation in favor of the greater good is becoming less possible.

It just costs too much to have a seat at the table.

If people want to have good things, it might become completely dependent on older regulations which were in their favor before it got too expensive to do that any more.

I spent 10 minutes and have not been able to find said "government-commissioned review". Is this even true?

To me, it seems UC wants to bulldoze a park famous for homeless camps and replace it with student housing. Pro-development is trying to cast the UC expansion in the same light as folks asking for affordable housing. But, UC is not providing useful housing for residents of Berkley.

no.

It’s really a collective action problem. Nobody wants their gasoline to be more expensive than other companies’. So everyone has the incentive to use the cheapest ingredient. If you ban that ingredient, prices go up. But since everyone's prices will go up, you remove the competitive disadvantage.

In an age of natural rubber components, poorly sealed fuel systems with steel tanks and aluminum carburetors pretty much anything other than ethanol is the "right choice".

And once they ruled out ethanol they settled on lead because it was cheap/profitable. Obviously they chose wrong, they should've picked something more expensive but less terrible.

These weren't cartoon villains with monocles twirling their mustaches. They were normal humans making pragmatic decisions based on the constraints they faced. Without knowing the details people cannot understand what future similar fact patterns may look like.

That said, it should be no surprise to anyone that nobody wants to talk about "well we don't know how bad the harm of leaded exhaust is, we know it's not good, but it's diffuse and undefined so we'll round it to zero/negligible" type decision making, for that sort of unknown rounds to zero logic underpins in whole or part all manner of modern policy discourse.

TEL was patentable, but those patents were long expired before there was a big push to eliminate leaded gas.

https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-developmen...

Actually, moisture problems are from using things like homemade alcohol or alcohol from unknown sources, where the likelihood of it already containing a sizable percentage of water has been a problem since the Model T days.

And if that water has a bit of an aggressive pH, it can have an effect on aluminum components.

This is just not a problem with gasoline-alcohol blends from reputable suppliers unless there is serious failure in the supply chain after that, where any fuel would have been contaminated by water regardless. The fuel-grade alcohol is tested before it is added, then the finished gasoline fully analyzed afterward.

Neither moisture nor corrosion is a problem with fuel ethanol or methanol, and when you see convincing information to the contrary (like from a pro mechanic) it often originates from misguided sources, "old wives' tales" for which actual evidence existed without being well-understood. But sometimes the most professional are the ones who don't take any chances, whether "common knowledge" is factual or not, if it doesn't hurt, no big deal.

Miscellaneous polymer compounds were the real question for cars that were not originally made for modern alcohol mixtures.

Ethanol just doesn't absorb moisture into your fuel tank by itself, even from a very humid environment.

Not any more than plain hydrocarbon fuel. In old ventilated fuel tanks, extreme temperature cycling under very humid conditions draws moist air into the tank when the fuel shrinks or is consumed. Kilos of cold fuel and cold metal can continue to condense moisture from the air, when the dew point is greater than the temperature of the tank. After a while you can get grams or ounces of water rolling around in the bottom of the tank. This could build up and stall out the vehicle or keep it from starting.

If it was only an ounce or two of water at the bottom of the tank full of all hydrocarbons, it would actually help to add a gallon of plain (good) alcohol to help dissolve the separated water into the gasoline so it can pass through harmlessly like it always has since gasoline has always had trace amounts of water anyway. Condensation is about as clean as rainwater so it's nothing the engine hasn't seen.

When most mechanics see something like this it has already gotten way out of hand, and there have been waves of anti-alcohol propaganda disseminated through time which reinforce the superstitious component.

Another problem from the '80's was when you do first start using alcohol-containing gasoline in an older car, it can break up varnish that has built up in the tank for years which never would come off until some alcohol came along. This could be a few grams, end up clogging the fuel filter, and the car stalls out no different than from water in the fuel line. Direct cause-and-effect relationship undeniably due to the use of alcohol, with many independent observations. Not a water problem, but who's keeping score.

Just not any more of a problem in the 21st century, similar conditions are so rarely encountered now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

That's besides the fact that there are genuine certified unleaded alternative fuels for piston aircraft now. Fucking "we oh can't do it" lead apologists smh.

The stilted phrasing in the report from Salmon Business definitely does not sound very credible, but marine life protection is definitely a real thing with nuclear and all fuel-burning electricity generation

The vast quantities of water needed to cool nuclear (for every kWh of electricity, 2 kWh of waste heat must be discarded) can have significant impacts on wildlife. In the past, we just devastated ecosystems but most modern countries decided they didn't want to do that anymore.

This is not a nuclear regulation, it's a "thermal plant" regulation, it's just that nuclear needs more cooling than, say, combined-cycle gas because nuclear's lower temperatures are less efficient at converting heat to electricity.

At a mere $700M, even dropping all marine life mitigations from Hinkley Point C wouldn't help much with affordability. If they could drop $7B of costs from Hinkley then it may start to have a halfway-competitive price, but it still wouldn't be very attractive.

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.

Check your public library.

You're also legally required to maintain 30-45 minutes of emergency reserve, longer if you're flying IFR.

And again, this isn't even touching on the "long" cross-country flights that are legally required for training.

And I mentioned workhorse aircraft for a reason, considering that the Velis Electro has a payload of...172 kilograms. Turboprops (gas turbines in general) are far more expensive and far less fuel efficient at low altitudes than their piston engine counterparts, which is precisely why piston engines still exist.

The fact that alternative fuels now exist for piston engines does not make the blatantly wrong nonsense you've been throwing out any more correct, such as your suggestion that you can "just run" piston engines on Jet-A. That is something that anyone who actually knows anything about internal combustion engines can tell you for free causes regular piston engines to detonate/knock. Your assertion that piston-engine aircraft have virtually no vital role was similarly ignorant.

And that's besides the fact that black-and-white "if you don't agree with whatever half-assed or plainly incorrect crap I say in support of The Cause™ you're an apologist" nonsense lost its efficacy years ago; you might want to find a better soapboxing tactic for 2026.

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.