A few weeks ago I wrote about Americans who are terrified that they can’t live without relatively new government handouts: End-of-Obamacare fears a good illustration of why government has to grow?
Here in Beaver Creek, Colorado, a subset of the millionaires can fairly be characterized as Millionaires for Obama. Recent conversations have included them expressing their horror, after reading the New York Times, that coal companies will now be able to dump unprecedented amounts of filth into America’s rivers. An example article seems to be “Republicans Move to Block Rule on Coal Mining Near Streams”. If you read the article carefully and also follow a link to the Federal Register you can learn that this rule was promulgated in December 2016 and never took effect. You would also learn that it was Congress rather than the Trumpenfuhrer who killed it. However, the Democrats here in Beaver Creek had the idea that a regulation that had been in place for decades had been revoked by King Donald I. They were preparing to find a whole new world of pollution any time that they visited the Midwest (i.e., never).
Regarding something that Trump actually did, the visiting and local Democrats had read “Trump Rescinds Rules on Bathrooms for Transgender Students” and concluded that we were in a whole new and unfamiliar world of hatred. The Times story was in the news section, not the editorial one, but the journalists give a misleading impression that the feds telling local school districts how to run their bathrooms was the policy throughout the Obama Administration (8 years) when in fact it was closer to 8 months. For most of the Obama Administration, and indeed at any time from 1635 through 2015, a public school could do whatever they thought best.
For both the coal mining/river and bathroom policy issues the country would simply be living under the regulations that prevailed during 2010 when Obama was in the White House and Democrats controlled Congress. Yet the idea of returning to a slightly less regulated time filled at least some wealthy and degreed Americans with terror.
Since in this post and many others you are interested only in peoples’ reactions to these regulations and/or ignorance of them, I take it that you are against the regulations, or simply don’t care?
Trumpenfuhrer… here we go again. This is so mean to King Donald I. How disrespectful.
On a completely different note, can anyone actually tell the difference between “news” and “editorials” these days?
On a related note, the “Stream Protection Rule” is huge – 380 pages, in a tiny font:
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-12-20/pdf/2016-29958.pdf
It was canceled by a short single page decision:
https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/hjres38/BILLS-115hjres38enr.pdf
I wonder how many pages are in the whole corpus of laws and executive rules currently in effect in the US.
@Alexey: The actual regulations start around p254. The rest is “preamble” (background, history, justification, and response to comments).
The Final EIS is 404. Normally I would lay that on bureaucratic incompetence but right now…
Grumpy: Am I against the regulation? I would have to try to read and understand it before offering an opinion. Given that the government did such a terrible job at regulating automobile emissions (instead of measuring cars that are on the road and taxing owners according to actual output, which would have given people an incentive to get older vehicles off the road and/or to fix them, the government instead just tried to regulate brand-new cars (and we see where that got us with Volkswagen)), I would be skeptical of any new regulation.
On the transgender bathroom issue, I don’t think that school systems should build or maintain physical infrastructure. It is a distraction from in-classroom operations. Our local school committee, for example, spends most of its time and energy figuring out how to build a budgeted-at-$60 million new school (will cost $120MM?). So the topic of in-classroom instruction never arises. If schools were in rented space it would be up to the landlord what kind of bathroom facilities to provide.
https://www.arb.ca.gov/research/weekendeffect/arb-final/wee_sr_ch1.pdf
Figure 1-5 is a picture of abject failure. Of course they deliberately excluded the glory days of pristine LA air ca. 1968 nor account for all the people who left LA between 1968 and now.
Thanks for responding, Phil. I think your response perfectly sums up the zeitgeist of this blog. You mock people for their baseless response to a pollution regulation (what idiots, they didn’t even read it!), but your contrary opinion is just as baseless (“I’d have to try to read and understand it”).
Kudos to Neal for tongue-in-cheek citing Figure 1-5. It *should* cause you to reconsider your claim about the terribleness of existing car emission regulations. But I’m not holding my breath.
Grumpy: I think you missed the point of the original posting. It was not about the merits of the regulation that never went into effect. It was about the fact that people were fearful because they thought that this never-implemented regulation had been in effect for years or decades. They expected the U.S. to become suddenly much more polluted.
Separately, I didn’t say that existing car regulations were worse than nothing. My point was that we could have cleaned up our air much quicker and cheaper if we had done the regulations the way that economists were suggesting even back in the 1960s. See http://www.atmos-meas-tech.net/8/3263/2015/amt-8-3263-2015.pdf for how even today the filthiest 5 percent of vehicles generate about 40 percent of the pollution (so if we upgraded 1 out of every 20 vehicles we could have air that was only about half as polluted). Econ 101 says you have to tax externalities like spewing out filth. But the U.S. has never managed to impose a tax on filth-spewing (actually kind of the contrary; we impose a heavy sales tax on purchases of new comparatively cars).
[Singapore, of course, does it slightly better, though still not in a perfect Econ 101 manner. They tax continued operation of old cars and they also tax actual usage of roads.]
There is a Technology Review article on this subject from the 1970s, I think, but I can’t find it now with a Google search. Here’s a 1978 paper that is probably close: https://fas.org/rlg/000078ACAP%20Approaches%20to%20Controlling%20Air%20Pollution.pdf
Basically if you tax the effluent you get the most efficient abatement. People with super filthy cars will scrap or export them. Manufacturers have an incentive to produce cars that are as clean as possible (instead of “just clean enough to meet a standard”).
>They expected the U.S. to become
>suddenly much more polluted.
The direct effect of rescinding the clean streams rule will probably be to slow down improvements to the environment associated with the eventual demise of coal. Even if “they” understood the effect correctly “they” would probably not be happy about it. Additionally, the action signals a change in regulatory attitude which could result in the U.S. becoming more polluted.
>Separately, I didn’t say that existing car
>regulations were worse than nothing.
The choices on offer are “nothing” or the “clean streams regulation”. If existing car regulations are better than nothing they do not provide a basis for being “skeptical” of the clean stream regulation. If the government has a record of producing regulations which are “better than nothing” that suggests the clean stream regulation could also be “better than nothing” and thus (potentially) worth retaining relative to nothing.
>My point was that we could have cleaned up our
>air much quicker and cheaper if we had done the
>regulations the way that economists were suggesting
>even back in the 1960s.
In the 1960s measuring tailpipe emissions was expensive, the process of collecting car taxes was labor intensive, and all cars including new vehicles were gross polluters. The first step was to get extremely reluctant car manufacturers to start producing lower emission vehicles. It was thought to be possible, but no one knew exactly how it would be done or how much reduction could be achieved. In this context, it isn’t hard to see how a broad tax on emissions would have been considered much less practical than regulating a small number of vehicle manufacturers.
>Basically if you tax the effluent you get the most
>efficient abatement.
In theory, but in real world application taxing effluent may not always be the most practical approach. Even where taxing effluent is practical and would produce more efficient abatement, we happen to live in a democracy and pollution has a constituency. That is, there are (powerful) people who benefit from producing pollution more than the pollution costs them personally and therefore they would like to continue to pollute. The unfortunate reality is that taxes are unpopular and that makes it is much easier for polluters to demagogue and block effluent taxes than other forms of regulation. Thus, we often live with solutions which are “better than nothing” even if they are less than optimal.
Neal: Judging by their actions, I don’t think that these folks would be happy with environmental regulations regardless of the cost. For example, one great way to cut down on pollution would be to ban leisure travel. That would clean up the air but put an end to these folks’ multiple airline trips back and forth to ski country. It would also reduce the mileage driven each year in their pavement-melting SUVs. But I somehow think they would find a reason to oppose such a ban. Nor do I think they would support a 100 percent pollution tax on airline tickets. So they liked the headline of this 380-page regulation but their actions suggest that they are willing to accept more pollution if it means more wealth and more leisure.
>I don’t think that these folks would be
>happy with environmental regulations
>regardless of the cost.
Of course not, why they should they be?
>So they liked the headline of this 380-page
>regulation but their actions suggest that they
>are willing to accept more pollution if it
>means more wealth and more leisure.
It is actually a 130 page regulation with 250 pages (plus a missing Final Environmental Impact Statement) documenting why the benefits are worth the costs. Can you say that about your proposals to “ban leisure travel” or introduce a “100 percent pollution tax on airline tickets”?
“Separately, I didn’t say that existing car regulations were worse than nothing. My point was that we could have cleaned up our air much quicker and cheaper if we had done the regulations the way that economists were suggesting even back in the 1960s. See http://www.atmos-meas-tech.net/8/3263/2015/amt-8-3263-2015.pdf for how even today the filthiest 5 percent of vehicles generate about 40 percent of the pollution (so if we upgraded 1 out of every 20 vehicles we could have air that was only about half as polluted). Econ 101 says you have to tax externalities like spewing out filth. But the U.S. has never managed to impose a tax on filth-spewing (actually kind of the contrary; we impose a heavy sales tax on purchases of new comparatively cars).”
You just propose regressive taxation that will penalize exactly the kind of people who need to use older vehicles regularly to commute to work. Gotcha. This is how Europe works, BTW. In both France and the UK a stroke of a pen can obsolete a generation of cars that were perfectly compliant with the regulations of the era they were sold.