The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones” (opens in new tab)

In cities like Mobile, Alabama, the opposite is usually true[1]: people already lived in those areas, but companies (and local governments) don't consider their health sufficiently important. I'll leave it up to you to infer why that is.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/26/africatown-s...

Yeah, if your industrial process causes cancer you need to re-engineer the process to be safer and polluting less, even if you were there first.

It isn't always one way or the other.

As someone who is seeing more and more how irreversible so much of our environmental damage is these days, I am leaning on the plant owners being responsible, not the schoolchildren who are getting rolled a 1:20,000 chance of cancer.

Perhaps, knowing how much pollution affects surrounding areas, we should force such chemical plants to purchase all the land around them that will be affected to a certain extent. Internalize the costs of their damage to the community, and prevent others from being exposed to it.

In general this can be solved with an extension of property rights, the industrial zone/airport/music venue etc can own the rights to "pollute" the neighboring areas, much like buying air rights in a city. Then it's clear when you purchase / rent / what level of noise / pollution you can expect.

This allows market forces to work, if after a certain time the city is bigger and that land is more valuable for quality housing then they can buy the rights from the polluter and shut it down.

But not always, let's not paint them with the same brush. Zoom out on the problem broader.

Why are industrial companies polluting land that they don't own? Well, because this was all established in an age when we considered pollution out of sight and out of mind. If it's not an oil barrel lying in a ditch, but some happy vapor going out into the atmosphere, who cares?

So the lack of government regulation of pollution on land not owned by the companies is the problem.

In 21st century sensibilities about externalities, an industrial plant should not be able to pollute land it doesn't own. And if there is no way to avoid that, the government should set it up as an isolation zone not zoned for residential, and force the company to price that into their economics.

By the way this is what the rest of the developed world does. The US, with it's obsession with profits, and deregulation, and "letting the free market" decide doesn't, and now has the worst correlation between health outcomes and socioeconomic class of any developed country.

Are you suggesting that this question is somehow hard to answer? I don't think it is.

Going forward wouldn't it make sense to zone an entire area to not be allowed to build for residential purposes (essentially a buffer around the industrial zones)?

It feels like its a grey area of responsibility etc. For industrial processes that are known to be highly toxic it would fall on the industrials but as we find out more information around toxicity and impacts (which it feels like more is coming to light all the time) it will require some deft navigating.

This argument confuses policy and morality and somehow implies we should ignore both.

Morally, if you spew chemicals you know are going to cause significant excess deaths, you will have to live with yourself and myself and many people will think little of you.

Legality, if you spew an otherwise unknown chemical that you happen to know is quite toxic, you'll be liable. If you stay with EPA guidelines but happen to know this is going to kill or injure significant number, you only have public perceptions and your own conscious to answer for.

Policy wise, the EPA should impose regulations that make all neighborhoods reasonably safe. Moreover, I suggest structuring the regulation process to incentivize creating compliant processes rather than in terms of after-the-fact punishments. (I've heard a variety of contrasts between the US and Europe, where despite the US very "pro-capitalist", the regulatory paradigm is entirely adversarial).

Why not make that our political discourse? We stop the world at work to solve problems in revenue generation.

Somehow this has to be mired in political speak.

Letting figurative power thrive while squashing people is good business.

The EPA has all sorts of silly guidelines like saying setback a gas station 500 feet from school or wetlands if they pump over 3.6MM gallons a year. Under that? 25 feet.

https://postpump.org is the project so far.

A crazy thing I learned recently is the cost of cleanups for underground storage tanks is not really tracked or published publicly. I started requesting information a few weeks ago. https://postpump.org/oregon

Thank you, a voice of reason! This really needed to be said on this thread.

I disagree with the notion that regulations are inherently harmful to corporate profits. Foreign competitors do generally exist in other countries with different regulations, which complicates the matter in the real world; but in a healthy, homogeneously regulated market, a new regulation should increase the operating costs of all suppliers more or less equally. Assuming that there's a sufficient amount of competition to keep profit margins reasonably thin, the increased cost of regulatory compliance should be passed onto customers in the form of higher prices.

I'm thinking of where I grew up. A local anti-establishment rag noted a cancer cluster in one part of town and wouldn't let go even when shown the truth. The end result of the mess was it went from a cheap but decent area to somewhere I wouldn't want to venture even by day.

The only toxic stuff in the neighborhood was benzene from all the old cars about--the "cluster" was because it was the cheapest decent area in town, people who got sick and had medical bills and couldn't work ended up moving there. The rate of *diagnosis* of cancer there was below average, the cluster was purely due to immigration.

You can argue about the merits of having that informed consent and still _choosing_ to put up with it, and whether that's truly free will or necessity, or something in between.

But time and time again, there are companies that will lie to everyone, employees included, about the risks.

That is _not_ informed consent, and is not defensible for any reason.

But to make sure that it doesn’t veer into city bashing (as HN is sometimes wont to do): the only difference between the glistening urban core and 300 square miles of suburban sprawl is the number of trucks needed to distribute the raw materials involved. All things being equal, the pollution involved in building the former is both lesser and more sustainable.

Boston area has no big chemical/hard industrial industry, and nothing on that map. Neither does seattle (but the map shows some small process in areaa). Id wager a lot of modern "intellectual" cities (where knowledge worker industries dominate) can be devoid of such processes. Tourism cities too - eg, Vegas and Miami don't have such a history and their maps are clean.

Obviously SFBay is a notable exception to the knowledge-worker idea, but SV was founded on horribly toxic silicon refining which, while mostly gone, has a terrible history of poisoning the ground.

Industry contributes all the time. Their contribution is to make sure nothing at all gets done by funding politicians, lawyers and fake science. This pattern has been repeated ad naseum with lead, asbestos, PCBs, climate, etc.

In a just world this kind of bad faith action would mean at a minimum industry is ignored in the policy process while a solution is imposed on them. Better would be to wipe out the shareholders in order to compensate for the externalities they've inflicted on others.

Large corporations and not governments offshore production. Arguably this hasn't much to do with regulations but wholly different economies such that the comparative cost advantage is 10x or more. And of course it's possible to check under what conditions suppliers produce things.

If there was a release of sulphur dioxide that was going to stay on the Canadian side, the plant management notified the relevant authorities. Sometimes the kids were told not to go outside for recess.

If the SO2 was potentially going to drift over the border, the entire plant was shut down because the U.S. EPA would hit them with millions of dollars in fines.

Was someone talking about ethics and morality?