[kaiju0]

This is a pretty typical growth pattern. Industrial zone establishes and city is set far away in a safe area. City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work. People then see this and say they built industrial next to the poor people when the opposite occurred. Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong?

[woodruffw]

> City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work.

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...

[kube-system]

Agreed. It's the same market forces, though, just in reverse. Industrial businesses don't want to buy land at Park Avenue prices.

[mazamats]

> Who is right and who is wrong?

In Alabama it would the industrial sector that is in the wrong.

Nobody wants to pay for more expensive land, but we should force them to via regulation if they are going to spread cancer in the air.

[kube-system]

Looking at the outcome of economic effects with "right and wrong" isn't really a helpful measurement. We should force them, not because they are "wrong" but because the economic incentives deliver an outcome that is undesirable.

[wholinator2]

Agreed, but I don't see how "economic incentives" and "undesirable outcomes" isn't just a different way of saying right and wrong.

[kube-system]

“Right” and “wrong” implies a sense of free will. When the expensive negative externalities of a business are legalized, a market is guaranteed to force any would-be altruistic actors out of existence. Those who get a job in one of these industries have no functional or legal ability to make choices which would bankrupt their own organizations. The only way to solve the issue is with a regulatory level playing field.

Economic incentives are a scientific force. You can’t solve problems by suggesting that people ignore them, you have to work within the bounds of the natural effects that inherently exist. Groups of people do not make moral decisions like an individual person does.

We won’t solve this issue with mere criticism while we continue to financially reward these outcomes. Make negative externalities illegal.

[tdeck]

More like nobody wants the industrial buildings near them but poor and marginalized communities don't have the political power to resist.

[kube-system]

That’s still not the fault of industrial businesses. No businessperson could change this dynamic even if they wanted to. It’s the fault of our political process to give equitable representation to people of all economic backgrounds.

[vineyardmike]

> Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong?

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.

[chrismeller]

Sorry, but that seems a bit ignorant. A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts.

I’m not saying this is good, but by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house.

[vineyardmike]

There is a difference between a person driving a car, and a factory spewing off a criminally high level of carcinogenic chemicals.

> A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts

And we should stop and fix that. Why do we accept this as ok?

> by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house.

My logic says we should phase out cars that we know kill people. Maybe build cars that use a new, less-polluting method of pollution. Like EV! We solved this issue with cars, maybe Exxon should solve their issue with petroleum.

[chrismeller]

I know I’m late to the party, but I wanted to let you know you’re an idiot in the kindest of ways.

No, there is no difference between a person and a factory. A factory is many people, so change your equivalence to “my suburb” or “my town”, by the time you get to “my city” there are hundreds of studies that prove car usage has much more widespread health effects - they’re slower to materialize and lifelong, but they also impact 100% of people over a much wider area.

You also assume electric vehicles are inherently better, which is a shockingly common logical fallacy. Where does the power come from? Once you trace that back, based on a geographical area, you can start to make comparisons.

For instance a lot of power (to your house and the car you’re charging in the garage, to the city’s charging points, to the Tesla charging points), still comes from burning coal or things like shale (particularly in certain areas of Europe). Know what you’ve done with your “green” EV? Take the pollution you spread out across the city/county/state/country and concentrate it around the local power plant.

What about the oil that lubes the moving parts? The tires? The metals in the batteries? The acid in the batteries?

And now you, your family, your friends, are all basically as bad as the chemical plant. Still sleeping ok at night up on your high horse?

[hcurtiss]

The "optimal" level of pollution is not zero. While there may be exceptions to individuals, to society as a whole, the benefits of an activity may very outweigh the costs. This is true of every human endeavor. There are always costs. The question is whether they are worth it.

[cool_dude85]

The optimal level in your opinion probably depends heavily on how close you live to that factory.

Anyway even if you want to live in Cass Sunstein land where everything is a cost benefit analysis then you have to work on some really hard problems like how it's not really possible to fairly cost something like a person getting cancer. It's also really hard to fairly compare them to the extremely diffuse "benefits", like the oil company doesn't need to spend a million bucks to install a scrubber so everyone's gas is 1 one trillionth cent per gallon cheaper on average.

Point is this kind of cost benefit stuff is a buck passing truism unless and until we can solve these problems and more. I won't be holding my breath.

[hcurtiss]

The answer, IMHO, is to assign property rights and let people trade for the optimal outcome. People frequently and willingly make transactions that on average shorten their lives in exchange for short term benefits (e.g., eating at McDonalds or drinking alcohol). There are tools to address the problem of transaction costs.

[sseagull]

> A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts And we should stop and fix that. Why do we accept this as ok?

Of course. But it is not always easy. You can’t always wave your hand and make non-harmful alternatives. Sometimes it is due to incentives, but also sometimes it is really just chemistry or physics.

See the “tin whisker” phenomenon when they took lead out of solder.

[vineyardmike]

> Sometimes it is due to incentives,

We can fix those. If you could sue a chemical plant (or it's engineers!) that design/implement carcinogenic pollution, i bet the incentives get better fast.

> but also sometimes it is really just chemistry or physics. >You can’t always wave your hand and make non-harmful alternatives

I think we can more often then we give it credit for. Especially if there was more money flowing into R&D, and more regulatory efforts.

> See the “tin whisker” phenomenon when they took lead out of solder.

I've never heard of this and I buy tons of electronics. Seems like industry incentives took care of this. Now we have no lead... and i can still buy iPhones whenever i want.

Why do we accept destruction in our society? Why don't we push for better? Nothing has to be the way it is if we don't want it to be.

[curryst]

> We can fix those. If you could sue a chemical plant (or it's engineers!) that design/implement carcinogenic pollution, i bet the incentives get better fast.

Or the pricing of everything goes up astronomically to account for the new risk, and the poor go back to living in the stone age because they can't afford to pay for the risk assumed by anyone using industrial processes.

Watch how quickly AC vanishes from the poor when Freyon becomes $2,000 for a refill. I doubt the chemicals we use to treat water are free of industrial carcinogens either.

> Why do we accept destruction in our society? Why don't we push for better? Nothing has to be the way it is if we don't want it to be.

Because none of this is free. Handling the tin whiskers wasn't free, there's a certification process for that now. It killed a satellite in 1998, temporarily shut down a nuclear plant, and may have been a culprit in some Toyota car issues.

That was probably worth the tradeoff. It was a fairly minor change, and the payoff was pretty good.

I don't think we can just handwave away that getting to 0 carcinogens would be a net benefit. I'd probably take a 1 in 50,000 chance of dying from industry effects rather than having to go back in time 200 years in terms of quality of life.

[sseagull]

> Especially if there was more money flowing into R&D, and more regulatory efforts.

You won’t hear any argument from me there.

To put it into perspective, the annual budget of the entire (US) National Science Foundation is $8 billion. Now compare that the revenue or even profit of google, apple, etc.

[riversflow]

>And we should stop and fix that.

By exporting it to a poorer country? Because that's what happens.

[azinman2]

That happens because the incentives and supply chain machinery allow it to. Externalities are never priced in regardless of where things are made. Price in externalities, regardless of origin, and things would change. That's just one example of a potential solution, and one that many are trying to do with carbon taxes/credits.

[macintux]

That seems to be the fatal trap we're in: government can compensate for the fact that capitalism is effectively unable to price in externalities, but the big winners from capitalism have the resources to simultaneously lobby government for less regulation and persuade voters that government is evil.

[belltaco]

It's more like installing a catalytic converter on your car. Or adding a muffler.

The article says the factory does not have an ethylene oxide scrubber installed.

[dd36]

If your car is damaging property that’s not yours, then absolutely!

[friedman23]

The engineers didn't set out to create processes that resulted in toxic by-products, your statement is not helpful at all.

[woodruffw]

No, but they did set out to create processes that fit into an economic envelope with forces (unchecked externalities) that encourage pollution. The engineers aren't evil people, but the incentive system that they participate in allows them to be more myopic than it ought to.

[ceejayoz]

The engineers have a responsibility to manage toxic byproducts their processes give off.

[klyrs]

Engineers don't set out to design a bridge that will collapse, either, but folks still want them to be held to account when it happens; folks still expect bridge failures to result in root cause analysis and an update to standard practices after the cause is understood.

[vineyardmike]

> The engineers didn't set out to create processes that resulted in toxic by-products, your statement is not helpful at all.

if the engineers did not set out to create a process free from polluting carcinogens, then they did something wrong.

[curryst]

I don't think you really understand the implications of that statement. You can't even have bronze-age level technology with 0 carcinogens. At least not with present technology.

You can't burn wood. You can't heat a lot of metals. Practically anything that requires smelting metal is out because of the preceeding two. Eletrical power is basically a non-starter, because the mining and refining both release carcinogens.

We need more advanced technology to be able to truly isolate those emissions, but we don't have the ability to develop that technology without releasing those emissions. The goal should be managing the amount of emissions we allow, and prioritizing the "emission credits" towards goals that can reduce those emissions further.

[sokoloff]

When you have a campfire (or fire in your fireplace), you are releasing polluting carcinogens. When you heat olive oil to the smoke point, you are releasing carcinogens. If/when you do those things, are you also doing something wrong?

[woodruffw]

It is relatively easy, from my vantage point, to see dividing lines between "doing something bad for your own health," "doing something bad for your health and those in your physical and emotional circles," and "doing something bad for the health of an entire city, country, or region." It can be the case for each of these to be wrong, in different ways, without confounding or deflating the other cases.

[LorenPechtel]

Exactly. My former employer had repeated battles with the EPA over his supposed refusal to improve emissions. Never mind that we had already done everything technologically feasible, they only saw the pattern of improvement and then stopping. And they kept comparing us to a competitor that we kept telling them had to be faking the numbers. Took them 10 years to figure out we were right--and we spent more on compliance than their penalty when their non-compliance was finally discovered.

Other than mixing our own colors everything involved was available at the local hardware store. We were simply staining wood, the issue was the solvent evaporating while drying.

[vineyardmike]

> we spent more on compliance than their penalty

Sounds like a failing over EPA penalty, not that we should allow pollution! Why should we as a society allow large scale pollution to poison our world without containment?

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> When you have a fire in your fireplace, you are releasing polluting carcinogens. When you do that, are you also doing something wrong?

Yes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51581817

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/property/1430579/wood-b...

For the reasons that you set out. It's fairly straightforward.

[refurb]

So you’re for banning almost all foods that brown through baking this form acrylomide, a known carcinogen?

[vineyardmike]

> If/when you do those things, are you also doing something wrong?

Its hard to say you're doing something "right" by releasing carcinogens. But scale is important here. Its hard to really conflate burning olive oil in your kitchen with oil refining.

[8note]

Yes.

Dont bring your olive oil to the smoke point

[tux3]

Yes, except scale makes all the difference.

If you burn a tire, you're polluting and releasing toxic fumes around. But one burnt tire doesn't affect the neighborhood.

Industry is not negligible. At larger scale toxic waste hurts a lot more people, of course it does! The campfire whataboutism is a bit silly in comparison.

[imoverclocked]

Each one of us burning one tire is a large scale toxic waste issue. Same thing with wood fires.

[agonmon]

Yes. If you care about the surrounding people's health.

[unethical_ban]

As someone who grew up in the Clear Lake area of Houston in the 90s and 00s, I can tell you that the La Porte and Deer Park areas were bad, but weren't this bad. People lived in the surrounding areas before some of those plants ramped up.

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.

[dantheman]

It's the same when people move next to the airport and then complain about noise.

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.

[francisofascii]

The right to pollute should never be granted in perpetuity. If anything, it should be a recurring cost that increases or decreases based on the how much polluting is occurring. That way the markets work in incentivizing less polluting.

[LorenPechtel]

Yup. For the most part I would like to see current pollution regulations tossed wholesale.

Instead, put a price tag on each pollutant. The charge is applied at the point in the supply chain where the pollutant is created or extracted and is rebated to anyone who destroys the pollutant (although they may be charged for other pollutants created in the process.) Think of the oft-proposed carbon tax, just much, much broader.

[drawqrtz]

In an ideal world this would be a great solution, but on earth I think this would invite a whole host of corruption, similar to the carbon offset trading. Not combating the problem but making everyone richer.

[boringg]

This is interesting and far too progressive for any of the cities to regulate at this time (or at any point in the past). This does sound like the right way to permit new industrial areas / processes. Though I imagine it might be difficult to pull off. Grandfathered industries would have such a huge advantage.

[convolvatron]

aren't you assuming we spend the money to adequately track the problem and hold the correct people responsible? that's certainly not the case now in the US. maybe you can fix that by creating a market somehow?

[lettergram]

Gonna have to side with city zoning being the wrong party here. It’s really the people who represent the tax base that should be protecting said tax base.

[dontcare007]

Yep, a failure on the part of the beaurocrats to deny the zoning changes.

[throwaway5752]

That completely lets the companies off the hook for dangerous and unnecessary pollution. Even if nobody was around, they should have an ethylene oxide scrubber. That is a major source of teratogenic emissions per the article.

Also, it strikes me as extremely speculative on your part that this is a zoning issue. How do you know that these plants didn't shift product mixes or expand after there were established communities nearby, or that the companies provided incorrect information to regulators? Unless you want to fund armies of scientists for the regulator to validate the truth of claims made on submissions then you have to blame the companies that submit false data. That seems far more likely than your assumption.

[lettergram]

I’m responding to a post which mentioned zoning issues. Generally, this is an article about “sacrifice zones” - I’m confused.

Putting zoning aside, companies have no motives outside of growth and profit. That’s why governments exist to protect the population they represent. From people, companies, foreign invaders, etc.

[daniel-cussen]

Not even profit these days, just growth. For-market-capitalization companies, profits are just to look good on the balance sheet, what you want is revenues, really.

[zardo]

Yeah we can safely assume that the chemical plant didn't exert any political influence whatsoever.

[azinman2]

Houston is imfamous for not having zoning. That's how you get an industrial plant next to a school next to a mall next to housing next to a cattle feed lot.

[kmeisthax]

Given how zoning utterly ratfucked half the west coast into being all single-family hellscapes; I'm not inclined to say Houston should start having American-style zoning codes. Zoning goes way beyond safety regulation and includes all sorts of things that should never have been brought under democratic control. If we want to keep housing from being built next to polluting factories, then that should be the EPA's job[0] to enforce.

[0] or local state equivalents

[throwaway946513]

Aye, but Houston isn't by far the only polluter on the list.

[azinman2]

I wouldn’t be surprised if the other places didn’t have similar features. Responsible zoning, imho, would put residential far away from industrial, especially when they have smoke stacks or other offgasing.

[deanCommie]

Who do you think is setting up these neighbourhoods? A lot of times it's the industrial companies as well looking to diversify their investments.

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.

[stonemetal12]

I would still blame the industrial zone in this case. If it is unsafe to live within 5 miles of the plant they should own all land within 5 miles of the plant.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people ... Who is right and who is wrong?

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

[dd36]

Property rights. If the adjacent property is unsafe due to your actions, you should pay to fix the problem.

[parineum]

If someone buys the adjacent property after you've made it unsafe without breaking any laws, who pays?

[8note]

I'd say still you.

That wasn't your property to make unsafe. If it's your own property that you've made unsafe, then sell it, I'd consider it on the buyer, unless you hid that it was unsafe

[joe_the_user]

If it's your own property that you've made unsafe, then sell it, I'd consider it on the buyer, unless you hid that it was unsafe.

No one should be able to build houses or establish habitations on poisonous and polluted area. You can sell poisonous land to someone else but anyone owning poisonous land needs to take precautions to keep people off.

It's like one should be able to sell spoiled food (to eat) or lead contaminated toys. Warning people here isn't enough because some people will be foolish or desperate.

[likeclockwork]

For someone to buy it someone has to sell it, no?

The adjacent property is already owned and already being spoiled.

[perryizgr8]

Not necessarily. Maybe it is unclaimed land. I don't know how the law works in that case, but there's certainly nobody who "sells it".

[boringg]

I think they way you described was a bit harsh. That said this is a serious challenge for industry that have large footprints and health risks to the community. In the electric markets there are lots of power plants that were originally far from communities but then housing spread and fell into the catchment areas.

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.

[pirate787]

You're underestimating the ruthless disregard most large industrial producers have for the communities where they locate. These companies are led by sociopaths and fools.

[pirate787]

The largest new industrial facility in West Virginia, Rockwool in Ranson, is permitted as a top ten polluter for formaldehyde in the entire United States and was built 1,300 feet from an existing elementary school just last year.

[refurb]

Top 10 polluter tells me nothing. Is it over the allowable limit or not?

[joe_the_user]

Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong?

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).

[hhaha88]

Why debate right and wrong and not simply make it an engineering problem to let people work on?

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.

[SinParadise]

The welfare of persons is always in the right.