[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.

[azinman2]

I don’t see any other method of economy / government solving either. USSR hid all kinds of dangers (including Chernobyl), China barely is reacting to climate change and notoriously has sacrificed its people for economic gain, etc.

The value structures of how much to care for any one person are different independent of government. Individual versus collective shows itself in both democratic capitalist governments on both sides, and now with market reforms so does communism.