EPA Plans To Get Thousands of Pollution Deaths Off the Books by Changing Its Math (nytimes.com) 308
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to change the way it calculates the health risks of air pollution, a shift that would make it easier to roll back a key climate change rule because it would result in far fewer predicted deaths from pollution, New York Times reported this week, citing five people with knowledge of the agency's plans. From the report: The E.P.A. had originally forecast that eliminating the Obama-era rule, the Clean Power Plan, and replacing it with a new measure would have resulted in an additional 1,400 premature deaths per year. The new analytical model would significantly reduce that number and would most likely be used by the Trump administration to defend further rollbacks of air pollution rules if it is formally adopted. The proposed shift is the latest example of the Trump administration downgrading the estimates of environmental harm from pollution in regulations. In this case, the proposed methodology would assume there is little or no health benefit to making the air any cleaner than what the law requires. Many experts said that approach was not scientifically sound and that, in the real world, there are no safe levels of the fine particulate pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels.
Um, you missed a word (Score:4, Insightful)
Thousands of "projected" deaths.
OK, so group A projects X, and group B projects Y.
I'm going to need a bit more than "OMG Trump pass the smelling salts" before I know whether this is good or bad.
in the real world, there are no safe levels of the fine particulate pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels.
Really? No safe levels? Because there is pretty much some of everything pretty much everywhere. Safety is all about levels.
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Because, then we'd all have to have a fireplace to cook and stay warm. There would be much more particulate matter, and we'd have more to worry about.
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Hey dumbfuck, "liberals" aren't trying to ban smoke.
This isn't about banning things. It is about levels, and trying to reduce them as much as is reasonable.
Nobody in this story is trying to ban anything. Don't be a fucking idiot.
Did you even know that Fox News isn't a liberal, and can't tell you what liberals want? You'd have to listen to proposals and policy positions by influential elected liberals to know what liberals are trying to do.
Who the fuck said anything about campfires? Oh, right, it wasn't libe
Re: Um, you missed a word (Score:2)
When you put the word 'faggot' in your comment for no reason, many of us just quit reading. Crapflooders gotta crapflood.
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Re:Um, you missed a word (Score:5, Insightful)
Most toxic threats can be divided into two different categories -
1) Safe below a certain level (vitamin A, clean water, etc.) They'll still kill you if you consume too much, but below a certain threshold they're definitely safe, and even potentially beneficial.
2) Unsafe at any level (lead, fine particulate matter, etc). No matter how little you're exposed to it'll do some damage. More will typically do more damage, and little enough may do an undetectable amount of damage, but there's no reason to believe that there's any level where no damage is done.
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How much damage does the particulate matter do compared to not having a job in a modern economy?
There are many trade-offs to be considered, and a regulatory body must consider them all, NPCs notwithstanding.
Re:Um, you missed a word (Score:5, Insightful)
Economically, you need to approach it as a cost-benefit analysis. Yes more pollution is bad. But what is the cost of reducing it? If the economic cost of reducing it is more than the benefit of the lowered pollution, then it's just not worth reducing it. As with most things, pollution controls follow a non-linear expense curve. Reducing pollution from a large amount to a medium amount is cheap. Reducing it from a medium amount to a little amount is not so cheap. Reducing it from a little amount to a tiny amount is expensive. And reducing it from a tiny amount to zero is cost-prohibitive (we couldn't do it even if we devoted our entire economic output to it). You need to figure out the point where it no longer makes economic sense to reduce pollution further. If you make the pollution controls too strict, you end up wasting economic resources (people's productivity) for little gain. Resources which could be better spent saving lives in other ways, or improving quality of life so that life is more fulfilling even if it's cut short by pollution.
And it's not a static target either. Technology progresses. And it progresses faster if you don't spend as many resources fighting things like pollution. That's the approach China has taken. They used to be a technological backwater, 50-100 years behind the developed world. Their government made a conscious decision to allow excess pollution in the interest of accelerating their economic development. It's helped boost their economy so they're now probably only about 10-20 years behind the developed world. They paid a heavy price for that rapid development in pollution. But now that they've pretty much caught up, they're starting to address that pollution. Their current generation will pay for that pollution in shortened lifespan. But that's just one generation which will pay, while all future generations will enjoy the benefits that come from being further along in technological progress than they would've been if not for the sacrifice of that one generation. Was it worth it? I really don't know. But neither can you say with absolute certainty that it wasn't worth it because the current generation suffered under heavy pollution all their lives.
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Absolute safety is for those without the balls to live in the real world. (And before you SJWs jump on me about the gonads, that quote comes from a female lead engineer at NASA.)
To be fair, Mary Shafer's favorite title is SR-71 Flying Qualities Lead Engineer. That'd be the Blackbird, the most batshit crazy airplane ever built that could actually fly.
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Its flying qualities were that if you kept it moving sufficiently fast you could usually avoid the ground.
I'm not sure that qualifies as flying.
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Most toxic threats can be divided into two different categories -
1) Safe below a certain level (vitamin A, clean water, etc.) They'll still kill you if you consume too much, but below a certain threshold they're definitely safe, and even potentially beneficial.
2) Unsafe at any level (lead, fine particulate matter, etc). No matter how little you're exposed to it'll do some damage. More will typically do more damage, and little enough may do an undetectable amount of damage, but there's no reason to believe that there's any level where no damage is done.
And the shorthand
1) Risks not related to cancer; safe below some threshold
2) Cancer risks; no safe threshold, risk increases with exposure
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If there was exactly one atom of lead in the entire planet, you would say the entire planet is unsafe to live on?
We need a select committee to study that. Expect a preliminary report in 2024.
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Most toxic threats can be divided into two different categories... 1)Safe below a certain level ...
2) Unsafe at any level (lead, fine particulate matter, etc).
Nonsense and you know it. If there was exactly one atom of lead in the entire planet, you would say the entire planet is unsafe to live on?
No.
For the material that is unsafe at any level, the amount of damage is proportional to the amount of exposure. So, an increase from 1 microgram per liter lead to 1.1 micrograms per liter lead over 1 million people has the same effect as an increase from microgram per liter to one thousand micrograms per liter for a thousand people.
There is no safe level, but nevertheless a trivial amount will have a trivial effect, unless it's an exposure of a correspondingly huge population.
See how it works? Distribu
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There is no safe level, but nevertheless a trivial amount will have a trivial effect, unless it's an exposure of a correspondingly huge population.
See how it works? Distributing a given amount of lead oxide into the envionment does not result in fewer deaths if it's spread out among a million people than if it's concentrated to a few people.
I think that’s the core of the problem. These are "deaths". Most people think that word means someone actually died, not that some trivial effect felt by a million people equals a "death".
How many "deaths" do you think we can project due to anxiety caused by cable news trolling?
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Most toxic threats can be divided into two different categories...
2) Unsafe at any level (lead, fine particulate matter, etc).
Nonsense and you know it. If there was exactly one atom of lead in the entire planet, you would say the entire planet is unsafe to live on?
Wait, you didn't know that life is unsafe? Nobody told you?
Oh, I see, you did know that, you're just so exceptionally simple-minded that you thought people who disagree with can't comprehend levels other than "safe" and "banned!"
LMFAO That some seriously Derptastic bullshit, man.
I know this is hard for you to comprehend, but people with a college education are more likely to vote Democrat than people without a college education. So your whole concept of the Ebil Libraaals being too stupid to look at risk levels and form a comprehensive response is simply not reasonable.
Your concept that the goal of Ebil Libraals is to make the entire planet "safe" is fucking stupid. Why don't you just take the cotton out of your ears and listen to what they say? Do you really think Fox News or AM talk radio is going to be honest with you about the people they disagree with? Are you that fucking stupid?
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What also happened is that the norms for clean air are continuously
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The air looks a lot cleaner these days. However, the concentrations of ultrafine particles are much higher. Not so many years ago, engines emitted soot. This has been largely eliminated. The higher combustion temperatures and lean-burning cycles of modern engines have unfortunately increased the amounts of ultrafine particles.
Soot is bad enough, but the relatively large lumps cannot easily cross into the blood stream from the lungs. Ultrafine particles do not suffer from such limitations.
On the upside, ultr
Re:Um, you missed a word (Score:4, Interesting)
Unlike previous Presidents Republican and Democrat, I do not trust the fact that he is at all working for the nations best interests. Changing how things are calculated is a way to ignore the problem vs. working on a solution. Normally if an administration wants to roll back environmental laws, they will just show how ineffective the laws are, and how they are just creating more harm. But for the Trump Administration they are just stating there is no problem, that the problem is just made up.
So which brings up how did these 1400 people die.
Air Quality/Pollution isn't an abstract idea like global warming, it is something people can smell, and see. We are working off of number on what has happened vs. projections with a degree of error.
Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away. And unlike running a business you just can't cut off the underperfoming areas.
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I agree with you that I don't trust this administration. But changing how things are calculated isn't a problem per se. The Obama administration made up the rules for how things were calculated. That doesn't mean they should be set in stone as the word of God. They can be wrong (in
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So which brings up how did these 1400 people die.
Um, "they" didn't. These are differences in projections, based on two different methods.
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Exactly. Right now, the analysis says there is nothing magical about a certain level; as you say, "there is pretty much some of everything pretty much everywhere." What the EPA is doing is to replace a cost-benefit analysis (which balances the costs of reducing pollution against the benefits of reducing illness and death) with an analysis that says, "when the concentrations go below this arbitrary level, the risk magically becomes exactly zero."
It's hard to do a sensible cost-benefit analysis if you assume
See? (Score:5, Funny)
And they said Trump wouldn't make things better.
Just believe the numbers, kids, and never mind that pesky cough you get when you go outside!
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The NYT article has been rewritten multiple times without disclosure. So what's that called kids? That's right. It's the Washington Post's favorite word. "Fake news." See the archive.today caches if you really want to see. I mean it's pretty bad when you got Tim Pool ripping your asshole, then ripping your asshole for being a shitty paper, then ripping your asshole some more because you hired reporters that believe "updating" articles that fundamentally change the entire premise is a-okay. But what the [youtu.be]
The New Truth (Score:3, Informative)
This is not post-truth. This is the new truth. The best way to do good politics is to bend to truth to your policy. Unfortunately that doesn't mean the policy is a good one.
Ajit Pai already did this adeptly for net neutrality. I'm surprised this practice took so long to spread into the hindrances os Trump's pals, so he can pay tribute to his oil and polluting industry sponsors.
Show Me The Bodies. (Score:2, Funny)
ALWAYS with the statistics! The Liar's Poker of Mathematics.
Get a shovel and dig them up and show me all these dead people.
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Are you saying you don't blindly believe politically inspired projections of the future? These other guys have practically made a religion out of belief in politicians and their prophesies of the future. Why can't you close your eyes and believe it too?
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^ Murder this Republican faggot traitor. It's environmentally sound policy, and with one fewer liar on slashdot maybe we'll get some interesting discussion instead of inbred faggots trying to pretend statistics are too difficult to understand.
Maybe Zorro was being sarcastic and forgot the "/s"? Also, difficulty interpreting statistics isn't limited to gays who somehow breed with relatives (through some kind of in-vitro mechanism?). Statistical analysis is difficult, even for heterosexual, patriotic, non-Republicans.
The NY Times stealth edited its story (Score:2, Informative)
Journalist Tim Pool has the story of how the New York Times published fake news about this topic and then Stealth Edited to hide the error. [youtube.com] They didn't issue a correction. Stealth Editing was Winston Smith's job in "1984", wasn't it?
If you don't watch Tim Pool, you should. He has higher viewership than CNN and MSNBC put together. Don't miss what people are talking about, watch the alternative news.
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At a guess I suspect he'd say that it's possible to have friends with whom you don't agree about everything.
Indeed, it's the only way to have friends.
Of course, a social interaction map on twitter would be a serious fucking mess, what with everybody talking to everybody that they haven't blocked because it might damage their world view to listen for once.
How many angels on that pin? (Score:2)
All these deaths are swamped by government policy interfering with or helping advancing technology advance.
It's being pennywise pound foolish.
This is where I disconnect from the Republicans (Score:2)
So many Republicans want to say that global warming is a sham..
Well let's say that it is..
That still doesn't make it okay to pollute tf out of our planet. :)
Wish some issues were so tied to partisanship and having to choose one side or the other.
The new AEPA. (Score:2)
Can we just change the name of the organization while we're at it from Environmental Protection Agency, to Anti-Environmental Protection Agency? Seriously, the whole point of the agency is to PROTECT the ENVIRONMENT, their function is in their name. Anything that allows additional pollution to the environment pretty much goes against what it's mission is. This isn't an agency meant to help business, but to insure it keeps the air we breathe, the water we drink, the items we consume in one way or another,
Meanwhile... (Score:2)
when the independents agree with the liberals.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I am generally a centrist, politically independent. I am not a Trump fan, nor am I a tree-hugger. My primary concern with the environment is that we all need it to function, so we can all live and be healthy.
But every time I read a headline about Trump's EPA, all I can think is, "Isn't their name the Environmental PROTECTION Agency?" When did they all sell their souls to political bias and completely forget their purpose for existing? IT'S IN YOUR NAME in case you forgot.
Must we all be poisoned and get
Re:no sauce? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no sauce? (Score:4, Insightful)
Trump wanted to replace Plan 1 with Plan 2, but according to Measurement Method A that would result in 1,400 more premature deaths a year, which is the bit you're quoting. So they want to replace Measurement Method A with Measurement Method B, to "eliminate" those extra deaths, which is what the article as a whole is about.
Which doesn't tell us anything ... what matters is whether Measurement Method B is in reality less accurate or useful.
If Measurement Method B is actually better, then "eliminating" incorrect projected deaths would be a good outcome.
Why don't Republicans apologize for their frauds? (Score:2, Insightful)
It tells us that Trump is putting his finger on the scale to aid polluters, which has been a focus of his entire sellout pseudo-presidency. There's evidence Trump's decisions are contradictory to sound science, you know nothing about it.
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I am starting to think this might actually be Hillary herself still posting this salty...
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We mattered in 2016.
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Don't argue with foreigner trolls.
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TBH I think this is Hillary herself. It's the only 'logical' explanation.
Re: Why don't Republicans apologize for their frau (Score:4, Informative)
Go look at bejieng right now. Notice the haze and how some days you can't see down the street.
That is the air pollution You want America to have.take a look at pictures of any City in the USA around the 70's and 80's. Notice the haze? That is pollution we used to have but don't becuase the EPA put a finger on the scale.
Your choice choke to death on industrial air or live in clean air.
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You mean the air pollution that we got rid of decades ago but will magically reappear because of fearmongering over a rule implemented a few years ago?
Particulates a problem - a solved problem (Score:2)
Particulates are indeed a problem. A solved problem, in the US. The standards in 1972 were too loose. In the 1980s the standards were changed to be about right.
The Obama-era standards kill about 250,000 per year:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
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If you're an old rich businessman who won't live long enough to develop lung/cardiovascular problems due to an increase in smog, or spend all your time in a nice air-conditioned mansion, and you will be able to afford more/better hookers if the standards are loosened due to your financial situation... and you don't care about anyone else... it makes perfect sense.
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And has the EPA provided any evidence to support their claims? Every department and agency in the Trump administration is moving to roll back regulations, safeguards, and oversight. It would be a surprise if the EPA leadership was actually interested in the data or science behind this and are not just following an anti-government agenda.
Re:no sauce? (Score:5, Informative)
If Measurement Method B is actually better, then "eliminating" incorrect projected deaths would be a good outcome.
In this case, the proposed methodology would assume there is little or no health benefit to making the air any cleaner than what the law requires. Many experts said that approach was not scientifically sound...
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Instead we could spend far less and remove deaths from drowning, shark attacks, being struck by lighting and those killed on golf courses for far less and even if only 1/2 of these deaths were prevented more lives would be saved.
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> But remember that many experts have both financial and career interests in pollution being hazardous
Oh fuck off with this bullshit. Pollution IS hazardous. If it wasn't it wouldn't be called POLLUTION.
"All those doctors saying smoking causes cancer are just on the take, smoking is great for you! You should REALLY be investigating those doctors to see where their money is coming from to motivate them to speak out against our poor poor tobacco manufacturers!"
-- you, probably.
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Light pollution is rarely hazardous, just inconvenient. Noise pollution gets even fuzzier, especially if you don't specify the species you're worried about creating a hazard for.
It's not called pollution because it's hazardous. It's called pollution because it's something that wasn't part of an environment that causes a change to that environment. Hazardous is subje
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> Light pollution is rarely hazardous, just inconvenient. Noise pollution gets even fuzzier, especially if you don't specify the species you're worried about creating a hazard for.
So to summarize light pollution is actually hazardous to some species, as is noise pollution. Therefore both of those forms of pollution are hazards, just perhaps not to humans - or in the case of noise pollution perhaps not discerned as hazardous until too late. So my point stands that pollution is hazardous.
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It would be easy to check police reports and find out that there is a lot of sound pollution that is harming people's sleep, and which when reported doesn't get stopped, or get measured and added to any cumulative total for a study. It is being discerned as hazardous, it simply isn't being comprehensively tracked.
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How is a lawyer able to give an expert opinion on what is or isn't a scientifically sound method of measurement?
Do you think expert in environmental law doesn't have anything to do with environmental case law that relates to a lot of scientific evidence?
Did he list the studies?
How lazy are you? Can't you simply google his studies [google.com]?
An idiot trolling AC.
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As the article mentions, neither is actually useful or scientific because no amount of particulates in the air is "good" for you, if you burn coal or wood in a fire pit and breath in the smoke, you're now more likely to die from one or another cancer.
If you apply these numbers to a large population, you can estimate that x amount of people will die prematurely if that was the only death factor. Eventually the death rate of any human is 1 but that doesn't mean a single factor has contributed to your death.
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Given that greater than zero particulates in the air is inherently bad, and zero particulates is not going to happen, perhaps instead of bleating on about 'particulates bad' the so called experts should do their fucking job and provide meaningful evidence backed analysis that helps people properly assess and identify an appropriate particulate level that balances the benefits of particulate generation against the damage caused.
Perhaps.
Obama EPA says worth $5 million (0.001% of cost (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't really matter, because either number results in the same conclusion.
The high number from the Obama administration is 1,400. It costs about $5 million to reduce deaths by 1,400, via nutrional education and support programs. If a government program costs less than $4,000 per life saved it's very effective and you should do it (modulo rights). If it costs more than $25,000 per person, it's wasteful - you should instead direct that money to more effective programs.
For example, traffic safety is about $10,000 per life saved.
If you spend $1 million on traffic safety, you'll save about 100 people. If instead you spend that $1 million somewhere else and only save 10 people, you've basically decided to let 90 people die unnecessarily.
The Obama-era EPA rule will save, they claimed, 1,400 people and cost $2.5 billion. If instead we spent that $2.5 billion on traffic safety we would save 250,000 people. The Obama rule chooses to let 250,000 die and instead save only 1,400. It is very bad policy. Very, very bad choice. The money / resources should instead be spent on nutrition education and traffic safety in order to save hundreds of thousands of people.
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The money / resources should instead be spent on nutrition education and traffic safety in order to save hundreds of thousands of people.
As if that will happen.
Re:Obama EPA says worth $5 million (0.001% of cost (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't really matter, because either number results in the same conclusion.
The high number from the Obama administration is 1,400. It costs about $5 million to reduce deaths by 1,400, via nutrional education and support programs. If a government program costs less than $4,000 per life saved it's very effective and you should do it (modulo rights). If it costs more than $25,000 per person, it's wasteful - you should instead direct that money to more effective programs.
For example, traffic safety is about $10,000 per life saved. If you spend $1 million on traffic safety, you'll save about 100 people. If instead you spend that $1 million somewhere else and only save 10 people, you've basically decided to let 90 people die unnecessarily.
The Obama-era EPA rule will save, they claimed, 1,400 people and cost $2.5 billion. If instead we spent that $2.5 billion on traffic safety we would save 250,000 people. The Obama rule chooses to let 250,000 die and instead save only 1,400. It is very bad policy. Very, very bad choice. The money / resources should instead be spent on nutrition education and traffic safety in order to save hundreds of thousands of people.
You are presupposing that the government must choose either traffic safety or pollution safety as is they are mutually exclusive. Governments are not necessarily constrained to a single fixed amount of money for preventing deaths. They can choose to allocate funds as they see fit, either taking money away from other programs (such as military procurement or industry subsidies), or collecting more taxes.
Don't see the contradiction? (Score:2)
You suggest that there is not a limited amount of money, that the government can spend infinitely, and then say:
> either taking money away from other programs (such as military procurement or industry subsidies), or collecting more taxes.
Yes any money (aka resources) spent on reducing particulates further is taken from somewhere. Military spending reduces (probability of) deaths at some cost per life, with different amounts of spending yielding different efficiencies.
There is a limit to how much they ca
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You suggest that there is not a limited amount of money, that the government can spend infinitely, and then say:
> either taking money away from other programs (such as military procurement or industry subsidies), or collecting more taxes.
There is no contradiction. Firstly, when I said governments are not necessarily constrained to a "single" fixed amount of money for preventing deaths, I meant they are free to spend on more than one single initiative. They do not have to choose between traffic safety and pollution safety, they can spend on both if they choose. Secondly, when I said governments are not necessarily constrained to a single "fixed amount of money", I meant that the amount they spend is flexible. Nowhere did I say that the gover
Re:Obama EPA says worth $5 million (0.001% of cost (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you sure about those numbers? In cost/benefit analyses, $10M per life saved or $100k per year in case of medical treatments are more typical numbers. Your numbers are about a factor 1000 off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (Score:2)
> $100k per year in case of medical treatments are more typical numbers
It turns out that doing a presentation on childhood nutrition is a LOT cheaper than treating diabetes for the rest of their life.
Similarly, installing a stop sign is a lot cheaper than medical treatment for someone who is paralyzed after a car accident.
PS those areas are going best, not average (Score:2)
Btw I pointed out nutrional education and traffic safety as better areas to spend resources because those two are among the BEST areas; the effectiveness is not average. The average effectiveness / efficiency of government programs will be far less than the efficiency in these areas.
Which implies that government decision making is not rational - shocker. Rational spending, spending which maximizes lives saved, would spend a lot more on nutrition habits and traffic safety. Those don't get voters and donors
Only true in a linear approach (Score:2)
Ar some point diminishing returns, so switch (Score:2)
Absolutely you get diminishing returns. For example, reducing particulates from 1970s levels to 1990s levels was much more efficient (effective per dollar) than further reducing them to half of 1990s levels.
At some point, we would have spoken enough on traffic safety and childhood nutrition and it we'd start getting diminishing returns. Then we'd focus on the next most efficient thing.
As you mentioned, seatbelt marketing and laws were very effective, and they cost very little. Currently, there remain some
Maybe whitespace will make it clearer for you (Score:2)
Maybe some whitespace will make it clearer for you:
--
It costs about $5 million to reduce deaths by 1,400, via nutrional education and support programs.
The Obama-era EPA rule will save, they claimed, 1,400 people and cost $2.5 billion.
If instead we spent that $2.5 billion on traffic safety we would save 250,000 people.
--
$5 million is the cost to save 1,400 people via childhood nutrition programs.
$2.5 billion is the cost to save 1,400 people via the EPA program.
One is 500X more effective per dollar than the o
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You gotta ask yourself: What are the odds that Trump is going to change to a more accurate method?
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Which doesn't tell us anything ... what matters is whether Measurement Method B is in reality less accurate or useful.
If Measurement Method B is actually better, then "eliminating" incorrect projected deaths would be a good outcome.
Well, why don't you just do some research before attempting to push your bias through your post? Do you really want to know or you just want to pretend you want to know?
Here [epa.gov] is the original paper which explains the methodology of the study in Obama era (2015). And here [epa.gov] is what they proposed last December which should be in their new model. People should read both and make their own decision by themselves instead of accepting those who posted their opinion WITHOUT even reading anything but rather use their
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Mainly because I can't be arsed to spend two days fighting jargon, acronyms and entirely disparate units of measurement.
How about you summarise for us?
Re:The "deaths" cam from changing the math (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion, it's better to error on the side of health than error on the side of profits at the possible expense of health. Politicians get a lot of campaign money from companies who want the latter.
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Is the error on the side of profits, or is the error on the side of historically lowest unemployment rate for African Americans in American history?
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Politicians get a lot of campaign money from companies who want the latter.
Yeah, but is that a good enough reason to vote them out?
It's a good enough reason to be skeptical of their actions.
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I thought Trump was a ignorant toddler?
It must be sad to have an ignorant toddler that can beat Hillary in a fair election, run the entire country by himself, while obstructing justice so much that Mueller could neither find collusion or enough evidence that he obstructed justice. That is one amazing toddler
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CO2 is not "pollution".
Neither is arsenic in small doses...
Re:Well then (Score:5, Informative)
CO2 is not even the issue being discussed; rather, it's fine particulate matter. Specifically, what's being discussed are particles smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5), which are mostly combustion by-products (e.g., soot particles). And PM2.5 is pollution, for which there is no known safe exposure level.
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Should be modded informative. Coal in particular (ahem) is just nasty, any way you look at it.
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You are more stupid than I thought. Besides, you like to jump the gun too. The parent said one thing, you spin it and try to make it as an individual issue which is not the case at all. Trolling much? Or lack of education?
The parent was talking about the density of the particle in the air. There is a scale [blissair.com] of how dangerous it is regarding its volume in the air. Little to no risk doesn't mean it is 100% safe. Smoke from house hold or individual has little to no effect but doesn't mean you should be breathing
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Derp derp, I can't comprehend regulations, I can only understand banning, or not banning. So listen to my stupid insight!
Oh, just fuck off.
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The time is coming - though I would advise against holding your breath.
Recent news claimed that the pollution from cooking a full English breakfast was more than from a Volkswagen with the cheat software enabled.
Disclaimer: I tried eating a Volkswagen, and it broke one of my teeth.
Re: Well then (Score:2)
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How about you go and get a bag, tie it around your head, and start breathing and get back to us in a few minutes. I'd like to get your data on what happens. After that, go live on Venus and tell us what it's like to live there.
Many bad things are not called "pollution". Crazy ACs, for example.
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So it is like shit, something that most animals excrete and something that makes plants grow. Are you arguing that shit isn't a pollutant when it is in your drinking water?
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How about you go and get a bag, tie it around your head, and start breathing and get back to us in a few minutes.
I'll happily do that, right after you come from the room that has been completely evacuated of CO2.
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I agree with you. You should sit in a room with absolutely none for at least 6 minutes a day. It will improve your mental health. Afterwords you will realize that it was Russian intelligence that was funneling lies to the FBI through Hillary and the CIA, and learn that you have been the traitor for the past two years.
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It would be rather difficult to talk about a proposed change without discussing what is being changed.
Whataboutism isn't always a thing.
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That's what consensus in science is for, to separate your statistical lie from truth. Your statistical lie would easily fail consensus.
Any policy based on some scientific value should have scientific consensus behind it, otherwise it's just a made up bunch of numbers as you claim. Your argument boils down because it's possible to fake the numbers, so don't trust anything, such a stand isn't policy, it's absurdity.
Unlike yourself, sensible people recognize that it's possible to fake numbers and rely on conse
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Government numbers can be presumed to be political unless there's strong evidence to the contrary.
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Come to NC last month and spend two HOURS outside, and you wouldn't be able to breath. I'm not asthmatic, and I could hardly breath from the yellow snot clogging my throat. It is like that nearly every year. The world is NOT a clean place.
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Did the NYTimes stealth edit that article too? Just asking before I read so I know to temper my expectations.