at some point we’ll be living in a dust bowl eating barely nutritious food and people will think “man, how could the liberals have done this to us?”
I hear problems like this and I think of that Ministry for the Future answer. The strong no, in the most absolute terms.
Given they haven't made an episode in more than 30 years, they almost certainly don't.
> It's kind of wild that that strong ethos on TV feels missing. Or at least, I have no idea what similar type shows there would be.
IIRC, Captain Planet was pretty preachy and not actually that fun to watch. But oh my does this article sound like it describes a literal Captain Planet plot, I can just imagine that yellow guy laughing about how he's going to dump toxic waste in a stream.
Not only were many environmental regulations "written in blood" (and are well justified by observed damages before they existed), the average citizen would typically gain little from scrapping them. Allowing some industrialized chicken farm to dump their waste into the next river is not gonna make your eggs that much cheaper. "Socialize (external) costs, privatize gains" is often the actual play instead.
Any. It's not going to make your eggs any cheaper.
The market is already bearing the existing price, so all that saved money is going in an executive's pocket.
If you wanted to dump shit on the riverbank in 1950 you'd just bribe/threaten officials with discretion or call in a favor from a friend of a friend to get approved.
To do it in 2026 you have to continually pay a bunch of middle men and compliance parties diffusing responsibility far and wide enough in the process that no one party can be held responsible because the lawyering it would take to drag that across the finish line would be more than you could recoup from said party, often helped by statutory limits to liability for all these middle men and compliance parties.
Focusing on the legality or compliance with rules of any one of the myriad of parties listed in the article or whining about the inaction of the enforcement agencies funding level is basically a red herring to rile up the useful idiots to clamor for more of all this. The more you pass rules that drive up cost the more you create room for additional middle men to diffuse responsibility if operating above the table and the more payoff you create for those who are willing to operate below the table.
Garbage disposal one of those areas where the modern regulatory state is an abject failure by anything other than the definitions of success cooked up by the regulatory state peddlers themselves. I don't know what the solution is. The paradigm it replaced was pretty bad too.
"It’s so expensive to dispose of waste legally that many people attempt to do it illegally."
This is one of those things where we just have to collectively bite the bullet and make it easy and cheap to dispose of things properly. Otherwise you get people dumping toxic waste in storm drains, throwing old tires and appliances in ravines, mixing dangerous contaminants into regular trash, or just putting their trash in other people's bins.
Where I am it costs $20 to properly dispose of an old can of paint. It costs about the same to dispose of any electronic item that has a screen. Even regular household garbage has to be put in special bags that cost about $2/each. All of this is a counterincentive to people disposing of their waste properly. And every few years the local waste manangement bureaucracy raises the rates.
Just build it into the base taxes that everyone pays. Make it "free" and easy for people to do the right thing.
You can also put the cost of disposal into the cost of the item at sale. Either through a deposit (like cans/bottles) or just a flat fee/tax.
Then you encourage people to buy less toxic, easier-to-dispose-of alternatives.
"concerning!"
In Australia all the regulations exist and the waste management is top notch, insanely easily and fairly cheap.
Construction was is also a major issue, insanely difficult to dispose of.
ShadowOfThePit•2d ago
> Eels are pretty hardy, says Alistair; they can even travel over land if they need to. To see them gasping and dying on the banks was heartbreaking. “It was apocalyptic.”
> The results found unusually high levels of heavy metals, ammonia levels that were “well outside acceptable limits for any freshwater life” and nitrogen levels that were “toxic to all aquatic life”.
It's quite a long article that deals with many problems the UK has regarding environmental protection, illegal waste dumping and so on. The lack of care and amount of damage is just shocking.
I really recommend a read.
pseudohadamard•1d ago
andai•45m ago
sscaryterry•30m ago
Oarch•56m ago
palmotea•50m ago
So is your life.
You should probably have just used Claude to summarize it into some bullet points than complain it wasn't what you wanted.
happytoexplain•47m ago
boesboes•46m ago
CharlesW•45m ago
CursedSilicon•11m ago
schiffern•40m ago