Yet the waterways in the USA have never been cleaner in the last hundred years. There are regulations and they are enforced, imperfectly like everything.
I live in Canada where we take the environment more seriously still.
Hardly anything is cleaner post industrial revolution. Not only are there more people but we use more resources per person and produce more waste products. That shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
There are exceptions though, sewers and sewage treatment have been a great invention. And big cities aren't drowning in horse shit which was a major issue in London and New York at the turn of the twentieth century.
Because wretched nigh on universal poverty, above 50% infant mortality, famine every 20 years killing perhaps a quarter of the pain, endless toil, all these things are bad. Given the choice between living like the average peasant in 1800 and maintaining something like our current first world standard of living and health while so destroying the environment that the first planet we need to terraform is Earth people will choose the latter. Most of the world’s population was peasants in 1900. No one had antibiotics. Air conditioning was practically unknown.
The state of nature is hellish and people will absolutely pave everything while breathing air that tastes like an ashtray to avoid it.
And the water quality is not far behind, as it seems like every month has some new repeal of protections in order to benefit a few cronies of the current regime at the expense of national interests. For example:
I have no doubt that the Clean Water Act has been super effective at cleaning up water. I do think that environmental protections have been significantly damaged, and that if we do not yet see those effects on water, like we currently do for air, then it's likely that water quality will soon decline.
There was a huge change in the 70s, but those changes are currently being rolled back.
Look into the Superfund sites in the US of A. Most of the things done in the 80s are now being cleaned up by the federal government at taxpayer's expense. (It's not uncommon to re-clean the sites that have already been cleaned before, either.) Were any CEOs of any of those companies brought to justice for the environmental pollution they have produced?!
Others weren't breaking the law. That's actually pretty important: our legal system doesn't allow us to seek justice for criminal behavior which wasn't criminal at the time, and mostly that's a good thing.
That's what Superfund is all about, really. Companies have been fined and sued into bankruptcy for breaking regulations that actually existed, though by no means all of the ones that deserved it.
A LOT of those superfund sites were government sites, mostly military bases. And those sites were grossly polluted before significant environmental regulations went into place.
Look at the notorious Love Canal. The company got permission to dump toxic waste into a pit. And after Occidental bought the company, they were required to pay for the clean up.
Yes, it's sad. It's a possible argument against old leaders - they're likely to be less forward thinking than someone with more life left. Plus people of that generation care a lot less about the environment.
It's obviously also a consequence of the short term focus of having fixed term limits.
I don't know how to fix these things, but it's irritating that nobody even tries to fix it.
It's not just the leaders. There's a large body of voters in both the US and Canada who are strongly in favor of coal, oil and gas and vehemently opposed to any limits being placed on those companies
And the shit that goes down in Canada is incredible. Trudeau. Young liberal, right? Ran on an anti-pipeline platform, but when he took office, he bought the pipeline for $7B and fully indents to build it.
I think I'm in favor of the pipeline, the alternative is shipping oil via rail which is riskier and burns more oil. Sadly it doesn't stay in the ground without a pipeline.
However, Canada should get smart here and do what Norway does with their oil profits. Invest it in a sovereign wealth fund that's diversified away from oil. Because the oil age is ending and it will hit the most expensive producers, like the oil sands the hardest.
That seven billion spent on converting to renewable energy might have made more sense.
Agree with your comments regarding Norway and renewable energy.
However, I suspect that if the pipeline is built they will still ship via rail if it is profitable - thus the net effect will just be more oil coming from the oil sands.
The only scenario were a pipeline could help the environment (relative to the status quo - it's still bad) would be it rail usage was displaced by pipeline usage. This could be true only when the price of oil holds stable between a narrow range such that pipeline shipments profitable, but not rail shipments. The price is unlikely to ever hold at such a range long enough such that Suncor, etcf.. would adjust production to ship by pipeline only. High sunk capital costs have meant that historically these companies run close to full capacity regardless of price.
That's an interesting take on the pipeline. If market demand for heavy oil and oil sands supply are unlimited, then it would indeed function like that. Both are finite though. It's a possibility, I just don't have the information to say which would be the more likely outcome.
There's little doubt the pipeline is what's best for Canada. What's best for humanity is another question.
