I don’t want to start anything but surely there is room for a hair cut or at least a good trim. Over 20,000 regulations or 80,000 pages were created in the past 8 years. 4000 of those with the EPA. Our lakes were pretty clean ten years ago so not sure what the issue is. Even dumping two for every new one is not going to do a whole lot. It’s just math. Dump 10,000, create 5,000 so its still at 15,000.
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You know it is going to be nimby, what is that quote about those who don;t remember from the past? Cuyahua river on fire due to dumped waste.
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Says who? Lakes are cleaner. But show me the lake you can drink from without filtering? None in the US that I know of.
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Since global warming is real and caused by greenhouse gas emissions (most of the World, including the major oil exporting countries like Russia, UAE, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia signed the latest UN Climate Change report attesting to this), we urgently need to address greenhouse gas emissions.
The auto makers could have helped by funneling the weight loss and increased engine efficiency into better mpg. Instead they increased engine size/power and just met existing standards.
The American public bailed out the US auto industry and they agreed to the new standards. Now they are reneging.
We need the increase mpg standards to slow global warming. Sorry if you can’t go 0-60 in a 1/10 of second less. I’d rather have a planet my kids and grandkids could live on.
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I bought a new air conditioner so did my part. Somehow though I think it pales in comparison to the thousands of flights a day spewing the fumes in the air. Maybe we could do with fewer business meetings, conventions, and expert love fests. But really people are starving in Venezuela so don’t think we should follow their lead, and Russians are the bad guys again, and of course we were attacked by the Saudis not too many years ago. So tell me again that a 4 cyl engine winding out to 3000 RPM trying to get up to speed spews less pollutants that a V6 that does it barely off of idle?
Not to mention Engbridge pipeline was proposing a rout through Pine River MN, in the watershed of the Mississippi and many of the freshwater lakes in the prime lake recreational area. Now 1 break would decimate tourism for the brainerd lakes area. Hopefully enough millionaires realize oil pipeline events can happen and influence the pipeline to be re routed out of the basin. Septic tank regulations have helped, hear about the algae bloom in Gull Lake and others? @bing
http://www.foreffectivegov.org/blog/map-displays-five-years-oil-pipeline-spills
Pipeline spills 2010 through present
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I was under the impression that the EPA has to satisfy some Congress-passed criteria when issuing new regulations - so I think the President can’t go backwards and deregulate without Congress’s approval? Please correct me if I am wrong.
Congress passes vague bills that becomes an act or statute. Congress does not write the details. The various agency interpret the act and they fill in the blanks. These filling in the blanks are influenced by the administration that appoints the head of each agency. The regulations can be reworked as long as the new interpretation does not conflict with the act signed by congress. Many supreme court cases arise from regulations that contradict the act.
The issue is that you run into a point of diminishing returns. Compared to cars of the 50’s and 60’s, today’s cars are something on the order of 95% cleaner (maybe even more) That’s pretty good. Is it worth it to pay another $3k-$5k per car just for another 2 or 3 % improvement? I don’t think it is. Emissions from industry and even agriculture are more prominent than emissions from cars/
If you’re computer savvy it’s kind of like the amount of RAM you have. If your computer has something like 2GB or RAM, then going 4GB will yield a massive performance improvement for $20… If you have 4GB and you go to 8GB of RAM, you’ll see a noticeable improvement, this time it cost you $40. If you have 8GB of RAM and you go to 16GB, most of the time, there’s not going to be a notable difference, and you’re paying $80 for it. If you have 16GB of RAM, and you upgrade to 32GB, there’s going to be no discernible different at all, and you’re paying $160 for that.
The point is, at some point you get as far as you practically can (for the time being) with one source of pollution, It’s more productive to look towards other sources that perhaps haven’t been under as much scrutiny as the automobile, even if it’s not politically correct to do so. How much pollution do you suppose a couple hundred thousand two stroke mopeds make in comparison to an equal number of modern Priuses?
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Mike, I hope you don’t mind, but…
I suppose it would be plenty safe to drink from the 10,000 acre lake in my front yard (I live on the shore ) as it has been tested and monitored by private groups of residents for decades and is pristine.
But, I wouldn’t! Have you ever seen what those fish do in there?
The water in my house comes from a well in my front yard. It draws water from 300’+ in the earth (no screen, in rock) and is crystal clean and requires no filter or softener/conditioner. It flows out of the well over-flow at several gallons/minute, very handy during power outages.
CSA
I’ll accept that. But those are rare…extremely rare. And I’d still have it tested to be sure. The run-off of fertilizers and pesticides can be found in almost every lake in New England. Even in places you don’t expect to find them.
I have a 800’ well. The water isn’t hard, but it has magnesium so I need a softener to remove that. Also have Radon and Arsenic. So I need to go through about 4 filters before the water is safe to drink. Radon isn’t a problem to drink…but is a problem when you take a shower and it mists.
And to bring this back to cars…there’s a salvage yard a couple towns over that is owned by one of our republican state reps that has been polluting many of the surrounding wells because he’s not taking the proper precautions to contain the fluids. He lost in court and is required to put in some RO and Bubblers in a several dozen homes. A couple of those homes are more then half a mile away, but the pollution has been traced back to his property. And of course he’s complaining about his rights being violated.
It’s about time. I feel like your getting much less for your money with the quality of materials nowadays even taking inflation into consideration. Just how thin can you make a body panel before it dents just from leaning on it?
“Burn on big river”! Randy Newman.
I don’t want to veer off again but a lot of people don’t understand the power is in the rule making process. Those folks are the unelected, burrowed in staff that continue to push their own agendas regardless of the EO or Congress. That’s why it’s so hard to turn the ship. And when the majority are hired out of east coast ivy leagues, you tend to get only one world view creating the regulations.
Sure they have public input opportunities but really doesn’t matter. Might be just a few wording changes or minor changes in response. An interesting one was looking back at the change in school lunch requirements some years ago. It didn’t matter what the public input was, the kids were going to be starved anyway. (I still notice quite a few obese kids and parents so maybe we need to look at that one.)
At any rate back to cars. The auto industry is important for a number of reasons and it needs to be healthy. Forcing them to provide products that people don’t want is a recipe for disaster.
Even our most pristine high mountain lakes can contain very nasty amoebas. Of course they were there long before humans walked the earth.
I agree with those…but specifically talking about human pollution.
We have many high mountain lakes here in the North East that is still being effected by Coal power plants from the west. The pollution has been reduced, but not completely.
The problem is that this is the kind of thing that sounds great if you’re not paying attention. The goal should be to eliminate the regulations that need to be eliminated, and to impose the regulations that need to be imposed.
As a comparison, the goal of traffic enforcement should be to stop people who are driving dangerously and give them a disincentive to drive dangerously again. Instead, thanks to quotas, around the end of the month some cops will pull people over for going 5 above the speed limit, and meanwhile 100 cars cruise past the traffic stop with drivers happily texting away on their phones.
But you don’t solve that problem by going up to a cop and saying “Every time you write a ticket, you have to let two other drivers off the hook.” You solve that problem by telling the cop “get dangerous drivers off the road, and leave other drivers alone. Abstaining from arbitrarily fining drivers who are not driving dangerously is not going to negatively reflect on your performance evaluation.”
Don’t assign a quota to the regulations, assign a needed/not needed requirement and go from there.
Huh? start with 100k for example. dump 10k, create 5k and you have 95k. Repeat and you have 90k. Repeat again, 85k. The number does go down.
Never had a problem with acceleration in my focus either…or high revs before shifting. I mean it was a rental, maybe it’s been badly abused…