For anyone wondering what value governments provide, it's this. Yes, ProPublica is the one who did the analysis and data viz, but the federal government used some of our income taxes to collect this dataset. This is a clear case of the value that governments can provide with your tax money, and something that almost certainly would not be provided (free of charge!) by the free market.
I agree. Private enterprise has built some incredible data set. Google Street View is an incredible public good, and who knows what would be built on top of it if it truly were public, rather than owned by Google.
But some things can't really be built by private enterprise. The government can compel data reporting. You can pay credit card companies to sell you their data, but only the government should have the power tell every employer "you must tell us the names and salaries of all your employees". (Credit agencies essentially do this too, but that means they're big enough to require government regulation.)
It can be onerous, though, and sometimes unnecessarily so. When I was at a charter school, every here I had to compile a data set on the demographics of our students to ensure we weren't mistreating people based on race or something. It's a very important thing for the government to be checking on, but given that we already had to send all our student's demographics, attendance, and discipline accounts to the state government, it felt redundant.
I feel like the government has been moderately good at making these data sets more accessible, I'd love to see more resources put into that, as well as making their collection smoother. Building effective, efficient systems is incredibly difficult, and requires constant investment to respond to changes.
I harp on "infrastructure" a lot, and I'm coming to realize that what I mean is less "roads, bridges, and trains" and more "efficient, effective systems of all types".
Don't forget that private companies like Google very often create value not by collecting data as such, but by crawling through 50 different US state datasets and untold thousands of county/town datasets to figure out property lines, ZIP code maps, address numbers, etc. There's a symbiotic relationship here, much like research in the natural sciences: basic research and basic data collection is a public good, but there's plenty of value to be added by private industry. It's a win-win as long as the people at large are able to recapture some of the value created by private industry (rather than it being concentrated in the hands of a few stakeholders).
Doesn’t the article state that lots of data the government collected was just incorrect in obvious ways? 29% of facilities ProPublica contacted said the EPA’s data on them was wrong.
And why didn’t the government pay for an interface and analysis that the public could easily use?
I think people believe their tax money could be spent more wisely and competently.
As I read it, the data about emissions specifically is self-reported by facilities:
> We reached out to each of the top 200 facilities (ranked by the level of nearby cancer risk) to ask them if their emissions reporting was accurate — and if not, whether they would resubmit 2014-18 data to the EPA. Of the 109 companies that responded to us, 71% confirmed that their reported emissions were correct, and 29% noted errors, which we asked them to correct.
I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with either sulfur or N-O bonds -- no clue what though!". Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals.
The entire east side of Houston metropolitan area has only 3 air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals. During huge major events like the ITC fire, they often show no increased pollution at all. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But the 3 monitoring sites over 10 miles from me showed nothing at all.
The data used by ProPublica is far worse than the data here -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical plants. But living next to them and working in them, I know that many leaks are never reported and many leaks are never even known internally! Our government's data collection is a travesty. ProPublica couldn't use the real air quality measurements because having 2-3 points across 1000 mi^2 is completely useless for the wind models they wanted to apply to the problem.
We don't actually have any data. The government is failing us. They need to spend about $1 million per air monitoring station and build them along the perimeters of each plant so that leaks can be assigned to the offending companies, and they need to be built near housing so that we know how families are being affected.
> 29% of facilities ProPublica contacted said the EPA’s data on them was wrong.
I don't think it's necessary to point out why this is not very convincing
> And why didn’t the government pay for an interface and analysis that the public could easily use?
Because "the government" -specifically, the executive branch- has its upper leadership torn out and replaced with a completely new bunch of people with hugely different ideology if not an explicit political interest in dismantling the work of their forebears every 4 or 8 years. This is most obvious with the recent Trump admin, but applies in degree to every single administration.
There used to be an internal, cross-disciplinary office that did API and visualization work for accountability reasons (unfortunately I forget the name). They did great work. It was dismantled and 90% of it was not replaced. The 10% that was replaced consists of (1) internal work (EIA being a good example, DOT being a bad one) that is driven entirely by the good will of employees who are fighting tooth and nail for any amount of budget to expose any amount of the work they do. And (2) external work by any number of massively wasteful contracting programs, like SBIR, where I used to work.
Reagan's SBIR program mandates a certain amount of money to be spent on tiny (100k-1m) contracts which are either useless or unused, because there's no way to actually convert anything to a long-term status. Most of that money goes to defense, but make no mistake that the work there is also completely useless. The whole program should be lit on fire.
> I think people believe their tax money could be spent more wisely and competently.
It can, if people stop voting for republicans who intentionally destroy the only functional programs and then divert the money to completely worthless contractors in the name of "free markets".
> Because "the government" -specifically, the executive branch- has its upper leadership torn out and replaced with a completely new bunch of people with hugely different ideology if not an explicit political interest in dismantling the work of their forebears every 4 or 8 years.
And what's worse is that one political party has been running a decades-long campaign to literally make government worse in order to get people on board with dismantling big sections of it. It's not even a conspiracy theory, it's an actual part of their public campaign platforms that people deliberately vote for.
It's hardly only the republicans blowing government funds on useless programs, Obama's team did the same with bogus 'clean coal' funding funnelled into public-private partnerships with coal outfits (to the tune of ~$8 billion via the DOE), gave loans to the renewable energy companies with the worst products on the market via insider connections (Solyndra), etc. It's an across-the-board problem.
If we really wanted to do large-scale infrastructure projects that were successful, like nationwide high-speed-rail, maybe we should study how China does it.
As a counterpoint, in my hometown there's a grassroots effort to collect and monitor the air quality because no one, including the feds, will. The data can be appreciated without dogmatism.
My personal bias here would be to say, "lowering the cost of technology, civic organization (whatever form that might take), empowering the individual, and removing barriers to entry wins again."
> This is a clear case of the value that governments can provide with your tax money, and something that almost certainly would not be provided (free of charge!) by the free market.
Pretty sure an HOA could fairly easily collect this data (I have a setup for various chemicals in my back yard). I have shared said data with my HOA to change the treatment plan for common areas. If an HOA did that they can sue a plant for any issues and alter emissions.
Government (big g) is nothing but an organized group of citizens agreeing to certain rules. There’s no reason any random organization can’t gather information, sue, etc. exactly the same as government.
We’re raised to think government is necessary, but I’m apart of many organizations that effectively function as self-governance and collective bargaining. At the same time they don’t need forced taxes paying for bombs in other countries either…
All it takes is a minor amount of organization. A great example of this is the HAM radio community, farming co-ops, churches, etc.
> Pretty sure an HOA could fairly easily collect this data
I agree, but on a large scale this would mean that every HOA needs to have access to someone who can/is willing to do this. If you expand this to other environmental factors (e.g. noise pollution, waterway health, etc) I could see that becoming a large burden on the few people in each community that care enough to collect environmental data. Seems more efficient to pay someone to do it full-time for a larger group.
Sure an HOA can easily hire someone, a building manager can and often does buy a service to monitor building detectors. That’s kind of my point, we already have these scenarios where people not government solve problems.
> I could see that becoming a large burden on the few people in each community that care enough to collect environmental data.
What you’re saying is not enough people care. So the people that do care are taking money from people who don’t care to get what they want. That’s called stealing when the government isn’t doing it…
That’s my point from above, we’re taught to need government. We don’t. Never did.
That's an uncharitable way to cast GP's comment, and not really true. We do understand by now that the state is just a better solution than private entities relying on "market forces" for certain desired outcomes.
Back to the original point: the problem is scalability. If everyone goes through the same process, running into the same roadblocks and suffering the same pitfalls, independently and disconnectedly, that is by definition wasted effort, ie, unproductive for the economy. If we want such things to succeed, ie, be productive and contribute to the commonwealth, we need to share knowledge, which requires some level of centralization at this time (decentralized knowledge management techniques are still in their infancy and IMO require architectural changes in our telecommunications infrastructure to properly support).
> We do understand by now that the state is just a better solution than private entities relying on "market forces" for certain desired outcomes.
I’d say the opposite is true actually. I don’t understand how any mandated entity is better. I’ve formed plenty of organizations, governments aren’t necessary. It’s supposed to help mediate force. Instead people use the governments monopoly on force to get what they want.
In terms of scale, we have planned parenthood, Churches, habitat for humanity, and so many others that work at scale. If pollution was an issue as described people would care. HOAs would hire organizations to monitor pollution and then HOAs would sue for damages. Almost exactly what the EPA does btw. Except the government gets the money and people in the country fund pollution research like this.
Totally, our $30,000,000,000,000 in government debt got us some measurement data that is barely a passing grade (~1/3 incorrect data). They kind of dropped the ball after that but a private company was able to clean the data and make it neat visualization that got up votes on HN.
There are varying degrees of "toxic." Red blobs painted on a map may or may not be relevant to your health. Toxicity is an arena rife with controversy and dispute. That they (EPA IRIS, ATSDR, or the like) take a "Lowest Observed Effects Level" and then straight line it back to zero, and then apply myriad "uncertainty factors" to derive an "X in a million" chance of getting cancer -- in many ways, it's all make believe. Many toxics have non-linear toxicity thresholds (like table salt or tylenol), and there's plenty of reason to believe humans may be more resilient to toxic exposures than animal surrogates, and not less. These Pro Public efforts, or those by the Environmental Working Group, use data produced by public agencies to paint a picture of hazard out of context, and they can sometimes lead to very expensive policy prescriptions with very low return on investment in terms of human health.
Yeah, I dunno. I'm sure that's what people were saying about the [Monroe school PCBs] behind the scenes – return on investment! It's too expensive! – but we shouldn't be comfortable with those factors being weighed in the dark with so little public accountability. If you want to tell me that the EWG has a chemical wrong, I'd buy that, but it should be the job of the people who want to make money off that chemical to persuade the public that it's fine – not to argue the public should go back to unawareness.
The best Visualizing of Toxic Air I have seen so far was an electron microscope image of pollen covered in all kinds of plastic particles and immeasurable toxic chemicals. Whenever I hear the words allergic hey-fever to describe our bodies panic reaction to these "hyper reactive ninja stars" I am disgusted.
"electron microscope pollen pollution" showed a few similar papers. I did not read them, and microplastics seems a little... unexpected, but the general idea seems to be accurate. Kind of crazy.
> Making data public isn’t enough when it’s incomprehensible to the people it affects. ProPublica set out to decode a complex EPA data set to expose hot spots of industrial air pollution across the U.S.
If at some point AR becomes commonplace I expect visualizing the hotspots directly would cause outrage.
> There are around 29 million 810-by-810 meter grid cells nationwide and more than 1.4 billion rows of data for a single year. Even using the largest database instance available on Amazon Web Services, it took up to a week to run queries on the data. Often, our queries took days simply to fail. It was a long, demotivating slog.
> That’s when some colleagues told us about Google BigQuery, which is a Google Cloud services product that allows you to do SQL-style queries on very large data sets. Using BigQuery, code that once took a week to run finished in minutes.
I use BigQuery at work for all my SQL processing, but I'm usually working with data in the 100K to 1M range that take 1 to 10 seconds to process and don't have to think of costs. Does anyone have an idea of what minutes-long queries involving billions of rows would typically cost?
>RSEI uses emissions estimates industrial companies submit to the agency each year along with weather data and facility-specific information to estimate concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals in half-mile-wide squares of land across the country.
It sounds like the results are really dependent on whether or not these companies are lying. I would prefer to see them based on diagnosed cancer rates, but that data set probably doesn't exist.
> I would prefer to see them based on diagnosed cancer rates, but that data set probably doesn't exist.
Definitely not, especially in the US. Cancer is very highly correlated with age and body weight. Maine has one of the highest rates of cancer in the US, because the population average is the oldest in the US. Texas, despite a huge amount of air pollution, has relatively low rates of cancer because it's the second-youngest by average population age.
Ideally you'd be able to look at baseline age and body weight data in a broader area, and then compare areas with comparable average ages & body weights that do and don't have high-carcinogen-emitting facilities nearby. You could even look specifically for less-emitting industrial areas as a control for lifestyle, access to medical care, and other forms of industrial pollution.
Yeah and it'd be noisy due to any regional differences in culture and behaviors. You'll see higher cancer rates in the South, with their love of sweet tea and fried fish, than you would in say, Colorado where there is more of a culture of fitness and health.
One of the interesting things I wish they mapped are where some of the corporate offices / residences are - Based on personal anecdote (could be wrong) for Houston I'd speculate much of it is further west in the residential areas of Katy, Sugarland, and The Woodlands, and downtown (westheimer/loop)
It's time we moved towards a world of "you may not vent anything to the atmosphere".
Ie. nothing may have a chimney, exhaust pipe, pressure release valve, or anything similar.
All gases must be stored in a tank and reprocessed at gas recycling facilities, which can separate out and sell the gases.
Even in your house, when you 'ventilate' the house, you are taking the stinky stuffy polluted indoor air and putting it into the environment. The volatile organics, farts, Nox from your cooker, CO2 from breath, and cooking smells aren't 'natural'. Instead, your house should purify its own gases with filters.
Will it be expensive? Yes. But looking after the environment is expensive. But it's worth it.
This is the sort of extremist attitude that alienates the general population from all environmental measures.
Like banning plastic straws while the cups are still plastic, it enrages even many with a moderate amount of goodwill.
I agree we need to treat this seriously and invest a lot of time and effort, but if we don't address first the biggest issues (factories, automobiles), why force me to recycle the exhaust from my cigarette lighter?
> Like banning plastic straws while the cups are still plastic.
I don't think there is a single person upset at the plastic straw ban because they didn't ban even more single use plastic.
I'm not even sure that's logically possible, because that's not being upset at the straws being banned, it's being upset at the other things not being banned.
I am one of those people. I'm more willing to accept a more stringent requirement if I also perceive it as fair and can see an actual improvement in something.
A restriction is fair for instance if it draws a cost/benefit line, and just bans all things on the wrong side of that line. Even if I don't agree, the conversation is at least around where to draw the line, and not on absurdities.
Banning plastic straws without banning plastic cups is mostly useless and inconvenient.
It would be more inconvenient, but at the same time it would feel more self-consistent.
It you'd want to limit alcohol consumption (just an example), you don't want to ban tequila but allow gin for instance. You can say ban anything with more than 15% alcohol by volume -- that would feel harsh but more fair.
I'm really not rationalizing, for me and some others there needs to be a perceived fairness in the restrictions.
>Like banning plastic straws while the cups are still plastic, it enrages even many with a moderate amount of goodwill.
This is a false equivalency when compared with the top comment. The equivalent statement would be "only car exhausts must be captured but we don't care about the rest of the gasses."
The commenter said all gasses and exhausts must be contained, and I tend to agree that this is a good goal to move towards.
Most of the population, quite frankly, is wrong about a lot of things like this. We see that from the hate for regulation partially driven by propaganda from businesses.
As a side note, cigarette smoke is also considered exhausting waste to the atmosphere.
> The commenter said all gasses and exhausts must be contained, and I tend to agree that this is a good goal to move towards.
> Most of the population, quite frankly, is wrong about a lot of things like this. We see that from the hate for regulation partially driven by propaganda from businesses.
Yet we do not live in that world and it is in fact not a goal to achieve. It's over the top and nonsensical. Like the commentor stated above you its extremist views like this one which will make the common folks squash any movement towards "green new deals." Just watch what happens when the climate nuts like Extinction Rebellion try to interfere in the normal people's day.
They ER types get crushed because real people do not have time or money for horseshit.
Climate change will merely be adapted too. But not in the expensive fart counting way some in this thread suggest.
Humanity will continue to expand and use technology to solve our biggest problems.
The world is in fact not ending. It is changing just as it always has. Humanity will do the same.
You seem to be suggesting that our homes become airtight enclosures with filtered exhausts. Perhaps even an airlock to get in and out of the house.
No outdoor barbecues, no campfires. What's next? No farting in the park?
No thanks.
I'm all for regulating industries, automobiles, etc. and to some extent what kinds of chemicals and materials can be used in the home but don't come telling me that I can't open a window to ventilate my house.
There is at least some controversy around the actual impact of cow's methane in global warming [0] [1].
I was mostly talking about humans farting in the park though. In any case, I guess the solution is to install catalytic converter in all human and animal exhausts, like we do for cars, I guess. Right? :D
That people live in such a fantasy land is concerning when energy production regulation is about to plunge the western world into full managed decline.
> when you 'ventilate' the house, you are taking the stinky stuffy polluted indoor air and putting it into the environment
This is some different level of ecological concern. People over here straight out burn furniture, rubber, and plastic in their heating units, burn outdoors their green garden waste during autumn, remove faulty catalytic converters and adblue-bulshit from their cars. With adblue removed one can literally smell the brilliance of German automotive engineering. If we're into tightening the regulations, we should start with controlling the home heating units and measuring car exhaust gasses.
Absolutely not. Ridiculous regulations would beg to be ignored and summarily ludicrous by common folks.
The climate is what it is. But its hardly to the level that your actions call for. No. Just no.
