Good information.
All of that inspecting and paperwork has contributed to a LOT of government jobs in the USA.
Ever stop to consider how much "environmental protection" has actually been realized, in exchange for all of this cost and man-hours?
I submit it's not, in all its accumulation, even a fraction of what would be required to even move the needle on the positively-protective scale.
Yet it continues, and it grows with every spending bill passed in DC.
What is gained?
And what is lost?
Ryan is frequently a target of criticism, but the real criticism needs to be directed elsewhere in my never-to-be-humble opinion.
A couple points on this.
I'm from eastern Ohio. River
fires were a common occurrence until the Environmental Protection Act was passed under Nixon. The problem was that companies weren't
allowed to dump reactive chemicals directly into the river, but there was no structure by which they were held to account for it, no organization to investigate where the chemicals were coming from, no body with the authority to levy fines against companies that were doing it.
So if the "legal" way was treating chemical waste to neutral and disposing of it in lined basins costing a lot of capital, and the "illegal" way didn't cost anything and there was nobody allowed to fine you, then you'd do the latter. And so the river caught fire. Over and over and over. Fish were unsafe to consume, both from the Cuyahoga and from Lake Erie. Cancer rates along the rivers were tens of times higher than five miles inland.
The Cuyahoga hasn't caught fire since the 1970s. The fish are safe to eat. Cancer rates for communities along the rivers are down to within a margin of error from general background. And the Cuyahoga National Park is the most bio-diverse region in the Lake Erie watershed.
Without the EPA we still have leaded gasoline. Even as it was, that got pushback from Congress and oil companies through 1996. In 1978, Congress banned lead-based paint production and use, but the EPA is the only agency tasked with enforcement.
More recently, the bans on CFCs and HCFCs have come from international treaties and congressional directive, but the research leading to that has been funded by the EPA, and the enforcement (as well as regulatory structure for the phase-outs) has been from the EPA.
And it reflects in actual numbers. Since 1999, the rate of cancer diagnosis in the US is down 9%. Since 1989, it's down about 23%. That might not seem like a lot, but that means for the past 35 years, there have been about 250,000 fewer cases of cancer per year than the steady state it had been from about 1920 to 1970. The
only direct difference in that time has been environmental regulation. This isn't mortality rate; it's diagnosis.
But let's say that there's a factor there being missed. That only 125,000 of those per year can be attributed to companies not dumping sludge in public waterways and not scrubbing coal burnoff and whatnot.
Tally the average cost of cancer treatment today, per the AARP, at $150,000 per patient, against the 4,375,000 people that didn't get cancer, and the savings of the EPA, adjusted for inflation, is $656
billion. Well, the EPA's budget has grown versus inflation, which means we can take the highest budget they've had, 2024 at $9.5 billion, multiply it over their lifetime, and have the
highest estimate for what their inflation-adjusted budget it, and it's only $432 billion in total inflation-adjusted costs over 48 years.
That's the rub.
That if we only look at the rate of cancer fall-off, if we ignore asthma and neurodevelopmental difficulties brought on by lead and dioxin, if we ignore ozone depletion because of the banning of CFCs, and we say the EPA was about 20% more costly than it actually is and take away half of the reduced cancer diagnoses for arbitrary reasons and only actually start tracking the cancer rate falls about 20 years after the EPA was founded because we assume cancer rates don't fall immediately - if we give
every possible statistical benefit of the doubt to the idea the EPA is wasteful and not as beneficial as they tout...
They've still saved hundreds of billion of dollars in reducing environmentally-caused cancers.
No consideration of other illnesses. No consideration of impact on farms and fisheries. They
still showcase their worth directly.
My kid can play and splash around in the Ohio or the Cuyahoga or the Scioto or the Olentangy without getting lesions the next day. My parents certainly didn't get that luxury.
working for us 