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Comment by adamredwoods | Hacker News Reader

The thread reminds me of the Guardian's podcast "Sewage Sleuths" which uncovered catastrophic sewage being dumped into England and Wales's rivers and streams. Very informative and enlightening how bad some government infrastructure can be (hint: in the podcast they also enlightened HOW the failure got bad).

https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2022/aug/15/sewage-sl...

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It's worth clarifying that the issue with the government infrastructure is with the regulatory agencies, rather than the water infrastructure itself which is privatised.

There's also a good text article version; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/04/sewage-s...

It's a failure of privitisation 30 years in the making since water and waste management was privatised in 1989 here in the UK. Of course you can lay some blame at the door of the regulator but let's not forget the tens of billions that have been siphoned off to shareholders and fatcat CEOs, some of whom are arguably criminally negligent and should be put on trial for the catastrophes that have become apparent in recent years.

I really don't like this kind of knee-jerk "privatisation bad, fatcat CEOs bad" reaction sadly prevalent in the UK. Let's talk about the underlying argument, shall we?

Firstly, you're talking about a failure of a regulator to regulate an industry and prosecute alleged perpetrators, and the implied solution is to… nationalise the industry, somehow assuming the nationalised entity will be managed better by the very same regulator? I don't think it's a good argument really

Secondly, if we go even deeper, what pressures would such an entity have to provide good service and not be wasteful with their resources? Right now there's at least market pressure, the companies trying to outcompete their peers, cut costs, and ensure future profitability by investment. What pressures do you think exist for a nationalised entity that don't exist for a regulator?

Thirdly, do you actually have any evidence to prove that those companies are uniquely profitable? Because unless they are, it's only fair that people investing their own money into infrastructure (remember, that was one of the goals of privatisation, tapping private budgets in addition to tax money) get some return on it, otherwise they'd just invest it elsewhere, e.g. into Apple stock, which would benefit British people much less.

Privatisation per se is not the problem, political failures are.

How can you look at horrible evil companies literally destroying the environment around us just because it makes them more money and say there's no alternative??? If you need a regulator to make sure companies don't literally dump sewage all over the country then it's pretty clear that this is a failed system with bad incentives.

What pressures would a nationalized system have? How about the fact that normal people don't want to ruin the environment around them? You don't need additional pressure to make sure that doesn't happen. If you stop optimizing for short term money the problem goes away.

And I don't give a shit about private budgets. The government doesn't need that shit, it can create money as it needs to allocate resources. And if it needs to reduce money supply that's what taxation is for.

>What pressures would a nationalized system have? How about the fact that normal people don't want to ruin the environment around them? You don't need additional pressure to make sure that doesn't happen.

Elsewhere in this thread people are literally talking about nationalized healthcare systems where people are waiting hours for ambulances, or dying in hospital waiting rooms. I think the statement of "normal people don't want to ruin the environment around them" is applicable to the people working in those healthcare systems, yet it's still apparently happening.

Entirely different situations. One is happening by design, the other is happening due to external circumstances.

Private companies pollute because dealing with externalities costs money. It's not a problem they're trying to solve, it's a feature they implemented to increase margins.

The NHS doesn't have appropriate funding. If you increase funding you fix the problem. From what I've seen, the NHS used to be great until the 90s when the cuts began.

The NHS is collapsing due to politicised defunding. The NHS is a sacred cow in the UK so the right can't overtly criticise it, instead it's death by a thousand cuts (pun intended).

Remember Noam Chomsky's quote on this subject? "Privatisation technique: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital". The latter part is already happening.

Because I'm well aware of horrible evil governments doing exactly the same. Norilsk became what it is now under Soviets, which were not keen on private enterprises. Pollution is more or less orthogonal to the form of ownership.

No, the problem does not go away. You start optimising for short term political goals (see also: ongoing property debt crisis in China), and minimising short-term drama (see also: regulatory capture by unions). Sometimes you also start implementing insane projects just because your glorious leader decided to do them and cost/value is not an issue (see also: Chinese war on sparrows). Sometimes you just minimise the expense and make everyone disagreeing with you shut up, because they don't have a choice either way (see also: Chernobyl not having containment). You also get way less feedback, because you're spending someone else's money (i.e., taxpayers'). So no, "government consists of decent people and they won't optimise for the short term even though they are doing it now because there'll be no commercial company controlling it" is a very optimistic take at most and definitely not a realistic one.

Stop fighting with the man in your head and actually engage with the argument. Private for profit companies inherently optimize for profits. Dealing the pollution costs money, so they don't do it. This is by design. This is a bad system, and it will never work no matter how much duct tape you throw at it.

Neither government agencies or crown corps are perfect, but at least they're not inherently flawed either. Yes they're subject to different circumstances than market companies, but that can be dealt with. Capitalism's inherent drive to cut corners and destroy the environment can't.

Even if the water companies were state owned, dealing with the pollution would still cost money and there are a bazillion other demands on the state's finances which are more pressing than keeping rivers clean, such as providing healthcare. This isn't a hypothetical. Scotland has a state-owned water company, and it'd be impossible to write an article like this about theirs not because they're doing better - all indications seem to be that that they're not - but because it relies on information from monitoring equipment that just doesn't exist there. It was pretty recently added in England too, over the last few years, so it's clear that the Environment Agency does actually care about this... not that you'd even know that had happened from the UK news coverage, especially the Guardian's.

Other places in Europe seem to be even worse. For example, I've seen people from Ireland shocked that thsi would happen and preaching the benefits of their state-owned water and their fight against privatisation and water billing. There are places there which literally have no sewage treatment plants still. As in, their sewage goes straight from their houses into the rivers and the sea untreated, not because of a fault or undersized treatment plants or heavy rain ( all of which they have problems with too) but because the sewage system is literally designed to do that 24/7. The government was meant to have fixed this decades ago according to EU rules but has kept dragging its feet on building sewage plants. And they're probably not unique - they were literally the first country I checked, and the second, Spain, had the same issue as well.

If your entire argument is "better things aren't possible" and "it's bad in other places too" then that's pretty weak

No, the argument is that nationalisation/privatisation is irrelevant to the problem at hand. There is no causality, there are plenty of examples of well-regulated private companies and disastrous state-owned ones. There might be a correlation, but you didn't show any numbers to that effect.

"How can you look at horrible evil companies literally destroying the environment around us just because it makes them more money and say there's no alternative?"

I guess for me I just don't understand how nationalising a given company makes it stop emitting carbon.

Nobody's talking about carbon here mate

Insert your pollutant of choice

You are assuming they are competing. They are not, you get one choice for water company in the UK. Therefore, by your own argument, they have no incentive to provide a good service.

I mean, in theory there's the backstop of getting water delivered by truck and everyone having a septic tank. Service would have to be extremely bad for that to be the better option, though. Just like how trains compete with buses, cars and planes.

I work for a private energy company so you don't have to tell me it's complicated when it comes to the private vs public ownership debate. There is a complex spectrum between the extremes. There are very obviously the wrong incentives in the water setup and a failed market. Tbh, I'm open minded about nationalisation in some areas of some sectors with what I'm seeing right now. It's undeniable when you look at the history.

There's no competition for water here. And even if there were, what are they competing on? They don't produce water, they don't manufacture anything, there's no innovation to be had. The water is the same whatever the case. There's no advantage to a market.

So how do you seek profit as a water company? You can't seek more customers, since that is constrained by population. All that's left is reducing overheads and increasing margins. By reducing quality of service. By not improving infrastructure, or letting it fall into disrepair. Or, as discussed here, dumping sewage and ignoring costly environmental responsibilities. A tragedy of the commons.

As for the regulator. They are duty bound to ensure water companies are making profits. The incentives are all wrong.

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