Clean water used to be controversial decades ago, but is now considered essential.
Decades from now, I predict that clean air will be considered essential also.
And just as there are mandates (not recommendations) for clean water, so too do I expect that sooner or later we will have mandates for clean air. With corresponding boost to public health.
This Supreme Court is hostile to regulations and precedent.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/the-supreme-court...
The rest is opinions about that finding.
And it's pretty clear that congress has pretty well abdicated its responsibilities...
The supreme court could have abolished the EPA and this statement would still be true. They simply ruled it, no politics happening here!
It is completely meaningless to discuss the supreme court without discussing the actual circumstances of the cases and the precedents set by their rulings.
Disagree? Just ask Kavanaugh w.r.t. their clean water act ruling, which of course just simply ruled that the EPA exceeded its authority:
> The majority had “rewritten the Clean Water Act” and ignored its text as well as “45 years of consistent agency practice,” Kavanaugh wrote.
> The statutory text, Kavanaugh wrote, “does not require a continuous surface connection between those wetlands and covered waters.”
> By narrowing the (Clean Water) Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/politics/supreme-court-wetlan...
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/05/supreme-court-curtails-cl...
John Snow traced a cholera outbreak to contaminated water from a particular water pump, the Broad Street pump.
The pump handle was temporarily removed, which stopped people from drinking the contamined water, and so reduced illness.
But once the immediate crisis had passed, the pump handle was replaced:
> After the cholera epidemic had subsided, government officials replaced the Broad Street pump handle. They had responded only to the urgent threat posed to the population, and afterwards they rejected Snow's theory. To accept his proposal would have meant indirectly accepting the oral-faecal method of transmission of disease, which was too unpleasant for most of the public to contemplate.
It took another few years until there was agreement to build the London sewer system.
Before then, the River Thames was essentially an open sewer.
To be fair, I can see the analogies to the air systems. I just hesitate to think that "clean water" was a controversy.
So even though they knew the water made people ill, it didn't visually appear dirty, and so there was reluctance to clean the water.
Ditto now for air.
So the situation is analogous: back then, it was controversial to introduce the steps required to clean the water (since many falsely thought it was already clean). Now, it is controversial to introduce the steps required to clean the air (since many falsely think that it is already clean).
Note, please don't take my post here as argument against having targets for ventilation. I don't intend it that way. I do think many people over state the dangers of in house stoves and such. I also have no problem saying that we have advanced enough that well ventilated house should be the default.
Stated differently. I have no problem mandating child seats. I do wish the safety comparisons for them wasn't to "someone completely unbuckled in the vehicle." So, for air, I do not argue against better codes for ventilation. I also don't expect it to have an impact on my life. My last house didn't even have forced air anything, whereas my current house does. I feel basically the same between the two. Such that all of the stories of ventilation being a miracle cure rub me very much the wrong way.
I am primarily thinking of "dirty air" in the context of airborne diseases (e.g., Covid and flu).
This can be any enclosed indoor place with people and without mitigations, i.e., doesn't require wildfires or stoves.
The mitigations to clean this indoor "dirty air" can be either replacing with outdoor air, or directly "cleaning" by removing or inactivating the disease particles (e.g., with HEPA filters / UVGI).
Note that it is easy to believe most claims, except schools stand in the way. The outlandish claims that so many have held about the magic of ... well, anything, seems to fall in the face of why it didn't demolish schools. It clearly spread through the schools. Just as I have friends where it hit their family, but didn't spread to us this round. Somehow. I don't think I can credit good hygiene for my family. Certainly not the 5yo.
Again, I'm all for ventilation standards. They certainly shouldn't make things worse. By all reasoning, they should make things better. Claims against Covid/Flu, though, I take with some salt right now. I'm hopeful, but not sure I'm expecting anything there.
Amidst all the noise, my understanding of the key points is:
- We know that airborne diseases primarily spread indoors
- We know that we can clean the air, and that cleaning the air reduces disease spread
Putting the two together, I believe that cleaning the air can improve public health.
I don't expect most diseases to disappear entirely. But I do expect a dramatic reduction.
Analogy: like cholera. It hasn't disappeared entirely, but I don't personally need to think about it during my day-to-day life because the incidence rate is now so low.
My takeaway was that evidence-free predictions should be treated differently to evidence-based predictions.
Besides, humans and our ancestors have spent millions of years exposed to all sorts of things. It is why we have an immune system.
The rise of respiratory pathogens corresponds with dense cities, which are only a few thousand years old. This is the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
This is different for humans than for bats, which co-evolved for millions of years with such pathogens.