About four decades ago, when the Environmental Protection Agency was first trying to figure out what to do about lead in drinking water, Ronnie Levin quantified its damage: Roughly 40 million people drank water with dangerous levels of lead, degrading the intelligence of thousands of kids.
But new regulations were going to be costly and complicated. So, “instead of trying to deal with it substantively, they just tabled it,” Levin, a former EPA researcher, said of some of her colleagues at the agency in the 1980s.
One co-worker, though, leaked Levin’s analysis to the press, igniting a public outcry that pressured the EPA to act. And the rules it issued back then have stayed in place, with only modest changes, ever since.
It feels like we’re finally waking up from insane free market dogmatism. I’m liking the active regulatory posture of the Biden administration.
I like it too but we need to keep this up for a good 40 years to undo the damage since Reagan, and all it takes is one Republican president to undo it all.
Or any governor appealing to a regressive Supreme Court.
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I wonder how they’ll phrase it when the inevitable conservative backlash walks this change back