A lot of science is about trying to find the best questions. Because the best questions can lead us to better answers. So, in the spirit of better questions here goes.
By loosening environmental regulations aimed at pollution prevention or remediation, the mandarins reporting to POTUS 45 have apparently made the calculation decided that some resulting uptick in pollution is justified by the jobs created thereby.
Question 1: For any given relaxation in regulations that result in an adverse biological, chemical or physical insult to the environment, what is the limit of tolerable adverse effect?
Question 2: How will the upper limit of acceptable environmental insult be determined?
Question 3: Will the upper limit of acceptable environmental insult be determined before or after the beginning of the adverse effect?
For a given situation there should be some ratio of jobs to acceptable environmental damage.
Example: By relaxing the rules on the release of coal mining waste into a river, X jobs are created and, as a result, Y households are denied potable drinking water. What is an acceptable ratio of X to Y?
Those are enough questions for now. Discuss amongst yourselves.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Nicely said and well worth trying with those who now seem to be in charge of decision making and regulation setting. My only worry is that they have neither the intellect nor the desire to make the effort and produce the calculations you propose. Moreover, such calculations would only generate a public outcry that they would have a hard time suppressing. Better they just ignore it. DON’T LET THEM.
Hi Phil,
I guess I wouldn’t expect them to even try for an answer. These matters aren’t in their playbook. My theory is that the Kochs want something resembling a confederacy in place of our federal system and unfettered access to our national treasure of resources. They’ve taken the John Birch ideas closer to reality.
Dear Gaussling,
You have expressed it well. It seems to me that the only course we peons can take is to speak out (as we do) and hope that others listen. Keep the faith.
I would modify that to say Faith and civil disobedience.
What strikes me as strange about this entire deregulation of environmental protection for the sake of ‘jobs’ is that Agent Orange is fully willing to severly cut funding to HHS (i.e. NIH). I’d imagine the loss of jobs due to this asinine policy would completely (bigly?) negate any gains realized by an increase in coal production.
Now now, you are using analysis to work the problem. You must learn to develop an angry reflex instead. Use the power of the dark side.
Trust me, there is more than enough anger, fear, and hate to make me a worthy adversary for the Emperor himself.
For the most part, getting people to vote without thinking (and while forgetting that there is anything of substance than is not a figment of political imagination) has been pretty effective for the GOP. Proposing a rational discussion of the risks of reduced (or enhanced) regulations (to who) versus the rewards (to who) would screw that all up.
I think that mostly they want to keep discussions of policy with their voters on a fuzzy, magical level – we can’t screw anything up, we know what we’re doing, everything will be ok (and if it isn’t, it was Obama’s fault). On that level, they can function pretty well. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work for people working with electricity or chemical plants or nuclear weapons, and we handed them the keys to a large number of nuclear weapons and the world’s largest military.
Wavefunction tweeted that Trump was the instantiation of the idea that “you can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into”. Unfortunately, a better aphorism might be “The sleep of reason breeds monsters.”
Good quotes. Thanks for sharing.