America Is Clean Because We Regulated It
We didn’t get blue skies by accident.
I’ll probably get called a “libtard” for this one. I can live with that.
I’m writing this because I’ve seen what happens when growth, profit, and industrial expansion are allowed to run without guardrails. And because a lot of people in the United States have forgotten just how bad it can get.
If you are older, you might remember pieces of this. If you are younger, you probably never saw it at all. And if you have never left the country in any meaningful way, you almost certainly do not understand the scale of it.
This is not about arguing whether it is cold outside today or whether winter disproves climate change. That conversation is lazy.
This is about what happens when there is no oversight, no regulation, and no enforcement. When companies are left to their own devices in the name of growth and profit. When the environment becomes an externality instead of a shared responsibility.
America Is Beautiful Because We Fixed What We Broke
The United States is an incredibly beautiful country. From an environmental perspective, it is wildly underrated.
I have driven across the country, up and down both coasts and have been to roughly forty states. I lived in Hawaii. Our national parks, metro parks, lakes, rivers, coastlines, and geographic diversity are extraordinary. You cannot easily find that range of natural beauty anywhere else in the world.
But it is easy to forget that it was not always this way.
I remember visiting the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh and seeing exhibits showing what the city looked like at the height of industrial pollution. The sky darkened during the day. Eyes and lungs burned. Rivers were choked with waste.
Cleveland was no different. Buildings above certain heights were stained black and gray from soot. The smell of sulfur and chemicals hung over Slavic Village and the river. I remember going to Edgewater as a kid and my mother commenting on how polluted it was and seeing dead fish everywhere. And yes, the river caught fire. More than once. Actually, I think somewhere of 13 significant burns are recorded.
California had its own version. Smog trapped between the mountains, the city, and the ocean. The smog hung in the air like a permanent fixture, as iconic as the Hollywood sign announcing your welcome to Los Angeles. Until it was addressed and it did not fix itself.
Republicans and Democrats alike stepped in. Richard Nixon signed the legislation. The EPA was created. Regulations were enforced. Cars became cleaner. Industry became cleaner. Dumping was restricted. Standards were imposed.
Not because corporations suddenly grew a conscience, but because they were forced to.
Regulation Worked. That Is Not a Theory.
We forget this because we can look outside and see blue skies.
What people forget is that it was regulation that got us here. Enforcement. Standards. Limits. Accountability.
It was not just the visible pollution either. Lead. Forever chemicals. Industrial dumping. The casual pouring of paint, oil, detergents, and chemicals down drains. I grew up in the 80s. This was normal behavior then.
Even now, we are still dealing with the long tail of it. Microplastics and nanoplastics in our bodies. Chemicals leaching from cookware, plastic containers, plastic wrap, and recycled plastic utensils when heated. Hormone disruption. Chemical imbalances. We just accept it as background noise now.
We forget how far we have come because the worst of it is no longer visible to us.
I’ve Seen What “No Regulation” Actually Looks Like
From 2004 to 2010, I lived in Beijing during the peak of Chin’s growth.
There were days in Beijing when the air was so thick with pollution that you could not see thirty story buildings across the street. The sun did not shine. It glowed dimly, like a weak streetlamp behind a dirty shade. After a day outside, your eyes hurt. Your nose hurt. Your throat hurt.
I still think sometimes that if I die of cancer, it will be lung cancer from breathing that air for years.
And then something important happened.
The Chinese government intervened. Aggressively. Deliberately. Standards were imposed. Enforcement followed. Blue skies returned. Clean days became possible.
That did not happen by accident.
Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, I have seen rivers that flowed around trash instead of water. Beaches with as much garbage as sand. Cities clogged with smog from millions of small engines spewing black smoke. Drinking water that no one trusted, forcing entire populations to rely on bottled water. Billions of plastic bottles piling up in landfills and makeshift dumps in the middle of neighborhoods, and of course, in every body of water.
The Cost of Forgetting
Lately, there has been a lot of talk about rolling back regulations. Weakening the EPA. Opening national parks to drilling. Framing environmental enforcement as an obstacle to growth.
That kind of thinking only exists because people have forgotten how bad it was.
I agree there needs to be balance. Forced, unnatural timelines. Unrealistic mandates. Blunt policy instruments can harm economies and markets, especially in the West where we already did much of the work.
But that does not mean we abandon the lesson.
Most future pollution growth is coming from rapidly developing regions in Asia and emerging economies in Africa. That does not absolve us. It makes global coordination more urgent. Pollution does not respect borders. I watched China’s pollution spill into Hong Kong, Taiwan, and neighboring countries in real time.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is still there. I saw how ocean currents collect trash and deposit it in one place while living on the Big Island of Hawaii. It is almost as if the ocean is doing us a favor by piling our mess together and pleading with us to deal with it.
Prevention Is Cheaper Than Amnesia
It is easy to laugh off environmental concerns when you wake up in a place that already cleaned up its mess decades ago. When the worst damage happened before you were born. When enough time has passed that collective memory fades.
And if you want a real-time reminder of how fast that slide can happen, look at the push to allow drilling and fracking underneath public land, including Ohio state parks and protected areas. That is not “energy independence.” That is turning the last places we all share into a balance sheet.
It is the same logic as always: public risk, private upside. The moment we start treating protected land like it is just another asset to monetize, we are back on the same road that gave us blackened buildings, burning rivers, poisoned water, and decades of cleanup bills that regular people pay for while executives cash out.
But profit-driven deregulation without guardrails always runs the same way. It runs fast. It runs dirty. And it leaves damage that takes generations to undo.
An ounce of prevention really is worth far more than the pound of cure we would need if we let this run unchecked again.
I have seen what “no oversight” looks like.
Trust me. You do not want to relearn that lesson the hard way.
Stay Angry.
Amen!
I visited Beijing in August 2010 and agree completely with your description. I couldn't breathe for the first several days and so had to stay in the hotel (and I don't usually have any problem breathing). I'm glad to read that things are better there. It wasn't all bad; when we visited the more remote Great Wall (versus the one closer to Beijing) we even saw a rainbow. And, of course, the people were great (even the old men sitting shirtless, belly out, on their city porches after work).