The EPA estimates that nine million homes in the U.S. have lead pipes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20665840

President Biden on Tuesday announced $2.6 billion in funding to replace all lead pipes in the United States as part of a new EPA rule that will require lead pipes to be identified and replaced within 10 years using the new funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.

  • bluGill
    5•2 months ago

    Cities should take on most of the cost themselves. Some cities have already done this from their own revenue - pipes wear out over time and so on - why should those cities pay for cities that couldn’t be bothered?

    • TheTechnician27OPEnglish
      13•2 months ago
      • The citizens in those cities don’t deserve to have lead poisoning regardless of what city and state officials are willing to allocate to it.
      • Some cities just objectively have worse lead problems than others.
      • This feels like the “well I paid off my student loans through hard work, so why should they get theirs paid off for free?” argument. (They are still paying through their own funds too; they’re just receiving federal help to accelerate it.)
      • Having citizens that aren’t poisoned by lead is good for the whole of the country, full stop.

      I didn’t downvote you, by the way; I at least understand the rationale on a surface level.

      • bluGill
        5•2 months ago

        Citizens should be voting for politicians who do things. They for politicians who cleaned things up. Will you fire all those corrupt politicians in your town that didn’t clean things up? Remember those cities that did clean things up paid for the price on their own. I do not want to reward cities who vote to continue corruption.

        • TheTechnician27OPEnglish
          5•2 months ago

          You understand that lead poisoning most predominantly affects children, right? So even if your argument is that the minority of voting-age individuals who vote against these politicians should suffer the consequences of the majority who do (let alone that those majority deserve to have lead poisoning for voting in incompetent or corrupt politicians/living in a jurisdiction that can’t afford to rapidly replace these lines), you’re failing to acknowledge that the children who are most deeply affected here have no say whatsoever.

    • @ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8•2 months ago

      Because we live in a society.

      I don’t know how to convey that you should do things that keep people, particularly children, healthy even if they don’t live in the same municipal tax jurisdiction.

      • @basmati@lemmus.orgEnglish
        3•2 months ago

        If your thought was shared by society, we wouldn’t have lead pipes to begin with and you wouldn’t have cause to reply so smugly to someone merely suggesting people should get what they vote for.

        • @ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          7•2 months ago

          If people thought we lived in a society, than we wouldn’t have used lead pipes in the 1950 or before?
          In an era where we didn’t know there was as much risk as we found out over the following decades?
          What the fuck are you even talking about? Do you know when these pipes were even installed?

          Do you think that people should be held responsible for the votes of their great grandparents? Or, more specifically, that their children should get brain damage because of how their great great grandparents voted?

          What do you think we gain by letting poor communities be potentially poisoned? That hurts all of us.
          Hell, Flint (the prototypical example) didn’t even vote for the people who screwed them over. The state government imposed them on the city against their will.
          I suppose you think they deserve lead poisoning because they didn’t have the good graces to have a flourishing economy after the biggest employer in the city left?