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Showerthought: Amateur sleuths are now auditing corporate pollution reports like cold cases

My feed is increasingly dominated by threads dissecting environmental violation data with the same fervor as missing persons boards. It seems the tools for parsing witness statements are equally effective at unraveling misleading emissions disclosures. Has anyone else considered whether this makes the EPA's job easier or just outsources it to the internet?
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evand11
evand111mo ago
In practice, these amateur audits create a paper trail that regulators can't ignore. However, they're no substitute for actual enforcement actions.
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young.elliot
@evand11 isn't wrong about the paper trail. It's like when people make lists of safety issues at work, and management calls it 'data for the future'. Or when neighbors document illegal dumping, only to see the same truck back next week. All those reports just become background noise in a system that moves slow. Pretty sure the only thing getting enforced is the rule of more paperwork.
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coleman.felix
A blog post showed how they decoded a shady pollution chart!
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