It’s pretty easy - show the effects and the cause and not a visualization of something that you can’t see. Like in the movie Dark Waters where they showed cows dying and birth defects, then the plant that produced PFAS nearby to tie it together.

That water pollution is neon green goo, air pollution is thick black smoke, or radioactive waste is only in drums.

Most of it is invisible and you don’t know about it until it’s too late.

A lot of people don’t understand them. Others don’t care, thinking they will deal with the debt later or never.

American basic education in math doesn’t really cover financial math much.

That was the intent of the system for water at least. The acronym for water discharge permits is NPDES. National Pollution Discharge Elimination System.

Then profit driven companies, their soulless lobbyists, amoral lawyers kept bending that.

Like just about any environmental regulation in the US - most of them are heavily influenced by the industries that are regulated. All US laws prioritize commerce and profits first and everything else second. Including the environment, workers rights, etc.

Gotta get lobbying and money as speech out of the equation. Then everything would have some chance of improving or kind of aligning with citizen expectations.

Also, most of government workers would love to have more effective regulations so we can be more effective. Despite most people shitting on them as lazy or ineffective. The ineffective is by design and under funding.

Good riddance

A lot of time the government refuses to comment on something because doing so would conflict with law, undermine an active criminal or civil case, or they are still working on it.

Saying “the government” in one broad general statement shows some degree of ignorance as to how the very systems you say “do not scale” work.

Yeah big parts of it are fucked up. A lot of politicians are power hungry sociopaths. But there are a whole lot of civil servants that work their asses off every day for below market rate pay in spite of how fucked up it is trying to make it better in a tangible way.

Maybe saying “the political system” might be more accurate than “the government” because a lot of the government is working pretty well despite the political system being so fucked up.