| Mnementh said: Eh, things always looked fucked. But while we certainly have setbacks, humanity overall improves generally. I am cautiously optimistic about the future. To illustrate that: Thomas Robert Malthus was an english economist who lived from 1766 to 1834. He observed that the global human population had entered an exponential growth. Based on that he predicted resources (he focused on food) would become a limit as it grows only linear and he thought humanity would be fucked. But it didn't happen. We didn't all starve. The exponential growth of human population was correct - but resources didn't grow linear, with technological progress exploding alongside population growth it also grew exponentially. That is the thing. We solved many problems. Nowadays we face the problem of climate change, but people forget we had similar global crises with the depletion of the ozone layer and acid rain, both the result of human activity. We solved it by regulations on companies. |
The problem is that like vaccines, the measures to combat acid rain and the ozone layer depletion worked so well that conservatives eventually decided they were not needed and were needlessly expensive regulations. In the US, at least, a lot of those regulations were enacted under conservative presidents like Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and it was under Reagan that the use of tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline?petrol was ended in the United States. That is credited in part for the precipitous drop in the crime rate from the 1990s onward. Trump is running his government according to complaints from his billionaire buddies that these regulations are too onerous. His EPA chief is actually rolling back decades of progress.
Part of the problem here is that the signs of neglect of the environment are less visible and more sinister. In the 1970s, we had visual representations of the problem with the heavy blanket of smog over Los Angeles that turned the air brown, similar to Mexico City today, or Beijing 20 years ago. The Cuyahoga River, which is the river that supplies the Cleveland metropolitan area with water, actually caught fire, twice, due to industrial runoff. In the late 1970s, there was a town in upstate New York that sat directly on top of a dump where decades of chemicals and (allegedly) waste from the Manhattan Project had been buried and were leaking into a school playground. There was a valley in Kentucky filled with rusting chemical drums.
Today, the biggest polluting state in the United States is Texas, and Texas has become much more influential in the U.S. government in recent years. California's cities sit in the middle of valleys surrounded by some of the highest mountains in the United States, which trapped the pollution generated by industrial, commercial, and personal burning of hydrocarbons and caused L.A.'s notorious smog. Texas, on the other hand, is one of the flattest states in the U.S. There are no mountains in the densely inhabited East Texas Triangle that trap pollution over Dallas and Houston. The carbon and pollutants generated by industry and traffic in Houston and Dallas spread out over the southeastern U.S. And because there are fewer visible signs of the effects of Texas's air pollution on the environment, it's easier for Texas business leaders and politicians to deny the effects of human activity on the environment. They can also point to industrial businesses that move their operations from California to Texas because of lax regulations on pollution (and worker safety) to further reinforce their position. So until people in Texas actually see visible effects from their environment, they'll deny the problem exists.
Same thing with infectious diseases that were nearly eradicated by vaccines and are now making a comeback, thanks to wellness influencers and now reinforced by the guy who was put in charge of public health in the United States. I'm just glad that when the world was fighting against smallpox that RFK Jr. and today's wellness influencers. had no influence on anything. Same thing with food safety regulations. They weren't 100 percent infallible, but they worked as long as there was rigorous enforcement and internal compliance. Now that food safety regulations have been rolled back, we're seeing mass recalls pretty frequently.
Last edited by SanAndreasX - 1 day ago
