[dissident]

Regarding clean air regulations, they were a freak of the political climate coming out of the hippie 1960s. In Canada, the legislation has not been updated since it was passed in the early 1970s. The same was basically the case for the USA. Both the "left" and the "right" have become whores to big business and treat the clowns who think nothing of dumping carcinogens, teratogens and mutagens into the environment as sacred cows. Trump thinks that if he removes toxics regulations, then he will stimulate US industry. Such thinking is vapid. It is always cheaper and easier to follow the path of least resistance (e.g. apply some chemical processing pathway that produces toxins) than to figure out how to do it cleanly. As is evident from the utter lack of regulation of new toxic pollutants it will take decades for any fallout to bite the polluter.

BTW, listen to all the "regulators" chirp about how NOx and O3 are going down and patting themselves on the back for this "achievement". These clowns need to be laughed at. Real health damaging pollution has not decreased and we now have a cancer pandemic where people have a 50% chance of getting it and 33% chance of dying from it. And this has nothing to do with BS claims that people are living longer. The average life expectancy change with time is not correlated with the increasing cancer incidence. Cancer is not just some elderly disease.

[derhundistlos]

Dissident, you are entirely correct, which is why we need all the help we can get from Mother Nature.

Thank about this for a moment. Despite more than 50% of all medication originating from a living organism, due to the present ever-accelerating Sixth Mass Extinction, species are being lost before they are known to science. Each and every day we are decimating Mother Nature's pharmacy and only God knows what valuable drugs are being lost FOREVER. Childhood leukemia is no longer the death sentence it once was due to the discovery of a diminutive plant only found on the island of Madagascar. Today, a young person diagnosed with leukemia can expect a full recovery and a normal life expectancy.

[sparky]

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Things have never been better for so many in so many places
the future will be what it will be , no one know ,
everybody guess or extrapolate , some will be right but the future has a way of fooling most

[asg70]

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the future has a way of fooling most

This forum is nothing if not a testament to people being fooled by their predictions.

[dissident]

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Things have never been better for so many in so many places
the future will be what it will be , no one know ,
everybody guess or extrapolate , some will be right but the future has a way of fooling most

Better in what metrics? No point in discussing something without defining points of reference. I would say that the 1960s were better than today in many ways in the developed world. America's race problems are not a metric that can be applied everywhere else.

As for knowing nothing about the future. That is a pure BS claim. I can predict that if I throw a lit match into a barrel of gasoline that the gasoline will ignite. There is no doubt about this fact. Dumping 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, and seeing the secular accumulation of the gas now around 405 ppmv and not seen since 4 million years ago (before the now defunct ice age) will lead to major extinction event level global warming. And I will argue that my quality of life is not predicated on this spew of pollution. In fact, this spew of greenhouse gas is the symptom of a broken economic and political system that is closely tied to the degradation of society and individual quality of life. Humans are not required to exist to maximize entropy.

[sparky]

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Never in the history of the world has so many have so much food security
Wars are pretty small beer compared to the "usual" bloodbaths
Life expectancy increase is overtaking birthrates as a factor of population dynamic
The global standard of living is making the majority of the population live more comfortably than lower middle class in affluent countries of one hundred years ago
Global epidemics of infectious diseases have been overcome
The women half of the population is more aware and more able than a generation ago , itself an improvement on the past
billions of people have access to a virtually infinite source of knowledge and debates

Can this last .......probably not , humans have the knack of stuffing thing up
But the fall , should there is one , would be from a very high level

[Outcast_Searcher]

It is always cheaper and easier to follow the path of least resistance (e.g. apply some chemical processing pathway that produces toxins) than to figure out how to do it cleanly. As is evident from the utter lack of regulation of new toxic pollutants it will take decades for any fallout to bite the polluter.

And there's another major problem re pollution, which isn't obvious.

For example. I was watching a National Geographic documentary a while back on water pollution, the combinatorics re pollutants are a huge problem given all the new exotic chemical mixtures technology keeps coming up with.

How many combinations do you test for? As the numbers of potential cancer sources grows huge, do you test for all combinations of 5 because that's what you can afford? OK, but then decades later when some combination of 6 or 7 is decimating parts of the food chain, with humans at the top re cancer risk, THEN WHAT? Oh, and obviously, you can't just say "all of them", because "all of them" quickly reaches the millions, or even trillions, when you consider the factorial of even moderate sized numbers.

(Sadly, with the state of modern education, I doubt most of the voting populace would even understand the issue.)

And I'm not sure how much the same concept applies to air pollution, but a quick search shows the EPA and researchers are concerned about the issue.

https://www.epa.gov/air-research/exposu ... pollutants

[derhundistlos]

Sparky-

If you want to predict the future of life on Earth, study the history of Easter Island for the island’s human-induced ecological holocaust is a microcosm of the earth. Understand why Easter Island is today a desolate and parched landscape bereft of biodiversity- a deafening silence of life.

Before the arrival of man, Easter Island was Nirvana. Rich volcanic soils, moderate temperatures, abundant rainfall, forests teeming with exotic flora and fauna combined to create a paradise. Among Easter Island’s species found nowhere else was the world’s largest palm tree. This now extinct behemoth grew to a height of 100 feet and had a girth of six feet.

Then the Destroyer of Worlds arrived in the form of seafaring Polynesians. For a time, the land produced such bounty that sufficient leisure time existed for the human inhabitants to create the toppled over ghostly stone statues that still dot the island; however, the island residents ignored the balance of nature.

{We are here in 2019} Over time, human population numbers grew far out of proportion to what was sustainable- poor farming practices eroded fertile soil, animal and plant species found nowhere else were hunted to extinction. When the very last tree on the island was cut down, the Islanders sealed their fate. What kind of madness would allow this to happen (sound familiar)? No trees meant no canoes with which to harvest the ocean’s bounty and final remaining source of protein.

The result: When Captain James Cook discovered the island, he was shocked to find a small, parasite-infested human population engaged in cannibalistic internecine tribal warfare. After eliminating all natural protein sources, the inhabitants turned on each other for the only remaining food source-- human flesh. Welcome to the future.

[sparky]

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no problem here with your basic assumption than people are toxic
but what make you think that this time it will be different ?
people are the same since 50.000 years ago
if it move.... eat it
if it doesn't ...burn it
if someone object .... ignore it or tear them apart , whatever is politically convenient

but to this day we NEVER had it so good
this is actually part of the problem