Outcast_Searcher wrote:jedrider wrote:Thanks. At least, it serves a roughly useful purpose.
I am always surprised at how long the phase outs usually take. IMO, they should shudder all factories and replace the offending material. Of course, I recognize that there are materials that our industrial economy just depends upon.
But in the real world, costs matter, and just arbitrarily shuttering (not shudder) "all factories) willy-nilly without a plan, time-frames, dealing with any shortages, etc. is just a non starter. That makes no more sense than super-greens claiming no more oil will be used in a handful of years because they don't like oil.
We got rid of almost all the freon in air conditioning in time, using economic incentives. It worked, and now other less harmful materials are used. One can reasonably argue it should have been done more quickly. But just claiming willy-nilly such transitions should occur more or less instantly makes no sense in the real world.
There are many industrial chemicals and technologies which are harmful to a degree and yet optimal and irreplaceable, at least if you want to keep anything resembling modern civilization even in substantially scaled down version going.
There are technologies not ammenable to tampering with by economic incentives, unless you contemplate crashing out our world back to XVII century or earlier, just to make a point.
For example cement manufacturing comes to mind in this context or using copper and aluminium wiring for electricity transmission.
Misguided improving something may often make much more harm than good.
I would proceed to suggestion that it is overpopulation what is a primary problem, not toxic chemicals released to environment.
With few millions of peoples on the planet we would not need to care much what we are releasing maybe with an exception of short living and highly radioactive materials and chemical or biological weapons class of toxins.
With few hundreds of millions very basic regulations based on common sense would do but with close to 8 billions we will be poisoning ourselves, regardless what we do or don't.