Fifty years of sCiEncE from Time magazine
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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This climate change nonsense has been all over the news since I was young.
Remember Acid Rain? Remember hearing about all the horrors that would follow if we didn't recycle. AKA send more than half of it to a third world country to make it their problem. They have so much of it they just wholesale pour it into the ocean. Now broken down microplastics are in the things we take from the sea to eat.
Not to mention that it's usually more costly both in electricity and resources to make recycled paper, and the best we've been able to make from it is cardboard products that usually get thrown away into a landfill anyway. Like those cardboard pieces that fit around your tea or coffee so you don't burn your hand. Or those pulp paper products that hold the drink from a fast food place, or the cardboard tube in toilet paper and paper towel rolls.
Apparently throwing money at it hasn't helped one bit either.
All it's done is make me a bit suspect about all the places that we've been pouring money into, only for it to never get any better.
Acid Rain was a problem, but it was always way more hyped up than it ever really was, and the fact that we lowered the pollution to reduce it was never celebrated. Same shit with the Ozone Layer (which is actually beginning to recover).
This is the kinda shit that frustrates me because a lot of progress has been made, but activists need hysteria to fuel communism rather than identifying that we've made progress. Consider the fact that we basically de-leaded society for the most part.
The Recycling system doesn't help because the government controls most of it and instead of making it into a profitable business, it's just a giant waste.
Climate Change does, and will continue, to impact agriculture and resource extraction economies, but the Watermelons are the real threat to society.
The problem is, every step forward in slowing or halting the climate change has been almost completely been nullified by countries that didn't have to. There has been some progress, but they can't champion those changes.
China and global corporations do like 85% or better of the pollution the rest of us have to deal with, and they're not penalized for it in any way that truly matters.
China has cities straight out of the 80s and 90s horror story TV commercials where you'd have to pay 25 cents to use an oxygen machine or risk death because the air is too polluted to breathe. I remember all those scare tactic commercials. They tried to warn people, but instead went right to the hyperbole. And it didn't work. There are videos on the internet from heavily polluted cities in China where people will just walk along the horrible air quality laden streets, and just wholesale vomit because the air is toxic, and just continue on their way like that's just something you do. The air is killing you, so just heave, and leave.
The problem is something we probably could have fixed. The unfortunate problem is that money got involved.
Taking the lead out of gasoline wasn't for the environment. That was just a bonus. When catalytic converters became a requirement on cars, they were expensive things to replace, and the lead in the fuel would just devour those things. Auto Insurance companies wound up paying for a lot of that until they lobbied to get the lead out of fuel so they wouldn't have to keep paying out.
It just feels like every time something good happens, it was by accident when you look at things like that.
Emissions can pretty much be eliminated by expanding nuclear everywhere and massively reducing global trade by making as much production as local as possible. A billion gas-powered cars will never approach the emissions from global shipping, but that conversation endangers the grift.
Some populist politician (Trump or whoever) needs to latch on to that coopt the green movement for nationalism and eliminating nuclear regulations. Bring manufacturing back home and set up "no minimum wage" zones to encourage local employment. We have to do it to Save the Planet.
cargo ships should be nuclear like aircraft carriers.
if that means part of the ship has to be military staff then so be it