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> I’m personally in the camp that thinks we should just be doing everything we can to minimise all types of pollution because we just cannot really predict what the effects will be. Even if we think something is benign.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

Thanks for sharing.

What worries me is this is always going to be about a quick buck vs long term risk. We do not have the collective wisdom to stop.

Even if we have the collective wisdom, that doesn't mean it will outweigh the incentives, especially if that decision-making power is unchecked.

Yup. The shitty thing about the prisoner's dilemma is that we nearly always lose it.

I think the wisdom is there more than you think (look around, every other person is concerned about environment especially younger ones). The problem is collective power to do anything about it. The few on top have disproportionate power and don’t care at all (because it wont affect them).

It's not "unscientific." We have something like a century and a half worth of evidence that the hazards to environment and human health from man-made substances is very often missed, understated, or outright suppressed by the industry that is profiting off it.

How many more decades do we need?

Given we are seeing plunging birth rates and species unprecedented rate (a dozen to hundreds of species a day), I'd say shifting to a "you have to prove it's not harmful" is a good policy.

Yes, the chemical industry has not stuck to the precautionary principle.

Besides, lots of excellent drugs are used in a trigger-happy way. Take for instance antibiotics, which are one of the greatest achievements of modern science. Lots of children are prescribed antibiotics for mild infections, i.e. when they don't need them, ignoring side-effects. Thankfully, doctors are starting to be a bit more cautious.

This is one of the reasons autoimmunity has skyrocketed during the last 50 years, and quite a few friendly commensal bacteria are nearly extinct. Persistent gut inflammation, below what is considered autoimmunity, is responsible for lots of colon cancer cases in adults. It is all tied.

Blind trust in doctors is such a societal problem.

It doesn't help that the systems we have in place to keep them in check are failing us. In the US doctors can tell their patients that their illnesses are caused by demon sperm and that alien DNA is used to make medical treatments and they will still keep their medical license.

To me, doctors are not as big of a problem as hospitals. In my area, nearly all doctors are now hospital employees. Doctors don't have the independence they used to have with their own practice: as employees, they have to do what the hospital tells them to do. Doctors can't afford to run an independent practice because of the cost of paperwork, computer systems, and liability, so now they work for hospitals, ie, a corporate machine designed (even obligated) to maximize profits over care.

I know it’s true, you even see it here all the time, but it is really disappointing to see people see this approach as unscientific. Progress at all costs should not be the goal! We should be working towards the betterment of humanity and if new innovations have a significant chance of working against that via side effects, we should absolutely be cautious.

I think it's more relaxing and enjoyable for us as a species to slow down a bit. There is no need to keep rushing into problems. We had / still have a pretty good environment, even if all technological progress stopped tomorrow, thousands of generations would still have beautiful lives. Everything from here is a bonus IMO.

One might describe it as conservatism, had conservatism chosen to anchor itself to preventing change rather than social/human regression and the advancement of capitalism and laissez-faire regulatory/economic policy.

I think everyone agrees that it's much better to clean up pollution, but the problem is not really so much that we are bombarded with more pollution (in many places, especially in the West, most measures of environmental pollution are much lower than in the past), the problem is you are just constantly bombarded with more information. Some of it is valid, but nearly all of it is designed to scare you.

Just consider this study, which is simply bad reporting. Check out some of the other comments in this thread, but all of these numbers can simply be explained by the growth in the global population during the study period. Actual per-capita cancer deaths among young people are way down during this timeframe.

More young people in the southern hemisphere are dead from skin cancer than would be otherwise if we didn’t pollute the atmosphere with CFCs,l and put a hole in the ozone layer, for example.

We might’ve seen a decline in cancer rates even with more people if we didn’t pollute so much.

Imagine living in a less polluted world with the medicine we have now ? Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

I agree with most of this but I think we do recognize and every year we get smarter about how we handle it… I think it’s just very hard to see how we improve over a few years time scale… I remember in 1986 or 1987 my dad took us to his office I think it was cricket software in Pennsylvania and in the front of the very shiny new office was an extremely polluted stream. It was a bright red/orange color. I recall my dad telling us to avoid playing in the water and explaining that it was not supposed to be that color… years later and while much of the area that was farm land in PA is now homes and neighborhoods- I don’t believe such a stream exists…. That said plastic is still very hard thing to reduce in our environment already we see many more bio degradable examples of packaging being used and a lot of research into which plastics are harmful and ways to help reduce or mitigate the impacts… back in the 80s if it was known it was not talked about… progress is slow but if you care very deeply about it you should IMO go into research or engineering to do something positive about it. Understand why we use it and find good alternatives

I think this is because we have offshored manufacturing and even farming.

Could you imagine what rivers in China and India look like ?

I do agree we have improved in some areas for sure. But we don’t get clouds contaminated with plastic for no reason.

Half of adult men also smoke in China... who consumes ~50% of world total cigarettes, on the 1/3 of land that's not sand or plateau. 2.5 trillion cigarettes per a year smoked on 3m sqkm, or 2% of terrestial land. I don't know if that means anything, but if it does, it's not good.

Those streams and rivers exist. Look up industrial pollution in China, India or Vietnam. The manufacturing base which got pollution to that point is just geographically shifted.

When running industries, there is unfortunately no free lunch -- someone's paying the consequences. If not you, someone upstream who made the raw materials or any priors.

A lot of sites like that still exist but are unknown or look pretty.

Basically, don’t buy a home in a area where there were historically military facilities, especially Air Force, or defense contractors without careful review.

While plastic and car tires might have some measurably bad effects on humans, we still live on average way longer than our ancestors. You could draw a weird but valid correlation between poison rain water and living longer.

You're right though that we ought to be careful and try to reduce bad stuff. I suspect that will be key to increasing our life expectancy even further.

I'd argue our ancestors would outlive us had they had the medical care we do. I suspect our lifespan was prolonged mostly, or maybe solely due to advances in medicine.

I was going to say, if we keep fucking up, I can see that life expectancy hitting a cliff. Birth rates are already down.

> we still live on average way longer than our ancestors

Ted Kaczynski would like to ask about the average amount of happy years lived.

I feel like “microplastics are in our clouds” sounds like science hysteria, so I think tomorrow the scientist and geographer in me needs to figure out if I can see them through my own eyes at home or my university’s hydrology lab or something.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/micropla...

> I feel like “microplastics are in our clouds” sounds like science hysteria

We don't know yet just how much harm microplastics are causing us, but the fact that they are everywhere (including in your blood and organs) isn't helping. I don't think there's anything hysterical about all of earth's water being unsafe to drink unless it's filtered. (https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-ant...). The world has never been poisoned at this scale before. Your body is already polluted, and our children's bodies will be polluted from the moment they are born.

did anyone read the conclusion?

> with notable variances in mortality and DALYs between areas, countries, sex and cancer types. Encouraging a healthy lifestyle could reduce early-onset cancer disease burden.

and...

> Dietary risk factors (diet high in red meat, low in fruits, high in sodium and low in milk, etc), alcohol consumption and tobacco use are the main risk factors underlying early-onset cancers.

seems to indicate that the authors of this article were not pointing the finger at environmental causes.

I think the world fossil fuel capitalists will have something to say about that unfortunately :/

Its still a disease of old age not of environmental factors

If you lived next to a coal fire power plant it might tell a different story ?