Yet we let very many people die each year from the very small particles emitted by vehicle exhausts.
About 5,000 people in the UK die each year from vehicle pollution.
About 5,000 people in the UK die each year from vehicle pollution.
Unlike asbestos, banning cars cold turkey would have had too large an impact on society. Could we have tried to improve car emissions quicker? Yes, but just like the asbestos industry fought regulation, the car industry did too. Yet still, as anyone who has tried to breathe in a major American city can tell you, things have gotten better
[1] http://theenergycollective.com/jamescoan/85164/vehicle-emiss...
Cell phones are newer things in people's lives. There's less established understanding of what they can do. Combined with a general fear of radiation, and the associated risks of cancer, and it's easier to believe you'll get cancer from a phone than from car exhaust.
Ironically this is similar to the danger posed by low-level radiation releases (except exhaust is far more dangerous), except everyone freaks out when their local radiation levels are 10% above baseline, but nobody cares when local pm2.5 levels are 20% above baseline. (They do notice at 1000%, to their credit).
Anyway, back to graphene. As amazing as these materials sound I worry greatly about their environmental impact. What do you do when your lungs are full of graphene? Your blood stream? It seems unlikely the liver is well-suited to removing it from the body.
And that's the right way to approach things like this, evaluate the ups a material offers compared to the downs.
People will die (for the foreseeable future at least), the question is what they die of and if you can prevent some of those deaths without a high price to society then you should do so.
Consider roads, people die there as well, but the price we'd pay if we shut all the roads down would be prohibitive so we don't. (pretty apt for me because I witnessed the most gruesome traffic accident 4 days ago in Germany near Dinslaken).
You say that as if just shutting down all roads without any optional way of transport is the only solution available.
Shutting down many of the roads in cities, where the effects of cars are most pronounced, wouldn't remotely cause the "messy collapse of the existing civilization", and is a meaningful partial step.
How do you imagine this working, pray? "Build lots of trains" I expect to feature prominently in any response you might make, and that's fine as far as it goes. How do you envision their cargo making its way from there? Cities depend on endless fleets of grumbling, farting trucks, which of course no one loves, and presumably by now you'll have scrapped them all and had them melted down for their steel. But that leaves tons upon tons of goods -- tons and tons just of food and drink, every single day. How d'you plan to shift all that? Do you envision streets full of carts and horseshit? Hand-drawn wagons and barrows? Coffles of laden, staggering slaves?
Or do you instead fantasize about what in the early Cold War was called "decentralization" -- put short and simply, the enforced diaspora of millions upon millions of city dwellers into a countryside which has neither need nor desire for their presence, to say nothing of places to put them all? Oh, that'd go so much better! I'm not sure who'd hate whom worse, or where the riots would most likely start, but I'm sure that scheme would make for a stretch of history delightfully full of incident -- the sort of thing for which future high school students will find it actually worth keeping their eyes open in class, assuming future high schools reverse our modern degradation at least to the extent of resuming proper instruction in history.
Or have you some other fantastic scheme? Honesty compels me to admit that I have never yet encountered a utopian theorist whose fancies bore up under anything remotely resembling rigorous criticism, to say nothing of reality's much harsher judgment. But, while no longer young, I'm far from dead yet, and I don't imagine I've heard everything there is to hear. Perhaps you will astound me.