I was reading Scumfuck in Babylon, and I was thinking...the modern household is a drop in the pollution bucket. You can live the maximum-green lifestyle, off the grid, etc. but in the end, it's not going to be the average consumer that makes a difference. Combined, even- you take every household in America, in Canada, etc. and add it all together, and their combined waste and pollution, and you have like five days of operation of China's industrial sector.
That's it.
Seen the Yangtze lately? It looks like a post-apocalyptic nightmare! Beijing has worse air quality than Cairo. I'm not saying don't go green; I'm saying that if you're expecting serious results, what environmentalists SHOULD be doing is not buying products from companies that base production in China and India and other places where pollution laws are so lax. They should be drawing attention to ship-breaking in India, the rivers of China, things like that.
Wait, no, no one cares.
Industry is killing the planet. Maybe it's already mortally wounded. While self-reliance and stuff helps, does it help enough? Christ, I don't know. I'm still of the mindset that it's all coming to an end sometime. A new Dark Age, maybe.
Deschain
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It is hard to say if it can help enough-the only way to know for sure is to get enough people to do it that we can live on this rock long enough to learn to reliably colonize other rocks.
ReplyDeleteOur lust for cheap chinese toys produced with dubious prisoner labor, shoddy quality and lax environmental standards is a large portion of the problem. I think the only answer there is the eternal human trump card-research and innovation. We have to make it not only possible to produce products with less environmental impact, we have to make it cheap and easy enough that it is still profitable, and let the free market handle the problem, god willing.
Also, we absolutely must master planet colonization because no matter what, the whole lease is only like a couple of hundred million years longer. And it is looking more and more like that will not happen in our lifetimes.
Sigh. Space pirate dreams rest easy in your unquiet grave.
It is hard to say if it can help enough-the only way to know for sure is to get enough people to do it that we can live on this rock long enough to learn to reliably colonize other rocks.
ReplyDeleteOur lust for cheap chinese toys produced with dubious prisoner labor, shoddy quality and lax environmental standards is a large portion of the problem. I think the only answer there is the eternal human trump card-research and innovation. We have to make it not only possible to produce products with less environmental impact, we have to make it cheap and easy enough that it is still profitable, and let the free market handle the problem, god willing.
Also, we absolutely must master planet colonization because no matter what, the whole lease is only like a couple of hundred million years longer. And it is looking more and more like that will not happen in our lifetimes.
Sigh. Space pirate dreams rest easy in your unquiet grave.
Living in clean places is a luxury. Only the wealthy first world can afford that, if it so chooses. China, India, etc can choose between starting or living in pollution, and they choose to live in pollution.
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