In the first two months of the operation of a tetraethyl-lead production plant in New Jersey there were cases of insanity, hallucinations and five deaths. The guy who had invented it as an anti-knocking agent, Thomas Midgely, held a press conference where he poured tetraethyl-lead over his hands and inhaled the vapor from an open bottle of it for 60 seconds to demonstrate how harmless it was. Midgely subsequently had to take a leave of absence from work for lead poisoning, then subsequent to THAT, he bragged on the phone to an executive about how much money they were going to make from this stuff.
There is abundant direct evidence that exposure to lead causes violent behaviour and there is a correlation between blood levels in preschoolers and violent crime in the US (the crime rate line here is displayed with a 23-year lag):
Chronic lead poisoning probably caused enormous amounts of human misery for decades. A report by Cal State estimated $2.4 trillion in annual benefits resulting from the phase-out of lead, and along with that obviously comes less crime, incarceration, premature deaths, mental illness and so forth.
If the problem was as bad as stated, one international treaty wouldn’t have stopped it dead it’s in tracks.
In fact that’s kind of the entire argument for people right now–that even if we do a bunch of shit now, it’s pretty fucking bad anyway.
You might be one of those people who really believed all those virus hypes was magically stopped by people in charge or whatever instead of the obvious–the hysteria was ridiculously overblown vs the problem it actually was.
regardless, climate change is like not even top 10 on things we need to do to fix the shit we’ve created. especially with respect to the environment but only a few places are doing anything about them anyway.
Acid rain was overstated as a problem for some time, but it’s ultimately a scientific success story. Congress funded a comprehensive study on the problem, which concluded that many of the more alarmist claims were not true, however there was still enough concern to pass cap-and-trade legislation to ameliorate the problem. A study on the costs and benefits of this concluded that:
The lion’s share of benefits results from reduced risk of premature mortality, especially through reduced exposure to sulfates, and these expected benefits measure several times the expected costs of the program. Significant benefits also are estimated for improvements in health morbidity, recreational visibility, and residential visibility, each of which measures approximately equal to costs.
It’s not the case with climate change that more comprehensive studies have shown concerns to be overblown. The more the problem has been studied, the more worried scientists have become. And a recent study of old climate models showed that when they were adjusted for actual emissions, they predicted future warming accurately.
A huge amount of what helps is basic conservation. Waste less. Be more efficient. Innovate. All in the direction of General goodness that it’s freaking ridiculous to suggest any other cause of action. Almost all of these save more than they cost anyhow (albeit the investment is up front).
We are not (yet) seriously attempting to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. I’m a scientist and I don’t automatically trust models but I think the argument is all about the slope of the curve- not the direction. 10 years or 40 years. 1 degree or 2 degrees. Fossil fuels are stored energy and we are releasing that energy. It has to go somewhere.
