When I was growing up, the major issue about the environment was pollution. The vast majority of people , if asked , would have been in favour of reducing pollution. With the only exceptions being factory owners pumping stuff into rivers.
Then we moved on to ‘global warming’. There started to be a lot of sceptics about ‘global warming’. We then seem to have moved on to ‘climate change’. And more sceptics?
We should move back to anti-pollution. I do not think anyone these days could be against that.
Personally, I think that just stopping at littering laws would have been good enough.
Or unless anyone can tell me what the difference is between polluting and littering?
(1) We continue to worry about pollution…and we continue to make progress, at least in the industrialized world, in reducing it. And, by the way, if you follow the Bush Administration and many Republicans in Congress, you would find that in fact there has been considerable opposition on this issue…at least there have been attempts to slow down the progress from what was scheduled to happen under the Clean Air Act. The environmental groups have campaigned very hard (and successfully, in large part although not completely) to prevent the Clean Air Act from being weakened.
(2) You seem to suggest that we somehow stick to issues that you think are politically more palatable. Unfortunately, what also matters is what issues are actually important from an environmental point of view. Most scientists agree that global warming / climate change is very important.
(3) There isn’t really a distinction between “global warming” and “climate change”. It is a matter of terminology. Many now prefer “climate change” because it encompasses the idea that the changes in climate that result from the additional trapping of heat from greenhouse gases will have important effects besides just making the world warmer…e.g., changes in patterns of precipitation, for example.
Either you grew up some time after 1980 or you can’t have been paying much attention to environmental issues before that, if you think that the question of environmental pollution even as late as the 1960’s and 1970’s was non-controversial!
There were plenty of “pollution skeptics” of one form or another back then. For every environmental issue that’s ever emerged as a serious potential problem—pesticides, leaded gasoline, sewage dumping, factory smoke, you name it—there have been sizable groups of “skeptics” vociferously arguing that it wasn’t hurting anything and only sissies would worry about it.
Fine. Let’s stop polluting our atmosphere with massive amounts of excess greenhouse gases.
“Pollution” has no specific chemical definition: it simply means “contamination with harmful substances”. If, as appears increasingly likely, greenhouse-gas emissions from intensive fossil-fuel burning are damaging the functioning of our existing climate systems, then those greenhouse gases qualify as “harmful substances”.
So if what you’re saying is simply that we ought to talk about carbon dumping as a form of pollution, so that the average citizen can understand the situation better by seeing it in the context of a more familiar types of environmental problem, then I think you’ve got a good point there.
If, on the other hand, what you’re saying is that we ought to ignore any type of environmental problem that isn’t already universally recognized in the popular consciousness as a serious problem, then I think your point is ridiculous. Doing nothing about a problem until it becomes an obvious disaster is not sensible policy-making.
Littering is when you drop a gum wrapper on the ground instead of throwing it in the trash. Pollution is when an industrial manufacturer dumps tons of toxic waste into streams, underground aquifers, or air. Obviously, neither is desireable, but I’d rather have dirty streets and drinkable water than the clean streets and polluted water.
The OP seems to be making a couple of fallicies here; one is that these are separate issues (in particular, “global warming” and “climate change” are two terms for the same overall body of phenomena), and the second is that we can only choose one area of pollution/global climate change to fix. There are always skeptics to any claim or policy which requires change, regardless of how much evidence there is in support of it.
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