I think the real shock is that enough people vote into office those who deregulate environmental protections.
Democracies will be unable to factor in the ramifications of their actions unless the majority of them are highly-educated. To me, I doubt the sustainability of a technologically advanced democracy without universal college education for this reason. The electorate has enough power to drastically harm the environment and themselves without the ability to consider the self-harming consequences of their voting habits.
Can anyone think of a similar situation in history?
I know plenty of highly educated people who couldn't care less about environmental protection. Something tells me that universal college education isn't the fix for climate change, although it could solve other problems.
I know plenty of uneducated people who don't care at all about environmental protection.
The point I'm trying to make is that some understanding of physics and chemistry is necessary to logically conclude that human activity drives harmful changes to the environment.
For example, I understand that a glass box filled with carbon dioxide will be warmer after an hour under sunlight than the same box filled with oxygen. My parents don't. What follows is that my more liberal parent believes the environment should be protected and my more conservative parent believes it shouldn't.
If they had both gone to college and taken chemistry and physics 101, like I did, then their political leanings would be irrelevant. They would understand that current rates of pollution, especially in the United States, are making the planet Earth uninhabitable* for their precious children and grandchildren! As it stands, one is a tree-hugger and the other a brow-beater, so the dialogue is at a stalemate.
You can take this anecdote and apply it to the United States as a whole. We are politically split down the middle. Washington swings between right and left. Democratic presidents enact environmental protection, and Republican presidents undo it. The result is that the rate of pollution either stalls or increases. The problem is that at this rate of pollution, we're doomed to a terrible future.
I just want the debate to be about the science. You can't have that debate with people who coasted through American high school.
Although you didn't say anything to contradict this, I'd like to underscore that "people who coasted through high school" is a problem that transcends the divide. See the vaccine problem, where much of the problem resides in affluent left-leaning communities.
What I wish the "right" would notice is that both the US military and the fossil fuel companies (that is, the highly-educated conservatives) have privately acknowledged anthropogenic climate change and are preparing for it.
[edit] lol my goodness, who is downvoting me? advocates for the uneducated?
You do have politicians who just deny climate change is a thing, but you also have people who believe that in 50 years technology will have advanced enough to allow us to innovate our way out of global warming.
Arguably, the technology to stop or pause global warming (at least for decades while technology continues to develop and clean energy becomes more available) is available and cheap today, we just don’t feel impelled to use it yet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_inject...
>Scientists say that it is too early to see the effects of changes in environmental policy of the Trump administration, which took office in January 2017.
Where can I find the data they refer to? These articles are maddening: they try hard to sound scienc-y and factual, yet they omit any reference that was used to draw their conclusions.
> I don't know if the US has air quality norms? If so it could force strong measures that impact the economy.
They have rather strong ones, a lot of people are completely ignorant of how this stuff works. The U.S. tracks air quality across the country with a rather high resolution[0][1]; here in Canada we don't seem to have anywhere near the quality of reporting[2], and the air quality seems similar.
As someone living in Washington state who dealt with wildfire smoke in 2017 and 2018 it's important to note the paragraph in the article that mentions that the 2017 data was largely affected by wildfires. In our state, a lot of these originate in Canada.
It's an important note because the takeaway comments I see so far are directly implicating looser EPA regulations, when we don't have data to support that, yet.
Do you think there's been any focus on ways to prevent these more? I imagine they are in very remote regions where there actually is very low risk of harm directly from the fires. I wonder if there is any possibility of using drones or satellite imaging to identify them early in a way that allows them to be put out before it becomes too expensive a problem to tackle.
I don't know if that would actually help though because a lot of people argue it's a change in forest management and prescribed burns that allows these bigger problems to develop.
That’s not a generic air pollution map, just particulate pollution which often gets really bad due to dry areas. Which is why the the Sahara desert is so bad without people.
I wonder how much difference Gasoline Direct Injection has made. To meet fuel economy mandates it’s in most new car and light truck engines, and it produces way more particulates than engines that use normal fuel injection.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 78.4 ms ] threadDemocracies will be unable to factor in the ramifications of their actions unless the majority of them are highly-educated. To me, I doubt the sustainability of a technologically advanced democracy without universal college education for this reason. The electorate has enough power to drastically harm the environment and themselves without the ability to consider the self-harming consequences of their voting habits.
Can anyone think of a similar situation in history?
The point I'm trying to make is that some understanding of physics and chemistry is necessary to logically conclude that human activity drives harmful changes to the environment.
For example, I understand that a glass box filled with carbon dioxide will be warmer after an hour under sunlight than the same box filled with oxygen. My parents don't. What follows is that my more liberal parent believes the environment should be protected and my more conservative parent believes it shouldn't.
If they had both gone to college and taken chemistry and physics 101, like I did, then their political leanings would be irrelevant. They would understand that current rates of pollution, especially in the United States, are making the planet Earth uninhabitable* for their precious children and grandchildren! As it stands, one is a tree-hugger and the other a brow-beater, so the dialogue is at a stalemate.
You can take this anecdote and apply it to the United States as a whole. We are politically split down the middle. Washington swings between right and left. Democratic presidents enact environmental protection, and Republican presidents undo it. The result is that the rate of pollution either stalls or increases. The problem is that at this rate of pollution, we're doomed to a terrible future.
I just want the debate to be about the science. You can't have that debate with people who coasted through American high school.
What I wish the "right" would notice is that both the US military and the fossil fuel companies (that is, the highly-educated conservatives) have privately acknowledged anthropogenic climate change and are preparing for it.
[edit] lol my goodness, who is downvoting me? advocates for the uneducated?
You do have politicians who just deny climate change is a thing, but you also have people who believe that in 50 years technology will have advanced enough to allow us to innovate our way out of global warming.
Arguably, the technology to stop or pause global warming (at least for decades while technology continues to develop and clean energy becomes more available) is available and cheap today, we just don’t feel impelled to use it yet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_inject...
It says they are planning on changing the rules but nothing has actually changed yet.
They do not give an explanation for why things changed.
I don't know if the US has air quality norms? If so it could force strong measures that impact the economy.
They have rather strong ones, a lot of people are completely ignorant of how this stuff works. The U.S. tracks air quality across the country with a rather high resolution[0][1]; here in Canada we don't seem to have anywhere near the quality of reporting[2], and the air quality seems similar.
[0]: https://gispub.epa.gov/airnow/ [1]: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=... [2]: https://weather.gc.ca/airquality/pages/index_e.html
It's an important note because the takeaway comments I see so far are directly implicating looser EPA regulations, when we don't have data to support that, yet.
I don't know if that would actually help though because a lot of people argue it's a change in forest management and prescribed burns that allows these bigger problems to develop.