[gouranga]

The reason it introduces so much emotion is that it's used as political leverage and people get all uppety when red vs blue comes into the picture.

We're screwing up our direct environment for certain as that is directly observable, but we're not necessarily screwing up our climate. The latter is pseudo-science, despite how we wrap it up. We just haven't been around long enough to come up with a climate model that makes any sense.

Correlation does not imply causality.

[twoodfin]

> We're screwing up our direct environment for certain as that is directly observable...

Is it really? I guess it depends on what you mean by "we", but I was under the impression that major "tangible" environmental statistics in the U.S. have been on a positive trend for decades. Smog, acid rain, toxic metals etc.

http://blogs.reuters.com/gregg-easterbrook/2011/09/01/the-fi...

[gouranga]

It's a fair observation, but that is the US. There's a big rug in the far east with lots of toxic crap under it. There's also a lot of stuff we buried in various places and cross fingers it'll never escape.

[saalweachter]

It's occasionally said that we aren't importing manufactured goods to China, we're exporting pollution.

[twoodfin]

That's fair, though. They'd rather have dirty, labor-intensive manufacturing to grow a middle class out of grinding agricultural poverty and we'd rather have desk jobs and cheap clothes.

It's a fantasy to believe there's anything more than a marginally better alternative. Certainly China is going to industrialize a lot "cleaner" and faster than we did, and when they have a real middle class they'll start caring about pollution a lot more. And it won't be "too late", I suspect.

[andrewflnr]

IMO, deforestation is one of the worse global problems. Also those giant rafts of trash in the oceans.

[nirvana]

Regarding screwing up the direct environment- I only want to say that I believe a historical survey, and economics, would support the perception that as societies advance in standard of living, they tend to clean up their local environments.

People start having higher standards for everything, including the quality of their local environment, when mere survival is no longer the primary concern.

So, it could be said that this environmental damage is more a sign of poverty than a result of success. And that if/when the world economy is unleashed and allowed to grow for a couple decades, as a side effect of eliminating poverty we'd likely see massive improvements to the direct environment.

This is also consistent with the evolution of business- when its more competitive you want to minimize waste because its cheaper to use more efficient methods, which has a positive environmental side effect.

[gouranga]

This is a fair point and one I agree with, however the issue at the moment at least is that as standard of living grows, problems are pushed to other places. This is because they are truly uneconomical to solve locally due to people wanting to protect their standard of living.

The lowest rung of the ladder always gets to solve the problem at the end of the day.