Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cwal37 37 days ago
The classic pre-EPA slogan comes to mind: "the solution to pollution is dilution".
3 comments

The dosage makes the poison - but if it sticks around in the body dilution may slightly alleviate effects but at the cost of more widespread buildup. This is out of my field so I'm not certain if that's a concern here.
In some cases it still is, but we need to emphasize the exceptions, which can be rather serious.

For example, we can hardly "dilute" CFCs or CO2 any more than we did, by putting them into a whopping 5.15×10^18 kg of the entire atmosphere of the Earth. Yet both still cause bad things, because there's no (sufficient) process to break them down or move them to a safe state.

Is that so? The amount of atmosphere stays the same, but we're constantly adding more CO2. So wouldn't this continually reduce the dilution?
the volume of CO2 is negliglible (ppms) and it uses often Oxygen from the air.
Accumulation makes the... what rhymes here?
I like where you're going with this.

"The solution to pollution is dilution, except when accumulation is a violation upon creation"?

Litigation
The complication of this realization is bio-accumulation