On the whole I still think things look pretty good. We're getting better at reducing our impact environmentally. We're getting better at purifying things we already messed up. We're also making tech to do all this cheaper so that if and when the rest of Asia become more modern, they might, just might, get to skip the polluting parts.
>We're getting better at reducing our impact environmentally.
We are getting better at reducing our environmental impact from tech that have been in use for decades. And that too after decades of negligence and denial.
But we are still mostly blind about how todays new tech will impact environment if it becomes widespread. For example, most people who consider electric cars as something that will undo the environmental damage from fossil fuels, fail to consider what new kinds of impact these automobiles have on the environment. For ex. The batteries. If all of todays cars started going electric, that is a lot of batteries, right? How does the environmental impact look like after 30 years of growing use of these batteries? Just an example.
The point is, the problem is our boundless affinity for new and better things. If it is cars, then we want suvs and we will have three of them if we can afford it. We throwaway old stuff and buy new stuff without a second thought. Most of the industries of the world are producing stuff that is planned to break in a couple of years. "Planned obsolesce", they call it. All of these tendencies are the dangerous ones. Not the use of a single thing like burning of fossil fuels or coal or using fertilizers.
So I think it is the tendency of our current system to maximize consumption, the real danger, and I think there is very little hope that will change, and that will be our undoing...
