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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

It will never cease to amaze me how we allow farms, factories and power plants to dump millions of gallons of toxic chemicals and fertilizers in the same lakes, rivers and oceans we rely on for food, bathing and drinking water.

Besides the fact that governments allow cancer causing chemicals to flow into our water tables and rivers, humanity is now going to have to deal with the massive repercussions of an ocean that is not capable of supporting the bio mass we rely on for food.

We are quite possibly serving as a solution to the fermi paradox.

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>Corporations have paid more than $57 billion in environmental, health and safety penalties since 2010 (from 2015)

I checked, and Koch Industries has paid over $700M in fines for environmental violations. Seems like the penalty is too light.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

Possibly a case of it being cheaper to break the rules.

Hard to imagine it's anything else, but I'd be curious to read alternative suggestions.

Any fines paid will ultimately be passed back to the consumer through increased prices.

Maybe the funes should be replaced by firing and/or imprisonment of culpable management?

I really believe we're entering a new global Gilded Age, in which the concentration of wealth is yielding increasingly abject poverty and misery for the lower and middle classes. Corrupted government, environmental degradation, a resurgence of authoritarianism - these are all symptoms of the dominance of wealthy and the consequence popular disillusionment with social institutions.

It's high time for a revamped Progressive Era.

Not only that, but certain fertilizers (like phosphorus) are in limited supply. The fact the US effectively subsidizes the dumping of these valuable micronutrients is baffling.

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/p...

Seems far worse, overall, than global warming.

Sure, we might be toast in a century, but this problem of industrial pollutants is far, far more urgent, because it is far more immediate in effect.

In comparison to said pollutants, carbon dioxide, is fucking tame. Might heat up the planet to whatever degree, but plants also consume excess amounts as food for photosynthesis.

This is why I sometimes suspect that the focus on global warming is something of a distraction from the far more immediate threat of chemical pollution by corporations. Well, the corporations probably pay enough in bribes to keep the politicians mostly silent about it... :(

One of the challenges with global warming is the gloal effect. If you poison you own well, you better believe that the repercussion cycle is very quick.

If you're dumping CO2 into the air like no tomorrow, there are no repercussions for effectively sinking the Philippines or Bangladesh 100 years from now.

*edit better example, Sri Lanka not as low lying as I thought.

Global warming contributes to this, and will make the situation worse as the earth heats up as Warmer waters hold less oxygen compounding the problem.

you might want to read up on rapid climate change on the arctic news blog. greetings from Sam and have a nice couple of years!

>an ocean that is not capable of supporting the bio mass we rely on for food.

Honest question, does this just apply to people that eat seafood? For instance, if I have never eaten seafood, is my own personal food source at risk? Of course I should be concerned for people that do rely on seafood, but does the health of the oceans affect the growing of wheat, sugar, beef cattle, Doritos spices, etc.?

You don't have your own personal food source. Everything is connected.

Perhaps there is something down the food chain of what you eat that relies on there being sea food? I'm not a biologist, though.

if there's less seafood to be eaten, more people are gonna eat Dorito spices, etc

Do you like breathing? Because the oceans provide most of that oxygen https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankto...

If the ocean dies, so do we. The phytoplankton in the oceans is responsible for something like 50% of the Earth's oxygen.

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