Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure why the focus has been put onto greenhouse emissions and CO2 in general.

If there's any direct threat to the planet, it's insane amount of industrial waste entering the environment daily that gets downplayed in this ridiculous song and dance about CO2.

https://publicintegrity.org/environment/industrial-waste-pol...

https://www.buschsystems.com/resource-center/page/why-indust...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5699236/

Industrial waste poisons drinking water, destroys the oceans and their ecosystems, poisons the land and our food.

Everyone's busy worrying about how much CO2's being produced, very few people seem to be worried about what kind of mysterious proprietary petro derived chemicals are being pumped into rivers, lakes, the ocean. Few people seem to sorry that groundwater and resevoirs are contaminated by agricultural runoff, runoff from factories, manufacturing plants, chemical plants, oil refineries, fracking operations.

Every day, thousands of tons of carcinogenic, toxic, environmentally altering chemicals are relaeased into the environment doing damage we don't even understand yet.

Sperm counts keep dropping, and it very well may be due to chemicals that mess with our hormones and genetics.

I don’t know why it isn’t talked about more. There has been a significant drop and at the current rate it won’t be too long until the average man is considered essentially infertile.

I remember becoming very concerned by the idea that microplastics are behind decreasing sperm counts. But by Occam’s razor, I think it’s much more reasonable to assume that lack of exercise, poor diet, not enough sleep and sunlight, and high levels of stress are the bigger culprits.

Do you think that pumping farm animals full of hormones is another factor?

Maybe it will be self correcting in the end, if sperm counts drop enough to make a dent in population numbers, which is where a lot of the problem ultimately lies.

Would it not be best to make your (good) point about industrial waste without referring to the conversation about CO2 as a ridiculous song and dance? It's not as if gigantic problems can be expected to line up in a neat and orderly queue for us to deal with one by one.

Totally agreed. Plus it's not like these are even really separate problems. These petrochemicals exist entirely because they're effectively by-products of fossil fuel refinement, the use of which is the major contributing factor to CO2 emissions.

I think the reason people are concerned about CO2 and greenhouse gasses is that we know they will end up hurting us, while industrial waste is not something to be concerned about at the moment beyond local effects. The fact that this is 'damage we don't even understand yet' points to this simple fact that this is not a significant problem and can safely be ignored while we work on the problem that we know will have serious long-term consequences.

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