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Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

You don't know that. Environment is much more polluted, and thus is our food. We move less. And so on.

Whose environment is much more polluted. In the developed world, pollution is decreasing. For the U.S., for example: https://gispub.epa.gov/air/trendsreport/2024/

That's showing that air pollution I would guess mostly from cars has gone down since 1990.

There are lots of other new chemicals not shown on that chart that are in our food and clothes and everything, particularly almost everything modern babies in the US come in contact with.

There is also a lot less toxic chemicals around nowadays such as flame retardants, DDT, lead (petrol), asbestos, PCB etc.

While PFAS and microplastics and the like are a huge problem, you can't just dismiss the major efforts done over the decades to reduce pollution and improve health; wood / coal fire bans, mandatory catalytic converters, ban on asbestos and CFCs, lead-free fuel and paint, EVs, renewable electricity generation, emission zones, trash collection & safe disposal, smoking bans and discouraging measures, etc. It's not an either/or, and not celebrating successes means there will be less inclination to also solve the newly discovered issues.

Fair points honestly. We tried a lot of awful stuff in the 1900s that has been stopped and that should be celebrated.

There's also a lot that was never stopped, and more and more coming all the time.

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