The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(07-27-2020, 10:02 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/soviet-...l-disaster

I am amazed more at how much the above looks like sections of Lowell Massachusetts than how the Soviets are unique.  Oh, the Lowell factories are mostly idle now.  One became a museum, where they still occasionally power up the old machinery and the noise is deafening.  It wasn't that long ago that we had much the same attitude, that our cities looked much the same.  

I concur that it is no longer sustainable.  I keep waiting for countries like India, China and Russia to install stack scrubbers cutting back on pollution, to make health care solutions and life style decisions in line with what the western countries decided long ago.  I suspect part of why US manufacturing jobs have gone abroad is that they are still polluting abroad, still putting the chance to profit ahead of the earth and the people.  The faster governments institute cleaner solutions, the sooner the corporations shift their operations to other countries where policies are more profitable.

Yet the US imports products from these polluting countries.  Our country still imports the products of pollution.  Our elites profit from it.  We are not adequately distancing ourselves from the dirty policies of the recent past.  You read about how dirty the air is in China and elsewhere.  There is a plume of pollution from India which drifts into the Middle East and parts of Africa.

The sort of particulate pollution pictured above contributes significantly to global dimming.  The particles block the sun, making agriculture less effective and reflecting energy back into space.  Thing is, if the dirty countries do clean up their act, the cooling effects of global dimming being reduced will adversely impact global warming.  Temperatures will go up significantly.  In a way it is better for us to keep our cleaner air and postpone the reckoning, but the reckoning is coming.