The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(07-28-2020, 02:46 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(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.

That's the same pattern, really. People used to look at early-industrial manufacturing plants belching out black smoke from their chimneys and recognizing that smoke as "progress". As people get richer they come to recognize that such ugliness is what it is. As people get better educated, more people learn about chemistry and find that coal is one of the dirtiest sources of energy possible because coal often comes with sulfur(sulfur dioxide is noxious, but let it meet ozone and water and it morphs into sulfuric acid, a substance that carbonizes much that it contacts by stripping out the water combined in carbohydrates, proteins, etc. Add to that such impurities as mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and lead...     

Quote: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.

Those countries will need to do something about toxic wastes. 

The early-industrial stage of development depends upon the assumption that productivity solves all problems and assumes that people simply want more stuff as compensation for their toil. Let's start with the obvious refutation: obesity is bad for health, and clutter is confusing and ugly.     

Quote: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 late arch-conservative Milton Friedman offered a simple solution to pollution: tax the Hell out of it.  I assume that taxes that he would accept on pollution would include tariffs. So clean up your manufacturing act, or pay the tax collector. Buy stuff from clean sources or pay for the privilege of polluting Third World  environments that you never have to visit.

It may surprise people, but the Michigan community with the worst summertime air pollution is Holland, Michigan. No, it is not particularly industrial, and it doesn't generate more than its share of vehicle exhausts. It is down-wind from such industrial metropolises as Milwauke,,, but in summer the winds tend to come off Chicago. Guess what happens when the temperatures soar in the summer? Vehicle exhausts become more chemically active... 

Quote: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.

The solutions for stopping global warming will include giving much of what many of us consider the American way of life -- single-family houses, heavy use of vehicles, and much of our meat consumption. Maybe the realities of the last High gave many Americans the best of both worlds -- the spaciousness of pioneer conditions with the prosperity of industrialization. Privileged youth came to the belief that they could get whatever they wanted and could step on anyone who got in the way or demanded anything more out of life than bare survival. 

Now we see the contradictions between liberty and an elitist economy, a soft moral standard for the elites but a draconian one for everyone else, and productive capacity outstripping human desire. We have unbridled greed at the time in which real incomes collapse for multitudes. We have elite demands for rigid conformity at the very time in which the culture splinters and recombines. Of course we have the conflict between elites trying to live in an over-extended 3T of which the vast majority of Americans are at least jaded and at worst harmed --and people ready to move along.