this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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The hole in the ozone layer is now repairing due to international regulation of CFCs
Acid rain is no longer a problem because of regulation of sulfur dioxide emissions
Leaded gasoline has now been banned in every country
Asbestos exposure is rare now due to regulatory controls. It's bad that it took so long to get done.
Government regulation is effective in protecting people from health risks.
Collective action (e.g. through voting) is effective in establishing such regulation.
If you spread the lie that voting in favor of such policies (and politicians who support them) is a useless waste of time, you are spreading industry propaganda.
Effective, large-scale change is IN FACT at the polls.
It is nowhere else.
the thing is that cleaner production methods benefit big industry because they get to produce higher-quality products which makes them more profit due to higher price.
Sure, maybe in the long run. But that will cost money now and the quarterly earnings report is due.
So all those problems are fixed but somehow new ones keep popping up? Maybe it wasnt real change but actually just band aids and the root cause stayed unadressed through all those years.
Somehow the system you want to maintain and support keeps creating these problems. And then it says we need this exact system to deal with thosr problems.
The only system that doesn't create any new problems is one that's static. Humans aren't static (we're born, we live, we die) and we live in a non-static environment. Unless you manage to completely isolate us from our environment & take away all our free will, you'll never build a system that doesn't create any new problems.
If you cant or dont want to see the reoccurring elements of the listed problems, then we probably cant find a common ground in this.
The biggest recurring element of the listed problems (at least 3/4): we didn't know about the problem when we started using the stuff that caused the problem.
How does any other system fundamentally solve this without completely banning research & development?
Probably by just taking some time (and yes I am talking in the time frame of years) for testing, evaluation and centering humans & earths needs when deciding on how to go forward. Very few innovations tackle so pressing problems, that they have to get mass adopted asap.
You could have spent a century testing CFCs in a lab environment. The problem they caused with the ozone layer would still not have become apparent until CFCs were used in the real world where they could interact with the ozone layer.
There is no amount of testing and preparation that can account for every possible outcome or interaction.
Asbestos is another good example. It is naturally occurring and quite common and was used as a building material for millennia. It is lightweight but strong, flexible in thin sheets, and fireproof. It's an extremely useful and versatile material, and abundantly available.
It wasn't until the 1900s that medical testing linked asbestos fibers to several health risks. It basically required the entire history of human development for our medical technology to identify the danger. No amount of testing, analysis or review done prior would have mattered.
Okay. Congratulations, your system failed, because some of those issues take decades to manifest.
Thats quite the logical leap. As far as I can see none of the examples tackled issues that were actually a threat to the existing system. Waiting on them would most likely saved more people from hurt / death than just doing the FAFO approach.
Alright, but we don't know which things will be dangerous decades into the future before we actually test them that way. So how long then do we have to test anything new before it is widely available? 50 years? 100?
Please consider the following:
How did early humans find out which food sources were safe to eat, and which were not?
Yes. Welcome to reality.
The entire history of human civilization is an example of building the airplane while you're flying it, without a plan for either the airplane construction or the flight path.
There are a lot of problems, and yes the solutions to old problems often create new problems, because reality is not a video game where collecting a dozen McGuffins ends the quest and you get a reward and then never worry about that issue again.
Sometimes the airplane crashes: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/
The options are:
u should learn about maths.
you can start with 4 problems, then solve them and create 2 new ones instead, then solve them as well and create 1 new problem instead.
even while you are creating new problems, you can still be doing more good than harm. learn some maths.
That's probably anything but math.