I remember gathering in the gym to watch PBS productions in elementary school circa +/-1970 instilling fear into impressionable children over the deadly man made smog. Lots of film of LA tailpipes and close ups of OH coal fired power plant smokestacks.
The crying Indian commercials became the next rage ("pollution"). Paddling around a puddle and crying over a piece of trash.
In High School the depleted Ozone Hole became the next rage.
Meanwhile there was much discussion about the coming new ice age.
50 years later ... here we are. Cleaner air, cleaner water and more artificially generated fear of the ecological future than ever.
I'm all for limiting pollution and being cleaner (within reason), but the over the top fear baiting has done a lot of damage to our civilization.
Absolutely. We had stringent water/air standards set and over the next 30 years met or exceeded those goals. Then came Obummer and all of those standards were further tightened by 10X, what were agreed safe and tolerable trace amounts were no longer deemed "safe". Suddenly many people were installing filtration and mitigation systems in their homes and factories had to invest in more antipollution mitigation if they wanted to sell their homes.
My neighbor just sold their old new England farmhouse, had to install many thousands of dollars worth of radon mitigation for air and water + filtration for arsenic to satisfy the young new buyers who were artificially triggered by those artificially tight Obummer purity standards. The water was fine before, as was the air. No one that lived in that house over the last 70 years ever developed cancer or diagnosed with arsenic poisoning.
Insanity.
Fun Fact, the plant near where I used to live, The Conesville Generating Station, was one of the worst polluters for acid rain. That all vanished one day when they put scrubbers on the stacks.
I grew up about 5 states away, downwind of all that air coming out of Ohio. We had smog days in the hot, humid days of summer- a warning to those with breathing issues. The air usually smelled stale to varying degrees when we were getting winds from the southwest. When the air switched to coming from the northwest out of Canada, it was noticeably fresh and clean smelling (as long as there were no raging Canadian wildfires).
My sniffer isn't what it used to be but the air doesn't seen as stale anymore, the scrubbers did a great job. They put scrubbers on the paper mills here too. We used to get a strong rotten egg smell from the tall stack on the paper plant 15 miles away when the wind blew in our direction - it was so obnoxious! Scrubbers ended that phenomena by 1975-1980.
I remember that smell, that sick sweet smell from a papermill. All of that's gone back home now. The mills, the power plant. Oh well.
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