Comment by lm28469
10 hours ago
> see smog and pollution from England Industrial revolution
I love how people keep using the "it was worse during the industrial evolution" argument as a gotcha for every environmental and societal issues... no shit my dude, really? even in the middle of the "dark ages" we didn't send 8 years old kids down mines for 10+ hours a day or make people work 12 to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week... WW2 era Poland was literally a better place to live in than England during the industrial revolution
They had 0 smog and 0 pollution before all these innovations, we had 200 years of insane innovations and smog/pollution is now consistently in the top 5 leading causes of deaths every single year, you scaled it from like 5 cities in England to the entire planet
> I love how people keep using the "it was worse during the industrial evolution" argument as a gotcha for every environmental and societal issue
Maybe you think I'm saying something I'm not.
> They had 0 smog and 0 pollution before all these innovations
That's not true. Man-made ecological disasters go back a long ways, but they did not scale up as much until the population growth exploded following the invention of ammonia and the industrial revolution. Until then, 80% of people worked the land. If you understand the reasons behind the deadly plagues that decimated numbers in middle-age Europe, it was clearly not pollution-free.
With technological progress, and policy, total emissions are falling in developed countries despite growing population. They were still growing rapidly in China until recent years where fossil fuel use has plateaued.
Now emissions are growing because other East Asian countries are getting rich, e.g. India, Vietnam. Fortunately they are not missing a beat taking advantage of renewables either.
Pollution is not in the "top 5 leading causes of death" unless you count all deaths caused by diseases that are exacerbated by pollution as caused by pollution.