Comment by themaninthedark

Agreed, we(collectively) do seem to assume and teach that the environment is/was in homeostasis before modern man when that is very much not the case.

However we do have measurable effects on the environment i.e. acid rain on the east coast due to the iron and steel foundries. We eliminated/reduced that heavily by implementing controls, same with the hole in the ozone.

I don't think that the path forward for repairing(if assuming all manmade)/changing what is going on is banning things as that is difficult to implement on the world wide scale that it would need to happen.

Case in point, China is one of the largest GHG emitters in terms of number but when it is brought up, the argument is they are smaller per capita and most of the emissions are due to them selling to the west anyway. If we said "Ok, let's stop manufacturing there", now you have the free trade people upset. Also the people who believe that you need trade in order to prevent war. Also everyone really likes cheap stuff, the man on the street may not care about who their senator is but they really like it when they can get very big TV for cheap. So it's politically untenable.

I think that we could do some Geo-engineering to reverse/fix the situation; carbon sequestration in the ocean, greening the Sahara. But then you have people worried about the second order effect, it costs money and who will pay and you may be doing it on someone else's land...Europe doing a big push to green the Sahara would be bad optics because of colonialism.

I think we will take action but unfortunately it will have to be after things get a lot worse because that is really the only way to get people aligned.