The next hundred years is probably going to be grappling with how many toxic chemicals we allowed at 'safe' levels because it was inconvenient to industry to ban them the same way we're floored by the casual irradiation of the early 20th century.
That's funny, because as researchers are finding out, the interaction of many chemicals are having significant effects at concentrations 1 to 2 orders of magnitude below the "safe" values of acceptable daily intakes.
They funded a state-of-the-art ecotoxicology research lab next to where I live, that was going to do pioneering work in the field, within a university-industry cooperation framework. As coincidence would have it, once the first results started coming in, there was a lot less interest from the industry in cooperation. The lab now runs at a fraction of its capacity.
People are going to scream about the cost of remediating all of this (hundreds of billions, if not trillions), but it was just shareholders through limited liability corporations stealing from taxpayers (who will end up with the remediation bill through taxes) by way of the market and government, with enormous aggregate harm a second order effect. So long, and thanks for all the poison.
> The estimated cost to the federal government of cleaning up environmental contamination, referred to as environmental liabilities, was $613 billion in fiscal year 2021. This is an increase from $465 billion in fiscal year 2017.
So many industries are only profitable because their costs for pollution and environmental damages aren't included and by the time that bill comes due the company and all the shareholders are long gone and the cost gets dumped on the public.
Man, really puts into perspective how silly it is for me to be paranoid about deploying a change for a webapp with 100 DAU, while agricorp businesses have no problems accidentally poisoning the planet.
Same as with the fossil fuel industry - the chloralkali industry as a whole is going to end up net negative all time, with the cost of cleanup exceeding all the total profits of that entire chemical company subcategory. We've already seen it with asbestos, it's going to be playing out similarly for a number of industries.
