> because lead lobbyists continued to disrupt regulation efforts.
I have genuine, actual trouble maintaining faith in humanity when I hear about people like this existing. It just makes me incredibly depressed and bummed out about life.
I hear you. We’re just more sophisticated chimps. Sophisticated enough to devise ways to kill nearly all life on earth, but not wise enough to take care of the planet and ourselves.
The biggest importer of asbestos is India. Even if they'd already banned Russian asbestos, the only country to have enough asbestos is China, guess the rest.
Gasoline is not big business? They had a "scientist" on staff, that proclaimed that leaded fuel was harmless. Who cares about paint, when there are millions of cars driving around blowing lead dust into the air? The (real) scientist who saw a connection needed years to prove it. By digging into the ice in the arctis he was able to prove, that the high lead levels where a recent phenomenon. The documentary Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey by Neil deGrasse Tyson [0] tells this story much better than i ever could and much more... Highly recommended!
People doing what's best for them can be very evil for others, like the fact that buildings full of lead paint and lead-leaking pipes have not been fixed.
> buildings full of lead paint and lead-leaking pipes have not been fixed.
That’s because a few IQ points in black and poor people is not considered more important than not using tax money to solve the problem.
Arguably, the added IQ points times the number of people affected would most likely have a positive effect on the GDP and would pay for the fix in a couple decades.
That we even think that we’d need to do the math to justify it is deeply depressing.
I have genuine, actual trouble maintaining faith in humanity when I hear about people like this existing. It just makes me incredibly depressed and bummed out about life.