Dealing With, Undoing Damage Already Done

THE GOOD NEWS is that the era of the internal combustion engine seems, at long last, to be coming to an end. Most of the major auto manufacturers globally say that they do not intend to manufacture or sell gas burning cars after the year twenty thirty five. That date is rapidly approachng. Many countires, including India, are committing themselves to having gasoline cars off the roads by that date,and, in the United States, progressive states such as California and New York are following suit. Thousands of electric vehicles are being sold and entering service daily all around the world, and their price is coming down, somewhat. Soon there should be sufficient competition among auto makers to cause the price point fof EVs to be reasonable. New sources of lithium are being discovered, and exploited in a more environmentally friendly fashion that traditional mineral extraction. It tiurns out that the manufacture of lithium ion batteries for EV cars can be accomplished without significant damage to the environment, which defeats an prime argument made by fossil fuel conservatives; that the electric vehicles will actually do more environmental harm in the manufacturing process, than gas burners. Like nearly all other conservative claims, this is proving to simply be untrue. The bad news is that this is all happening too late. Climate change is here to stay, as are more insidious but equally harmful forms of human environmental folly. Consider this: the level of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere is currently at about four hundred and twenty five parts per million. Before human pollution started, it was naturally at about two hundred ppm. We've more than doubled the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And even if we were to stop burning all carbon emitting fossil fuels tomorrow, which we are certainly not going to, that amount of carbon would remain in the atmosphere for decades, maybe centuries. Humanity is still going to add a significant amount of carbon to the mix, over the next few decades, before we are finished doing so altogether. One hope is that new effecient cost effective technologies of the future will enable us to rapidly clean the existing extra carbon out of the atmosphere. As of now, our efforts are insignificant. The Earth's environemnt, land, air, and water, is generally heavily polluted with harmful human made chemicals that are not found in nature, and are entirely the product of the chemical industry. There are more than ten thousand kinds of PFAS chemicals, artificial compounds with strong flourine and carbon chemical compounds, making them virtually indestructable, used in many forms of manufacturing, which end up in sewage, and also end up, it has recently been discovered, in fertilizer, and thus, in the soil of the world's farm land. These heavy elements end up in the plants, animals, and crops on the farm, and thus inside the human body. The extent of the damage and harm already done in this way, as processed sewage has long been used in agriculture as fertiziler; is just now being studied and learned. The news will not be good. We know of no way to effectively clean up all the plastic which permeates our environment and our bodies.Crops can be grown which draw the polluting chemicals out of the soil, but the plants must be harvested, and disposed of, without returning them back into the ambient environemnt. Land fills will not be adequate. So far, we have no way of doing this. For our own sake, we had better learn, fast.