rich bastards claiming that windmills would harm them through visual pollution.
you fucking fuckwits, smog is visual pollution. But they don’t care.
you fucking fuckwits, smog is visual pollution.
I’m old enough to remember people losing their shit at China over the 2008 Beijing Olympics drowning in a toxic cloud. The international outcry was such that the state spent a decade cleaning all that shit up (which produced its own wave of “Has Chinese Eco-fascism Gone Woke?!” screamer articles in turn).
But their rate of pollution has been falling steadily for the last two decades, in no small part because the state wasn’t fighting an uphill battle against corporate slobs in white doctor’s coats trying to tell everyone that smog wasn’t happening/was good aktuly.
Meanwhile, US expenditures on lobbying, denialism, and greenwashing stretch into the billions of dollars annually. And its not hard to understand why, when the ROI is $7T/year on the international stage.
When our living conditions deteriorate gradually, we adapt to these conditions instead of fixing of them. But sudden threats get sorted out immediately.
Coal has done far more damage than nuclear energy ever will, but coal has over 2300 stations worldwide and nuclear has 400.
A perfect example of the ‘Boiling Frog Syndrome’.