Environment & Energy

Quitting a bad habit like smoking would be a "step forward" to a healthier life.

Taking up smoking again, after quitting, would be a "step back."

Today is not any kind of golden age and yesterday was only worse. There is no golden age of humanity, even when earth's human population was measured in the millions.

When I was a kid my grandma would drive me and my siblings around Los Angeles in her Cadillac. That car got terrible gas mileage and had no smog control systems. The gasoline sold then contained toxic lead that damaged people's brains and nervous systems. The air in the city was often brown and obviously poisonous, it burned your eyes, throat, and lungs. Does anyone want to "step back" to that?

Hydrogen was being proposed as a solution to the smog problem in the 'sixties. It was bullshit then as it is now. Cleaning up one place, let's say Los Angeles or Beijing, by sacrificing another place, the Mojave or Mongolian deserts, is not a step forward, it's a step back.