Environmentalism is a $3 billion a year industry and the trial lawyers they help are orders of magnitude greater. What is the last public health win they gave us? Name a hysteria, from dying bees to BPA to DDT, and I can show you where actions were taken over the objections of scientists, not because science showed harm.
The wealthier a country is, the more ways people who "need to live important times" will find obscure ways to terrify themselves. Like pillaging social media with claims that a plastic spatula causes cancer, which then gets written about by the SEO experts that LA Times and Slate hire to guide their journalism.
This year, companies are even selling air filters designed to protect wealthy elites from virtual pollution caused by...Christmas trees.
Your Christmas tree is killing you. If you think the beating of a fly's wings impacts the gravity of the moon. Image generated by Meta AI.
Long before Christmas, they solemnly warn us, Factory Farms mow down Christmas trees where they are packed into emissions-belching trucks and we rubes buy them and then they emit harmful gas and microbes and we breathe them in and...well, then it is what you choose to believe.
If you know so little science you think trace amounts of a weedkiller that only acts on a biological pathway found in plants is ruining your "microbiome" and causing human cancer, I know how you vote - and that you are a target customer for an air filter that protects you from Christmas Tree Syndrome fumes. You're probably on the coast, you are probably white, and thanks to inflation we've endured for the last three years, probably rich - because you can afford a real Christmas tree.
In the real world, we evolved to harmlessly filter out trace amounts of stuff. Just like the moon is so big that the beats of a fly's wings don't impact its gravity even though we can detect that. We can detect anything in anything in 2024. That is great for sue-and-settle environmental predatorts because all they have to do is hire an epidemiologist to look through surveys and match how many bought Christmas trees and how many got lung cancer or whatever and create statistical significance and write the "linked to" "suggests" "correlated" paper in a pay-to-publish journal with breezy peer review and hope CNN editors have your press release rewritten without reading the methodology at all.
This is all the legacy of cleaning up the air. An entire industry built up around doing it and by the 1990s actual smog was so low, geographical basins like Los Angeles aside, that in order to keep getting funded they had to "define air quality down." Instead of smog, an actual carcinogen, PM10 - particulate matter 10 microns in size - being the focus, they tightened the noose 400% and claimed PM2.5 was now the worry. Suddenly air quality maps could be red again, even though you can't see PM2.5 unless you have an election microscope.
It's done nothing but erode trust in science, the same way anti-science activists in a war on farming, vaccines, and energy eroded trust in science since the 1990s and public trust has gotten so low even journalists and academics who dismissed the problem when it was their political party dominating denial of science are finally speaking out.
Your air is safe. From Christmas tree lung damage anyway. Anyone who claims mold and bacteria are putting you at risk are literally selling you something. But don't get a tree the day after Halloween. Fire risk is absolutely real.