Never rains but it pours.
Oh, sorry in advance.
Wired has a report on the next problem originating from our excess:
Writing today in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western US each year. That’s the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. “We just did that for the area of protected areas in the West, which is only 6 percent of the total US area,” says lead author Janice Brahney, an environmental scientist at Utah State University. “The number was just so large, it’s shocking.”
It further confirms an increasingly hellish scenario: Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.
I wonder how this will be dismissed by the anti-regulatory right?
Skipping over questions that I can’t answer regarding collection, disposal, and prevention, it seems to me that only one thing will get the right on board with taking steps to stop and roll it back – if, in fact, there is a viable strategy for same – and that’s if something they value is hurt by it. Consider Ducks Unlimited, dedicated to the conservation and increase of waterfowl. Seeing as
The majority of DU’s financial contributors and 90 percent of members are hunters. [Wikipedia]
J. P. Morgan
and the founders included robber baron J. P. Morgan, it seems reasonable to assume that if these plastic micro-debris begins hurting, say, their favorite prey animal, or begins ruining scenic overlooks, we might start seeing some activity on the right side of the political spectrum.
