I think you have your rose-colored glasses on when looking at the past. Air pollution: down since the 1990s. [1][2][3] Water pollution: down since the 1990s.

I think you have your rose-colored glasses on when looking at the past. Air pollution: down since the 1990s. [1][2][3] Water pollution: down since the 1990s. [4][5] Noise/light pollution: definitely up since the 1990s, agreed there. Cancer: US deaths are way down since the 1990s, though it's cheating a bit since that was the top of the smoking-related spike in lung cancer. Still, other cancer deaths are way down since then too. [6][7] (Edit: worldwide this looks worse and things have increased lately, see: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-with-cancer-by-age?facet=metric https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-with-can...) Heart disease: can't find long term stats on this quickly, but cardiovascular mortality is way down. [8] Obesity, addiction, and suicide: certainly up. "Much worse environmental impact," I think the decline in air and water pollution makes this debatable. Climate change is a bit of a weird one, because it's definitely getting worse, but at the same time, the worst-case scenarios (greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated into the indefinite future) is becoming less likely. [9] So the derivative is bad, but the second derivative is good. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-air-pollution?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-air-poll... [2] https://www.slowboring.com/p/wildfires-have-partially-reversed?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=159185&post_id=126860879&isFreemail=false https://www.slowboring.com/p/wildfires-have-partially-revers... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-air-pollution https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-air-poll... [4] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-good-news-on-americas-cleaner?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-good-news-on-americas-clean... [5] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/water-and-sanitation?tab=chart&facet=none&country=IND~USA~KEN~OWID_WRL~BGD~ZAF~CHN&Resource=Drinking+water&Level+of+Access=Safely+managed&Residence=Total&Relative+to+population=Share+of+population https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/water-and-sanitation?ta... [6] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-in-the-us https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-in-the... [7] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates?tab=chart https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates?tab=ch... [8] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5268076/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5268076/ [9] https://www.slowboring.com/p/people-need-to-hear-the-good-news?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://www.slowboring.com/p/people-need-to-hear-the-good-ne...