Look at what happened with PCBs… in much of the world, nothing.
I was pretty shocked to discover quite recently that in the UK you are advised to eat two portions of oily fish per week, for your health. But no more because of the levels of PCBs in the fish. The UK isn’t the only place with this problem and (for instance) the Bay Area is pretty contaminated as well.
There will be no correction. There will only be collapse and perhaps partial mitigation. Correction implies a brain, and if we collectively had one, we wouldn't have been polluting with these toxins in the first place.
Moreover, correction alone is not sufficient -- it doesn't remove the PFAS which is already in the ecosystem. It will take over ten thousand years of UV light to naturally break it apart.
We had a good run, now it is time to scratch this evolutionary iteration as well and start from a clean slate again. There were mass extinction events before also and life restarted in a new form. It is time now for the same to happen, we are not capable of learning and behaving. While we might have advanced further than any species on Earth before, we are an evolutionary failure nevertheless. And what do you do with bad code? You rewrite it.
I would say most people are capable of learning and behaving. But our system is riddled with cancerous tumors that are trying to accumulate all resources to the detriment of the rest of the system.
Our collective consumption habits and preferences are primarily shaped, limited, and controlled by a few villains. What you can afford and what is available to you in the first place matters most.
Not at all, its more like human nature. For example, illegal logging in Brazil: it isn't mega corporations with evil billionaires at the helm, its small every day people who just want to make a better life for themselves.
There's a hypothetical from an Oxford debate that I am struggling to find that was something like this:
If you are poor family and starving and for every day you could press a button and giant plume of CO2 would get released, but your child would not starve, would not get disease and would lead a fulfilled life, would you press that button?
Every parent would smash that button until their hand bled.
In the first world bubble, we have this button (more or less) but every person on earth would want this button too.
I blame the "debt fueled " economy, basically our whole financial system, where companies can take big debts to do anything at the expense of the environment. Banks especially love funding fossil fuel projects. This financial system will have to collapse under its own weight of its exponential debt.
Once we return to a more grounded concept of money, perhaps gold based, where debts are a lot more controlled due to an absence of uncontrolled moneyprinting, growth can then slow down, allowing us more time to digest what's actually good for us and what's not.
We are talking about micro plastics, the specific harms of which aren't even quantified that well (DALY?), and their future impact given current climate with regard to environmental tradeoffs.
Now, what would your comment look like, for example, in context of adopting coal, that is demonstrably much much worse for health and environment and also was adopted when there was hardly any law or public pressure to protect nature?
If we extrapolate the catastrophising it would seem downright apocalyptic. And yet, coal adoption unambiguously led to increased life expectancy and quality of life. Now let's do the tradeoff for plastics :)
How is the chemical industry supposed to make a profit if they have to do 50 years studies on people and the environment when they manufacture a new compound? Think about the shareholders.
It was already clearly known at the time that PFAS was originally engineered that it's harmful and that it accumulates in the environment. This data was just willfully chosen to be ignored in the name of profits.
Luckily they have thousands of variations available for PFAS, so we'll only have to wait a few thousand years before they regulate them all, assuming it takes about 20 years for them to realize the new variation is exactly like the previous one.
