Well, that's the problem nowadays. We don't have the luxury of dealing with just one thing at a time. We have to deal with warming and pollution simultaneously.

Of the two, warming is the most urgent issue. Pollution needs to be addressed, we need to stop making it worse. But, the consequences of pollution are "baked in" at this point. There's not a lot about it we can do in the short term that will help much.

When I say that, I'm thinking mostly about plastic pollution. Compared to it, everything else is a distant second in scale.

I saw something last week, that the amount of plastics produced since it was developed is now equal in weight to the weight of the planetary biosphere. That's how much plastic is in the planetary ecology now.

We did it, we did this massive experiment on the planetary ecology without any discussion or oversight. Companies just started making shit and selling it without a clue of what the long-term consequences would be. Now we are going to find out.

I think everyone sort of assumed that plastics would "breakdown" just like natural materials do. We don't understand just how artificial plastics are. We don't understand that they never decompose, they turn into smaller and smaller bits of dust.

Right down to the nano scale that you breath in, that's in your water, that's in the food chain and part of everything you eat. Plastics become part of your "internal pollution", part of your lifetime chemical load.

These particulates aren't benign. Plastics are hydrocarbons. Lattices of hydrogen and carbon holding in the chemicals that we use to make plastic into stuff. The stabilizers, flame retardants, hardening agents, etc. All of that is in the particulates, in the molecular lattices that are plastics.

We have reason to suspect now that when plastic nano particulates get into you, those chemicals leech out. Just like they do in the rest of the world. That's how plastic breaks down. The chemicals leech out as the hydrocarbon lattice breaks into ever smaller particles.

We may have already poisoned ourselves. The global decline in male sperm counts may be the indication that plastics are killing us.

This might sound hyperbolic, but remember DDT and the American bald eagle. The DDT didn't kill the eagles. It accumulated in their tissues and when females laid eggs it caused the eggs to have really thin shells. So thin, that most of them were breaking.

DDT is an example of an environmental toxin that kills slowly. By building up in the environment and destroying the fertility of organisms in the food chain over time.

We aren't 100% sure plastics aren't doing the same thing to us.

But that's a longer term problem. If we don't get warming under control we won't have the ability to do anything about the plastics problem.

We may have to tackle all of this at once if we hope to pull through. That's very discouraging though. The more things we have to do at once, the more likely we will fail at everything.