Pollution

Nobody that I'm aware of is in favor of polluting the environment.  I doubt there is anyone who would openly support that.

What the question becomes is what are we willing to do to prevent it?

At the individual level are we willing to make decisions that support a clean environment?

Are we willing to extend regulations to businesses that require them to?

Those are the decisions that cause the issue.  If we could do everything with no pain or no cost, we would be fine.

However it costs money and effort to prevent pollution and sadly it costs even more to clean it up if we don't prevent it.

On an individual level many of us feel our decisions won't matter but of course its the sum of all those individual decisions that matter.  There is no acceptable level of pollution, it all contributes to climate change, polluted air and water and tons of plastic in our oceans.

Similarly we allow businesses to continue to contaminate the air, ground and water.

Some of course behave better than others and some regulations have been passed to curb the worst abuses, but we have seen a bit of a reversal.

We already have sites around the country that were polluted years ago and which are now extremely costly to clean up.  In many cases the original polluters are not available to pay for the clean up leaving the cost to us.  Inevitably, without control we will have the same problem own the road.