De-industrilization of the US from the seventies to the present

[Toolmaker51]

Those huge container ships are silently creating a very real environmental hazards. In addition as they get larger and larger, they are creating logistical nightmares that the builders should have seen coming, but did not bother to look for or to care about.

Just like auto manufacturing ignored ecology, as fashion decimated beaver populations, or buffalo herds for tiny portion of carcass, selling anything rarely involves thought of the future. I compare it to adverts declaring "It's Fun", or why no vacation approaches vision imparted by travel posters.

[mklotz]

Just like auto manufacturing ignored ecology, as fashion decimated beaver populations, or buffalo herds for tiny portion of carcass, selling anything rarely involves thought of the future. I compare it to adverts declaring "It's Fun", or why no vacation approaches vision imparted by travel posters.

It seems the that when a given activity starts it has only a very small impact on the resource/ecology/humanity and so it's easy to minimize and ignore that impact. No projection is made of when the impact will be enough to require addressing it and no plan is made for how to address it so, when that point is reached, no plan is in place.

On to two of my favorite current concerns like this...

When you erect a wind-powered generator, it extracts energy from the wind. There aren't enough generators yet to impact the earth's weather systems but, as power demands grow and oil and nuclear are increasingly shunned, who can say how they will proliferate? To my knowledge, no one is studying the problem, especially the case of limited 'local' weather effects.

The same concern exists with large scale photovoltaic arrays. Currently, the largest here in Kalifornia covers 4700 acres and has eight million collectors (https://www.power-technology.com/fea...-power-plants/). Again, still not enough to be a great concern at the moment, but who can say what the future holds?