Originally Posted By: PandaBear
I know there are already people that support ban of anything, but is it just me that think there are people that are against ban of anything?
No, not just you. A lot of people fall into the habit of supporting whatever their "team" supports, and opposing whatever the "enemy" supports, no matter what.
There are a lot of good reasons why we shouldn't use materials that cause damage. One lead weight sitting on the side of the road isn't going to hurt anything. The problem is in the aggregate, over time.
Someone said the roads aren't sitting on water. That's true, and not true. The road sits on dirt, but there is groundwater below that. And what sits next to the roads? Cornfields. A tiny amount of lead leeches off the weights every time it rains. Some of that lead gets into the ground water, some of it is taken up by the crops, which is then taken up by the people who eat it. Over time, the levels of lead slowly increase. Maybe it won't hurt most people, but it will change things at the margins. There will be kids who would have been fine, but who aren't because they got exposed to just a little bit more lead and ended up getting sick. There will be A LOT of people who will have no acute symptoms, but who will have generally lower IQ scores and be generally less able to learn. Over the span of time and the nation, this will harm us.
It's the tragedy of the commons. We get no direct signals that what we are doing is harmful, so we keep doing it. And so does everyone else. And eventually, the cumulative effect of all of those behaviors builds up and cause harm to everyone.
Same thing with CO2. We need it in the air. It is important, it keeps the planet habitable. But too much will cause problems. We can't control natural sources, but that's ok because natural sources tend to balance out with other natural process. Every time we exhale or flatulate, there is a plant or a microbe somewhere who will use it. But the problem is in unnatural sources. If we are pumping so much co2 out that it upsets the balance, there will be trouble. So we need to find a way to not cause harm, by not pumping out as much as we reasonably can.
(As well as planting as many plants as we can. I'm a big believer in that side of "conservation". Mayor Daley in Chicago created a green roof on top of the city hall. The plants up there absorb a lot of the heat and reduce the need for cooling the building. And they eat up a significant portion of the co2 that the building generates (not directly, of course). Things like that hurt no one, and help a little bit.
(As an example, remember that guy in Ukraine that was running for president and got poisoned with benzine? He got one big dose, and it hurt him. But if he'd have gotten a series of much smaller doses, but over time, he would have been a goner. He would have had far less poison in his system in total, but the ways he got it would have been bad.)