We might want to prevent them from owning our candidates, legislators and judges first.
This may be a long-overdue self-correction.
Global infertility may just be what solves global warming.
How many destitute families are you sheltering in your home?
The world is polluted, and heating up. The most obvious parameter of that is this: the sheer number of people.
You can like people and be on board with the idea that there is such a thing as too many people in one place at one time. The extreme example of that is crowding incidents in which people die, like the one in Seoul this Halloween. No, it's not always "the more, the merrier".
Buildings, vehicles, and various structures and equipment which support or carry people all have maximum occupancies.
Maybe, so do planets?
This is the worst argument ever. I'm not sure what kind of fallacy it is, but it's a really really bad argument.
It's even worse than the "if you really wanted to lose weight you'd find a way, so obviously you just don't care that you are overweight" argument.
In the EU the manufacturer needs to prove the ingredients are safe.
In the US they need to prove they're not harmful. "not harmful" != "safe"
You already lost.
I don't want to diminish the importance of a paradigm shift in how regulators treat various chemicals, but I don't think this will be anywhere near as severe and immediate threat as climate change.
Ultimately, if there is a substantial pool of people who's fertility is not adversely impacted by some yet to be identified chemical, then it will be those people who's genes will pass on. Within a generation we as a species will have developed resistance to at least the impact on fertility by some unregulated chemical.
I get the sense we (as in all of us collectively) are not taking it seriously enough. I wonder where this "fearmongering" is happening. A lot of stuff that is happening (the Western US drought that seems to be the worst in a millenium plus the consequent heavy use of groundwater, triple dip la nina, etc.) seem like they should worry us more than they actually are.
Objectively, “climate change” was happening on this planet allegedly since it was born 4.6 billion years ago. It’s a natural course of things.
To understand the scope of fear mongering you can look what “priests” were saying 10 years ago and how much of their predictions came out as true. It’s quite interesting. They use shortness of human memory.
By this logic, plenty of species have died out in the 4.6 billion years of earth and so we should do nothing about the demographic crisis in many countries. After all it’s all just life and life will go on.
You can try to change global things like earth orbit or natural course of time with same result.
To understand how stupid “climate change” ideas are, you can simply look if it’s preachers are doing anything following their preachings. They fly private jets and then tell regular people about “offsetting carbon footprint”.
It’s all about money and power, nothing else. Climate change is of no interest to them.
The truth is the truth - regardless of who tells it to you.
But what if it's some other random thing that also gives people heart attacks?
If you want a more thorough list, the NIH compiled this
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What are some common endocrine disruptors?
Bisphenol A (BPA) — used to make polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins, which are found in many plastic products including food storage containers
Dioxins — produced as a byproduct in herbicide production and paper bleaching, they are also released into the environment during waste burning and wildfires
Perchlorate — a by-product of aerospace, weapon, and pharmaceutical industries found in drinking water and fireworks
Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) — used widely in industrial applications, such as firefighting foams and non-stick pan, paper, and textile coatings
Phthalates — used to make plastics more flexible, they are also found in some food packaging, cosmetics, children’s toys, and medical devices
Phytoestrogens — naturally occurring substances in plants that have hormone-like activity, such as genistein and daidzein that are in soy products, like tofu or soy milk
Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) — used to make flame retardants for household products such as furniture foam and carpets
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) — used to make electrical equipment like transformers, and in hydraulic fluids, heat transfer fluids, lubricants, and plasticizers
Triclosan — may be found in some anti-microbial and personal care products, like liquid body wash
> Phytoestrogens — naturally occurring substances in plants that have hormone-like activity, such as genistein and daidzein that are in soy products, like tofu or soy milk
Your comment doesn’t explicitly say that Phytoestrogens are only present in soy, but it should be clear that such compounds are extremely common, even though people tend to single out soy (largely because soy has been the most studied for potentially positive health reasons.
Phytoestrogens are present in many different grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, vegetables, etc [0]
You have to carefully read product labels, 99.9% of products don't contain any info about EDC's, you have to specially seek out ones that are labeled as phthalate-free, BPA-free, etc.
Biggest offenders are in the kitchen and bathroom. Shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, perfume, are big offenders. There are special versions of these products you can find but they don't usually work as well. Most things that are scented have phthalates. Pretty much any food that comes in a flexible plastic container, most dairy and eggs have it as well (dairy because of the flexible plastic tubing used when pumping milk).
One example of a source for milk: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23138015/
Also - products which would not reasonably be produced with, say, "phtalate" - would probably not be labeled phtalate-free anyway. So one first needs to know which "X-free" labels to look for.
But yeah, specifically the thing to look for is "phthalate-free".
So do I get super sperm or something?
On the other hand, people in more industrial countries are exposed to different chemicals (BPA, FPOAs, flame retardants, food additives, etc.), than people in more agrarian countries (field chemicals, like fertilizers and pesticides). These chemicals are all harmful, but it's hard to blame a single class of them for a global problem.
If I had to pick a truly universal issue, I would say childhood and young adult obesity. Surprisingly, obesity is growing rapidly even in countries where hunger is also a problem.
- Tons of popular and legal products/chemicals are "endocrine disruptors"[1]
- The FDA/EPA doesn't deny that, they don't themselves even really test for long-term health effects in humans (too difficult). Instead they give animals a 1000x or more does and look for immediate drastic effects (i.e. dies in a few days).
- The attitude on a lot of chemicals is "Safe until proven guilty," but when some of these chemicals are suspect (e.g. pesticides) instead of a public announcement they are pulled from public use quietly prior to the point of definitive evidence. New/similar ones can be introduced with presumption of safe until proven guilty. (Search PFOAs if you want to get a sense of how ineffective our protection mechanisms are)
I came to the conclusion a radically new model is necessary, the EPA/FDA need to design models to test for fertility effects, perhaps multigenerationally, in their studies (fruit flies?) quickly.
My bet is within 20 years we'll see it as the more immediate problem than global warming.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor