environmental hygiene

What is personal hygiene? It is basically about not doing things that could make you sick, generally regarding cleanliness. You don't pick up dirty food from the floor and stick it in your mouth. It is not hygienic. This is true even if you are not positive it will make you sick and you don't even know exactly what disease you could get. It just isn't worth the risk.

On the other hand, we have the 10 second rule, which says that if some food hits the floor and you pick it up pretty quickly, you can still eat it. This is because we assume that the risk of this situation is small enough that we don't want to lose that Oreo cookie.

So lets transfer this idea to the environment. You should not stick stuff into the environment that could make it sick. We may not have perfect data on what exactly it will do or what the precise consequences are, but we should know not to do it. On the other hand, we have think up some 10 second rules for things of low risk.

So I am not an "environmentalist" or at least not the way that it is interpreted in the public domain. I just believe in practicing good environmental hygiene. I don't care if the evidence on global warning is 100% sure or not. All I know is that sending up tons of greenhouse gases into the environment is not good hygiene, and I think we should stop doing it.