If you grew up in the Seventies as I did, you may carry the impression that we once faced environmental problems that were real—and that, by and large, we solved them. And you would be right. Those problems were tangible. Rivers you could not swim in because the water itself was hostile to life. School-free days in summer when heat trapped smog bubbles over cities so thick and yellow that breathing became an active effort. Acid rain supposedly killing entire forests—later revealed to be vastly overstated, but at the time convincing enough. Garbage everywhere, in nature, in rivers, along roadsides.
Much of that was fixed in the developed world. Quietly. Methodically. Without apocalyptic theater.
In my own country, the Mur River—biologically dead when I was a child—now hosts trout again. Actual fish, swimming, breeding, existing. The smog I remember, the biting yellow variant that turned summer into a respiratory endurance test, is gone entirely. Not reduced. Gone.
And yet, there are still real environmental issues left to tackle.
Here comes the paradox. Things began to get worse again—visibly worse—right around the time the climate cult spread its wings. After a brief lull in environmental damage, the bulldozers returned. Forests were razed. Green land flattened. All to make room for wind turbines the size of cathedrals and solar arrays stretching to the horizon like industrial graveyards.
Anyone who looks at endless fields of so-called green energy contraptions and does not recognize them as pollution is either making money from them or is profoundly deluded. When old forests are cut down to install these things, I have no trouble naming that act. It is destruction. Full stop.
And while we congratulate ourselves, the old, ugly forms of pollution still thrive—just not here. They thrive outside the developed world. Rivers choked with chemicals. Air unfit to breathe. Landfills masquerading as landscapes.
So how do we deal with that?
Easy. We stop pretending carbon is pollution and start addressing what actually is. Impose border adjustment taxes on imports from countries that produce real, measurable environmental damage. Not carbon quotas. Carbon is not pollution. Tariffs on conventional pollution. Toxic discharge. Heavy metals. Particulates. The stuff that kills rivers and lungs.
We already know how to do this. Carbon taxes showed us the mechanism. Let’s apply it to something real for once.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/01/30/real-environmental-crisis-is-not-climate-change/