"Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars"
About this Quote
The line is engineered to puncture a familiar, lazy storyline: that modern life only ever means more pollution. Diamond isn’t offering a feel-good fun fact; he’s smuggling in a theory of history. By pairing “30 percent better” with the blunt reality of “more people driving more cars,” he creates a controlled paradox that forces the reader to admit something uncomfortable for both sides of the culture war: environmental outcomes are not simple thermometers of population or consumption.
The intent is pragmatic and political. Diamond, a chronicler of long arcs and unintended consequences, uses a measurable improvement to argue that institutions matter. Regulations, enforcement, catalytic converters, cleaner fuels, and litigation-by-public-pressure can outperform sheer growth in demand. In other words, technology helps, but policy is the plot twist.
The subtext pushes back against two temptations. One is fatalism: the idea that environmental decline is baked in, so why bother. The other is complacency: “We solved it, so relax.” The “even though” clause does most of the rhetorical work, implying that progress required deliberate counterweights to market forces. It also hints at fragility: if improvement happened against the current, it can reverse when the current strengthens (through deregulation, weak enforcement, or new sources of emissions).
Contextually, this is late-20th-century America’s Clean Air Act legacy distilled into a sentence - a case study in how collective action can beat arithmetic, at least for a while. Diamond’s larger project is to show that collapse isn’t inevitable, but neither is rescue.
The intent is pragmatic and political. Diamond, a chronicler of long arcs and unintended consequences, uses a measurable improvement to argue that institutions matter. Regulations, enforcement, catalytic converters, cleaner fuels, and litigation-by-public-pressure can outperform sheer growth in demand. In other words, technology helps, but policy is the plot twist.
The subtext pushes back against two temptations. One is fatalism: the idea that environmental decline is baked in, so why bother. The other is complacency: “We solved it, so relax.” The “even though” clause does most of the rhetorical work, implying that progress required deliberate counterweights to market forces. It also hints at fragility: if improvement happened against the current, it can reverse when the current strengthens (through deregulation, weak enforcement, or new sources of emissions).
Contextually, this is late-20th-century America’s Clean Air Act legacy distilled into a sentence - a case study in how collective action can beat arithmetic, at least for a while. Diamond’s larger project is to show that collapse isn’t inevitable, but neither is rescue.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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