Yet, according to the UN, 7 million people die annually from air pollution.

The theme for this year’s World Environment Day is air pollution. All around the world — from megacities to small villages — people are breathing dirty air. An estimated 9 out of 10 people worldwide are exposed to air pollutants that exceed World Health Organization (WHO) air quality guidelines. This is lowering life expectancy and damaging economies across the planet.

To improve air quality, we must know our enemy. Deaths and illnesses from air pollution are caused by tiny particles that penetrate our defences every time we fill our lungs. These particles come from many sources: the burning of fossil fuels for power and transport; the chemicals and mining industries; the open burning of waste; the burning of forests and fields; and the use of dirty indoor cooking and heating fuels, which are major problems in the developing world.

This polluted air kills some 7 million people each year, causes long-term health problems, such as asthma, and reduces children’s cognitive development. According to the World Bank, air pollution costs societies more than $5 trillion every year.

But gee, common sense air pollution regulation, designed to address the simple truth about breathing toxic air, makes “businesses” less competitive in our “globalized markets”. In other words, regulations designed to keep the air we breath from becoming too toxic for continued human survival, cuts into the profits of “America's corporation's” competitiveness in the global market.

What's that quote from the bible about Rich people getting into heaven? (Fucking hypocrites)

Gee, with out clean water, we die. From BusinessInsider.com

Even in the wake of the Flint water crisis, which exposed around 10,000 residents in Michigan to lead-contaminated drinking water, an estimated tens of millions of Americans are still exposed to unsafe drinking water each year.

And capitalism's response has been to “bottle” water and sell it to us, but even that water isn't safe. From a different article at BusinessInsider.com

But not all bottled water is necessarily free of contaminants. A recent round of tests from the Center for Environmental Health (CEH) found "high levels" of arsenic in bottled water brands owned by Whole Foods and Keurig Dr Pepper.

Exposure to arsenic, a contaminant found naturally in the earth's crust, has been linked to brain-development issues in children and can lead to an increased risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

Gee, we're buying poisoned bottle water, ain't that great! But hey, you can sign up for our new medical subscription service that treats symptoms, but does not cure disease!

Isn't Capitalism just wonderful, golly I love it!

But wait, that's not all, included with your purchase of our arsenic poisoned bottled water, we're going to give you a heaping does of, yes you guessed it, MICROPLASTICS, Tell'em George, absolutely free with e-v-e-r-y purchase!

From theGuardian

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has announced a review into the potential risks of plastic in drinking water after a new analysis of some of the world’s most popular bottled water brands found that more than 90% contained tiny pieces of plastic. A previous study also found high levels of microplastics in tap water.

In the new study, analysis of 259 bottles from 19 locations in nine countries across 11 different brands found an average of 325 plastic particles for every litre of water being sold.

In one bottle of Nestlé Pure Life, concentrations were as high as 10,000 plastic pieces per litre of water. Of the 259 bottles tested, only 17 were free of plastics, according to the study.

Nestle, that corporate monster who wants to privatize all drinking water on the planet, was getting 400 gallons a minute from aquifers that feed lake Michigan, FREE, while the residents in Flint were being charged the some of the highest water rates in the nation, for POISONED WATER!, as this DemocracyNow video explains.

[video:https://youtu.be/gCl-3WwkJgg]

As Flint residents are forced to drink, cook with and even bathe in bottled water, while still paying some of the highest water bills in the county for their poisoned water, we turn to a little-known story about the bottled water industry in Michigan. In 2001 and 2002, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality issued permits to Nestlé, the largest water bottling company in the world, to pump up to 400 gallons of water per minute from aquifers that feed Lake Michigan.

This sparked a decade-long legal battle between Nestlé and the residents of Mecosta County, Michigan, where Nestlé’s wells are located. One of the most surprising things about this story is that, in Mecosta County, Nestlé is not required to pay anything to extract the water, besides a small permitting fee to the state and the cost of leases to a private landowner. In fact, the company received $13 million in tax breaks from the state to locate the plant in Michigan. The spokesperson for Nestlé in Michigan is Deborah Muchmore. She’s the wife of Dennis Muchmore—Governor Rick Snyder’s chief of staff, who just retired and registered to be a lobbyist. We speak with Peggy Case, Terry Swier and Glenna Maneke of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation.

Nestle has racked up 91 violations since 2000.

Oh, look, how nice, they get government socialism too, Nestle get's about 450 million in subsides.

Nestle is also spending 1.2 + million on lobbying in 2019.

Question? Didn't the Romans figure out, how many years ago?, that using lead to transport water, wasn't really a good idea?

Question? Where is this "innovation" Capitalists are always going on about? Where the fuck is their ability to provide, clean, uncontaminated drinking water?

Our air is toxic, our water is toxic, what about our soil?

Ironic that when I google, "Toxic soil in America farmlands", the 1st link is from the Economist.Com, about China...

TANG DONGHUA, a wiry 47-year-old farmer wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt, smokes a cigarette and gesticulates towards his paddy fields in the hills of southern Hunan province. The leaves of his rice plants poke about a foot above water. Mr Tang says he expects to harvest about one tonne of rice from his plot of a third of a hectare (0.8 acres) near the small village of Shiqiao. There is just one problem: the crop will be poisoned.

Egrets and damselflies chomp lazily on fish and insects in the humid valley below the paddy fields. But just beyond this rural scene lurks something discordant. Mr Tang points to a chimney around 2km away that belches forth white smoke. It belongs to the smelting plant which he blames for bringing pollution into the valley. Cadmium is released during the smelting of ores of iron, lead and copper. It is a heavy metal. If ingested, the liver and kidneys cannot get rid of it from the body, so it accumulates, causing joint and bone disease and, sometimes, cancer.

Hey, a lot of food we buy / consume, is from China so I reckon it makes sense?

But, according to Earth Institute at Columbia University,

A new study says that emissions from farms outweigh all other human sources of fine-particulate air pollution in much of the United States, Europe, Russia and China. The culprit: fumes from nitrogen-rich fertilizers and animal waste that combine in the air with industrial emissions to form solid particles—a huge source of disease and death. The good news: if industrial emissions decline in coming decades, as most projections say, fine-particle pollution will go down even if fertilizer use doubles as expected. The study appears this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Agricultural air pollution comes mainly in the form of ammonia, which enters the air as a gas from heavily fertilized fields and livestock waste. It then combines with pollutants from combustion—mainly nitrogen oxides and sulfates from vehicles, power plants and industrial processes—to create tiny solid particles, or aerosols, no more than 2.5 micrometers across, about 1/30 the width of a human hair. The particles can penetrate deep into lungs, causing heart or pulmonary disease; a 2015 study in the journal Nature estimates they cause at least 3.3 million deaths each year globally.

(bold emphasis mine)

Very troubling... “ emissions from farms outweigh all other human sources of fine-particulate air pollution in much of the United States, Europe, Russia and China”.

Okie dokie, we get to add another 3.3 million annual deaths from just “Farming” air pollution. Isn't capitalism great! So, over 10 million die annually from "total air pollution". Got it...

Then there's this from GreenBiz.Com:

Kirkham's expertise is in water and plant relations and heavy metal uptake, so she decided to conduct her own research in which she cultivated wheat plants exposed to microplastics, cadmium and both microplastics and cadmium. Then she compared these plants to those grown without either additive. She chose cadmium because it's poisonous, carcinogenic and ubiquitous in the environment due to human activity — it's shed from batteries and car tires, and is naturally found in the phosphate rock used to make agricultural fertilizers.

"Cadmium is everywhere," said Kirkham.

At the end of the experiment she sent her wheat plants off for analysis and, validating previous reports, the plants grown with microplastics were more cadmium-contaminated. "The plastics really were acting as the vector for uptake of the cadmium," she said.

Snip

"For decades, scientists have believed that plastic particles are too large to pass through the physical barriers of intact plant tissue. But our new study disproves this assumption," Luo told EHN.

Luo's team reported that the microplastics seemed to be entering the plants through cracks in the roots where lateral branching occurs as well as diffusing through cells at the developing root tips.

Capitalism has infected everything and everyone and it is killing us, but hey, we'll be rich when we die!