Let’s see what Project Censored has come up with as their top 25 “censored” stories of 2021. “Censored” has a broad definition here which includes “under-reported”. News stories are under-reported when there is no market for them in our mostly profit-driven media. Anyway, here are a handful that caught my eye:

• “Coastal darkening” – I hadn’t heard this term, but it encompasses organic matter in the water (from farms and urban runoff and wastewater), algal blooms, and sediment stirred up by human activity. These are all forms of water pollution scientists and engineers have been familiar with for a long time. Solutions are known, but the scale of the problem and cost of dealing with it is difficult. Our industrialized, urbanized, heavily populated civilization creates these forms of pollution. We should appreciate that a lot of money and hard work go on behind the scenes to make these problems much, much less bad than they would be if nothing was done – wastewater treatment, etc. But still, the scale of the problem is daunting to solve completely and we prefer to pay in environmental damage which affects everybody a little bit rather than divert the money and effort it would require to solve them completely. Under the basic economic principle of scarcity, something else would have to give if we did this, at least in the near- to medium-term. In the long term, there is a virtuous cycle where once we get started, technology tends to improve and we learn by doing. But cynical politicians elected on 2-4 year cycles are not going to pitch these ideas to the public, even if they understand them.
• The pollutants mentioned above (organic matter, nutrients, etc.) are yucky but at least biodegradable. Another article is about microplastics and PFAS in the ocean. They are going to be there until the end of time now, but we could start working on trying not to add more of them.
• “tens of thousands of satellites” – driven by civilian communications but inevitably useful for military applications. Companies like SpaceX are getting billions of dollars of military-industrial-complex money.
• factory farming creates a risk for future pandemics – the article is about “U.S. factory farming”, but even if we invented it, it is being done all over the world, and the scale of what is done in Asia dwarfs anything the U.S. or Europe does at this point
• things are not good for Amazon (the rain forest)
• You could think of the social cost of past carbon emissions by industrial economies as a kind of debt owed to countries that are less industrialized or have industrialized more recently. That would mean that they have taken up much more than their fair share of the atmosphere’s and ocean’s ability to absorb emissions over time. The US, UK and Europe would probably prefer to focus on their share of current annual emissions rather than their share of cumulative emissions since they got the first lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings and burned them a couple centuries ago.
• The sky is up, the Earth is down, and US drug prices are still insane. The article estimates the human toll of this in terms of premature deaths.