Honey, I Ruined the Planet! Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Industrial Revolution

While the Industrial Revolution was a very important catalyst for progress in many scientific fields during the 19th century, the long-term effects (and-- heck-- the short-term effects) may have been one of the early steps leading to an environmental nightmare.

As factories became commonplace, the output of smoke pollution ended up becoming a cause for concern, and with most people moving to cities for work, it had an adverse effect on health. A hundred years after the Industrial Revolution, the world's average temperature had risen by one degree celsius.

Answer: Coal

Fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, were created over millions of years of breakdown and build-up beneath the earth's surface and are considered a finite resource. One issue here is that much of our world's energy sources have come from these deposits, and removing them from the Earth means using them up.

The other issue with this is how dirty all of these fossil fuels are, both in obtaining and use; coal facilities and oil drilling contribute to significant greenhouse gas emissions.

It's believed that in 1900, one billion metric tonnes of carbon emissions were let into the atmosphere annually. A century later, that number multiplied by ten.

Answer: Freon

CFCs were first created by Thomas Midgley Jr. who, as it may have turned out, may have been one of the single-most destructive human beings on the planet. After Freon started getting use in refrigeration and cooling units, it ended up becoming an important part of aerosol cans and inhaler sprays. What wasn't known at the time was that these difficult-to-break-down compounds would have such an adverse effect on the atmosphere, depleting ozone and increasing greenhouse gas emissions to catastrophic levels. Oh yeah, and he also created leaded gasoline.

Some people.

Answer: Pesticide

DDT started seeing use as pesticide as early as the late 1930s and while it worked to an extent, the long-term effects it had on people and animals alike was enough to get it banned from use in most countries. Outlined in Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", DDT was determined to be carcinogenic to humans and outright toxic to small animals, and we were spraying it on our crops during the Second World War.

The ban of DDT in the United States was a turning point for several endangered species though the chemical's effect on waterways, soil composition, and birdlife continued long after.

Answer: Methyl isocyanate

A truly tragic case of poor upkeep, a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India emitted enough toxic gases in 1984 to suffocate thousands of local citizens, affecting hundreds of thousands who inhaled the toxic methyl isocyanate. Additionally, the leak caused immediate problems with local water supplies, soil deposits, and river ecosystems. Thirty years after the incident, chemicals were still confirmed to be leaking from damaged parts of the plant.

Answer: Beijing, China

While China's insistence that air quality would improve in time for the twenty-ninth Olympiad was enough to grant the bid, particulate levels closer to the event were said to reach levels that extended past the charts, more than double the expected concentration of pollution.

While China took measures to attempt to reduce emissions before the game (one idea being to allow people of certain license plates to drive on certain days), the air quality did not improve. Sources of the pollution can be tracked to heavy coal usage and the overwhelming emissions of vehicles and factories in urban China.

Answer: BP

The worst oil spill in history, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was destroyed in 2010 resulting in an uncapped oil well spilling over two hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico staining beaches as far away as Florida and damaging marine ecosystems in a nearly two hundred thousand square kilometer radius. BP (British Petroleum) was later found to be responsible due to negligence and was fined nearly nineteen billion dollars. Unsurprisingly, the spill sparked an increase in the deaths of marine creatures, partly due to increased toxicity when additional chemicals were used to disperse the oil slick.

Answer: Nuclear

Occurring in March 2011, following an earthquake and tsunami in the North Pacific (one of the largest earthquakes in modern history), the events in and around Fukushima Japan resulted in the largest nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl, releasing significant amounts of nuclear material into the atmosphere for several days following the event.

While none died during the meltdown, it was expected that radiation from the event would have significant long-term health effects, keep hundreds of thousands of citizens displaced, and would continue to leak into groundwater.

Answer: Lead

This crisis began in 2014 and stretched across several years. It started with complaints about bad-tasting water and investigations led researchers to find an astounding amount of lead in the supply as well as traces of E.Coli bacteria. A state of emergency was soon declared, leading the citizens of Flint to be restricted to bottled water supplies indefinitely as the entire network of water piping throughout the city would need to be replaced to remove traces of lead. Unsurprisingly, the concern about clean drinking water was a major issue; another after the fact is the replacement piping which, all in all, would require significant groundwork in Flint and the surrounding area.

Answer: Green

In an ironic twist, while Brazil claimed to have one of the greenest and most environmentally-friendly games to date, their diving pools turned a sickly green prior to competitions, hinting at improper chemical usage and poor water conditions. The water was most certainly poor outside the venues as well, hinting at much greater concerns for Brazil's impact on the oceanfront. Guanabara Bay, holding a number of sailing and surfing events, was allegedly overloaded with trash prior to the games, and concerns about untreated sewage dumping into the bay were rampant.