Quote Originally Posted by Ibi View Post
It's probably impossible to quantify how much of an effect this "trickle down" has, if it even has one.
It is virtually impossible without removing it. As an environmental scientist, I view this as an ecosystem where every aspect is interconnected whether it's immediately apparent or not. If you remove one aspect of it, it has trickle effects that would be impossible to predict. If there is one thing I think human's (should have) learned by now with all of the environmental degradation we have done is to not mess with ecosystems. Here is an interesting story of unexpected consequences:

“In the early 1950s, there was an outbreak of a serious disease called malaria amongst the Dayak people in Borneo. The World Health Organization tried to solve the problem. They sprayed large amounts of a chemical called DDT to kill the mosquitoes that carried the malaria. The mosquitoes died and there was less malaria. That was good. However, there were side effects. One of the first effects was that the roofs of people's houses began to fall down on their heads. It turned out that the DDT was also killing a parasitic wasp that ate thatch-eating caterpillars. Without the wasps to eat them, there were more and more thatch-eating caterpillars. Worse than that, the insects that died from being poisoned by DDT were eaten by gecko lizards, which were then eaten by cats. The cats started to die, the rats flourished, and the people were threatened by outbreaks of two new serious diseases carried by the rats, sylvatic plague and typhus. To cope with these problems, which it had itself created, the World Health Organization had to parachute live cats into Borneo.”