* The lowest opinion poll ratings ever for a newly elected UK Prime Minister
* Fresh splits and infighting in the Conservative Party
* Jacob Rees Mogg being touted as a serious candidate for leader of our country and then announcing that he has never changed a nappy for any of his 6 children because the nanny does that very well.
* The survivors of a fire caused by excessive de-regulation and austerity told that they can't be re-housed yet whilst homes in their borough continue to be traded as investment opportunities by international buyers.
* A widely publicised inept start to Brexit negotiations and a very little noticed commencement of negotiations on a free trade deal with the USA which will place UK sovereignty under the control of US corporate lawyers.
* The President of the United States hitting new lows of behaviour. This time by openly saying he hopes that his nation's health care system fails and asking his advisers how he can pardon himself from the crime of using Russian help to win the election.
* The UK Prime Minister refusing to publish a report on the funding of terrorism by Saudi Arabia because she thinks she wants to sell them powerful weapons worth billions.
What you ask could possibly outrank all that? The answer comes when you start thinking about the long term. Every one of the problems I have mentioned above could be fixed relatively quickly if we had the political will to do so. The thing that bothered me most can't be. It is a problem that has taken decades to create and will take decades more to overcome and we aren't showing the least sign of starting on that journey.
For me the most important information we got this week is that US scientists revealed that the world has produced 8.5 billion tonnes of plastic. Enough to equal 25,000 Empire State buildings. Only 30% of that is still in use. The remaining 70% has been disposed of somewhere. Of that total only 9% has been recycled. The rest is causing long term damage to the environment.
Start with the idea that 12% of the plastic that has been disposed of has been burnt. Even using the best and most carefully controlled scientific methods it is impossible to filter out every bit of health damaging PCBs from the furnaces. Which is why so many people in Keighley don't want a plastic incinerator built near them and also probably why the Conservatives chose to site it in a poor area where they thought not so many people would object to breathing poisonous air. A lot of plastic gets burnt in much more dangerous ways such as on open rubbish dumps in the Third World.
Then we come to the really long term problem. 79% of all the plastics that have ceased to be used are lying about somewhere. That could be as part of a landfill mountain. It could be littering the countryside. It could be gyrating round the ocean in a raft of visible muck or washing up on the remotest of Pacific Island beaches. Or it could be being eaten by turtles who mistake clear plastic bags for their normal food of jellyfish. Or consumed by plankton mistaking the billions of plastic particles in a face scrub or toothpaste for a healthy foodstuff. Finally, it could sink to the bottom of the deepest oceans where it has been filmed by highly specialist submarines searching for life that we know desperately little about. Apart from the fact that plastic is raining down on it in sufficient quantities to be found.
We are therefore covering the entire planet with a layer of plastic that can never be removed. In my book doing that when you don't really understand the consequences is every bit as dangerous as climate change.
Worryingly half of the world's plastic has been made in the last 13 years so we have doubled the problem in just over a decade. The rate of use of the material is increasing rapidly not reducing. We can therefore expect the current volume of waste to double again within the next decade as more and more people start to consume products that contain large amounts of it.
It isn't quick or easy to re-engineer the economy away from plastic use and plastic consumption. There are a few simple things that could be done such as passing laws to insist that drinks companies introduce bottle deposit schemes to incentivise return and re-use. Trading standards officers could be given the power to ban the sale of products containing excessive packaging so that every Christmas or Eid celebration isn't accompanied by a mountain of waste - most of which can't be re-cycled.
That kind of tinkering at the edges is extremely helpful but is never going to be enough. Essentially we have to redesign virtually every product we use to either be almost entirely recyclable or we have to switch rapidly to producing every product that is made anywhere on the planet without using plastics. That is why I say this challenge dwarfs every other issue I've read about this week.
It is a mind boggling difficult necessity to move human civilisation off its addiction to plastics. This kind of re-engineering takes decades and cannot be done without putting up costs. It also clashes with other important environmental priorities. For example there are very few solar panels that do not contain plastic compounds and it is far from clear that most solar panels have been built with a clear focus on being able to recycle them when they cease to be of use.
You'd have thought that with a problem of this size the various political parties would be vying with each other to explain what is necessary and to put our country at the front of the change in technology that is necessary. There again perhaps you wouldn't.
Any political party that is thoroughly responsible and doesn't want to burden future generations ought to be placing this issue centre ground in their policy objectives. Instead we do have a lot of talk from politicians about not burdening future generations. Unfortunately the burden our Conservative politician focus on is a debt mountain that they created by deregulating banks and then bailing them out when they failed. When it comes to the environment they don't seem so very keen on being responsible. Which is probably they gave the job of Environment Minister to Michael Gove.
Let us hope his sudden conversion from wanting to be best pals with Donald Trump doesn't prevent him from becoming a sincere champion of the changes that are necessary. Or rather let's not rely on hope. It's rather too late and too important an issue for that. Let's put him and every other politician around under as much pressure as we possibly can to start taking a responsible attitude to the environmental crises that surround us.