I agree there were so many screw-ups in the response, especially in the early days. China insisting upon secrecy until it spread across the globe, the WHO’s confusing statements on the efficacy of masks in order to preserve supplies for the front lines, the ridiculous pro-masker vs anti-masker mentality, the Trump fiasco where he suggested doctors use lemon fresh Lysol or whatever the hell he was on about to disinfect people’s lungs as if he has a goddamed clue, the alt-right losing their minds over a dangerous vaccine with Bill Gates computer chips in it, etc.
But remember CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer? Scientists were like “Hey, guys. There’s a hole here. We need to stop using this crap or we dead.” And everyone banded together and stopped using CFCs, and the hole in the ozone layer closed happily ever after. Sometimes we can actually do it right. I don’t know, maybe it’ll take a crisis like losing Florida to the ocean for Americans to collectively give a shit again and start doing things right. Or maybe we’ll all die before we get a chance to see that happen.
Acid rain is another success story for “making a giant collective change to fix a nearly invisible problem”.
I think one major difference is that there are enormous companies and entire countries whose way of life truly depends on pumping fossil carbon out of the ground. It wasn’t that way for CFCs or NOx. Sure, Dow/DuPont/whomever surely lost some profitable investment in freon plants, but they had other business as well, and their old customers switched to buying the new refrigerants from the same suppliers.
My tinfoil hat says that DuPont/Dow was behind all of that as their patents were about to expire anyway. Now nobody else can produce their products cheaply and they get to sell their new pantended “safe” replacement.
It’s funny that when their patent for r-134a ran out they got it phased out for yf-1234.
yf-1234? That’s dumb, r-134a rolls off the tongue. Also, my tinfoil hat agrees with you.
The difference is that with banning CFCs, the vast majority of people weren’t even mildly inconvenienced. Dealing with COVID required some temporary personal sacrifice from everyone, and it was too much for half the population. Dealing with climate change requires major, permanent sacrifices from everyone, so I don’t see any way it will happen until most people are simply unable to maintain any semblance of their current lifestyles.
And the time for that was before we hot record ocean temps killing off all of florida’s coral. Things are accelerating past the point we could have done anything. Any time now the antarctic ice sheet is going to calve into the southern ocean which, on its own will lead to nearly a meter of ocean level rise - this is now a sure thing. The time to act like we did on the ozone layer was probably some time in the 90s.
