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.
