Good, so we have shown that we can make a difference. That means the defeatist argument ("we can't, so what's the point") does not hold, and we can proceed to actually do something. Patting ourselves on the shoulder that something has been done in the past will not help.
We actually do need action, and the whole “we can’t do anything so why try” argument was never made in good faith to begin with. Rather it’s just one barrier of many in a game of political trench warfare. The bottom line is that we have incumbent industries that make money from the status quo and they maximize income by running out the clock.
Even if that isn't the case, planting trees is still a long term move, and it's going to take at least several hundred billion trees to make a difference. It's not something where you can say "just plant trees, and everything will be alright."
has the word "albedo" mentioned six times. This is what you are alluding to:
"In the near term and locally, says Saatchi, forest restoration may actually have a warming effect. As the trees mature, the new forest canopy cover would presumably make Earth’s surface albedo darker"
Ditching CFS is laudable. Ditching oil is a bit harder.
I remember the hole in the ozone layer thing from start to not being quite finished (there are still a few holdouts in some parts of the world)
I remember the breathless announcements on the TV news and realizing that the underarm deodorant I was using was a wrong one and doing fuck all about it (I was a teenager.) The manufacturer of that deodorant switched chemicals.
I remember fridges and freezers being dumped because they were using the "wrong" refrigerants by well meaning owners. Could they have been re-gassed up with a non CFC and continued to work? No idea but I suspect that a lot of waste was generated.
Pollution is hard to deal with, it's so easy to emit and so hard to withdraw. At the risk of trivializing the issue: try farting in front of your parents-in-law or considering doing it in front of 'er Maj Queen Elizabeth and considering the consequences.
Ditching fossil fuels substantially isn't hard, it's just expensive. If we'd been willing to take the economic hit (and able to co-ordinate doing so as a species) we could have kept emissions well below the current atmospheric level within the bounds of current technology. It would just have meant building a lot of nuclear power plants and using shitty batteries for a lot of stuff
Sure, but ditching your 20-year old beater of a car for a new electric one is not viable for a large percentage of the population at the moment, even in the richest countries. Maybe when 20-year old beater EVs are a thing the tide will turn.
I agree about nuclear, though. We should have been doubling down on them years ago, if only as a stop-gap until the renewable power storage problem has been solved. Although I'm of the opinion that they should be a solid percentage of our power output until fusion plants are viable. Our energy needs are only going to go up in the future.
> Sure, but ditching your 20-year old beater of a car for a new electric one is not viable for a large percentage of the population at the moment, even in the richest countries. Maybe when 20-year old beater EVs are a thing the tide will turn.
That's part of the coordinating as a species problem.
I didn't word this very well. What I mean is that there are/were no huge engineering challenges involved. We can't build a space elevator at any price, we can massively reduce our emissions by 'merely' spending a truly unfathomable amount of money
Do you have a source on it being such a large amount of money? My impression is that just like water rights we've priced the externality so low that a lot of things weren't done even though they were cheap. Here's a 2007 analysis putting the cost at less than 1% GDP:
What makes ditching fossil fuels on a civilization scale difficult is that ditching fossil fuels on an individual level is only easy for a portion of the population - a portion very much over represented on HN. If it were easy for all individuals to ditch fossil fuels (sorta the level of easy it is for all individuals to use paper instead of plastic straws) we'd pass some laws and ordinances and get it done in the blink of the eye. There would be push back sure - there are always reactionaries for everything - but the problem with EVs (and the problem that increased battery production scale might solve for us soon) is that it's expensive to switch to an EV and if America has spent more than a hundred years struggling to try and actually keep a roof[1] over everyone's head - getting a car in their pocket isn't going to be any easier.
1. I know it might feel the opposite at first glance when you think of how much EVs cost compared to a house in SF - but bear in mind that houses can be built extremely inexpensively.
Cash for clunkers anyone? How much waste did that create...turn in a 20 year old Civic and get a bunch of money to buy a brand new vehicle that probably gets worse MPG.
Perhaps what you say is part of the problem, though usually MPG improves with newer vehichle versions?
Change it over to "Cheap EV for clunkers", the government could/should cover most of the financials and it's a win for the car owner and the environment.
I think it could be argued that it's the government's job to fund things like this. Vision is all that's required!
A lot of older cars had excellent MPG figures but actually polluted more than current cars, especially diesels. Also, cars have largely gotten bigger and heavier, which hurts efficiency.
> Also, cars have largely gotten bigger and heavier
... In the US/Canada. This is for the most part a self-contained cultural problem.
SUVs/trucks numbers are a small percentage of the vehicles on the road elsewhere in the world, mostly because there is no space for them in the road/city infrastructure in most other places.
Except CFCs have been on the rise [1] because not all countries follow the ban. They are a more potent GHG that fall right in the middle of the atmospheric window. It's a big deal...
Oh, so this is about the indirect effect of UV on plant growth reducing carbon uptake. Cool study. CFCs are also
highly potent greenhouse gasses due to their long atmospheric residence time and the fact they have very different absorption spectra than everything else out there.
The Montreal Protocol is a lot like the chemical weapons ban: a ban of something the rich and powerful really don’t need that is incidentally the right thing to do. This kind of enforcement regime will work on fossil fuels in about 20 years when we have fusion power, but until then incentives are too greatly against it.
This article is an interesting retrospective on some really good environmental moves the world has undertaken and may serve to help wash away doubt folks have about the ability for global cooperation to actually materialize buuuut... Gosh that title is just itching to be abused by apologists, we've managed to not end mankind in a whole bunch of ways during the past century - some people were quite convinced that a nuclear apocalypse was going to be the inevitable conclusion to the cold war.