[starik36]

It sounds like you are quite young compared to me. They were talking about it in the late 80s while I was in high school. I remember Al Gore in the 90s was saying that Florida will be under water in 10 years or something like that. So this conversation has been going on for a long time.

> 15 years later nothing has been done about it.

That is absolutely is not true. When I moved to SoCal in the 80s, for the first six months I didn't realize there was a mountain nearby because of all the pollution and resulting haziness. You can clearly see it today because the cars have gotten a lot cleaner. This is just one anecdote.

[belval]

I meant nothing was done w.r.t CO2/CH4-based global warming. I think some form of pollution (smog/acid rain/CFC) were tackled surprisingly efficiently because they didn't require a complete rethinking of our lifestyle.

[lkbm]

It took us a long time, but overall emissions in the US are down about 10% from their peak in 2005, even when you adjust for us exporting manufacturing to elsewhere. This only brings us down to ~1996 levels, but it's a good sign. Per capita, we're back down below 1990 levels[0]. (I think this is mostly from some energy-efficiency improvements and less coal, though a lot of that has just shifted to natural gas[1].)

It's not nearly enough, and may be overwhelmed by China and India's development, but significant positive change is happening. It just took us until ~2007 to really get things moving.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...