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by hinoki 9 hours ago
We did a reasonable job with ozone depletion, but that has much lower costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

4 comments

The cost of not addressing it is more distributed: at some point you can't go outside anymore since the UV index is so high, sunscreen can't block high-intensity UV-B and UV-C, plants get damaged to the point of catastrophic crop failures... you can live in denial about climate change in developed countries (for a limited time anyway) but ozone affects everyone.
True but at the time the ozone hole was mostly over the Antarctic so the average person didn't feel its effects which wouldn't then contribute to the change in policy.
I find the reverse of this argument significantly more compelling.
I get where you're coming from - our vantage point has a lot to do with that though. The average member of the public never had to sacrifice or even know about ozone, and there's so much complexity to climate science. People have a surface deep impression of what stands to be lost and they're working against a powerful propaganda machine. Virtually all extractive industry makes the problem worse, whether cattle farming, timber, energy, etc.
Yesterday there was an article here about ozone vs aluminum from the spacex sattelites reentry (which soon there will be plenty of)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062120

“Plasma Tunnels Reveal How Dying Satellites Fall to Earth” (ieee.org)

Acid rain as well.
Indeed. But still amazed we did anything about it, since it didn’t immediately affect population centers or cause economic impacts.

I just can’t see the same happening in today’s political climate…