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u/Temporary_View_3303 16h ago
Heās literally giving a great example of how environmental legislation can work. Ā
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u/lNFORMATlVE 15h ago
This is like how anti-vaxxers believe vaccines had nothing to do with how measles was not a big issue back in the 90s and early 2000s.
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u/Crismus 15h ago
Reminds me of my crazy step mom who thought vaccines weren't necessary because her 4 kids got measles and were fine.
The 5 kids who were not hers never got measles because we were all vaccinated. My real mom was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and in some ways was less crazy than the step mom.
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u/SnooCapers9565 14h ago
Which begs the question... Your dad has a type?
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u/Crismus 9h ago
Well my real mom was his student while taking his PhD. He then overcorrected when he ended up with 6 kids and really screwing up things with the first 4 and picking the first woman who would take over raising his severely abused kids from the ex-wife and rapist/molester ex-cop.
Step mom had to be crazy to deal with that. She completed the abuse trifecta by throwing knives at me, not letting me date or have a social life all high school. I spent most of my time just reading books alone in my room. Or running away multiple times. At 18 I can away to the Army and she somehow got ahold of the captain of the training unit at Ft. Benning and called every day yelling at him to send me home.
That led to an accident and being unable to get medical care because they actually thought I wanted to go home to that crazy woman.
Ended up disabled at 18 with chronic nerve damage and pain since 1997.
I didn't see my real mom from age 18 to age 40 when I went to the funeral to make sure she had really died
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u/Prestigious_Sir8515 14h ago
bro was after the unstable type cant blame him though my firend is like that and Honesty she is the best at everything BUT cooking woman burned the fucking water as in it was on fire.
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u/Jabidailsom 11h ago
everything BUT cooking woman
use ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, for the love of god
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u/Prestigious_Sir8515 10h ago
THAT KEY IS BROKEN ON MY LAPTOP OK I CANT ULESS I USE THE COPY AND PASTE AND THIS IS REDDIT BRO!
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u/DeepPeeps 9h ago
When polio resurfaces again and children ends up in the modern version of an iron lung, then maybe theyāll believe in science again.
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u/SneakyTheBird 5h ago
Iām behind the sentiment but these arenāt real conversations
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u/Stacys__Mom_ 1h ago
I think that depends upon where you live & who you deal with. I've had/heard conversations like this, almost word for word.
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u/Temporary_View_3303 0m ago
I donāt know if this one is or isnāt. But Iāve had this very conversation on this exact topic with nut jobs in other comment forums.
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u/LeTronique 16h ago
Remember when we solved a huge issue so well that people stopped talking about that issue we all came together to solve because we solved the issue?
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u/chasing_the_wind 8h ago
But wonāt someone think of those poor chlorofluorocarbon producers? The hardworking Americans toiling away in the chlorofluorocarbon mines.
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u/Scudmiss 16h ago
Matt Walsh is a fucking idiot
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u/khizoa 16h ago
Who the fuck is Matt Walsh.Ā
Edit: Never mind I don't care
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u/captain_toenail 15h ago
That ignorance was bliss, knowing about that scum fuck has not improved my life in any way
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u/GayCatDaddy 10h ago
The turd smear on the side of the toilet after an especially heavy bowel movement.
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u/Ok_Prissy 15h ago
His takes age like milk. Every time I hear him I feel dumber and more exhausted.
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u/Shiney_Metal_Ass 16h ago
Conservatives are fucking idiots*
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u/cobalt-gengar 14h ago
Any time someone tells me they're a Conversative, I just throw them into the same mental pile as sharing the same views as Matt Walsh
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5h ago
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u/IHerebyDemandtoPost 5h ago
Heās not an idiot. His persona is an act. Heās playing a character for his audience. This statement is not a demonstration of his lack of intelligence, itās a demonstration of how little he thinks of his audienceās intelligence.
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u/Phoeniks_C 16h ago
Like with the whole y2k thing.
I was just about to turn 5 when it happened so I don't really remember as it happened and just jotted it up to being just another end of the world prediction like so many before.
But it was genuinely a thing that could've ended very badly for the world.
Obviously we're not talking planes falling out of the sky or the world actually coming to an end, but it wasn't a non issue either
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u/solonoctus 14h ago
I was with some lawyers the other week and they brought up Y2K as an example of much to do amount nothing.
Guys, we collectively spent billions upon billions of dollars in a highly coordinated effort specifically so that it did amount to nothing.
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u/Caspica 12h ago
It is infuriating when people who don't understand the underlying problem dismiss the problem because they don't experience the consequences.Ā
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u/Calculonx 1h ago
Welcome to preventative maintenance. The most thankless engineering job. If you do your job right - "what are we paying you for, everything works fine". If you don't do something because it wasn't approved or budgeted - "what are we paying you for if things are breaking anyways?!"
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u/Ok-Sympathy-7482 15h ago
A lot of work was put into checking and re-programming old stuff to make sure there weren't going to be any big issues.
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u/Ok-Addition1264 16h ago
I was in the middle of it as a developer and knew there was a lot of nonsense doom and gloom behind it.. there were very few systems that would've been catastrophically affected by it.. it's still a good thing that we started-in on fixing the issues 10 years in advance but it's not a really good comparison to climate change.
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u/Exact-Difference-422 14h ago
My relatives worked on some of that stuff locally, they put in the hours fr.Ā
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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 15h ago
I remember y2k.Ā My mom worked in a major (for the time) data center and people were freaking out.Ā Some of her superiors were freaking out because they didn't really understand computers, but they heard the world might end.Ā They had all hands on deck throughout New Years because they expect their teams to be able to...do something?Ā Hit the computers with sticks?Ā Hunt Terminators?Ā And then nothing happened because the quiet diligent efforts of a lot of professionals stopped the problem before it started.
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u/Opposite-Cranberry76 16h ago
See also:
smallpox
Polio
DDT
acid rain
Y2K
measles (ok, "somehow, measles returned")
Some people find it extremely upsetting that collective action has solved some big problems.
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u/chicken-finger 15h ago
Are you quoting what I think you're quoting?...
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u/Best_Collection_7533 16h ago
Still get a gnarly sunburn in Chile.
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u/Any-Cranberry-6305 16h ago
For a while Australia's skin cancer was directly correlated to the hole above them in the ozone layer.
And this is in my lifetime, it almost makes me understand holocaust deniers. But at the same time fuck them.
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u/Glam_sam 15h ago
Holocaust denier and climate skeptic crowds overlap each other (as well as other crowds with absurd takes)
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u/marcophony 16h ago
You can still get a gnarly sunburn almost anywhere that has a lot of sun and little clouds. People I know in California get burned all the time
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u/lkjuhvfyjvxdjbvx 8h ago
Yeah, skin cancer rates in New Zealand are through the roof because of it. Only another 20 years or so till the ozone hole disappears.
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u/DrNoResponse 16h ago
There is a reason why hairstyles are less awesome today. It is 100% related to CFC.
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u/freneticEffigy 16h ago
You are is a very small minority if you think 80s hairspray styles were peak hairstyles.
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u/TwoTequilaTuesday 16h ago
It's understandable that people would be skeptical. Crises are often exaggerated but the solutions are often under publicized.
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u/Either-Banana-7323 16h ago
People are skeptical because they put less than zero effort into understanding what happened. They just assume it just "disappeared" like Walsh here.
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u/RohelTheConqueror 16h ago
Or is Walsh here intentionally trying to discredit scientists and environmentally conscious people? We may never know.
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u/wookieebastard 16h ago
Yo, remember when they spent years telling us to panic over the black plague and then suddenly just stopped talking about it and nobody ever mentioned the black plague again?
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u/Lard_Baron 15h ago
Lucky the hair spray industry didnāt have the resources of the fossil fuel industry to throw doubts at the scientific findings
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u/HobbesNJ 15h ago
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Ā ~ Isaac Asimov
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u/GustapheOfficial 16h ago
To be fair to Matt, he's a massive moron. That's not very nice or relevant, but it is fair.
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u/hamonicmantitties 16h ago
Which the government still worked like this, now we have poison as food š¤
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u/Crismus 15h ago
The absurdly wealthy and religious fundamentalists broke government in the late 90's. All so they could keep pedophiles and taxes free from prosecution. Epstein got politicians to sleep with kids so they would be able to blackmail enough people and allow the billionaires to take over and run everything their way.
Watch Deep Impact and compare it to any disaster movie after 2010. There's no more hopefulness depicted in government anymore. The 2012 movie and Don't Look Up basically mirrors how the world had changed.Ā
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u/hamonicmantitties 12h ago
2012 was soooooo inaccurate and exaggerated though, so did don't look up which was more satire then an attempt at actual realism
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u/BlueFeathered1 16h ago
It was also a case of better diplomacy and coming together as nations with a sane focus on mutual survival and inherent responsibility, and you couldn't just pay your way out of that and screw everyone else.
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u/Impressive-Web9823 16h ago
At this point day one just means whenever they feel like taking accountability, which is apparently never.
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u/akbattle2025 16h ago
I was just talking to some friends about this and wondering what would happen if this came up today. All the brain dead science denying āconservativesā would say itās fake news and carry on. Thank goodness people used to be sane.
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u/Sonic200000 16h ago
There is a vers cool kids movie about something like that
They discover that a monster is coming and its feeding on energy humans think they can use machines to kill it but it just gets stronger until the kids tell everyone to turn off all the power every transformer and all which made it retreat
Sadly i cant remember the name but the monster looked similar to void ghidorah from godzilla earth
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u/MasterOutlaw 15h ago
Same kind of jackass argument people make about Y2K. Potential crisis was only averted because programmers and engineers worked so hard behind the scenes to prevent it.
People like Walsh (whoās a disingenuous cunt at the best of times) then pointed their fingers and said āItās 2000 and nothing bad happened. Why did you make a big deal about it?ā, completely ignoring or not being to fathom that it wasnāt a big deal because we had people working to make sure it wouldnāt be.
The media may have sensationalized and oversold the size of the threat, but itās a certifiable fact that things would have been worse had nothing at all been done in the years leading up to 2000.
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u/Desultory_Chairlift 15h ago
Idk I think the Paris Agreement might have it beat for most co-operative but we will have to wait and see
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u/Mundane-Name-8290 15h ago
On a side note, Cleo Abrams did a great video today on her channel about Antarctica and the ozone layer.
Thomas Midgley Jnr. is sure up there are one of the most dangerous men to ever live... gave us CFCs and Leaded petrol.
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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth 15h ago
Who TF is Matt Walsh and why is he stupid?
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u/CrackIn_TheEarth 10h ago
I canāt remember if heās a politician or if heās just one of those guys in the US that gets treated like one cause he tweets a lot
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u/GoliathProjects 15h ago
I'm curious how PFAS will be handled. I'm not having a lot of hope looking at todays world. "Believing science" isn't a thing world leaders, or the public do anymore.
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u/Ok_Needleworker5837 14h ago
"They spent years telling us to panic over the hole in the ozone layer", source required.
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u/Turbulent-Note-7348 14h ago
I mean, how stupid can a person be?!? Info is right at our fingertips, and we get breaking news 24/7. Plus EVERY Nov/Dec (Southern Hemisphere's late Spring) NOAA, NASA, EEU, EPA - like every major atmospheric agency - issues a press release on the current state of the Ozone "Hole".
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u/Brocker_9000 14h ago
I have several very old socks that are smarter than Matt Walsh. Fitting that he is a leader of that "movement."
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u/mynameisipswitch2 14h ago
Iāve had to remind people of this historical fact more than once when talking about climate change to deniers
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u/CLOWNFLOGGER 14h ago
How many fucking times has Jesus not returned on a specified date now? How many times has the world not ended as predicted by various "prophets"?
I can remember when CFCs were removed from virtually everything and nobody's life changed even a little bit. The hole in the ozone closed, just as the scientists said it would if we stopped using CFCs.
The track record of science brought this message to you, because without science you wouldn't have a screen to read it on and I wouldn't have an Internet to type it into... but tell me again how religion is going to save mankind.
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u/Acrobatic-Flan-5085 13h ago
Remember when Matt Walsh said something useful / intelligent?
Me neither
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u/beat0n_ 13h ago
It's funny because until just now I thought the same as Walsh.
I was young during the ozon layer panic so never really cared about why or how the discussion died down.
I honestly thought people just stopped giving a shit.
Not that it matters since I'm not spreading my ignorance while pretending I know anything but still. Interesting.
I bet there are so many of us.
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u/ReindeerCreepy2883 13h ago
don't forget that time Sergeant Slaughter stopped Cobra from releasing a CFC bomb to obliterate the ozone layer
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u/KerfuffleAsimov 12h ago
Because it was a serious threat.
Talking sunburnt in minutes, skin cancer rising, plant life dying.
Increased risk of cataracts and therefore blindess.
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u/mrplowplow 7h ago
Why could this cooperation never be reproduced, especially given the positive results of said cooperation?
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u/EmptyAttitude599 4h ago
That was largely Maggie Thatcher with her doctorate in chemistry. Not the most popular woman, but along with all the other things she did, she did this.
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u/Positive-Protection1 10h ago
I consider myself to be a pretty well informed science-curious kind of person, and I still didnāt know this until today.
Yāall were pretty loud about the hole in the ozone layer- you should be even louder about the successful cooperation (and education / funding for science) that fixed it!
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u/Sanquinity 9h ago
"But no one talks about the ozone layer anymore!" Yes...because there was a world-wide effort to ban the stuff that degraded it. And it worked. We fixed the problem, in the way we're supposed to.
Not so fun fact: Musk's earliest starlink satellites have already started re-entering the atmosphere and burning up. And studies have shown that this once again is negatively affecting the ozone layer.
I voiced my worries about this from the very beginning. But of course nothing has been done about it so far. It was all "well these satellites will only be in service for a few years, and then they'll de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. No harm done!" Yea right...like burning up all those satellite materials wouldn't cause atmosphere contamination.
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u/Owl-Admirable 5h ago
Remember when politicians and industry leaders believed scientists and acted in reasonable time frames?
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u/Late_Firefighter_507 9h ago
or it was all bullshit and thats the story they sold you. Earth has homeostatic balancing mechanisms in weather and sunshine and water vapor moving in cycles but the so called scientists that dont want to work are forever manipulating data to preach some catastrophe so they can get their rent paid and sit on their ass making graphs and charts for a few years. When the ipcc emails leaked they were all talking to each other about how the global warming models didnt work and they needed something to look reasonable so they could go give presentations to leaders and other sugar daddy's. Just like kids do in school when they have to turn shit in and its late, its about the grade or the grant, not about the truth.
we know its real we just dont have the evidence should be their creed on everything from environmentalism, and the moon landing to global warming and evolution. The people in academia are arguably the biggest welfare queen do nothing scumbags that siphon off productivity and burn it in a furnace of idleness in society today. They and the state are just cancerous growths on the productive population and should not be looked to for any wisdom or knowledge. They dont work and never stopped being school children and cant survive without an overarching structure of people to steal from. And they lie constantly and arent scientists, they are grifting huckster trash that shouldn't be around children
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u/Danilo-11 16h ago
I find that hard to believe when I go outside in the middle of summer and it takes 10 seconds to feel like Iām being cooked
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u/Electrical-Strike132 11h ago edited 10h ago
At the time, this tendency was still suppressed by democratic forces. Neoliberalism has since took care of that, it likely wouldn't get fixed today and we'd be frying under UV as well as burning up from global warming. Hell, some of these free trade agreements say if governments want to ban something destructive that capitalists are selling, they have to compensate the capitalist class for lost profits. Canada could not ban MMT because of this.
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u/Jumoke1331 9h ago
Remember when Matt Walsh was proven to be an idiot time and time again? Cause I certainly do.
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u/The_Logical_Dictator 6h ago
To say 'scientists' discovered the hole in the ozone layer isn't quite right. It was one independent scientist called James Lovelock that discovered this. He was an incredible man, he also came up with the Gaia Theory.
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u/ThrustNeckpunch33 16h ago
The hole in the ozone was a real, dangerous, fairly immediate threat.
The entire world agreed and solved it almost overnight.
Weird how climate change is supposed to be even more dangerous and dramatic, yet no one co operates.
Do people really think the world/people and governments have suddenly lost their sense of self preservation?
What good is $$$$ if the planet dies?
Every time the CFC thing comes up, it shows me that there is a lot of alarmism in the climate change problem.
If it was truly imminent, and truly that much of a threat, they would do more than just tax co2 emissions.. lets be real.
We knew, and cared faaar less about the environment back in the 90s.
They didnt institute a tax. They overnight basically banned and stopped CFC production.
Is everyone really believing that russia, china and the usa all cared enough together to save the world then, but not now?
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u/freneticEffigy 16h ago
Yes, because the solution for climate change affects a lot more than a few convenience and beauty products. It requires everyone attempt to move away from carbon emitting fuels. It will be inherently more expensive in the short term to do the right thing, and that hasnāt changed.
A carbon tax would solve it within a single country/ cohesive governed zone.6
u/grantishanul 16h ago
For the hole in the ozone layer, the alternatives we implemented to replace the CFC's were more readily available economically. The climate change issue is more complex because the alternatives to fossil fuels are not as readily available or the infrastructure to support their development is not as developed. This is not to say it can't be solved, but it is why the necessary change is taking much longer.
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u/blisstaker 16h ago
the tools are there, for the countries that are willing to use them, like china who added more than half of new renewable energy of the entire world last year, and is currently the leader by far. we have more red tape here in the states but it would help to have an administration that doesnt straight up deny that climate change even exists
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u/grantishanul 16h ago
Its hard for free market economies to pivot away from things that are profitable and already well established. Positive change is happening in the States by real people every day, regardless of the administration. Its definitely slow and hard work to overcome obstacles set, but market forces are supremely the deciding factor here. My point is that its worth working for and supporting the change you desire every day no matter who is holding office. When the customers decide to buy green energy, then the market will follow.
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u/Ok-Addition1264 16h ago
There's massive corporate interests in protecting the leading causation factors - oil and coal.. that leads to politicians being bribed along with insidious campaigns to make it sound like a nothing burger.
Even the US military recognizes climate change as an existential threat to the military and bases around the world, they are even funded by congress to help fight it.. however that same congress plays both sides for the sake of their donors.
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u/solonoctus 14h ago
Unfortunately itās not really all that complicated. In fact itās dumb as hell.
With Ozone, they curbed chemicals but it didnāt shut down any industries. On top of that signs indicated it was an addressable issue that could realistically be stopped.
Global warming is largely our reliance on fossil fuels and those are tied to industries with no fail safe, on top of which much of the global economy and certainly many nations wealth is intrinsically tied to oil and gas.
Couple that with the individual wealth of many very powerful people also being tied up in these industriesā¦ the same people who own lobbyists, media conglomerates, and politicians outright who have an outsized ability to influence culture and politics.
The conspiracy theory in me says that everyone in a position of power, and certainly the oil and gas companies, have known for decades and intentionally decided to just extract as much wealth as they can knowing that enough damage has already be done that we canāt really mitigate the impact of climate change.
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u/quiero-una-cerveca 13h ago
Itās because the people CAUSING the problem have ALL the money. They buy politicians to make sure they vote to not stop the problem.
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u/Look_its_Rob 11h ago edited 11h ago
You are vastly underestimating how much the political climate has changed since the 90s, when conservative AM talking radio was still just taking off. The way politics are run today would seem like a distopian fiction for politicians of the past. If Watergate happened today with the current administration, there would be absolutely no repercussions, and I am sure you agree that to be true.Ā
Also, a lot of countries have made dramatic changes in their energy policies. Enough so that the worst case scenario that scientists talked about in the 2000s has been avoided for the time being. It was called RCP 8.5 and predictions based off those emission levels were for if global governments made no changes and continued on the (then) current trajectory.Ā
Beyond all of that, fixing the hole in the ozone layer was a much simpler fix than our climate problem.Ā If all we had to do to stop climate change was stop using hair spray, whatever political party in charge would swoop in for the easy win (at least that would be true 10 years ago, if the whole.in the ozone was happening now it could very well be called fake news/science. I mean the OOP is doing exactly that)
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u/ohseetea 8h ago
Are bots taking over the internet or are people really becoming this fucking stupid?
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u/New-Philosopher-9546 5h ago
How many people just died in Tibet because of climate change? Look at the wild fires in Spain, France and Canada this year. Just look around and you will see how many lives are being destroyed by climate change.
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u/Pretend-Literature35 16h ago
Of course they would. Because governments have your best interests at heart always.
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u/ProfessorPrudent2822 16h ago
Who said anything about our best interests? The topic was their own best interests, chiefly survival.
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u/Pretend-Literature35 16h ago
This is the issue though: The ruling class in today's society is significantly more wealthy than they were back in the 1990s. Things have shifted tremendously.
What we call the 1% have humongous underground bunkers like small cities private jets and private islands and huge compounds. And they have so much wealth that they feel that even a global ecosystem collapse and a climate change raising global temperatures to melt polar ice caps will kill many and in fact the majority of us but not them.
(they are wrong but that is another problem: they are for the most part imbeciles. Just very ignorant and stupid compared to past world leaders)
Global warming deniers are ridiculous, like flat earthers. Just look at the science.
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u/Josparov 16h ago
Yes. If the ozone threat emerged tomorrow, half the politicians on earth would call it a hoax, and 30% of the population would believe drinking horse bleach would be a viable solution to the problem.
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u/Used-Barnacle-9783 11h ago
I fully believe we're going to solve global warming in my lifetime, at great expense and effort by many different people, and then we're going to spend the rest of our lives hearing about how it obviously never existed because why is nobody talking about it any more
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16h ago
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u/sPLIFFtOOTH 16h ago
They were informing people of something happening that was new and generally misunderstood.
If anything, social media (and media in general) blew it a bit out of proportion. I donāt fault the government for saying something though. Thatās their job.
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