Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> don't have much value as a rhetorical device to persuade people to care about the environment

Our success with ozone depletion should ring out as inspiration.

Ozone depletion was a relatively easy problem to solve though, since it was replacing some chemicals with different ones, but didn't require much in the way of behavior change.

We are doing very well at replacing CO2 emitting power plants with wind and solar in some places. NIMBY is the major limit right now, so there is plenty you can do about that. Anything you do locally helps scale production of clean energy over dirty.

Electric cars are coming which are a big improvement (fueled by above wind/solar). No changes needed. Though most of us would find our lives improved by the better if we replaced cars with great transit (not to be confused with the terrible transit most of us are familiar with) even though it would be a behavior change.

Concrete and asphalt manufacturing require similar disruption before we can claim EV a like for like win.

Asphalt is only cheap because it is a gas byproduct. switch to ev and it is done. I don't know what to do about concrete though.

But the EV needs asphalt for most of its roads.

The strategy that worked for the ozone layer crisis might not be as effective for other issues. Obviously for one problems like climate change are way more complex than the ozone issue, which had a pretty straightforward solution.

Also, climate change more broadly is going to affect also big sectors like energy and transportation, so there’s a lot more resistance and economic implications. The ozone issue was more direct – people got it because it had immediate effects like increased skin cancer risk.

So, yeah, while the ozone strategy was a big win, we can't expect the same playbook to work for everything else.

Agree. Ameliorating urban heat islands looks like another place to focus effort. [0], [1] Even better, you can attack it at the level of individual cities.

I would add that the uncertainty in the underlying science means that there are as yet undiscovered opportunities to make other improvements.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island [1] https://cshub.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/Albedo%2011...

Acid rain is also another example I reach for. I'm not sure why these things are different that society was willing to accept the necessary changes. I'm guessing acid falling from the sky was an easy thing for people to accept is just bad, and were willing to go along with changes. I'm guessing the ozone depletion was acceptable as replacements for the items causing the problem did not cause interruptions to people's day.

The fact that we say significant improvement in such a short time during the pandemic lock down is the most recent example I reach for when providing examples. We as a society can do this if we wanted to. The fact that there are more that do not is beyond pathetic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com