While banning one compound and the healing of ozone layer has shown that there is hope still present. However, climate change being a much more complex problem do you think such a collaborative and swift response globally is possible?

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Beginning-Panic188:

While banning one compound and the healing of ozone layer has shown that there is hope still present. However, climate change being a much more complex problem do you think such a collaborative and swift response globally is possible?

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/107insu/can_the_success_of_healing_ozone_layer_be/j3miefu/

That kind of agreement sounds perfect for geoengineering, and if things get desperate we will do exactly that.

Or do people think that if things get desperate we would just ignore the cheapest and easiest option?

I don't think it can be as collaborative or as swift, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.

If CFC's were a biproduct of something we absolutely had to have.... then the ozone layer would be gone today.

The problem with greenhouse gases is that it is dang hard to turn off the fossil fuel energy as it is and will continue to be the cheapest most reliable energy source.

> as it is and will continue to be the cheapest most reliable energy source.

It's already not the cheapest.

There are huge differences, mainly economic and political rather than technical. CFCs were relatively easy to replace with substitutes that were just as effective and ultimately not that much more expensive. Also, major American chemical manufacturers (like DuPont and Dow) were well positioned to dominate the replacement market, so they eventually supported the policy change. As a result, the US was a global leader on ozone policy, even under the Reagan administration. It was fairly easy to build an international consensus with those factors in play. The cost gap between carbon and no carbon sources of energy is much bigger…although it has shrunk considerably for some applications (like renewables for baseload power), there is still a pretty big gap for things like peak power, transport, and industrial heating. Also, fossil fuel producers have trillions of capital tied up in long term projects, and they are not going to let that capital be stranded without a massive fight. As a result, the US is a laggard on climate change rather than a leader, and US leadership is still really important. (It’s probably less important than during the ozone situation in the 1980s…the EU has stepped up a lot on climate. But given the size of the US economy and the fact that other large economies like Russia and China basically need to be forced into energy transition, the absence of US leadership is pretty devastating.)

Call me cynical.

But I bet if we were just discovering about this today then there would be nothing done about it. Governments would hand wring, morons would be calling the science into question, misinformation campaigns would be run, rednecks would be against it just to spite environmentalists. Etc etc.

There were viable alternatives to CFCs, and relatively few companies produced and used them.

Almost everyone uses fossil fuels, and the alternatives are still problematic:

Solar and wind are intermittent and only work economically in certain areas (requiring transmission upgrades and storage capacity).

Nuclear is very expensive (outside of France) and slow to build out.

It’s much easier to regulate a few dozen companies than to tax carbon in hundreds of countries at different stages of development.

It is because you get 100% uptime. Renewables like solar can be cheaper but you barely get uptime or reliability. This forces you to over build capacity and invest in expensive and inefficient storage like batteries or have back fossil fuels. So essentially you’re all in cost is extremely higher than just going with fossil fuels. Germany and California are perfect examples to show you how renewable which are thought be cheaper lead to way higher energy prices.

Storage really only increases the price of home solar by 50%, and is increasingly being included in packages. I see this as a minor transitionary issue.