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I vaguely remember Ozone layer predictions being pretty dire decades ago… I am conflicted. On one hand, there is a definite “slant” to news reporting. There

I vaguely remember Ozone layer predictions being pretty dire decades ago… I am conflicted. On one hand, there is a definite “slant” to news reporting. There seems to be a short list of topics that publishers frequently and regularly publish content about, seemingly to “check a box” without really providing anything new. Whether it be “climate crisis”, “democracy”, etc… I also dislike the coverage of CO2 emissions.. Threshold X is the goal, threshold X+0.1 is doom… There seems to be a reluctance to admit that all we’re really doing is trying to decide which generation meets the fate we fear. Buying time is certainly valuable though. On the other hand, the scale at which humans make a mess is hard to ignore. One trash bag/ week times 100M households… where does it all go? How many tons of lead are we putting into the air from coal use? There used to be a lot more bugs when driving in rural areas at night… Could go on and on… I feel like we should just live slightly a more simply instead of trying to “fix” climate change. The problem is not climate, it’s us. We could decrease consumption slightly and have a better quality of life. The plastic coffee lid or food container today will still be intact in 75 years… yet we’ll be gone. Why is that OK?

rich_sasha 2y ago
Ozone was much easier / cheaper to fix, we could keep doing what we are doing and just change it around a bit. Which is mostly what we did - there was a resurgence in freons emissions, vaguely traced to China. The ugly truth of CO2 emissions is we would have basically needed to massively cut our energy consumption - either by going to renewables more aggressively, at a higher cost, or by outright cutting fossil fuels. We couldn't make small adjustments and keep going as we were. So we didn't.

rich_sasha 2y ago

Ozone was much easier / cheaper to fix, we could keep doing what we are doing and just change it around a bit. Which is mostly what we did - there was a resurgence in freons emissions, vaguely traced to China. The ugly truth of CO2 emissions is we would have basically needed to massively cut our energy consumption - either by going to renewables more aggressively, at a higher cost, or by outright cutting fossil fuels. We couldn't make small adjustments and keep going as we were. So we didn't.