In a year that’s been fairly full of grim weeks, learning that we have 12 years to completely reverse our use of carbon if we want to avoid boiling the sky in 2040 really put me off my beer.
So I’ve been throwing trash out of the window on the Interstate and started a tire fire in my back yard.
Because what else are you gonna do?
Well, I did learn a few weeks back that we actually solved the Hole in the Ozone problem that everyone was talking about back in the 90s.
Remember that? When the sky was broken? Those were also bleak times. The Ozone problem didn’t have the same kind of doomsday deadline that came with the UN climate report, but it sure seemed like a trouble.
Well it got fixed. We fixed it. We took CFCs out of hairspray, hair metal went out of style, and the problem solved itself.
Now, I don’t mean to criticize, and I don’t know who would be responsible for doing so, but I think SOMEONE could’ve let us know that we fixed it!
You know. Help us feel like we have a little momentum in not destroying the planet. It’s helpful to know that we can actually make things happen when we try to do so.
But no.
I had to hear about it, second-hand, from a podcast, like an animal.
Oh and apparently Newsweek tried to tell us in January. But we (I) didn’t hear them:
The hole in the ozone layer was first discovered in the 1980s. This layer of the atmosphere protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation, which can cause skin cancer and cataracts, suppress immune systems and harm plants. Just two years after the hole was discovered, the world jumped quickly to solve the problem. Several nations signed the Montreal Protocol, which would ultimately ban CFCs, the chemicals responsible for destroying the ozone. Fast-forward decades later, and the ozone hole was measured at the smallest since 1988, NASA announced last November.
The good news is that we’ve had the political will and scientific knowhow to solve for environmental crises in the past. The bad news is that only climate change denying political party ON EARTH is in complete control of the US government.
So the big question is, what can we be doing in the meantime?