TBH “The whole world agreed on something” narrative doesn’t really reflect what happened.
Actually, The Industry dropped using CFC after a cheaper and luckily safer alternative has been discovered right around that time.
The fact is, most companies are fine to let an existing system run rather than replace it with one that has a cheaper consumable thing, provided they can still get that consumable and the cost of replacing that system is high.
Basically, corps would have kept buying and using CFCs because replacing the refrigeration system is too costly.
Not only was an alternative found that was cheaper and safer and almost as good (as effective), but scientists and engineers put in the effort to find ways to adapt existing systems to the new working fluid. All for significantly less than replacing the system.
Not only was a replacement found, but it was made economically viable for widespread deployment in a very short timeframe; not just having a short development time, but also a very short duration to deploy the new solution to an existing system.
You’re right, that it was cheaper and everything, but most of the time changing the working fluid of a refrigerator/air conditioning unit, will require that the system is replaced. They worked around that. Additionally, you’re correct that it was industry that made the change and pushed it to their clients.
I just want to make sure we recognise the efforts put in by the scientists and engineers that enabled the rapid switch to non-CFC based cooling systems. It’s still an amazing achievement IMO, and something that required a remarkable amount of cooperation by people who probably don’t cooperate often or at all (and are, in all likelihood, fairly hostile to eachother, most of the time).
IMO, that’s still one of the best examples of global cooperation that anyone could possibly point to. Rarely do we have a problem where there’s almost universal consensus on the issue and how to fix it. In this case, there was. That level of cooperation among the people of earth is borderline unparalleled; the only other times we cooperated this well that people would know about are usually negotiations done with the barrel of a gun. Namely the world wars. One group said that we’re going to do a thing, another group said nope. It was settled with lives, bullets and bombs, and nearly every person alive was on one side or the other… Except Sweden, I suppose… And maybe smaller countries that didn’t have enough of an army to participate. (I’m sure there’s dozens of reasons, but I’m not a historian)
Without guns, bombs, or even threats, just a presentation of the facts and a proposal for a solution, everyone just … went along with it.
To me, that’s unprecedented.
Okay why the fuck has this been top of my front page for two days
Imagine if we did this with climate change. Imagine if we tried to switch to renewable energy en masse 20 years ago.
Problem with that is that in comparison the alternative to CFC was not that more expensive and then a cheaper one was invented shortly after.
For climate change you basically can double our energy costs and therefore double the cost of almost everything.
But that isn’t true anymore, right? Renewables are now way cheaper per produced Watt. And still, we’re stuck with people pretending that’s not true.
It’s not so simple. They’re cheaper than building non renewable, but are they cheaper than keeping the current plants running? Also, energy consumption keeps growing, and in many places, new generating plants using renewables usually only take care of the growth, and doesn’t allow for room to take older plants out of operations. If we don’t make huge efforts to reduce our energy consumption, I doubt we’re going to get rid of non renewables so soon…
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
And didn’t they find a bunch of Chinese factories pumping them out again not long ago?
