I remember visiting in the 90s as a kid and seeing how incredibly smoggy it was. It was just as bad as pretty much any place out there and all from burning gas in cars.
Now it's very often crystal clear. It's really stunning how much policy changes can impact the air.
> Now it's very often crystal clear. It's really stunning how much policy changes can impact the air.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the air is often clear. There is still the natural geography that traps all particles in the air over the basin. But the policy changes absolutely made a huge difference.
Interesting to note however that during the first couple of days of COVID lockdown, when almost no one was driving in LA, LA had the lowest AQI on the entire planet (it was just 4). So the next thing they have to do is solve traffic to get the air cleaner. :)
To me, this was the clearest example of how much human activity truly is causing issues, and how it can be reversed.
Also, expanding and living in suburbs, I believe in contrast to the general consensus, reduces emissions as well. Though people still need cars to get somewhere just because the distances are larger, the use of cars is much more efficient.
This book has a liberal air, while I am a fiscal conservative republican (not a "Trumpian" 'flat-earther', nationalist, or handmade tale dreamer - never have been or will be... not all 'Republicans' are the same. These days I generally don't vote republican due to lack of sane options. F'ing painful and horrific).
[Just wanted to provide context for who was making this statement]
Disclosure aside, as anyone with two brain cells can see, the world has been snookered by the oil and gas industry and their kickback Trumpian-like Lackies for decades (old puppets same as the new). Seyer discusses the history of all of these topics, and additional similar ones, raised above fairly well (acid rain, LA smog, UK smog, etc.).
The biggest idea Seyer conveyed to me, that I wish was just a leaflet air-dropped accross the US is that Climate Change activists are preaching to the choir when they state that we need to reverse climate change because it's irreversibly harming the planet. They need to instead focus primarily on the human harm due to extreme weather (towns, societies, crop lands, god forbid ocean front property) that polution/carbon emissions are causing. I couldn't agree more.
It's like you have to point out how it's going to affect 'these people' directly, specifically, in their lifetime, for it to even register.
We are North American Scum. Unfortunately, common sense is a rare commodity these days. The internet gave too many selfish ding dongs a podium to preach to and 'unionize' other selfish ding dongs.
OK, this ding dong is off his podium. Sorry (but do check the bood out)
What is, I think, very telling about human nature is that they self-identify as Orange County Republicans and feel the pressure to deny climate change. They’ll talk about how acting will destroy the economy and you can almost see the struggle when someone points out that the exact same arguments were made back then and California’s economy is famously un-destroyed.
>Now it's very often crystal clear.
like the change from somewhat polluted air (even in a semi-rural area where I was then) to much less polluted, in India, during Covid lockdown time. I had read then, that the same had happened in other parts of India too.
it was almost like living in pristine nature for a while, in terms of cleaner air.
only lasted until the end of the lockdown, some number of months later, sadly.
then things were back to (ab)normal.
i remember reading about acid rain happening in Germany, years ago.
I googled acid rain germany.
one result:
https://www.gmfus.org/news/acid-rain-lessons-germanys-black-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of...
We saw the same thing on the front page here just last week in the Bald Eagle thread, pointing out that it wasn't particularly endangered and that even if it was it was never so in Alaska. This in a discussion about how it was not listed as endangered in the continental US anymore precisely because of the success of the conservation effort under the Endangered Species Act.
I'm not even sure it has a particularly strong effect, a quick search [0] shows that a depleted ozone would have a moderate cooling effect and a full layer would be slightly warmer but it's swamped by the effects of more direct green house gases.
Now the current and some variation of the future state of the ozone layer is definitely accounted for in the models, we just have so much more compute to throw at the modelling we can try many more scenarios but even then by [0] it looks like it's a minor effect.
[0] https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/research/ozone-uv/moreinfo?view=...
Go back to 1950 and try to breath in LA. Go to your local gas station and ask for leaded fuel. To measure the PH of the next rain fall. There are been many environmental wins over the decades.
Your parent might mean by "we" the people who are living now, in the era when environmental concerns have become politicized, so that victories can't be bipartisan and so have become much less common. (It's inconceivable to me these days that the EPA was founded by Nixon!)
Makes you wonder if we really couldn't attempt some kind of man-made "pollution" in the atmosphere to mitigate warming.
The minor shade advantages didn't count much against the billions of tonnes of additional insulating gases added each and every year, and the decision was made to remove sulphur compounds because of the downsides of using them - acid rain and other consequences.
That said there are private groups that collecting money as credits and putting sulphur back into the atmosphere as we type .. they're here on HN and may or may not be doing a good thing.
It’s crazy to me that after studying the ozone hole for 75 years, this is the first and only paper that confirms the hole healing was primarily caused by human interventions.
Also, an important caveat is made by the authors: “The forced response in this study considers GHG and ODS only, and does not include known forcings from important volcanoes and major wildfires after 2012”, which are the top non-human factors that ozone hole deniers always point to when trying to debunk stuff like this.
It really is proof that concerted effort can bring about worldwide change, for little sacrifice.
Classic GOP: it’s not a problem until it affects me, personally, and then we absolutely have to fix it.
Until then? Liberal fear mongering, special interests, etc. etc.
The "magic" of the Montreal Protocol wasn't any kind of sympathy or joint cooperation to save the Earth. No one had to sacrifice anything so it breezed through no problem.
"Eliminating CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals by switching to alternatives could cost as much as $36 billion between now and 2075, according to the Environmental Protection Agency."
"Substitutes have drawbacks compared to the industrial perfection of CFCs, however, he said. Turpines are flammable. In addition, its toxicity in high concentrations has yet to be determined, so 'we use it with caution,' he said. 'It all comes under the grand scientific principle of no free lunch.'"
For that matter, fixing LA's smog wasn't cheap either.
Sure there are alternatives but they are both expensive and with sub par performance. We need to have alternatives that both cheaper and better before we can do anything?
But no, rich countries showed that they could actually get together and ban harmful chemicals, and by sheer economic force alone turn the whole world around. Research was let loose when there was economic incentives, mass production effects set in and over time the expensive and bad alternatives was cheap and good enough.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48353341.amp
Let’s hope that now that Europe needs to focus on more important issues, they stop hindering our productivity with environmental artificial limits so that China can keep increasing their pollutants and industry.
This is a strange take to me. We've had a great positive environmental impact and your take away is "but China is bad so we should also be bad!"
Why not instead use tarrifs and international pressure for what it's good for. "Goods linked to CFC emissions get an automatic 25% tarrif".
[0]
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03277-w
https://www.dw.com/en/ozone-layer-recovery-back-on-track-aft...
I'm a stratospheric scientist. Back when the reports were written, that CFC's were still being emitted in China, our community was pretty bummed and weren't very hopeful, but we were very happily surprised when China got those emmissions under control so quickly.
I’m also curious what issues you suggest Europe focus on that would require abandoning these straightforward, if slightly more costly, manufacturing efforts.
It’s not like the west didn’t benefit massively from it initially. Just like with carbon emissions where China will likely never emit as much as say the US will cumulatively, despite a much larger population too.