Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/17/oh-ffs.html
…
1 Like
Well that sucks, especially for those of us down here in New Zealand.
12 Likes
Our species seems driven to destroy all life on earth. We are going to need global solutions. It sucks that this president dropped the ball on the most important problems.
12 Likes
“For all practical purposes, that air conditioner is a part of Ng’s body. Y.T.'s driving around with the worlds only Freon junkie.”
- Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash
https://books.google.com/books?id=RMd3GpIFxcUC&pg=PA240&lpg=PA240&dq=snow+crash+freon+junkie
13 Likes
I’ve come back from the future to let you know this relapse of the Ozone Hole came to be known as the Pruitt Effect.
8 Likes
At least that narrows it down.
1 Like
[...] atmospheric levels of CFC-11 have risen by 25%, eroding the still-healing ozone layer and suggesting that someone, somewhere, has started manufacturing the substance again. No one really knows why you'd make CFC-11. Cheap substitutes are readily available
Sounds like the obvious ploy of an evil genius – “Nations of the World, concede to my demands or I will destroy the ozone layer!”
2 Likes
Wasn’t there always a big issue about how using those “cheap substitutes” would require a costly retrofit of old equipment?
Of course, one might expect that over the course of 30 years, switching to a cheap substitute would ultimately provide substantially greater savings than any such retrofit, but that would require longterm thinking.
3 Likes
3 Likes
Ars Technica explained how they narrowed it down, actually, it’s pretty interesting. An increasing concentration gradient pointed to the Northern Hemisphere, and Hawaii measured it as correlating with industrial emissions, and the researchers modelled the emissions with climate data to narrow it down to there.
4 Likes
I was just thinking that the oceans were the ultimate tragedy of the commons, I may be mistaken.
1 Like
When I worked for E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company I got repeatedly verbally savaged by various PhD chemists for suggesting that we could make money by investing heavily in the development of environmentally sound alternatives to Freon®.
These guys insisted that admitting chemically induced ozone depletion was real was disloyalty, and thought it was a shame I could only be fired, rather than physically punished, for saying such things. They believed that any project that acknowledged environmental concerns was morally wrong and that all environmentalists were dirty hippy traitors to America.
I learned a lot about organizations and tribalism from Uncle Dupie.
In the end, DuPont did what I had suggested, of course, but not until the government basically forced them to.
19 Likes
Killing us and themselves for a filthy dollar.
3 Likes
One of my favourite books of all time.
1 Like
More sunscreen for us then. We already have one of the highest rates of melanoma in the world 
3 Likes
We don’t have any internal checks on our individual or collective resource consumption. There is a name for biology that operates that way. Cancerous.
3 Likes
“Better Living Through Chemistry”
2 Likes
He really is an Ozone Hole
2 Likes
Where is James Bond now that we need him?
1 Like
Any bets on China?
