I don’t think there will be another moment for positive collective action, like we have seen in this example. Getting a country (let alone multiple countries) is like getting a family to agree on pizza toppings for dinner. Thank you for this piece! As a millennial, the ozone was one of the first things I learned about that piqued my interest in climate change.
Eli has been pointing out since forever (or at least the initial outbreak of the RCP8.5 war) that RCP8.5 is the climate change version of the ozone world avoided meme
Sep 1, 2023·edited Sep 1, 2023Liked by Andrew Dessler
UPDATE: I just read your exchange with Dean in the comment thread which addresses some of the points I make below -- Matt
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Hi Andrew -- this is an incredibly well written and straightforward account. I had not seen the recent paper on how close we came, which I will need to take a look at and a something possible to assign my students in the course I teach on environmental politics + communication. The Singer NR article is also a great flag on a standard rhetorical blueprint used by Singer later applied to climate science. A few thoughts below on insights from environmental historians and policy scholars who have studied and published on the Ozone case and its differences in comparison to climate change:
1) The general critique in that literature of how we "collectively remember" and tell the story of arriving at the Montreal Protocol is that it conforms to what is called the flawed "linear model" of science policy. The assumption being that industry and policymakers responded to ever growing certainty among scientists and the communication of that certainty to take action — and that climate change should be following that same "linear" path of ever growing scientific consensus driving a correlated intensification of societal progress.
2) But what the historians, policy scholars, and STS folks in fact emphasize were key factors in acting to address Ozone are quite different than the standard linear model narrative — and also show why the case of the Ozone hole is very different from climate change.
3) In the case of the Ozone hole there were a few key factors that enabled industry and countries to act even in the absence [as you correctly note] of the reduction of scientific uncertainty.
4) The first was that unlike climate change there were only a handful of industry members and countries that were major producers of CFCs — and so the scope of negotiation and decision-making was actually quite small especially in comparison to climate change which requires economy-wide transformations across every industry, country, citizen, and consumer.
5) Second there were comparatively cheaper technological alternatives to CFCs that were just coming available and so it was cost-effective for industry members to switch away from CFCs.
6) Each of these features and others lead up the distinction between the Ozone hole being a conventional, "tame" environmental problem versus climate change being a "super-wicked" problem.
I am going to write at my newsletter BLUR about this complementary history to your piece and in relation to the recent study on how close we came. I will flag you when the piece runs next week.
While I agree that there are similarities, i.e. science identifies a problem and then finds solutions to the problem, I believe the scale and magnitude are quite different. Susan Solomon, the scientist who led the Antartica Expeditions prior to the Montreal Protocol, even gets quickly to the point in her 2019 interview with Time Magazine, that substitutions and solutions were easier to implement, e.g. roll-on deodorant vs spray. https://time.com/5681661/climate-change-ozone-history/ .
Also, I don't believe any discussion of comparisons between the two is complete without including interviews or comments from Stephen Andersen, who played a key role in implementing the Montreal Protocol. In this video interview that also includes Susan Solomon, Stephen talks about the history of the Montreal Protocol, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hwh-uDo-6A. He makes a couple interesting comments regarding skeptics in that there were some still in 1987 but almost all of them were gone by 1990. He also mentions that industry, particularly end users of CFC, were not devoted to CFCs and quickly looked for alternatives and changed and adapted almost quicker than the policymakers. I guess you might argue that in some ways that is similar to climate change where corporations have committed to change even before policies are enacted.
Sorry, my comment was unclear, so I deleted it. I was basically referring to the size and scale argument. I agree that size and scale are different, so we cannot solve the problem as quickly as with CFCs (which was solved in a decade or so), but we have the tech to solve it now. It might take a few more decades to get close to net zero, but it's achievable. I would certainly not believe the climate skeptics who claim that we CANNOT solve the problem — they've been wrong basically every time, so why believe them now?
You seem to have misunderstood me completely about skeptics and maybe I wasn't clear. By comparison, it seems that the ozone skeptics faded fairly quickly while that is certainly not the case for climate change, thus, making it different and more difficult compared to fixing the ozone problem.
I have researched this comparison a lot trying to understand the similarities and differences and was trying to add to the conversation.
Yes, I misunderstood your point. I agree that, in the pre-social media, pre-Fox News world, skeptics had much more trouble getting traction. Their only outlet was the Wall Street Journal and various small circulation periodicals like National Review. I think it was also the case that the chemical companies didn't oppose the policy as much as fossil fuel companies did, so there was less $$$ to pay for ozone denial. It's a fascinating question.
If by fairly quickly you mean more than a decade after the Montreal Protocols were signed. The social medium of that issue was USENET and the pushback was just as fierce with pretty much the same arguments.
I get a different impression listening to the recollections of Stephen Andersen in the video interview. The pushback maybe continued but he claims that the user industry moved on fairly quickly once the connection to the ozone hole was made.
Uncertainty. Yes, after working at a research lab, I concluded that scientists, in general, are pretty conservative. They are reluctant to sound an alarm without pretty solid backing. Which worries me with climate change. I suspect that things will actually be worse than predicted, and happen faster than predicted, because of that very conservative approach. I especially worry about catastrophic ice-sheet collapse, which is now being seriously talked about, but 20 years ago when I asked a top glaciologist about that possibility, he basically said don't worry, it won't happen.
Although not as low cost as ozone protection, reducing and reversing CO2 omissions would also be similarly ho-hum if done with a tax on net CO2 emissions.
It is interesting that the same ozone deniers morphed into climate change deniers. Scientists tend to err on the side of caution, while these guys throw all caution to the winds and bury their heads in the sand. Do they not have compassion for the welfare of others? OK, never mind...
It makes sense when you realize that the arguments are not really about science. They’re about the solutions and about their efforts to make arguments to let polluters keep polluting. In that sense, you could expect them to deny every environmental issue.
The window of opportunity for the Montreal Protocol was opened by Richard Benedick who wrote a book about it: „Ozone Diplomacy“.
I don’t think there will be another moment for positive collective action, like we have seen in this example. Getting a country (let alone multiple countries) is like getting a family to agree on pizza toppings for dinner. Thank you for this piece! As a millennial, the ozone was one of the first things I learned about that piqued my interest in climate change.
Eli has been pointing out since forever (or at least the initial outbreak of the RCP8.5 war) that RCP8.5 is the climate change version of the ozone world avoided meme
https://twitter.com/EthonRaptor/status/1451549214480257031
UPDATE: I just read your exchange with Dean in the comment thread which addresses some of the points I make below -- Matt
--------
Hi Andrew -- this is an incredibly well written and straightforward account. I had not seen the recent paper on how close we came, which I will need to take a look at and a something possible to assign my students in the course I teach on environmental politics + communication. The Singer NR article is also a great flag on a standard rhetorical blueprint used by Singer later applied to climate science. A few thoughts below on insights from environmental historians and policy scholars who have studied and published on the Ozone case and its differences in comparison to climate change:
1) The general critique in that literature of how we "collectively remember" and tell the story of arriving at the Montreal Protocol is that it conforms to what is called the flawed "linear model" of science policy. The assumption being that industry and policymakers responded to ever growing certainty among scientists and the communication of that certainty to take action — and that climate change should be following that same "linear" path of ever growing scientific consensus driving a correlated intensification of societal progress.
2) But what the historians, policy scholars, and STS folks in fact emphasize were key factors in acting to address Ozone are quite different than the standard linear model narrative — and also show why the case of the Ozone hole is very different from climate change.
3) In the case of the Ozone hole there were a few key factors that enabled industry and countries to act even in the absence [as you correctly note] of the reduction of scientific uncertainty.
4) The first was that unlike climate change there were only a handful of industry members and countries that were major producers of CFCs — and so the scope of negotiation and decision-making was actually quite small especially in comparison to climate change which requires economy-wide transformations across every industry, country, citizen, and consumer.
5) Second there were comparatively cheaper technological alternatives to CFCs that were just coming available and so it was cost-effective for industry members to switch away from CFCs.
6) Each of these features and others lead up the distinction between the Ozone hole being a conventional, "tame" environmental problem versus climate change being a "super-wicked" problem.
I am going to write at my newsletter BLUR about this complementary history to your piece and in relation to the recent study on how close we came. I will flag you when the piece runs next week.
Very clear and nice post!
While I agree that there are similarities, i.e. science identifies a problem and then finds solutions to the problem, I believe the scale and magnitude are quite different. Susan Solomon, the scientist who led the Antartica Expeditions prior to the Montreal Protocol, even gets quickly to the point in her 2019 interview with Time Magazine, that substitutions and solutions were easier to implement, e.g. roll-on deodorant vs spray. https://time.com/5681661/climate-change-ozone-history/ .
Also, I don't believe any discussion of comparisons between the two is complete without including interviews or comments from Stephen Andersen, who played a key role in implementing the Montreal Protocol. In this video interview that also includes Susan Solomon, Stephen talks about the history of the Montreal Protocol, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hwh-uDo-6A. He makes a couple interesting comments regarding skeptics in that there were some still in 1987 but almost all of them were gone by 1990. He also mentions that industry, particularly end users of CFC, were not devoted to CFCs and quickly looked for alternatives and changed and adapted almost quicker than the policymakers. I guess you might argue that in some ways that is similar to climate change where corporations have committed to change even before policies are enacted.
What do you mean? Are you questioning their integrity?
Sorry, my comment was unclear, so I deleted it. I was basically referring to the size and scale argument. I agree that size and scale are different, so we cannot solve the problem as quickly as with CFCs (which was solved in a decade or so), but we have the tech to solve it now. It might take a few more decades to get close to net zero, but it's achievable. I would certainly not believe the climate skeptics who claim that we CANNOT solve the problem — they've been wrong basically every time, so why believe them now?
You seem to have misunderstood me completely about skeptics and maybe I wasn't clear. By comparison, it seems that the ozone skeptics faded fairly quickly while that is certainly not the case for climate change, thus, making it different and more difficult compared to fixing the ozone problem.
I have researched this comparison a lot trying to understand the similarities and differences and was trying to add to the conversation.
Yes, I misunderstood your point. I agree that, in the pre-social media, pre-Fox News world, skeptics had much more trouble getting traction. Their only outlet was the Wall Street Journal and various small circulation periodicals like National Review. I think it was also the case that the chemical companies didn't oppose the policy as much as fossil fuel companies did, so there was less $$$ to pay for ozone denial. It's a fascinating question.
Again, not to be pedantic but I think that a discussion of this type benefits not only from the discussion of the similarities but also from discussing the nuances of the differences. I would encourage you in any subsequent treatment to include the thinking of Solomon and Andersen, two of the unsung heroes in helping to save the ozone layer, e.g. the video noted above and here are two articles with interviews of Solomon, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2019/04/how-the-ozone-hole-can-help-us-communicate-climate-change/ and https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/27/137093/the-climate-optimist/
If by fairly quickly you mean more than a decade after the Montreal Protocols were signed. The social medium of that issue was USENET and the pushback was just as fierce with pretty much the same arguments.
I get a different impression listening to the recollections of Stephen Andersen in the video interview. The pushback maybe continued but he claims that the user industry moved on fairly quickly once the connection to the ozone hole was made.
But they faded when solutions were underway. I'd expect the same to happen when we have a tax on net CO2 emissions and the sky does not start falling.
Didnt Thatcher persuade Reagan that the Montreal protocols were needed?
Uncertainty. Yes, after working at a research lab, I concluded that scientists, in general, are pretty conservative. They are reluctant to sound an alarm without pretty solid backing. Which worries me with climate change. I suspect that things will actually be worse than predicted, and happen faster than predicted, because of that very conservative approach. I especially worry about catastrophic ice-sheet collapse, which is now being seriously talked about, but 20 years ago when I asked a top glaciologist about that possibility, he basically said don't worry, it won't happen.
100% agree. Scientists are anti-alarmists. The true alarmists are the people who say that transitioning to renewable energy will bankrupt us.
Although not as low cost as ozone protection, reducing and reversing CO2 omissions would also be similarly ho-hum if done with a tax on net CO2 emissions.
It is interesting that the same ozone deniers morphed into climate change deniers. Scientists tend to err on the side of caution, while these guys throw all caution to the winds and bury their heads in the sand. Do they not have compassion for the welfare of others? OK, never mind...
It makes sense when you realize that the arguments are not really about science. They’re about the solutions and about their efforts to make arguments to let polluters keep polluting. In that sense, you could expect them to deny every environmental issue.
Agree, but to some extent they may truly overestimate the costs. We should take the opponents of taxing net CO2 emissions seriously if not literally.
100% I agree they overestimate the costs. This is a strategy to scare people, not a legitimate error. See, for example, https://library1.chc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Weaponizing-economics-Big-Oil-economic-consultants-and-climate-policy-delay.pdf