Why You Don’t Hear About the Hole in the Ozone Layer Anymore

The ozone layer is an interesting subject that you cover because that doesn't get discussed anymore. But I've been to Australia and you go outside and you burst into flames. There's everywhere you go to Australia, there's these billboards for skin cancer. It's really, it was at least it was the last time I was there, which was over 10 years ago, but it's really strange. There's these billboards everywhere that show tumors and show people that have skin cancer and talk to you about the damages and the dangers of sun. Wow. I had not realized that. Well, they have a giant hole. Like Australia. Yeah, they're close enough to the ozone hole or partially under parts of it, I suppose. So yeah, they're experienced here. They got our hair spray. They got our, they exactly got our hair spray. Yeah. And it is amazing how that story does seem to have been forgotten. Oh yeah. Both the threat and the fact of the success. I mean, we caused this huge problem. We discovered this huge problem, which we needn't. I mean, that was kind of serendipitous. And yes, the industry denied it. And this kind of came in two chapters. First it was the aerosol industry saying, this is an attack on free enterprise. Particularly the KGB is behind it. I mean, what else did they say? Is that really what they said? There was one aerosol company president, yeah, who suspected it was a KGB, but many industry leaders were talking about this being as an anti-capitalist crusade and partly because this was the early 70s. So they had already faced all of these demanding environmentalists saying, take the lead out of the gasoline and do all kinds of other things. And so they were starting to feel like attacked on all sides. And eventually, so there was some denial there, mostly political. Eventually that got handled, well, I shouldn't say eventually, it got handled relatively quickly because actually it was only 1976 when they said, okay, we're getting this stuff out of the hairspray, out of the deodorant. We don't need this in spray cans. What was it that was in the spray cans? Chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, which were invented, ironically, by the same guy who invented leaded gasoline at GM. Oh boy. He invented both of these chemicals. What's that creep's name? His name is Thomas Midgley. Yeah, and he left quite a mark on the world. But here's the thing. I blame him for putting lead in gasoline. That was terrible. But inventing CFCs was actually done because it was replacing the poisonous gases that were then in refrigerators and they would sometimes leak and kill people. So people were just transitioning now from ice boxes to fridges. And so they needed a non-toxic gas to put in there. So he came up with this and it was non-toxic. And so at the time, nobody really even knew much about the ozone layer and they certainly didn't know CFCs were going to wreck it. So it was a much, much less obvious risk. And then it wasn't until the 70s then scientists who were just sort of curious put this all together and realized, uh oh, we are wrecking the ozone layer. And by 1976, I think it was 1976, the Ford administration said, okay, we're getting it out of the cans. You got a couple years. And this industry, the aerosol industry who had been screaming and yelling about anti-capitalists said, okay. I mean, it was not that big a deal. It was easy for them to do. And then I guess we were in the Carter administration and they were going to start looking at the harder problem of how do you replace CFCs in refrigerators and air conditioners. And they were putting up a plan for that. But then Reagan got elected and the concerns of the 60s and 70s about how do we protect the environment were replaced by concerns about how do we avoid environmental regulations because they felt it was hurting business. And so they basically dropped the ball on this completely. And the corporations like DuPont, which was the top CFC maker, they had been working on substitutes but once the pressure of regulation went away, they just dropped it. They didn't keep looking for substitutes even though they had the same science telling them that there was a risk here, but they decided, ah, we're not going to have to worry about it. Then eventually the ozone hole is discovered and scientists are shocked because the models had predicted a gradual reduction in ozone. And suddenly you've got this deep reduction in ozone and it covers like this huge space over Antarctica. One of the reasons NASA had not discovered this with their satellites was that they were expecting so much less that they had apparently programmed the computers to read huge readings like this as instrument error. Oh, wow. So it was actually the British who discovered this. They did it the old fashioned way, going down to Antarctica and like measuring things. So anyway, they announced it, then NASA looked back and said, whoops, you're right, huge ozone hole. And everything kind of accelerated and by 87 we had the Montreal Protocol and even though Reagan had run on this anti-regulatory platform, he signed the Montreal Protocol, the Senate, ratified it, I don't think there were any dissenting votes. So that was a big success story. And by the way, by the time things really were winding down, even DuPont said, okay, yeah, there's enough science here. We're going to stop making our product. And so it's sort of the one example I can point to where science and evidence overcame denial. But it's an example where the product wasn't their core product. It was a little sliver of revenue that wasn't that lucrative. They could replace it with something that they could sell and they were going to clearly get regulated anyway. So clearly the benefits of continued denial had sort of disappeared. So you can't count on evidence leading to the end of corporate denial. More typically you have a situation like tobacco and fossil fuels where even if it does lead to denial, it doesn't, they don't stop selling the product, right? So and again, obviously oil companies can't just stop selling their product, but they can be part of a process for us all to figure out how we're going to replace it as quickly as possible. What efforts were done, if any, to regenerate ozone? Just to cut the emissions. I mean, I'm not aware of anything. I don't know that, yeah, it's funny. I've not heard anybody talk about that. But we've always known that the CFCs take decades to get up to the atmosphere. So stopping emissions meant that the old stuff was still going up there and it was going to take decades to fix it. We do seem to have signs of healing now of the ozone layer. So it does seem like we have solved, well, solved this. We have stopped the harm and it's going to get better through natural circumstances. But I was talking about how people don't let us celebrate that as humanity at its best, because we really did something very hard in the sense of figuring out the science, getting the nations of the world together, and getting rid of a product that had been really useful and valuable to us. But what happened immediately after that was this political backlash. Even when you had the chemical industry saying, yep, we're destroying the ozone layer, we're going to stop doing that, you had these right-wing groups. Fred Singer actually was one of the witnesses who was also in Merchants of Doubt, who goes and he gets to testify before Congress, he's a scientist, and he's saying that the mainstream science on which you have just based all of these decisions, you're being bamboozled and they have an anti-capitalist agenda. And you had then, I think it was Tom DeLay, saying he doesn't listen to the ozone trends panel, all of those hundreds of scientists who've hammered out the data on these issues, he listens to Fred Singer. And that was sort of the beginning, well, not the beginning because you could take it back to the 80s, but that was the next step in the rise of the science deniers who sort of had this all-purpose agenda that looked at lots of different industries. And the funny thing was here, you had the industry saying, no, we're fine with this accelerating the phase out, we're going to go ahead and do it. So the way I think about it is that industry for a long time fueled doubt, and to some extent they also then funded groups with an ideological agenda who continued to push that doubt. And then some of those industries stopped denying the science, maybe because they were going to get sued or maybe because it was just time. But the groups that they have funded now sort of outflanked them on the issue. And for example, Exxon used to fund, ExxonMobil used to fund this little crazy little group called the Heartland Institute. And they stopped doing that quite a long time ago. This institute kept just getting more and more extreme on this issue. And recently they had a dispute between ExxonMobil and the Heartland Institute and Heartland's leader called ExxonMobil part of the anti-energy global warming movement. That's hilarious. Yeah, so things are weird right now. That's super weird. That is super weird. Exxon, part of an anti-energy global warming movement. Now it's possible that this was all kind of staged to make Exxon look good, but I think they have just created a monster and that monster is going to keep going around out there and it keeps getting a lot of money. The problem is it doesn't, we don't necessarily know who's funding these groups anymore. For a long time, Exxon funded a lot of climate denier groups. They got a lot of public pushback and pressure. They stopped funding the most extreme ones, not all of them. Then the Koch brothers started funding, their foundation started funding a lot of these groups. They got a lot of attention. Then we saw a lot of the funding of these groups going underground into these dark money organizations like Donors Trust that promise anonymity so that if you want to fund a politically sensitive issue, nobody knows you've done it. The more extreme groups get a lot of money from these dark money organizations and therefore there's even deeper anonymity and no accountability. That's some 4D chance if Exxon was doing that. If they're sitting there going, look, I know what we can do. Let's get someone to call us a bunch of hippies. Yeah, I suspect that it wasn't that. I think they really have just created a monster here. Really would be brilliant if it was true. Well, I think that some of this is true that you ... I mean, here's the thing. If you're Exxon and you don't actually want to do anything, you spin off the denial into other groups that will actually stop things. I mean, this little group, Heartland, this extreme edge of these advocacy groups, they're deeply involved in the Trump administration. It's not like they're just out there howling in the wilderness. They have had enormous influence. If you can back off like Exxon, especially ExxonMobil, especially if you're being sued and you've got angry shareholders and you've got the SEC, you have a lot of reasons and you have angry European countries that are taking this more seriously and you're multinational. You have a lot of reason to kind of keep your mouth shut and maybe say the right things, but you can indeed still benefit from the denial you have spun off into the world that is in fact, say, rolling back the fuel efficiency standards. I don't know what ExxonMobil has said about that, but clearly the more inefficient our cars, the more oil gets burned.