I’ve been reading 1960s news (my grandpa saved a bunch of news yearbooks) as an alternative to internet and so far the most striking—and this goes for other books I’ve lead from fifties through nineties was that it was from a world of hope, a world that could change.
Yeah, there were doomy pockets like the 1962 Cuba crisis or [the 1979 Détente collapse] but in the day-to-day the world was a changing world; civil rights, gay rights, the rise of feminism, new inventions that actually helped people.
I thank the heavens each day that the freon crisis happened during this era when people actually knew how to fix things. If it had happened now we’d all been fried and it’d’ve been bye bye ozone layer.
But it doesn’t have to be this way! The world could change and it still can!
Okay, the way we fixed the freon crisis was not good. HFCs, which was the alternative, are such a big problem that phasing away from them, which we now globally are doing thankfully, is [the biggest single climate win of all time][tbscwoat].
| [tbscwoat]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/15/climate-change-environmentalists-hail-deal-to-limit-use-of-hydrofluorocarbons “Climate change: global deal reached to limit use of hydrofluorocarbons | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian” |
A “win” that wouldn’t’ve been needed if we had solved freons in a better way in the first place which could have saved many lives.