The world may have less time than it thinks on climate change

This worked so well because we had suitable replacement gases and the industry had little financial incentives to push against it.

It's a very different situation with fossil fuels.

> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?

Because it also happened to be profitable for a large company (DuPont), which was also the company largely responsible for the whole ozone layer thing. They lobbied against ozone layer protections while they had a patent on Freon, but as soon as it expired, they came up with a new more expensive alternative and started supporting environmental regulations forcing people to switch to the new one.

Take a walk up the alps, compare to pictures from 20 years ago and see for yourself

Because with the ozone layer, the causes of the problem were much more narrow, the solutions were orders of magnitude cheaper, and they affected a much smaller industry, much less dramatically.

It’s not that the changes are “too damaging to the economy,” it’s that they’d need to be much more widespread. For example, everyone should have stopped driving gasoline engine cars at least by 2010, when the scientific evidence had already been undeniable for years, for anyone studying the matter in good faith. No such action was needed to deal with the ozone layer.

Compounding the problem for climate change mitigation is that it threatens the wealth of people in the oil, gas, and related industries. Changing refrigerant type for ozone hole mitigation was not an existential threat to any industry. The fossil fuel industry has plowed billions of dollars into propaganda and political influence to prevent or slow down changes.

Yes, a carbon tax would go a long way, but I think a broader view is to look for ways to use taxes to shift externalities back onto the organizations that created the problem. For example, data centers (a popular demon). The two main externalities are water consumption and power consumption. The tariffs for providing those services to a data center should be high enough to compensate the rest of the community for the impact the data center has on the community.

For example, tariffs could be used to subsidize non-data-center power users. Higher tariffs could also be used to fund community solar and community BESS, helping provide greater local grid resilience. For example, the tariffs should be high enough to subsidize everybody else so they don't have to pay more for their electric service, roughly speaking.

I would also advocate closing the on-prem generator loophole by classifying on-prem power generation services as belonging to or leased from local utilities, and setting the tariff for locally generated power to match the tariff they pay for drawing from the grid.