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

the Joe Rogan experience the ozone layer is an interesting subject that you cover because that doesn't get discussed anymore but I've been Australia and you go outside and you burst into flames huh there's everywhere you go to Australia there's these billboards for skin cancer it's really it was released it was the last time I was there which was over ten years ago but it's really strange Wow there's these billboards everywhere that show tumors and show you know people that have skin cancer and talk to you about the damages and the dangers of Sun Wow we have a giant hole like Australia yeah they're they're close enough to the ozone hole or partially under I got exactly better yeah I mean it's it is amazing how that story it does seem to have been forgotten oh the threat and the fact of the success I mean we caused this huge problem we discovered this huge problem which we need I mean that was kind of serendipitous and yes the industry denied it and and it's kind of came in two chapters first it was the aerosol industry saying this is an attack on free enterprise probably the KGB is behind it I mean what else there was one aerosol company president Yahoo suspected it was a KGB but but many industry leaders were talking about this being as a you know an anti-capitalist crusade and partly because this was the early 70s so they had already faced all of these you know demanding environmentalists saying take the lid out of the gasoline and do all kinds of other things and so they were starting to feel like attacked on all sides and and eventually you know so there was some denial there mostly political eventually that got handled well I shouldn't say eventually he got handled relatively quickly because actually it was like 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 chlorofluorocarbons CFCs which were invented ironically by the same guy who invented leaded gasoline at gee oh boy invented both of these what's a creeps name his name is Thomas Midgley yeah and he left quite a mark on the world but but here's the thing I mean 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 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 you know at the time nobody really even knew much about the ozone layer and they certainly didn't know CFCs were gonna wreck it so it's much much less obvious risk and and then it wasn't in until the 70s then scientists who were just sort of curious put this all together and realized oh we are wrecking the ozone layer and by 76 I think it was 76 the Ford administration said ok we're getting it out of the cans he got a couple years and this industry the aerosol industry who had been screaming and yelling about anti capitalists said ok I mean it wasn't it was not that big a deal it was easy for them to do and then then I guess we were in the Carter Administration and they were gonna start looking at the harder problem of how do you replace CFCs in refrigerators and air conditioners and they were for putting up a plan for that but then Reagan got elected and then 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 they were they felt it was hurting business and so they basically dropped the ball on this completely and and the corporations like you taunt which was the top CFC maker they had been working on substitutes but once the the pressure of regulation went away they just dropped it they didn't keep looking for substitutes even though they had the the same science telling them that there was a risk here but they decided we're not gonna have to worry about it then eventually the ozone hole is discovered and scientists are shocked because the models had predicted you know a gradual reduction in ozone and suddenly you've got this deep reduction in Ozone and it covers like you know 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 Wow so it was actually the British who discovered this they they did it the old-fashioned way going down to Antarctica and like measuring things so anyway they announced it the NASA looked back and said woops you're right huge ozone hole then 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 Senate ratified it I don't think there were any dissenting votes so you know that was a big success story and by the way by the time things really were winding down even DuPont said okay yeah that there's enough science here we're gonna 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 gonna clearly get regulated anyway so so clearly the you know the benefits of continued denial had sort of disappeared and so you can't count on evidence you know 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 what efforts were done if any to regenerate ozone just to cut the emissions and it's not aware of anything I don't know that yeah it's funny I'm not heard anybody talk about that but it 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 only taken 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 solve this we have we have stopped the harm and it's going to get better through natural circumstances but you know I was I was talking about how people don't let us celebrate that as humanity at its best you know because we really did something very hard or it's 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 gonna 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 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 you know hundreds of scientists who have 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 couldn't take it back to the 80s but that was the next step in the rise of these science deniers who sort of had this all-purpose agenda that looked at lots of different industries and the funny thing was here you know you had the industry saying you know we're fine with this accelerating the phase-out we're gonna go ahead and do it so you know 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 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 outflank them on the issue and for example Exxon used to fund ExxonMobil used to fund this little crazy little group called the Heartland in 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 leader called ExxonMobil part of the anti energy global warming movement that's hilarious yeah so you know their things are weird right now that's super weird called super with Exxon part of an anti energy global warming move movement now it's possible that this was all kind of stage 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 so these you know the more extreme groups get a lot of money from these dark money organizations and therefore there's even deeper anonymity and and no accountability that's some for DHS if Exxon was doing that if they're sitting there going look I know what we got 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 you spin off the denial into other groups that will actually stop things I mean this little group heartland I mean the this extreme edge of these advocacy groups they are deeply involved in the Trump administration I mean they it's not like they're just out there howling in the wilderness they have had an enormous influence so if you can back off like like Exxon especially ExxonMobil especially if you're being sued and you've got angry shareholders and you've got the SEC you had a lot of reasons and and you have angry European countries that are taking this more seriously in your 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 [Applause]

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 2,208,842

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: mYJHtauiP9Q

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020