to discuss news and stuff of the old world dying
They bang on about it because it's true. The rapid removal of the offending refrigerant did noticably reverse the damage to the ozon layer. But that doesn't mean something new can't come along to ruin it again.
And now it is caused by a single, very very shitty company, who is polutiong the skies with LEO satelites.
sauce?
As with so many things in science it's not considered proven, but as with so many things in reality, the damage will be done before we can really get proof. We have evidence so we should slow TF down
https://www.space.com/megaconstellations-threat-to-ozone-layer-recovery
Everywhere I look, musk and bezos are destroying something
Billinaires are the biggest threat to humanity.
Oh great, now that is back.
Make Ozone Hole Great Again!
I always thought that the international effort to change compressor gas had a positive effect! We can't have anything good anymore.
It had a huge positive effect. The levels are still better than they were. The hole is bigger, but the levels are better, it's just more spread out.
We might have possibly already destroyed the ozone layer tho. And by "we" I mean specifically Elon Musk and his Starlink bullshit. Those satellites are designed to orbit very low to get low latency, but that means they can only stay up there for 3-6 years (on average around 4.5 years). They just launch thousands and thousands to keep up with the rate of depletion. The satellites are small, so they burn up in the upper atmosphere, so not a problem right? Wrong as it turns out. When they burn up they drop a huge amount of aluminium particles into the upper atmosphere where they drift around for a long time. As they slowly drop lower into the atmosphere they interact with the ozone layer depleting it quickly.
It's pretty early to tell how bad the damage will be, but with the amount of satellites up there we might already be very fucked.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280
Might be a good time for countries to start charging SpaceXAI (or however it's called these days) for their effect on the ozone layer.
If e.g. the EU estimates that it'll have to spend fifty billion euros a year dealing with the effects of LEO satellite constellations in the ozone layer then they should bill those fifty billion euros to the operating companies with each paying a proportion relative to how many satellites they have in LEO.
Likewise for every other country that has to deal with the effects of a diminished ozone layer. If that means SpaceX becomes deeply unprofitable then that's unfortunate for the investors.
I get where you're coming from, but that's a pretty capitalist approach to it. Broken down it's similar to "As long as they can pay for it, we'll allow them to destroy the environment". A destroyed environment can not be replaced with money. Granted, it might work for problems that have an effect with a slow build-up, eventually hopefully replacing it with something that avoids that before its irreversible by pricing the harmful practice out.
But if the effect is close to destroying an important part of the environment, then we should outright forbid it.
Edit: Okay, I also just realized that it does not seem as easy in this case, as single countries can't forbid it, as this is about space, but then again, the world came together to ban the production and use of CFCs, so a similar approach seems possible
We could get a worldwide ban going but as long as any country with launch capabilities (like, say, the United States) decides not to join the ban we achieve nothing. And given how the States work, it's unlikely that they'd agree to such a ban.
With CFCs we had the benefit of having replacement chemicals available. Sure, they were somewhat less efficient than CFCs but they worked just fine.
(Also, some people still use them despite the ban. China has been shown to still be a CFC emitter although to a lesser degree than earlier.)
A ban or heavy restriction on LEO satellite constellations would render the whole high speed satellite internet business model useless. Sure, you can do it with higher orbits but that requires unacceptable tradeoffs. So you'd see much more pushback.
On the other hand, charging for environmental damage is kinda hard to work around. Sure, Musk can go cry to daddy Trump if the mean EU forces him to pay up. But Trump can't really do much except escalate the trade war for the thirtieth time.
I'd still say that the situation is similar enough to CFCs. If the USA would not have forbidden CFCs, there also wouldn't really have been much other countries can do, as it's in the atmosphere. From that political perspective it's pretty comparable.
As for having a replacement available, there are some technologies that just aren't worth it, when compared to the damage they do. We do have a replacement, which would be wired internet. Or heck, even cellular networks. For those rare remote locations it might have a higher upfront cost, but from a perspective of necessity, I'd say that a working ozone layer is even more important to those remote locations than high-speed internet.
That doesn't go against anything you said, on a factual level I agree with your statements - I'm well aware that that's not how the world works. I'm just annoyed by this being used as arguments in discussions about the environment. Of course the USA or even Europe would hesitate to do something that would eat into the profit margins of companies. That doesn't mean that we immediately have to take over these talking points. The world shouldn't be about profit over everything else. But that's just my little utopia.
Elon muck should be fucking skinned tbh.
Thanks for clarifying! This calls for new regulations on satellite starts
It did. Only now somebody else is fucking up somewhere.
It's China. CFC-11 is being used illegally in manufacturing.
Gonna need more than a random attestation from a .world user
That's rich coming from a .zip user! /s
It did! Getting rid of CFC was a major victory for humanity. But there are yet more struggles to overcome.
We need to terraform earth back into earth like.