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Opinion | The World Solved the Ozone Problem. It Can Solve Climate Change.

In 1965, following a report from his Science Advisory Committee, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to pass a law curbing carbon dioxide emissions. Four years later, in a memo to John Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s domestic affairs chief, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a presidential assistant, warned that “man has begun to introduce instability” in the atmosphere “through the burning of fossil fuels.” Atmospheric warming, Mr. Moynihan said, “very clearly is a problem, and perhaps most particularly, is one that can seize the imagination of persons normally indifferent to projects of apocalyptic change.” Indeed, he offered, it was not out of the question to imagine “mammoth man-made efforts to countervail the CO2 rise (e.g., stop burning fossil fuels).”

Later came the dramatic congressional testimony of James Hansen, a NASA scientist, before Congress in June 1988, linking global warming to human activities with 99 percent certainty, an assertion that landed the issue on the front page of The New York Times; also the strenuous efforts of advocates like Al Gore to demonstrate the link between warming and the increase in manufacturing and the use of fossil fuels since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Yet scientific knowledge has not produced action equal to the challenge. One reason has been the absence, until fairly recently, of obvious environmental damage threatening individual well-being and the sense of urgency that inspires the public to demand regulatory responses. The prospect of thousands and even millions of cancer deaths led to the Montreal Protocol. The Cuyahoga River catching on fire, giant algae blooms in lakes and rivers, and widespread contamination of municipal water supplies led to the Clean Water Act of 1972. Oppressive inner-city smog — so bad you could nearly taste it — as well as mounting respiratory illnesses, and dead and dying trees, streams and lakes, helped overcome political and industry foot-dragging and created the landmark 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act and its innovative cap-and-trade system for controlling ground-level pollutants.

Climate change, by contrast, has for a long time been seen as remote, something for future generations to worry about, and in polls has appeared far down on the list of voters’ concerns.

In addition, there were no relatively expeditious technological fixes for carbon emissions, as there were for fluorocarbons, and as there were for the pollutants addressed in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, like scrubbers for power plants, and catalytic converters and cleaner fuels for cars and light trucks. The global warming problem requires a whole suite of fixes, some of them mammoth, as Mr. Moynihan intuited a half-century ago — carbon-free alternatives to produce electricity; an all-electric vehicle fleet; an end to deforestation; climate-friendly agricultural practices; large-scale dietary changes; and, quite possibly, advanced technologies to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Reimagining the world economy means turning around a very big ship. Not to mention global buy-in.

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