Susan Solomon explaining why the United States held disproportionate leverage in negotiating the global CFC ban: consumer boycotts had already killed the domestic market for the chemicals, so exporters couldn't rely on selling into it regardless of what the treaty said.
Are We Doomed? · 2026-08-18
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Are We Doomed?
Around 31:50 into the episode
Speaker 4
Just another way for the rich countries to impose costs on them.
Ben Bradford
…days of the conference that negotiators reached common ground. Developing countries would get more time before a cap went to effect. Producer nations would subsidize if there was higher cost. Europe came on board. And ultimately, Susan says the deciding factor there was the market power of the U.S.
Susan Solomon
The American people made chlorofluorocarbons uneconomic for our industry because we gave up those spray cans.
Ben Bradford
You couldn't sell here anyway. Then, over in the White House, whether to agree to the treaty also quietly hung on a knife's edge. President Reagan had campaigned precisely against more regulation. His first head of the EPA had dismissed ozone depletion as a threat. His Secretary of the Interior…
Speaker 1
The ozone hole. Oh no, we're destroying the ozone with cans of hairspray. There is no ozone hole now.
Ben Bradford
And disbelief has survived all the way to the highest levels of government today.
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
Atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon, who discovered the chemical cause of the Antarctic ozone hole, describing which country ended up driving the hardest for the Montreal Protocol's global CFC phase-out. It happened during the deregulation-minded Reagan era, which is part of why she calls it surprising.
Are We Doomed? · 2026-08-18
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Are We Doomed?
Around 26:24 into the episode
Susan Solomon
hydrofluorolefins,
Ben Bradford
which seems to be better, such as progress. Anyway, it all added up to the largest producer of CFCs also being the nation leading the way to stop using them.
Susan Solomon
Amazingly, the country that pushed the most was actually the United States of America.
Ben Bradford
Cities and towns began enacting bans on CFCs. NASA used its tech to confirm and publish visualizations of the problem.
Susan Solomon
You know, you had these incredible satellite images of the hole in the ozone layer.
Ben Bradford
A giant dark blue wound across the bottom of the world splashed in the pages of newspapers and on TV. There were scientists still debating whether CFCs were the problem or whether the hole was natural. That's the nature of research. But no movement of denial gained a meaningful foothold. And so…
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
