Yeah the honest answer is there is no single “American education system”. Primary education is splintered into thousands of different counties, each with their own curriculum and funding, with varying degrees of state and national oversight. Some are good, some are terrible. My public school education was pretty solid overall, despite the clear shortage of funding.

On the other hand, despite rising costs, the US university system is still world-class.

I don’t think that’s true, we have more trees than we did 100 years ago but I couldn’t see anything about more trees than pre-European settlement. I am inclined to doubt that.

I guess. You could also look at things like plastic pollution where industry straight up won, and during the 60s-70s successfully pushed the responsibility onto consumers to recycle while continuing to crank out single use plastic with very few restrictions.

I don’t know of any for the ozone hole specifically, but you can look to the fight over cigarettes to see the same science-denying approach during the 50s and beyond. That was literally the blueprint for climate change denial by the fossil fuel industry in later decades.

Stopping climate change is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE harder than protecting the ozone layer. Protecting ozone requires switching the chemicals we used in refrigerants and propellants to other, viable alternatives. That affected products worth, generously, maybe 1% of GDP?

Stopping climate changing the vast majority of the vehicles on the planet, along with the majority of our electrical power plants. It also necessitates stopping deforestation and overhauling a wide number of industrial processes, including for basic materials like steel and concrete. And that’s not even getting into methane emissions from livestock.

All of these things add up to a massive chunk of the planets GDP. It’s an extremely heavy lift, and it’s not fair to say that the world has gotten worse because we’re struggling more with climate change than the ozone hole.

Yeah it absolutely would benefit from a wider range of opinions. That’s why a large portion of my comments are “against the grain”, I don’t see the value of reinforcing prevailing opinions in an echo chamber. I hope that as Lemmy grows we will see more diverse opinions, but what I think is more likely is that the hard-core leftist part of Lemmy will sort of secede and defederate so they can preserve their echo chamber while the rest of lemmy gets taken over by “normies”