Acid rain is another success story for "making a giant collective change to fix a nearly invisible problem".

I think one major difference is that there are enormous companies and entire countries whose way of life truly depends on pumping fossil carbon out of the ground. It wasn't that way for CFCs or NO~x~. Sure, Dow/DuPont/whomever surely lost some profitable investment in freon plants, but they had other business as well, and their old customers switched to buying the new refrigerants from the same suppliers.

Or he's just getting really into the persona of an 1870s immigrant, who would have been using traditional characters anyway! Such attention to detail :D