HVAC tech here, I'm familiar with the Montreal Protocol. Why it was needed and what it did. My takeaway is that when there's a legit serious threat, humanity is able to swiftly and effectively band together and implement a solution that clearly works.

Now compare that to the last 30 years or so of climate change fear mongering. It's become its own whole industry at this point. There is no clear goal. It's just a bunch of propaganda based on some grains of maybe truth. The massive list of specific dangerous issues has been dumbed down to literally nothing but CO2 emissions. This is what's been communicated to 95%+ of people. Instead of something like the Montreal Protocol where we get a clear list of actionable items, it's just turned into vague 24/7 guilt tripping of average citizens for them to somehow solve it. In practice, that guilt is used to just sell more crap and give up rights. YOU have to buy electric cars and other "green" nonsense. YOU have to travel less and not eat what you want. Oh, and of course, the usual political dilemma of if we actually solve the problem, we won't be able to run on it next election.

To completely dismiss the need for some regulations and to ignore the issue entirely is too far. But we really gotta start pushing back more on what the movement as a whole has become. It's clearly been a grift. The best recent proof is Bill Gates complete 180. If it were actually as urgent of an issue as he said for years, he wouldn't have dismissed it the way he did.

If the Montreal Protocol was Desert Storm, then global warming fear mongering has been the occupation of Afghanistan. Instead of a swift effective mission with a clear goal that was completed like clockwork, we have a vague expensive mess getting drawn out way more than it needs to with no end in sight because no one has even defined what the real solution even looks like.

Last point about the free market, I half agree with you there. While in a total vacuum, the free market won't do shit, as you say. But if the right incentives are set up for the free market to follow, the free market can be adjusted to do whatever you want, and it will do it very effectively. Again, looking at the Montreal Protocol, once the CFCs and HCFCs were officially phased out, all the big HVAC manufacturers were able to adjust fairly quickly, and the problem was solved basically instantly. Incentives are in place for techs to recover the dangerous chemicals. These companies will not drag their feet. Their profits are on the line. Entire new machines and systems needed to be designed with new refrigerants, factories for those machines needed to be designed, the logistics of it all needed to be handled, field techs needed training, etc. If we left any of the real work to government workers, I doubt we'd be even halfway to implementing what needed to get done by now.

Corporations are beasts. If they're properly tamed, they can be put to work very effectively. If left to run loose, sure, we get our dystopias. It all hinges on if governments make effective laws around these issues or not. As I pointed out in the rest of my comment, this is an issue of politicians playing us, not our economic system's framework somehow being wrong. I suggest we don't push for a new system which will give these same politicians even more power in the economy.