You're seriously overestimating Americans, circa 1982. We were still fighting about whether cigarette smoke causes cancer (correlation is not causation!) and we had a president who claimed that trees pollute the environment more than cars do (who went on to be reelected). Politically influential Christian public figures rationalized how the deadly sin of greed should be considered a virtue while also blathering about how HIV was a manifestation of God's wrath toward homosexuals. And everyone kind of assumed our odds of surviving the cold war weren't great anyway, so you want to worry about something about temperature increasing, and also didn't you say there was going to be an ice age or something, blah blah blah?
It's a minor miracle that we managed to cease the destruction of the ozone layer given the level of stupidity we were operating at. A person aware of current events and capable of making analogies might question how much progress we've truly made, but that's a separate topic.