Posted on 07/19/2003 3:22:14 PM PDT by Pokey78
President George Bush is targeting the international treaty to save the ozone layer which protects all life on earth from deadly radiation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
New US demands - tabled at a little-noticed meeting in Montreal earlier this month - threaten to unravel one of the greatest environmental success stories of the past few decades, causing millions of deaths from cancer.
The news comes at a particularly embarrassing time for the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who pressed the President in their talks in Washington last week to stop his attempts to sabotage the Kyoto Protocol which sets out to control global warming: one of the few international issues on which they differ.
Now, instead of heeding Mr Blair, Mr Bush is undermining the ozone treaty as well, by seeking to perpetuate the use of the most ozone-destructive chemical still employed in developed countries, otherwise soon to be phased out. Ironically, it was sustained pressure from the Reagan administration, in which Mr Bush's father served as vice-president, that ensured the treaty was adopted in the first place. It has proved such a success that environmentalists have long regarded it as inviolable.
The ozone layer - made of a type of oxygen so thinly scattered through the upper atmosphere that, if gathered all together, it would form a ring around the earth no thicker than the sole of a shoe - screens out the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays which would, otherwise, wipe out terrestrial life. As it weakens, more of the rays get through, causing skin cancer and blindness from cataracts.
The world was shocked to discover in the 1980s that pollution from man-made chemicals had opened a hole the size of the United States in the layer above Antarctica, and had thinned it worldwide. Led by the US, nations moved with unprecedented speed to agree the treaty, called the Montreal Protocol, in 1987 - which started the process of phasing out use of the chemicals.
The measures have been progressively tightened ever since. Scientists reckon that they will eventually prevent 2 million cases of cancer a year in the US and Europe alone. But President Bush's new demands threaten to throw the process into reverse.
They centre on a pesticide, methyl bromide, now the greatest attacker of ozone left in industrialised countries. The US is responsible for a quarter of the world's consumption of the chemical, which has also been linked with increased prostate cancers in farmers.
Under an extension to the Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1997, the pesticide is being gradually phased out and replaced with substitutes; its use in the West is due to end completely in 2005. Nations are legally allowed to extend the use of small amounts in "critical" applications, but the US is demanding exemptions far beyond those permitted, for uses ranging from growing strawberries to tending golf courses.
It is also pressing to exploit a loophole in the treaty - allowing the use of the chemical to treat wood packaging - so that, instead of being phased out, its use would increase threefold.
The demands now go to an international conference in Nairobi this autumn. Experts fear that, if agreed, the treaty will begin to fall apart, not least because developing countries - which are following rich nations in phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals - could cease their efforts.
"The US is reneging on the agreement, and working very, very hard to get other countries to agree," said David Doniger, a former senior US government official dealing with ozone issues, who now works for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If it succeeds, it threatens to unravel the whole fabric of the treaty."
Dr Joe Farman, the Cambridge scientist who discovered the Antarctic ozone hole, added: "This is madness. We do not need this chemical. We do need the ozone layer. How stupid can people be?"
The Kyoto Agreement is already dead.
The problem is the 'phase-out' takes place first and foremost in the developed nations - thus putting our 'already undercut' farmers at an even further disadvantage with 'developing nations'.
It's just like the CO2 emmisions... China gets away with every house heated by sulfer-rich coal, while we are building (and paying for) high efficiancy power plants, and appliances.
I don't see why we should hobble our economy just because we are the success. Let all nations 'bite the bullet' equally.
Only to discover later that the ozone hole over the Antarctic fluctuates in size in a measurable and apparently natural cycle. Right now it's barely there. Unfortunately, the world could have cared less that the hole might be a natual occurance. Facts didn't matter. Blaming mankind did. We humans, who if you stuck us all in the same spot could fit inside the state of Texas, are somehow able to devestate a PLANET, just by walking around and breathing on the thing. Never mind that we evolved here as part of the plantet's ecosystem and so have as much right to be here as four legged and woody-stemmed 'people'...mankind is evil. EEEEEVEEEEL I tell you!! We are bad. BAD!!
We got rid of the chloroflurocarbons everyone was so excited about. Everything else is just typical, cancerous, socialistic growth which has a tendency to turn even the smallest and most well meaning initiative into the blob that ate North America overnight.
It belongs in the trash with Kyoto.
That's right. PresBush is responsible for folks getting skin cancer. But laying out in the sun year after year, has absolutely nothing to do with people developing skin cancer during their lifetime.
Give me a break.
Just three years ago - even before he became president - weren't they blaming him for global warming?
HAHAHAHA!!! What a sentence. This is what passes for "journalism" in the UK???
I like to ask ozone fanatics the following:
1. Prove that the 'ozone hole' is a recent phenomenon and that it is not 50,000--or 500 million--years old.
2. Prove (do not speculate and say "may be") that CFCs are destroying the ozone in the high stratosphere.
3. Explain how Dr. Dobson (inventor of the device used to measure ozone) measured some of the lowest Antarctic ozone levels ever seen...in 1958, well before human CFCs could have contributed to "ozone destruction".
4. Prove that the ozone hole in the antarctic harms anything other than penguins.
By this time they are usually in a foaming and inarticulate rage. They cannot respond with scientific proof.
CFCs are probably among the most useful and harmless of any chemicals invented by man. Naturally, the only thing to do is ban them over a fantasy.
I have been on a quest, looking for a simple thing: a global budget of all gases emitted by vulcanism each year. I've contacted geologists and vulcanologists. Most of them just shrug (if they answer at all). This would seem to be a ripe subject for papers, PhDs, all kinds of research. Gosh, it is almost as if the subject were in some way forbidden...but that would be paranoid, right?...
--Boris
Quite right. Even on a day of no volcanic activity anywhere, volcanoes emit an estimated 20 times as many ozone harming chemicals as men. With just one active volcano, that goes to thousands of times and even millions of times as many. Nothing we do or don't do will make the slightest difference.
Not by several years, friend. The Word has been out for a long time.
The sound you may hear is two hands clapping. This is the kind of quest conservatives should be undertaking on a wide scale. I'll join you -- I know quite a few people in those fields.
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