The Undoing II—Red Days
147 Big Macs: Allan Mazur and Jinling Lee, “Sounding the Global Alarm: Environmental Issues in the U.S. National News,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23 No. 4, November 1993.
They finally, after the big discovery about five paragraphs down, agreed to stop using Freon—for Styrofoam packaging, in domestic fast food.
147 They were in the car’s AC: Lanie Jones, “Ozone Warning: He Sounded Alarm, Paid Heavy Price,” The Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1988.
147 “a smashing success”: Jeff Blyskal, Marie Blyskal, PR: How the Public Relations Industry Writes the News, William Morrow 1985. Chapter Nine, “The Battle for Corporate Survival: Crisis PR,” 173.
The view from inside: the real purpose of the PR campaign, explains Makovsky, was to buy time for the industry so it could come up with an alternative aerosol propellant that did not need fluorocarbons. “If we had not taken the offensive in this situation, the ban would have come a lot sooner, and the industry itself would have been unprepared to face the market realities.”
147 managed to “buy time”: It’s a strange thing: once legislation passed, the cycle seemed complete. “At that point, public concern about the problem virtually disappeared,” Paul Brodeur reports. “Most Americans were persuaded that whatever calamity might have been in store for the ozone layer had been averted.”
Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 8, 1996. Four years post-ban, the New Yorker reporter visited the chemist. Who showed him clippings: to save a pertinent news item required a scissors. One CFC company had invested $10 million in a new Freon plant. “As you can see, industry has become so confident that there will be no further regulation of CFCs that it is increasing its capacity to manufacture them,” Rowland said. “I feel as if we had circled the board and returned to Square One. Meanwhile, of course, I’m concerned that time is running out for the ozone layer.”
147 a case of help there, harm here: Richard Barnett, “The U.S. Can’t Do the Job All Alone,” The New York Times, November 16, 1986.
A strange, lawless vibe in this industry-penned op-ed. “Thus, while industry supports international action to lessen the danger of ozone depletion it will resist premature, unilateral action by Untied States officials.”
And then the international note:
Unilateral action will be ineffective without global cooperation. A ban or other controls on CFC’s solely in the U.S. would produce little, if any, environmental benefit and could significantly harm our competitive position in the world economy.
148 “I hope that the governments”: Associated Press, “Exxon Urges Developing Nations to Resist Environmental Rules,” October 13, 1997.
Business Day (South Africa), “Poor Nations Urged to Resist Green Rules,” October 14, 1997.
148 “resist policies that would strangle”: And during the actual Kyoto negotiations, lobbyists used the specter of India and China to scuttle any potential climate deal. The world, in its comic way, is dirtier than we give it sooty credit for.
The international meeting was stalemated. Poor countries were convinced that the United States was leading a cabal to deny them the right to develop economically. Environmentalists were fuming that a lawyer from one of Washington’s most-wired firms was trying, on behalf of American industry, to torpedo a deal by advising countries like India and China not to give an inch to any U.S. demands.
Sharon Begley, Jeffrey Bartholet, Karen Breslau, “Wake Up Call,” Newsweek, December 22, 1997.
Harriet Bulkeley, Peter Newell, Governing Climate Change, Routledge | Taylor and Francis 2015. Chapter Five, “The Private Governance of Climate Change,” 117. Bulkeley and Newell call this “double-edged diplomacy.” A strategy for “creating stalemate.”
Impressively nefarious. “While former chief executive of Exxon Lee Raymond was busy arguing in the United States that no action should be taken unless China, India, and other developing countries also undertook actions,” the political scientists write, “in front of audiences in China, party leaders and their industries were encouraged to resist calls from the United States to take action on climate.”
Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, “Accord Set on Cutting Emissions; 160 Nations in Agreement; US Hails ‘Historic First Step,’” The Boston Globe, December 11, 1997.
Greg Wetstone [legislative director of the National Resources Defense Council] blamed China’s opposition to accepting emissions limits on the chairman of Exxon Corp., Lee Raymond. He visited Beijing a few months ago and urged the Chinese not to adopt any emissions reductions, which he said would harm their economic growth. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the Senate not to accept any deal without China’s participation.
148 “increasing, not curtailing”: Associated Press, “Air Pollution in China Is Killing 4,000 people Every Day, a New Study Finds: Physicists at the University of California Have Found 1.6 Million People in China Die Each Year From Heart, Lung and Stroke Problems Because of Polluted Air,” August 13, 2015.
“In a 2010 document the EPA estimated between 63,000 and 88,000 people died in the US from air pollution. Other estimates ranged from 35,000 to 200,000.”
Jonathan Amos, “Polluted Air Causes 5.5 Million Deaths a Year New Research Says,” BBC, February 13, 2016. “In China, the dominant factor is particle emissions from coal burning.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35568249
Accessed 11-12-22.
Joseph Kahn, Jim Yardley, “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes,” The New York Times, August 26, 2007.
“The growth derives, now more than at any time in the recent past, from a staggering expansion of heavy industry and urbanization that requires colossal inputs of energy, almost all from coal, the most readily available, and dirtiest, source . . . Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says.”
And a 2011 Grist piece has numbers from the Chinese CDC. Janet Larsen, “Cancer Is Now the Leading Cause of Death in China,” Grist.com, May 25, 2011.
Dirty air is associated with not only a number of cancers, but also heart disease, stroke, and respiratory disease, which together account for over 80 percent of deaths countrywide. According to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the burning of coal is responsible for 70 percent of the emissions of soot that clouds out the sun in so much of China; 85 percent of sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain and smog; and 67 percent of nitrogen oxide, a precursor to harmful ground level ozone. Coal burning is also a major emitter of carcinogens and mercury, a potent neurotoxin. Coal ash, which contains radioactive material and heavy metals, including chromium, arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury, is China’s No. 1 source of solid industrial waste. The toxic ash that is not otherwise used in infrastructure or manufacturing is stored in impoundments, where it can be caught by air currents or leach contaminants into the groundwater.
https://grist.org/pollution/2011-05-25-cancer-now-leading-cause-of-death-in-china/
Accessed 11-12-22.
148 In 1986, EPA released a draft report: Philip Shabecoff, “U.S. Report Predicts Rise in Skin Cancer with Loss of Ozone,” The New York Times, November 5, 1986.
Allan Mazur, Jinling Lee, “Sounding the Global Alarm: Environmental Issues in the U.S. National News,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23 No. 4, November 1993.
148 “people with fair skins”: Shabecoff, New York Times. Also “blue or green eyes,” for some reason.
148 “enormous benefits”: Richard Barnett, “The U.S. Can’t Do the Job All Alone,” The New York Times, November 16, 1986. Barnett was chairman of the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, an industry group. He now estimated the “value of installed equipment relying on CFC compounds is more than $128 billion.”
148 “now put the same amount”: Gary Taubes, “Made In The Shade? No Way: Whatever the Implications of the Antarctic Ozone Hole Are, the Ozone Layer Is Being Ominously Depleted,” Discover, August 1987.
Rowland was right. Here’s Taubes:
This near-miraculous recovery shows up vividly in the numbers: in 1976 some 470,000 tons of CFCs were used in aerosols and 350,000 for non-aerosol uses. By 1985 aerosol use had dropped by half but non-aerosol uses had grown to 540,000 tons.
148 “The CFC industry”: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.
Rowland told Brodeur, “Thus, credible evidence becomes impossible to achieve.” And he relearned the Louis McCabe lesson about research becoming a dangerous sedative. “For this reason, one can expect industry to keep on asking for more time, to conduct other investigations. The tactic is known as studying the problem to death.”
And then Sherwood Roland unintentionally repeated Roger Revelle’s famous phrase; because when situations don’t change there are only so many ways to describe them. “We find ourselves, one way or another, in the midst of a large-scale experiment to change the chemical construction of the atmosphere, even though we have no clear idea of what the biological or meteorological consequences may be.”
He went on, summarizing the effect of a century of inadvertent climate experimentation. “At this point, it seems obvious that we have only two alternatives. We can continue the large-scale experiment on the stratosphere which is now in progress,” he told The New Yorker. “Or we can discontinue the experiment, for the simple reason that its consequences may prove to be disastrous for mankind.”
And then he added the grim thing scientists, reporters, and lawmakers would begin repeating about carbon dioxide over the next quarter-century. “One thing we cannot do is undo what we have done.”
149 figures were troubling: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.
Gale Christianson, Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming, Penguin 1999. Chapter 14, “A Death in the Amazon,” 173-76. Christianson too sees it as a sort of global warming dry run: the key scientist—the head measurer—on the Antarctic Survey he calls “Charles Keeling’s doppelgänger”; Keeling being the scientist whose drive to sample and record CO2 was an overwhelming desire.
149 same result: Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, Basic Books 2002. Chapter Nine, “A Grand Experiment,” 252. Scientists, Davis explains, “could not believe what was showing up on their instruments. Convinced that the ozone-monitoring apparatus had become faulty, they had replacement equipment flown out to their isolated research station. The readings from the new instruments were the same.”
149 In 1984, they confirmed: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.
Eric Dean Wilson, After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, Simon and Schuster 2021, Chapter Two, “The Age of Freon,” 226-28.
Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter Eight, “Ozone Holes,” 142-3.
149 declined nearly 40 percent: Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, Basic Books 2002. Chapter Nine, “A Grand Experiment,” 252.
149 the machine had tossed out: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986. “Suffice it to say that when Nimbus 7 confirmed the British observations of ozone depletion above Antarctica it became clear that—far from having been adverted—the calamity that Rowland and Molina had predicted for the ozone layer back in 1974 might have come sooner than anyone expected.”
Eric Dean Wilson, After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, Simon and Schuster 2021, Chapter Two, “The Age of Freon,” 226-28.
Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter Eight, “Ozone Holes,” 142-3. Weiner sees the CO2 parallel. Early; his book is from 1990. “In the retrospect of another few decades, our current star-crossed debates about the greenhouse effect may seem just as nightmarish.”
Here’s Weiner on one nightmarish aspect of the Nimbus story: how difficult it is, being the first person to believe. This job always must fall to someone.
“We are such a social species that when one of us finds something no one else has found, sees something no one else has seen, the discovery can seem doubtful to the discoverer.”
149 A hole twice the size: Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years. 152.
“The view from the Nimbus-7 weather satellite (no longer censored by the computer) showed that the Ozone Hole had now grown bigger than the Antarctic Continent itself. It was about twice the size of the continental United States.”
Eric Dean Wilson gives the numbers in After Cooling. Just interesting to know the national square footage.
Eric Dean Wilson, After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, Simon and Schuster 2021, Chapter Two, “The Age of Freon,” 229. “As the 1980s progressed, the hole stretched to over 8.5 million square miles. For comparison, the area of the contiguous forty-eight states of America is about 3.1 million square miles.”
149 larger than Antarctica: Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years, 152. “The Ozone Hole had now grown bigger than the Antarctic Continent itself.”
149 from Mars: Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years. 152. “As Rowland noted, the problem had become ‘something you could see from Mars.’”
149 “global scientific frenzy”: Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, Basic Books 2002. Chapter Nine, “A Grand Experiment,” 253.
The NOAA’s Susan Solomon was among the scientists who made the Antarctic trip and confirmed the hole. There’s a lovely story about in the MIT science magazine. Solomon is a professor there now.
One night in 1986, Susan Solomon, a young researcher with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), stood in subzero temperatures on the roof of McMurdo Station, the US research center in Antarctica. Solomon was adjusting the mirrors mounted there to capture moonlight and direct it to a visible absorption spectrograph in the lab below. Her goal was to measure the concentrations of different compounds in the atmosphere above Antarctica, in order to make sense of the large hole in the ozone layer that had developed there.
She wasn’t wearing goggles, because she needed to see very clearly, and as she squinted to make sure the beams of moonlight were angled properly toward the spectrograph, her eyes watered slightly. In an instant, her tears froze between the top and bottom eyelids of one eye, sealing it shut. But it was a clear night, and Solomon wasn’t willing to walk away from the opportunity to collect what she recalls as “the perfect moon data.” So she kept working.
Once back inside, she was able to open her eye again when her tears melted. And the data she gathered that night and over two months in Antarctica would change our understanding of how chlorofluorocarbons, released into the atmosphere from refrigerants and a range of other consumer products, damage the ozone layer, which helps protect Earth from ultraviolet radiation. In response to this and other scientific work, an international agreement limited and then banned the use of CFCs. Thirty years later, Solomon was also the first to clearly demonstrate that, thanks to this change, the Antarctic ozone hole has slowly begun to heal.
“It was exciting to come up with a theory about ozone destruction in 1986 and then, 30 years later, see that we, the people of this planet, have solved the problem,” she says.
. . . and two decades later, Prof. Solomon would serve as co-chair on the international panel that at last established the human responsibility for climate change. “In 2007, the group produced a textbook-size tome, which Solomon keeps above her desk, and which garnered attention for stating, for the first time, that ‘warming is unequivocal.’ (Solomon herself came up with that wording, based on the researchers’ thorough examination of the research.)”
Neatness: in both climate extremities, verification was performed by the same individual. Amanda Schaffer, “The Climate Optimist: Susan Solomon’s Research Pinpointed How CFCs Caused the Antarctic Ozone Hole—And Later Showed That the Montreal Protocol Is Helping to Mend It. She’s Convinced We Can Make Progress on Addressing Climate Change, Too,” MIT Technology Review, February 27, 2019.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/27/137093/the-climate-optimist/
Accessed 11-13-22.
149 President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior: Allan Mazur, Jinling Lee, “Sounding the Global Alarm: Environmental Issues in the U.S. National News,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23 No. 4, November 1993.
149 “Personal Protection”: Eric Dean Wilson, After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, Simon and Schuster 2021, Chapter Two, “The Age of Freon,” 237. Newspapers caught wind of a rumor: guidelines were being prepped—for “ ‘personal protection’ against ultraviolet radiation,” and also for useful “life-style changes,” Wilson writes.” “Incredulous, reporters called the department to confirm the rumor. Yes, they were told, the department was on the brink of calling for a ‘Personal Protection Plan.’”
149 encouraged to clap on sunglasses: James Lardner, “Comment,” The New Yorker, August 29, 1988. “The instinctive reaction of most movie heroes to a natural disaster is to ask themselves, ‘What can we do?’ The instinctive reaction of many influential people in American life to a natural disaster is to ask themselves, ‘Must we do anything?’”
Rochelle L. Stanfield, “Greenhouse Diplomacy: Secretary Of State James A. Baker III Has Raised Expectations for a Strong U.S. Role In Negotiations to Control Global Warming, but the Policy Machinery Is Just Getting Geared Up,” National Journal, March 4, 1989.
149 celebrity-size sun hats: Martin Amis, “Hikers’ Guide to the Death of Everything,” Independent on Sunday, January 28, 1990. Reprinted as “The World and I,” in The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, Jonathan Cape 2001.
149 “People who don’t stand out in the sun”: Editorial, “Through Rose-Colored Sunglasses,” The New York Times, May 31, 1987. And the Times board was quick to see the warming connection. That this was a real large problem and also a run-through.
If agreement cannot be reached even on so clear-cut a danger as the ozone threat, there is even less hope of international action against acid rain and the feared global warming of the atmosphere, known as the greenhouse effect.
The board asked a great mocking question—since of course it wouldn’t just be people under the newly empowered sun. “Will the cows be decked out in Vuarnets and sun hats,” the board asked, “or be trained to graze at night?”
149 DuPont rented another full-page: DuPont, “The World Is Phasing Out CFCs (Ad),” The New York Times, April 27, 1992. Du Pont calls it “an $8 billion segment of industry.”
149 the Nobel Prize for Chemistry: He shared it with his former student Mario Molina. And Paul Crutzen—the Dutch scientist who had examined ozone loss 180° away, at the North Pole.
Science is a small town. You met Crutzen for a moment in the chapter about the potential sulfur dioxide airborne event. Dr. Crutzen delivered the punchline: That best of all would be some successful attempt at CO2 control—but, at the moment, this seemed only a “pious wish.” It was the punchline to the scientist’s own 2006 piece. Eleven years after the shared Nobel prize.
Finally, I repeat: the very best would be if emissions of the greenhouse gases could be reduced so much that the stratospheric sulfur release experiment would not need to take place. Currently, this looks like a pious wish.
Paul Crutzen, “Albedo Enhancement By Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma? An Editorial Essay,” Climatic Change, Vol. 77, 2006.
Press Release, “The Nobel Prize In Chemistry 1995: Paul J. Crutzen, Mario J. Molina, F. Sherwood Rowland,” The Nobel Prize Organization, Nobel Prize Outreach.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1995/summary/
Accessed 11-14-22.
149 “To cease manufacture”: Brigitte Smith, “Ethics of Du Pont’s CFC Strategy 1975-1995,” Journal of Business Ethics, Vol 17, No 5, April 1998.
150 “wait for them to come true?”: Paul Brodeur, “Annals of Chemistry: In the Face of Doubt,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986.
150 since 1975: J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the World in the Twentieth Century, Norton 2001. Chapter Four, “The Atmosphere: Regional and Global History,” 114.
There was at the same time a great health savings. This is posted at the U.K. Royal Society for Chemistry.
Past studies have estimated the health gains in terms of skin cancers avoided through the implementation of the Montreal Protocol and its amendments. A recent update of this work that also integrated coupled climate-chemistry models has estimated that the world-wide incidence of skin cancer would have been 14% greater (2 million people) by 2030 without implementation of the Montreal Protocol and its amendments, with the largest effects in the South West USA and in Australia.
R. M. Lucas, M. Norval, et al, “Health Implications of Interactions Between Ozone Depletion and Climate Change,” Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences, Vol. 14 No. 1, 2015.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/pp/c4pp90033b
Accessed 11-14-22.
150 in the winter of 1995: Ross Gelbspan, “The Heat Is On: The Warming of the World’s Climate Sparks a Blaze of Denial,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1, 1995.
150 what Adaptation might look like: Jean McKirk, “Biggest Ozone Hole Over Chile Puts Southern Cities On Sunblock Alert,” The Independent (U.K.), October 11, 2000.
Randy Alfred, “Oct. 9, 2000: Ozone Hole Exposes Chilean City,” Wired, October 9, 2000.
Dawn Mackeen, “Life Under The Hole In the Sky: For the People Of Southern Chile, Ozone Depletion Isn’t a Political Issue — It’s a Nightmarish Reality. A Report From the Globe’s Ecological Future.,” Salon.com, November 3, 2000.
https://www.salon.com/2000/11/03/ozone/
Accessed 11-15-22.
A sharp funny Times story from 1995 shows the difficulty Punta Arenans had believing in the hole. Calvin Sims, “Punta Arenas Journal; a Hole In the Heavens (Chicken Little Below?)”, The New York Times, March 3, 1995.
The people of this quiet port city, on the Strait of Magellan at the bottom of the world, do not venture outside without first rubbing sunblock over their exposed skin and donning dark glasses.
For this practice, the 113,000 residents of Punta Arenas have one man to thank, or to despise: Bedrich Magas, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Magallanes.
It was Mr. Magas who first alerted the people of his hometown to the dangers of a large hole in the ozone layer above Punta Arenas that exposes the area to what he says are unsafe levels of radiation.
For the past eight years, Mr. Magas has appeared on television and radio and lectured to community groups, schoolchildren and agricultural associations, warning people to avoid long exposure to the sun.
Next decade, residents understood. Larry Rohter, “Punta Arenas Journal; In an Upside-Down World, Sunshine Is Shunned,” The New York Times, December 27, 2002.
Everything is different here at the bottom of the world, starting with the weather. Before Alejandra Mundaca lets her two children go out, she checks the forecast for the temperature, chances of rain and also the level of ultraviolet rays.
For the last decade the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica has been forming earlier in the Southern Hemisphere spring and growing larger. The 125,000 residents of the southernmost city on the planet, here on the Strait of Magellan, have reluctantly learned to adapt.
They closely watch the color-coded warnings of a ‘‘solar stoplight’’ publicized on television and radio and even posted on street corners here. Even on warm days, most people insist on wearing jackets or long-sleeved shirts or blouses. Many wear sunglasses and make sure to apply 50-proof sunblock even when the sky is blanketed in clouds.
‘‘Life has changed a lot for us over the past few years, and I know that my sons are not going to be able to enjoy the same kind of childhood that I had growing up here,’’ said Ms. Mundaca, 33, a schoolteacher.
Mundaca continued to the reporter, ‘‘We used to look forward to spring as relief from the long harsh winter, but now it is a time of maximum peril for all of us who live here.’’
150 A stoplight system: Jimmy Langman, “Under the Hole in the Sky,” Newsweek, December 3, 2001. As of 2001, the hole had grown from the size of the continental U.S. to the size of the continent.
To the 120,000 residents of Punta Arenas, the ozone hole is a local nightmare. Each spring it still swells to about the size of North America, just nipping the southern coast of Chile. As variable as the weather, the hole makes sudden visits to the city. For days at a time, the sun’s harsh ultraviolet rays, with no ozone shield to stop them, beat directly down on residents.
150 In one seven-year period: Langman, Newsweek.
150 “There is nothing else they can do”: Langman, Newsweek.
150 “to warrant what in our judgment”: Andrew C. Revkin, “Bush’s Shift Could Doom Air Pact, Some Say,” The New York Times, March 17, 2001.
150 “When it was their turn”: Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Talk Miramax Books | Hyperion 2002. Part One, “The Collapse of the Value of Human Life,” 63.
151 The company has since cut: Eric Pooley, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth, Hyperion, 2008. Chapter 15, “A New Recruit,” 140.
Petra Bartosiewicz, Marissa Miley, “The Too Polite Revolution: Why the Recent Campaign to Pass Comprehensive Climate Legislation in the United States Failed,” Prepared For the Symposium On the Politics of America’s Fight Against Global Warming Co-Sponsored By the Columbia School Of Journalism and the Scholars Strategy Network, January 2013.
https://scholars.org/sites/scholars/files/rff_final_report_bartosiewicz_miley.pdf
Accessed 7-21-22.
151 “There’s no question”: Rochelle L. Stanfield, “Greenhouse Diplomacy: Secretary Of State James A. Baker III Has Raised Expectations For A Strong U.S. Role In Negotiations To Control Global Warming, But The Policy Machinery Is Just Getting Geared Up,” National Journal, March 4, 1989.
The Bernthal quoted below is Frederick Bernthal, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.
A notable reference point in U.S. international environmental negotiations was the development of the 1987 ozone depletion treaty. That exercise set several precedents for global negotiations but also fomented interagency disputes within the Reagan Administration.
“The ozone treaty certainly plowed new ground institutionally within our own government and internationally as well,” Bernthal said. “It was the first time as issue arose in the international arena that everyone understood was a problem of all countries and would require cooperation worldwide to address. . . . There’s no question that that set the form institutionally.”
Those negotiations also brought about a close working relationship between EPA and the State Department — specifically, in the partnership of then-EPA administrator Lee M. Thomas and State’s [former Deputy Assistant Secretary Richard E.] Benedick. “There’s a direct parallel [between global warming and] ozone, an issue where we worked very closely with EPA because EPA has to handle the domestic regulations . . . ” Benedick said.
151 “stop energy production”: S. Fred Singer, “Ozone Scare Generates Much Heat, Little Light,” The Wall Street Journal, April 16, 1987.
Not “Ozone Situation,” or “Ozone Loss”: Ozone Scare.
Anyway, welcome to the book, Dr. Singer.
151 “all bunk”: ABC News, “Global Warming Denier: Fraud or ‘Realist’? Physicist says don’t worry, humans will benefit from a warmer planet,” April 15, 2009.
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/GlobalWarming/story?id=4506059&page=1
Accessed 11-14-22.
151 “out of concern”: Michael Weisskopf, “U.S. Intends to Oppose Ozone Plan,” Washington Post, May 9, 1990.
