Posted on 23-7-2003
Bush
Ready to Wreck Ozone Layer Treaty
By Geoffrey Lean, The Independent, 20 July 2003
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?"
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