How Diplomacy Closed The Ozone Hole

Hi, I'm Dr. Ralph Levinson, Health Sciences Professor Emeritus at UCLA,
and I'm Luc Lewitanski, a French journalist covering technology, politics, and power.
Welcome to Your Planet, Your Health, where we share stories about the environment without falling prey to despair.
In these conversations, we explore the knowledge and tools that we can use to be good Earthlings.
So, Ralph, as you may have heard, the COP28 in Dubai just wrapped up, and the results are pretty mixed, right?
You're right. They were mixed. This latest COP, well COP is short for Conference of Parties, is the 28th of a series of annual meetings that's organized by the United Nations where countries make commitments to address climate change.
In this COP28... in December of 2023, even if the final agreement was weaker than many of the stakeholders - stakeholders from scientists, environmentalists, diplomats - would have liked, the good news is that the wording of the statement that the participants landed on did officially call for "a phase-down of the use of fossil fuels." Now you think they'd have already stated that as a goal, but they hadn't, so this is progress. Well, it's certainly a commendable objective, and that's a good start. Although, the members apparently still had to compromise to weaken their language from phasing out fossil fuels to phasing them down. That's one of those small differences that changes a lot, and I'm sure the fact that this COP28 was hosted by a petro-state doesn't help matters. But in any case, you'd think this process would be more straightforward after 28 of these conferences already. I mean, actually, I think there'd be an interesting historical comparison for us to look at here. How does this COP process that we just witnessed compare with the way in which countries came together 36 years ago to deal with the ozone situation? I'm glad you brought that up. There is a better way. Let's talk about an environmental success story that could be instructive here. How the Montreal Protocol tackled the ozone crisis and averted planetary disaster. We really dodged a bullet. I think it'll be interesting for us to take a look at how the world community came together to pull this off. Now, you're probably familiar with the hole in the ozone. but this is a good news story that isn't necessarily spotlighted as much as you would think. Have you heard that the hole in the ozone is actually getting much better as a result of world diplomacy? You're absolutely right. The hole is projected to completely close back up by the year 2066 thanks to a series of decisions made by scientists, diplomats and industry. We'll be walking you through this process and what we can learn from how they made it work. So let's start by unpacking what exactly was at stake here with this ozone diplomacy. So what does the ozone layer do for the planet? How does it work? Well, the ozone layer protects us from ultraviolet light. We're talking about ozone up in the atmosphere. in the layer of the atmosphere called the stratosphere. This ozone is naturally occurring up in the stratosphere and the stratosphere is the second layer up of the atmosphere. We live in the troposphere and the troposphere it goes up to about 10 to 20 miles above our heads and that's where the stratosphere starts. sunlight is coming in, it has a lot of really high energy ultraviolet light and this ozone acts as a sponge sucking up the UV light, so much less UV light gets through to Earth. It's like a sponge or like a filter? More like a filter might be better, yes, exactly, and the reason that's important and why I do these UV rays actually matter is that it has a lot of harsh and bad effects on us and other living things. Not only can it cause skin cancers, even something that sounds trivial like sunburns, as you can imagine, is not trivial if you get a sunburn five minutes after you're outside, and it's not only damaging our to perform agriculture, it actually damages plants, it damages the ocean's plankton. These are the basis of ecosystems. This is one of the reasons why people refer to this as a catastrophe averted because you can have our entire ecosystem collapse if it was bad enough, and the fact is it was on track to be bad enough. So what was threatening us? To understand that, we have to go back to the 1920s, when refrigerators were relatively new, and the coolants they were using were really pretty toxic and dangerous. They were using chemicals like ammonia, sulfur dioxide, chloromethane, and it turned out that these were toxic if they escaped, they could affect breathing, and they could be flammable. So there were actually deaths by refrigerator. Your refrigerator could kill you, literally, by blowing up and or poisoning you. Refrigeration was risky business in the 1920s. That's right, and so knowing that Frigidaire General Lotus and DuPont actually got together and they started a research project in the mid to late 1920s to find a safer coolant, and finally they came up with chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, and they started using them as Freon produced by DuPont. the early 1930s. The UN commissioned a documentary about the closing of the ozone hole that will be instructive as they look back almost a whole century after the fact. This movie is from the 20-teens. They look back on the invention of CFCs. how the narrator in this documentary produced by the UN describes the invention of this great new chemical. Our story begins with Thomas Midgley Jr., a brilliant chemist who unwittingly developed a chemical that would threaten all life on earth. The first refrigerators were simple ice boxes. delivered every week. Then came early mechanical refrigerants, but they used dangerous refrigerant gases. Thomas Midgley was assigned to actually work on this problem. Midgley developed a group of man-made chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, brand name Freon, that can be used as refrigerants. There's a famous story of Thomas Midgley going to American Chemical Society meeting, and he actually inhaled some of this CFC, and then he blew out a candle. A really kind of a dramatic demonstration of the non-flammability and non-toxicity of this particular gas. Non-irritating to nose, throat, and lung. As for the non-flammable quality of Freon... Just look. I'll throw the candles. One, two, three. Midgley had no idea how devastating these simple chemicals would turn out to be. CFCs were designed to be used as a refrigerant, and for the first 10 years or so, that's what they were used for. It wasn't until World War II, a decade later, that CFCs were used as a propellant. to spray insect repellents for the troops. After World War II, that became a more personal care product use of these CFCs. Hairspray, perfumes, deodorants. It was still used for air conditioning, which now became not just a rare thing, but much more common in households. It was after the Second World War that it was really commercialized beyond a refrigerant. That CFCs began to be used in spray products in addition to just cooling. Exactly, and other things too. It was used as a solvent, it was used for dry cleaning. It was also used as a propellant for medications such as meter dose inhalers for asthma. a wide range of uses beyond its original designed purpose, and by the 1970s, they were making a million tons a year of CFCs, and it was big business. At a meeting that NASA held in August of 1971, they started talking about the possibility that CFCs could have effects. on the environment. It was already known that chlorine could affect ozone, and the scientists at this NASA meeting started to put it together that there could be some interaction. The people who really finally pulled it all together was F. Sherwood Roland and Mario Molina. Roland had been at that 1971 NASA meeting and he was thinking about this potential problem and he hired Mario Molina, a recently minted scientist originally from Mexico, who joined him at UC Irvine and they figured out what the chemistry could be. how this chemistry could work in the stratosphere. They published two papers in Nature in the end of 1974 and early 1975, and they warned people that it was plausible. They could show a mechanism, at least on paper, where CFCs can deplete. the ozone layer. proof that this was going on and they knew that. We know that chlorine can damage the ozone. Let's model that. Let's see how that would work if we put enough CFCs up in the stratosphere. Mario worked out that these CFCs were so unreactive they survived in the atmosphere for decades. Essentially happen to them that will remove them from the environment until they reach relatively high altitudes. He predicted that when the CFCs were broken apart by radiation from the sun, the chlorine that was released could destroy the planet's protective ozone layer at a terrifying rate. Actually, my first reaction was that there should be some mistake. I remember we had an almost emergency meeting with Sherry, just explaining to him, "We have this potentially huge problem. Look, here is what might happen." And she said, "Wow, well, we better look at it." Sherry, who is my husband, came home one night, and I was in bed reading, and I said, you know, How's the work going? And he said, "It's going really well. The only trouble is, I think it's the end of the world." I mean, it's quite a momentous thing. You don't usually tell your spouse. Come home and say, "I think I just discovered the end of the world." Yeah. That's got to be a little bit alarming when you're so thrilled about your research because... Because you know you're doing something important and finding out something important, but it could be the end of life as we know it. It seems a little grandiose in a way, but they were right. Those were the risks, and Sherry and Melina were the first people to bring it to life. As we heard from Sherwood Roland's wife, he obviously... was very concerned about this being the end of civilization, and he meant it, and he was not going to just remain silent. He got very active. He was warning people, giving talks about the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons, and he became basically an activist, and that wasn't considered proper activism. academic etiquette back in the mid-1970s. His career was put to a big degree on hold. He wasn't considered for certain grants. The University of California, basically his academic bosses, made it so he couldn't go give certain talks. They did not send him graduate students. and postdocs, they really interfered in a way that would be unconscionable now. They just said this was not what a scientist does, and he said, yeah, it's exactly what a scientist does. He was criticized for hurting what they said is an $8 billion industry. How dare you destroy careers, the economy, and they were accused of being KGB. agents. Sherwood Roland and Mario Molina were accused of being KGB agents. They were smeared as part of this red scare and ultimately they were told they were not respecting the role of scientists. That's right, they were supposed to be objective and dispassionate, and they were told that they were behaving like scientists by sounding the alarm about... the risks posed by CFCs to the ozone layer and thereby to the civilization at large. We accept now that scientists have a role in society beyond just being objective automatons, not just objective in the sense of let's stick to the data, let's not make predictions, let's not assessments, and it is, for the last 50 years, just not been all that uncommon for scientists to be activists. Many are. This was fairly new back then, and they were really trailblazers in that way. By the way, I think we have a clip for that, don't we? Mario and Sherry began to speak out. To avoid these hazards, man cannot continue his ever-increasing use of these chemicals. Instead, we must rapidly reduce in the future the amount of these materials released into the atmosphere. Stepping outside of the traditionally neutral world of science, Sherry argued that the production of CFCs for aerosol sprays, the largest use of the chemical, banned immediately. Many faculty people, universities nationwide, really objected to the fact that Sherry was making recommendations about what industry should do. They felt that was absolutely improper. As a result of that, suddenly no more invitations to give seminars in chemistry departments. anywhere in the country, no more students sent or post-doctorals for about 10 years, and that really did hurt his feelings. But what are you going to do? Stop? No. These are activist scientists. These are people that don't leave well enough alone. They can't stop themselves from... telling the public something needs to be done. - We felt a great responsibility to actually warn society that something could happen if you were to continue producing these compounds. - Major chemical producers such as DuPont, Ally, and Union Carbide were producing nearly 900,000 tons of CFCs each year. Gary and Mario. threatening an $8 billion industry. The chemical companies began to fight back. Regulation is premature and it's absolutely wrong. It has the potential effect of destroying a perfectly good and useful product without any scientific support. At scientific meetings, Sherry came under fire from industry. period. They would stand up and weigh papers and usually the question always would start with, "Have you ever thought of?" and "How dare you? How dare you scare the world?" And you're destroying an industry, you're practically destroying the economy of the United States. It was that kind of thing that was not pleasant, shall we say that. Industry magazines. ban articles attacking Sherry and Mario's work. some harm to American industry. So I took it as a joke. It turns out that that was serious. - They were Russian agents. Made good sense, right? It's like today's world. If it weren't so scary, it would be funny. - You know, to not be a trained PR person, to get up there as a scientist and have these kinds of- kinds of attacks from people who it's their job to tear you down and then be called like a Soviet agent during the peak of the Cold War. That's heavy stuff. Yeah, I mean, there was intimidation tactics from industry, which should be quite familiar, but in a way it didn't quite work. No, it didn't work, and I really admire them for that because You have to have a lot of self-confidence to stand up to that, I'm sure. Here we are then in the late 70s, and people started paying attention in the United States. Interestingly, not so much in Europe, but in the United States, the public really took notice and changed their habits. In 1977, Americans dropped three-quarters of their use. these propellants just on their own there was no organized boycott they just saw that there were alternatives and they on their own I don't know about on their own I mean I understand this wasn't like imposed by regulations from on high and that's a distinction you're drawing right but hold your horses this was a result of an organized consumer boycott and a concerted communication campaign. It wasn't just like people of their own accord read Scientific American and were like, "Hey, I'm thinking this is a big issue and I need to change my consumption patterns." There was an organized boycott. Oh, it came because it was publicized. So that drove consumer behavior. More so than people just woke up one day and decided they didn't want to use spray cans anymore. They were informed about this. popular media. Well, of course they were. Oh yeah, I see if that's what you mean. Yeah, to me, that's not an organized boycott, and they published their article in April of 1974. There was no uptick by the press until that fall. The Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, saw this, a scientist there, and recognized this was a big public issue. policy issue. So at the American Chemical Society fall meeting they had a presentation by Merlina and Roland and then by the best of good luck of ruthless corporate behavior the industry attacked them and made the scientific study newsworthy. So this was a tremendous good fortune. enough because then all the press was asking, "What are you talking about? Why is it important and what could happen?" And that cultivated in Molina and Roland. Mario Molina and Sherry Roland called for a ban on aerosol cosmetic products, hairspray and deodorants, and so this was stepping out of the role. of a normal scientist and becoming an activist, and of course, there was a boycott that was quite spectacularly successful in the United States and then some product bans. - Actually, I just wanna say, I think we should be proud in the U.S. that there was a consumer boycott. I mean, people turned away from spray cans, and that actually, interesting. enough, did not happen in Europe. Yeah, I see what you're saying now about boycott. You're right, there was. You're totally right about that. So it was the industry response that ended up bringing public attention to this, right? It was the fact that the chemical industry were panicked by Molina and Roland's presentation at the American Chemical Society. in 1974 that actually brought the spotlight of the news industry onto this issue. The irony is that panicked industry is what brought attention. Then all the press started asking like what is this about? What are Molina and Roland presenting? What do they have against CFCs, you know, these spray cans and what do they think they're gonna do to us? So the word was getting out and it was out, not just in academic journals, the fact is that it even reached the popular culture. There was, for example, an All in the Family episode that highlighted that hairsprays could damage the ozone layer. The irony is, when you look back at it, I saw the transcript for the The stuff about ozone is literally like four lines. in a like half-hour sitcom but when you're talking about something that was being seen by 20 million households every night there were so few networks at the time this was a huge infomercial essentially there's a discussion about overpopulation whether to have children and one of the points as the male baby boomer liberal coded character is is starting to agonize over his role in the world, he starts listing among the litany. He says, "Oh, your hairspray is killing people, and we gotta get rid of that," and she starts to try to bargain with him and say, "Oh, what if I get rid of my hairspray, can we still have kids?" So that's pretty much the entirety of how it appears in the show. It didn't feel like an infomercial, and I really think this is why, in the US, there was a consumer boycott. organized one, but mind you, a set of consumer choices to move away from CFCs at that time as a result of pop culture reacting to the science. The ozone issue kind of came along at just the right time when people in America who were already very attuned to environment and pollution learned. that the thing that was causing this potential threat to the ozone layer was their use of hairspray and underarm deodorant, they got pretty engaged. From Television City in Hollywood. In February 1975, the CFC issue reached its peak when it featured in the most watched show in America, All in the Family. One of those shows was the controversy where Gloria, the daughter, decided it was socially irresponsible to use hairspray. I deodorant all spray cans. I read that there are gases inside these cans, Gloria, that shoot up into the air and can destroy the ozone. Then as the show progressed, it became more and more technical information. What's the ozone? Ozone is a protective shield that surrounds the earth, that protects us against ultraviolet rays. You know what they can do? Yeah, they can give you a sunburn. Sure, when the ozone's there, but when it's-- you can get skin cancer, and God knows what it can do to the plants and crops! When the show ended, there was a national response of people stopping buying the hairspray and the deodorant. There was a measurable decline. You let me have a baby? I'm gonna let you have my hairspray! The aerosol industry... credits that all in the family show with being their own death knell. Well, they became sensitive to this and if they were told by Captain Planet, you know Oh watch out McDonald's is using a kind of foam that that's killing us all, you know The kids would be like we shouldn't go. Let's go to Burger King same difference It was a school teacher in Massachusetts and her children in the class that wrote to McDonald's corporation and said, "Why are you destroying the ozone layer?" So the people at McDonald's commissioned a survey of their customers, including children, and the customers responded. They did not want to destroy the ozone layer, and it made a big difference to where they chose to eat, and in the case of McDonald's, children drive parents. to the restaurant. The parents say, "Where do you want to go today?" So it was a huge impact. It was an eyes-open business decision. - Yeah, they were putting hamburgers in foam clamshells and they switched over to cardboard, which is fine because McDonald's is so delicious. You eat it so fast anyway, you don't need the foam. - This is exactly right, what Susan's saying. is you have this circular effect where you have the customers pushing the companies, you have the companies pushing their suppliers, and you have the policy makers setting deadlines, and pretty soon you've got this wheel turning very fast, and as quickly as you catch up with the available technology, then you look to the next strengthening. The McDonald's story is a good one and it's how we want things to work and it's good to know that in this case it did. Exactly. Children didn't learn about this out of nowhere either. It speaks to the big communication campaign. There was a lot of children's entertainment talking about the ozone layer in the 80s and the 90s. This was a major point of messaging that got pushed forward, and yes, it worked on some children who clearly influenced their parents' decision to choose one brand of fast food over another, and that's great. I mean, that's voting with their dollars and that clearly had an effect. Your phone was a big use for CFCs. Exactly. They went from foam boxes to deliver your handbag, I mean, to cardboard, and cardboard does the job just fine. It doesn't hold the heat. quite as long as a phone box is, but it has the ancillary benefit of not producing these CFCs that remain trapped in the stratosphere for decades. There's also, as I hear in a lot of that children's programming, it tells the kids to tell their parents about it. Tell your parents about the ozone. Tell your parents, don't discard your old air conditioning unit. Make sure to dispose of it properly. throw away your old fridge in the right way. It's a lot of messaging that made its way into American children's minds from the '70s onwards, really, as this came into public consciousness, mostly the '70s to the '90s, making sure children spoke to their parents about the things they were doing with potential release of CFCs as they discarded old things. But that's where the messaging came in in terms of the public service announcement. component for children. It was like giving them instructions to their parents to be careful about disposing of refrigerants. I thought this was kind of an interesting legacy. It's kind of like how you never hear about the ozone layer. It's kind of like how you never hear about the ozone layer anymore and you have to wonder like, did it get better? Because it was always about the ozone hole. That was what everyone talked about in the 90s. It's those damn fluorocarbons. They've been kicking hell out of the ozone. I don't give a damn about the environment. Me? Did I hear something about protecting the ozone layer? Relax, Mr. Newcomb, now you'll still have a job. You don't get it, Doc. If people learn how important the ozone layer is, they might actually start destroying it, and dispose of freon in your air conditioner and refrigerator, even in car exhausts. condition is properly. So do your part. Out, you CFC! Scientific concern that aerosol sprays damage the Earth's ozone layer has led Oregon to ban the sale of the sprays beginning today. Oregon is the first to pass such a law, but it probably won't be the last. The Food and Drug Administration said today it plans to stop the... use of fluorocarbons as the propellant in aerosol sprays. Following the public reaction, the U.S. government banned the use of CFCs in aerosols. The federal government did step out in front of this, and there was a ban on these aerosols. Not all uses of CFCs, but on these aerosols in 1979. The concerns legitimately, I would say, to some degree, from industry's point of view, is, hey, if you're banning it for us but it's not banned for others, we're going to lose market share. They weren't happy with this, and there certainly was pushback. Noting this need for it to be global is what led to the Montreal Protocol. In the meantime, science didn't stop. But in the meantime, science didn't stop. In 1985, the British Antarctic Survey scientists announced that they had found a depletion of ozone above the Arctic. what Roland would call the ozone hole. He had actually coined that phrase. Roland really seemed to have gotten the framing right, you know, to call this an ozone hole. That was brilliant. It was an image. It's a wonderful piece of marketing. Yeah, because it demonstrated the threats. Again, the timelines on this are very crucial, I think, to understanding. the problem started happening but also how quickly scientists observed it and how quickly they're able to act on it. We have a clip about the coining of the term ozone hole by Roland. It was Sherry Roland that coined the phrase "ozone hole". He was the first person to utter that phrase and that was also a very good case that the public... They could look at the NASA graphics and, in fact, the politicians by this time had been briefed a lot and at the United Nations, they've been working on this since 1970 when they organized the working group on stratospheric ozone depletion. So this great scientist and great science was welcomed into the community and they took of this and then other great scientists like Susan jumped on it to say well how could we go beyond simple finding of the ozone depletion and track it back to its origin the CFCs and the other ozone depleting substances so it was science and politics at its best. Yeah I guess I also want to say that it all starts with people understanding the problem. People everywhere, the public and all around the world could look at these satellite images of the ozone hole and say, "Hey, you know, that's actually pretty scary stuff." And that created the political will that generated the I think without people understanding the whole thing, nothing happens personally. It's interesting to hear Susan Solomon describe this because, again, she was in the thick of this. Not only did other people not believe the British group, but first the British group didn't believe the British themselves. They thought it was a measurement error. Surely the numbers are so bad. Oh, it must be the tool. That's what they thought. They thought this must be the tool. be a glitch. They didn't notice that there was a pattern that it was always, you know, early spring, that it had, there was clearly something to do with weather, but nobody had measured such low readings of ozone before in the ozone layer, and so they just assumed it was something wrong with their measurements since it was unprecedented, and when they looked back, they saw, oh, no, that they had data going back to the late '70s that there was thinning of the ozone periodically in Antarctica. But they had just sort of called that data. They just said that data must be wrong. The levels were so low for ozone, so below what they'd ever measured, they assumed it was what they considered anomalous readings point, that either the satellite data was wrong, their measurements from Earth were wrong, something just had to be wrong. They were limited by their vision, which is something that it became a blind spot and that's something we always have to guard against in science. I actually wrote to the guys that were doing the calibrations of satellites pointing out that our ozone values seemed a bit low, and was this confirmed by the satellite? We went back and looked very carefully at the satellite observations, and we realised the way we were processing the data was wrong. If you get what I call 'strange results', you just reject them, and so when we started to see the ozone loss every second. October in Antarctica, the algorithm we use just discounted all the data. It threw it away. The key question was why? Why were we seeing such a large loss of ozone? There still wasn't a clear mechanism and that's where Susan Solomon came in. She was really critical to this telling the story. in the late 80s. A young scientist, Susan Solomon, gave this a lot of thought, and she published in the journal Nature in 1986 that her models showed that the only thing that could do this were the CFCs. One thing about these chlorofluorocarbons, these CFCs, is They have a half-life in the atmosphere of 50 to over 200 years. They don't break up down here near us. They break up and release their chlorine up in the stratosphere. The layer below that we live in is the troposphere. That's where clouds and weather generally happens. It takes a very unusual situation to get stratospheric. clouds, and that happens over Antarctica, over the South Pole, because it's so cold that these ice crystals form clouds. Now that becomes a surface for chemical reactions to happen, and then in the spring, when the sun comes out, it activates all this CFCs and the chlorine and the various chemicals that have absorbed. on to the surface of these stratospheric clouds, now they're released and they cause depletion in the early spring of the ozone layer and that's how she put it all together. She put the various pieces of the puzzle together and we can hear that in this clip. It turns out Susan Solomon and Stephen Anderson were awarded by the Future of Life Institute in 2021 with this prize for their services to the species. I'm putting grandiose terms on it, but it seems they give this award to people for services rendered to humanity, and as part of this, they had an in-depth interview retracing their work as part of the regulation of chemicals that affect the ozone. What we knew was there was an ozone hole in Antarctica and not in the Arctic. We knew that it was there in the springtime, so the idea that I had was, well, you know, chemical reactions might be happening on polar stratosphere clouds. I didn't assume that the ozone hole was necessarily due to chlorofluorocarbons. I tried to produce it all kind of ways. We're talking 1985 here. I was a young scientist. I was 29 at the time, and I decided that I was going to try to take my photochemical model and beat on it and pound on it and make it stand on its head until it produced its own mole, and so I did that, and I figured out that the reason that it was happening. was because Antarctica really is the coldest place on Earth, and it's so cold that clouds form in the Antarctic stratosphere, these incredible polar stratosphere clouds, and that the idea of chemistry involving chlorofluorocarbons was not the only idea out there. You know, other people had meteorological theories and science... Scientists are always stimulated to come up with ideas, and we needed to get down there and make the measurements that could discriminate between the different ideas. So I was very, very fortunate to be young and able to get on an airplane and go to the Antarctic. So I did in 1986. It was great. I made some measurements with my colleagues using visible. spectroscopy, so we use the sun or the moon or the sky as a light source and the values we found were a hundred times more than they should have been. It turns out that Susan Solomon was able to piece together a story that fit this data. There was the very cold weather and the circumpolar wind. that made the Antarctic a unique place, and the cold led to the formation of high clouds, where they usually don't form in the stratosphere, that had icicles that became a surface that the CFCs adhered to, and then when these ice particles melted as the Arctic Spring started, well, that released the CFC. and that decreased the ozone. So we could get a scenario where all these could fit together in a really tidy story. Now what was needed was the data to show this and they sent down all these various people to make additional measurements and flew planes. Right. You're referring to this international research effort. Exactly. Which as you say it involved like literally flying a plane through the ozone hole so they could literally witness it. As well as ground observations but there was definitely these flights out of South America that gathered just a heck of a lot of data that that confirmed this. In 1987, uh, Watson. NASA's Bob Watson. Watson organized another mission, which actually flew on airplanes from Chile down to Antarctica and measured chlorine monoxide yet another way by laser resonance fluorescence on board an airplane that actually literally flew right into the ozone hole. Into the ozone hole. It's a really direct measurement. This really is not only confirmation, but it really cinches it down. But this is not what started the whole process of the Montreal Protocol. The Montreal Protocol started earlier than that. As we know, these things don't know borders. They go up in the atmosphere and they get spread out. The American companies wanted something global if it was going to happen at all, and they were right, and so the world did get together through the United Nations Environmental Program, the UNEP, and first met in Vienna. First it was the Vienna Convention in 1985. That was a framework convention that laid out these principles that they would pursue. Notice, this is before Susan Solomon showed her mechanism. On the 16th of September, 1987, more than 30 countries agreed to cut the use of CFCs by 50% within 12 years and signed the Montreal Protocol. 30 countries signing, eventually this became a unanimous, almost 200 countries signed on this eventually. This was just the original signers. The other point I think to make is 50% in 12 years is barely taking your foot off the accelerator. It's lightening your step. But it was a first step, that's how this thing was designed. It was built in to be iterative, and that was part of what they agreed in the structure in Vienna. Exactly. So there was the Vienna Convention, which by the way still exists. The Vienna Convention exactly was meant to be a framework convention, laying out the principles. It wasn't meant to have any actual legislation, as it were. The idea of meeting again and revising was crucial to the Vienna Convention, and not just that, that things could be tested and iterated on, but ultimately ratchet up the restrictions on these harmful chemicals by acting at the source. At the Vienna Convention and then subsequently Montreal Protocol, they really did set out And one of the big strengths of this is just what you were just talking about. Start and strengthen. It is really what made this work. They didn't just say, "We're going to go cold turkey here." Included in that document was the idea of start and strengthen. So if you look at it, it only was two chemicals. CFC, and then a fire extinguishing agent called Halon, and then the first negotiation in 1987, it was just to freeze the production of Halon, stop it from growing, and cut back CFC's 50%, but that was not hard to do because 30% was still aerosol. It was a very conservative start, but the science was so persuasive in the years ahead that they said to the policy makers at the Montreal protocol, that's not enough. You will not protect the ozone layer with those two chemicals and you certainly won't with those two So then they added more CFCs, they added carbon tetrachloride, methyl chloroform, methyl bromide, a litany of chemicals were added, and then each time that they would meet every two or three years, they would have an acceleration of the phase-out. So it was a very practical approach that was done on an international basis, and one of the beauties of this treaty is it includes incredibly strong trade restrictions so that if a country did not join the Montreal Protocol, they would lose access to these ozone-depleting substances even before the phase-out. So it had lots of clever features, and they really did it. I mean, we can look at the projections from what would happen based on these various agreements. There was an amendment in 1990 where they added more CFCs. They really got tough in 1992 and 1999, and when you look at those graphs, that's where we really save the day, when we look at those projections, and then they refined that later in 1999. So what you're referring to are visualizations of the effect of the different regulations that came into effect at different strengthenings of the initial restrictions. placed by the Montreal Treaty. That's right. That happened in these increments. This idea of start and strengthen in the treaty is fundamental and as you just explained we see that it really paid off. Part of the scientific process of iteration and revision and empiricism was built into the design of the enforcement of this treaty because they knew that in order to tackle the ozone situation the initial recommendation... were insufficient. But they needed to negotiate from a starting place and they knew that as people and industry became aware of not only the issue but the technical solutions that could be put into place that there'd be an inertia in this process and it turned out in this instance it was successful as we'll see. The disaster of the worst-case scenarios were averted and let's face it the initial Montreal Protocol would have been insufficient to close the ozone hole as we're seeing it. It would not have put us on the curve to lower the depletion of ozone if we'd only followed the 1987 restrictions. But as you say, as soon as you're to 1992, five years later already, we're onto a curve where things were starting to already go on the right track. As you mentioned, it did pay off. Now, it wouldn't have paid off if we just stopped at the original agreement, right? They started by banning a whole lot of CFCs, not every single one, by the way, and they also banned some other related agents like Halon that was in fire extinguishers that used a bromine. There's an impression out there, you know, it was kind of a one and done thing. type of situation, we talk about the Montreal Protocol, and the fact is, it's the Montreal Protocol and its amendments. Part of the genius, part of the way I think they got through some of these logjams is to say, "Okay, we can't solve every problem right now." In fact, if we relied on just what came out of the Montreal Protocol, we wouldn't have very much. It would have delayed things a few years, but we would have ended up in an environmental catastrophe. There were nine amendments after that, and it really started at the second and third amendments in the early '90s, where it really started projecting to bend the curve, where we were really starting to make a real difference as industries adapted, as there were more and more substitutes developed for the CFCs. Really it was first the London amendment in 1990, then the Copenhagen amendment in 1992. These really made the big difference. Then there were some additional amendments after that. So we mentioned And that the Montreal Protocol was finally signed in 1987, and this was not necessarily an easy process. It's not like everybody came with the same agenda and the same needs. There tended to be, on the big picture, two camps. There was the United States and countries. that agreed with them that there was something needed to be done. There were those that had their own industries to protect or didn't trust the United States. DuPont had 25% of the world's share of CFCs. So did they have an agenda to stop other countries? And it tended to be Britain, France, Russia, and Japan. on one side. Japan was interested and concerned because their electronics industry counted very highly on the electronic circuitry with the solvents. CFC was used in solvents for imprinted circuits. Exactly, and also the third world countries, they were also very concerned. So there were a lot of different agendas that had to be harmonized, and this took a lot of interpersonal reaction. It's important to highlight a couple elements in the timeline of CFC production. As we saw, American scientists, Sherry Roland and Mario Molina, in 1974, got a lot of media attention of the issue of CFCs depleting the ozone, right? result the US are sort of uniquely positioned here because as you said DuPont was a major manufacturer of Freon. But because DuPont and the chemical industry in the US got so freaked out by Roland and Molina's research in 1974 they had this overreaction and they panicked and that led an executive from the DuPont company, who were the major producer of 25% of the CFC in the world. The executive that was being questioned by Congress said, and I quote, "The chlorine-ozone hypothesis is at this time purely speculative with no concrete evidence to support it." And he went on to say in a pledge that actually really came back to bite DuPont in the ass, he said, if scientific data show that any chlorofluorocarbons cannot be used without a threat to health, DuPont will stop production of these compounds. So right there in '74, you've got the American company trying to downplay the science, but also in an aim to appear reassuring, making a commitment that they would end up delivering on about curtailing production. But again, even DuPont... It's just a question of timeline. So this sort of virtuous cycle led the scientists to call for a consumer boycott in the United States, and if you look at the trajectory, the United States are uniquely positioned in the question of CFCs. Because in the 70s, they're clearly the number one producer, and then in the middle of the decade, as you see in '74 with the research and the call for the boycott, the curve starts to plateau in the US. actually starts reducing CFC use right they were on the forefront of pushing this but both in the first place they were quick to adopt quick to distribute the arrival of CFCs in the 1920s but they were also amongst the first countries to actually pivot away from this and so you did have this connection where globally it's true that the US was a leader slowing down the production of CFCs so much so that you know fast forward a decade after Sherwood and Molina highlight this connection between CFCs and ozone depletion in 1974 we can see there's this moment in the mid 80s as this diplomacy is coming through the UN the US are now consuming the entirety of the CFCs produced in South Africa. side of the country so it was entirely self-contained. Now you can contrast that with you can see the early European nations here at the same period so looking actually from the period from 1976 to 1983 specifically over that time period you can see that whereas the US was entirely self-sufficient in the CFC that it had which is to say they didn't export any but they also didn't import any they were completely a closed-loop system within the US industry. So they had been producing a lot and they were slowing down. That's where the US was in the mid-80s. Contrast this with France. Now France, during the period of 1976 to 1983, was exporting 40% of the CFC that it produced, which is to say it was producing so much CFC that they were selling some to their neighbors and shipping it out. almost half of the CFC produced in France was making it out. Similarly for the UK, it was one third of the CFCs produced inside of the United Kingdom were being exported, making it off the shores. So if you think about it in that way, this was a major sector of industry, and part of the negotiation process, as I was looking, one thing that was spotlighted was the close ties between the company. Imperial Chemical Industry which is a company closely tied to the British government and they were implicated in the negotiations in Brussels as part of the European position basically and it turns out Imperial Chemical Industry were involved in CFCs not just because they made refrigerant products they were literally involved in the manufacturing of the chemical itself so anytime someone made CFC, they were making money off it. So if you think about it, if the US was completely slowing down its production and there was still going to be demand without this regulation, this would have been a huge boon for the company Imperial Chemical Industry, which is why they were lobbying so hard in the UK government. Another thing that's quite interesting is to see the extent to which this negotiation happened entirely internationally. You have to remember, this... protocol diplomacy and this negotiation process, the Vienna Convention and all this, is happening in the mid-80s. This is exactly the time where the European Union is really building up its institutions and they want to have the ability to be taken seriously as a negotiating partner. If you pull all European countries together, they look like a pretty big trading bloc and if they're able to make negotiations as a group, then they'd be taken more seriously, and as part of that process, it was very important to the EC, European Community, basically, the predecessor of the European Union that we have today, which at the time obviously featured Britain in a major way. So the EC needed to speak as a unitary voice, but actually there was a multiplicity of perspectives inside of Europe, and so there's a number of debates as to whether or not this United Front... quelled some of the more reasonable positions of countries like the Netherlands or Germany or whether on the other hand it basically forced more nuance out of countries that were initially more dogmatic like France, Italy or the UK as we've been covering. There is also a big question at one point whether they do vote as a bloc and as individual countries. countries when they sign on. In a way that's a way that you can sort of know after the fact the positioning of the individual member states while still ultimately letting the majority decide, and I think that was part of how you were able to get all of the countries at the table. So to give a little bit more context, the official line from the British government Between 1975 and 1988, on the science of the ozone was to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the veracity of the relationship between CFCs and ozone depletion. So this should be a pretty familiar playbook. They're basically saying, "Oh, the jury's still out there. We can't know. We can't observe this." And as you saw, since the British researchers were the first ones to... To not even realise what they were measuring in terms of discovering the ozone hole. Actually, the British government was quite quick, perhaps because of these relationships to the industrial production of CFCs, they were quite quick to say, "Oh wait, let's stop funding the research then, if it's showing that we shouldn't be making these." It's interesting to see that, if you think about the parallel to fossil fuels, industry both in the UK and in the US, but in this case, in the UK. the UK were so quick to preempt the fact-finding part of research once it became inconvenient. I think that speaks to where science is and isn't. You know, we went back to this idea of Sherwood and Molina talking about, oh, did they step outside of their role as scientists to become activists when they called for a boycott? Well, in a way, I don't think you can say that the UK government, when they... pulled out from funding research that was inconvenient to them or that disagreed with their financial objectives. They weren't behaving in the spirit of science in the slightest. Science is not about looking to prove a foregone conclusion. If you want that, you hire McKinsey to write a report for you, and then you can use the report to justify what you wanted to do in the first place. Research isn't about producing a document that you can use to teleologically retroactively support the claims you always wanted to make. So that's an important distinction to make. So if we go back to why there was this disconnect and what was happening in the US, who'd already started phasing out CFCs in the 70s versus France, Britain and Europe in general in the mid 80s. What was happening there? If we look at the time in 1985, the US, which had been producing almost half of the world output of CFC. By 1985, the US was only producing 30% of the world output of CFCs. If you bundle the European countries together, they were responsible for 45% of CFC use, and largely for aerosols. You know, you think about hairspray and the perfume industry. These things actually had major... Bastions, old houses of perfume and saying, "Oh, this must be made in this one process." Invented in the 1920s, but, "Oh, tradition must be so we can't change the process." So it was running up against these old sort of ideas. Really? Actually, it wasn't really used until after World War II for perfumes and that type of thing. Exactly, in aerosol. So of course, it's not a long tradition at all. People's memories have a short shelf life when it comes to sentimental attachment to luxury goods. But anyways, actually, speaking of the British-French connection, you might think an industry that was being developed at the time were these supersonic planes. The French and the British had the partnership around the Concorde plane, and because it was a project of the respective governments, it was seen as an attack on the Concorde to say, "Oh, the Concorde is a bad thing. Concorde's fuel can damage the ozone layer, and that's also part of this. So there was a concerted effort by the British and French governments to discredit the research around CFCs, and then it comes to the question of why did it fail? Well, their arguments kind of fell on their face. I mean, the British journal New Scientist was covering the Montreal Protocol. being a case of environmental neocolonialism, that basically the US's economic power was allowing it to have this largesse of signalling that it had an environmental conscience, that it could broadcast to the world while it actually had been itself responsible for emitting many of the CFC. So it's kind of a nuanced critique of saying they were basically trying to use ecology as a Trojan horse. to mask new commercial motives, and actually, if you think about it, if you deconstruct that, it was really a case of a delaying tactic from CFC producing companies in Europe, Russia, in general, to stall the process because they had gained a comparative advantage temporarily against the US companies because they were able to still inherit the use of this destructive product, and this is where this need for global negotiation came in. I mean, you think about the burgeoning Europe at the time of this negotiation. That's a big component here. The fact that we kind of had to pull everyone in Europe to be as one voice on the same line had some nuances that allowed some people to voice criticisms in an indirect way, but ultimately it meant that wanted to trade with Europe, you better get rid of CFCs, and the fact that everyone got to the table and made commitments on the smallest version possible, as you were saying, this start and strengthen component that was integral to the drafting of the Vienna Convention, the idea of iteration, starting with a small commitment and getting there, but ultimately showing that it-- was feasible and giving it some enforcement. These were all crucial elements in the delicate balance that was achieved by the diplomats in Vienna and Montreal in 1985 and 1987. So that was perhaps a little excessive table setting on the geopolitical stakes that undergirded the conditions for the first Montreal Protocol. But again, we want to come at this from saying it was complex, the US were early, Europe was late, but ultimately this paid off and it paid off in a major way, and that's really the story we're highlighting here. Absolutely. People wanted to make this work and they realized that there might be some compromises early on. At first, it wasn't every country. They didn't need every country. They just need a certain quorum to approve it. Later, other countries signed on. They didn't need unanimity. But the point is, they started. But Luc, how do you see breaking this logjam? What do you think was the major thing that got people to sit down and sign this Montreal Protocol to begin with? If we're talking about what got people to the table, I think it's ultimately about listening to the science. This goes to the clip that we have of Stephen Anderson. One of the people who made this really come together was Stephen Anderson, who was an economist by training who ran the technology and economic assessment program. industry, the military, the engineers, the environmentalists together to do the nuts and bolts of all this, to get it going, and in this clip, we have him talking about the diplomacy that led up to his being able to work his miracles. appointed with Vic Buxton from Canada to set up the first technical panel. We recruited the experts from the organizations that were already committed to protect the ozone layer. On a technical committee, you could not have a better set of people than the people whose success in their The other secret of our success is we had something called self-affecting technical solutions, and so, for example, one of the chairs of the HALON committee studying HALON was the chair of the National Fire Protection Association that set the goal of providing fire safety training to students. standards for where Halon is used. So as quickly as a use could be eliminated with an alternative he would go back to his committee and decertify Halon on that use. We had members of the Coast Guard on the committee and as quickly as there were alternatives on ships they removed from. requirements of the United Nations Maritime Organization, the use of halon. So it went from compelling the use for safety to prohibiting the use for environment. So it was this remarkable internal group and if you go back also, you'll notice that some of the most important technologies were invented by people that only met on the committee for the first time. So you had groups of military suppliers that got together and telecommunications suppliers and invented something called no clean soldering that eliminated the use of solvents and saved the ozone layer, but it also increased the risk. reliability of the products and they were enthusiastic about commercialization to the extent that they patented the technology and then donated it to the public domain. So it could be used anywhere in the world at no expense to the user. So you have this enthusiastic group of genius engineers working on a short deadline and They were being told it's not enough. It's not enough to just do these chemicals. We have to do more. It's not enough to do these chemicals on the old schedule. We have to go faster. Some of these sectors halted their uses years ago. I'm not sure if that's true. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. ahead of the deadlines of the Montreal Protocol for the Clean Air Act. It was really quite inspirational and most of those people would tell you it was the best part of their life because they never would have been allowed to work with the engineers from the competing corporations if it hadn't been for the team drawing those together for public purpose.Music And the researchers made a point to, instead of hoarding the profits for this for 20 years, as the intellectual property system would allow them to, they released the patents for this invention free to the world, and so it was in the public domain. Anyone could use this, and immediately, the entire planet benefited. Instead of letting some people profit for 20 years, there was an understanding of the collective responsibility here. was very quick. By January of 1988, you could see big changes. So the protocols signed in September '87. In January of '88, there's a large conference, and at that conference, there were several important announcements. The most spectacular was that AT&T announced that they had found an a nature-based solvent made from the turpains from oranges and lemons and pine trees that could clean half of the electronics equally or better than the CFC113 replaced and they said that transition was technically possible within one year. So they went from skepticism and standing back to becoming the driving force and it was also important because this terpane was not another synthetic chemical. It was naturally derived and harvested from the disposal of the orange rinds and the lemon rinds and then put to positive purpose, and then at that same meeting the Ottawa... step forward and realized that most of the emissions from car air conditioning was from servicing and from leakage and so for the first time they got together a partnership that developed commercial recycling for air conditioning they did that within one year and the next year after they confirmed and approved technology, they sold a billion dollars worth of recycling equipment all across the world. So there's this enthusiasm of going from panic that there would be high costs and disruption to the enthusiasm of profits and saving money. But Steve, I would just add one thing. So let me toot Stephen's horn a little bit and then also. clarify one point. I mean, I think the invention of the technology and economic assessment panel, TEEP as we call it, of the Montreal Protocol was a real master stroke because it brought the engineers and scientists from industry into the process to help figure out what could be done. The way the assessment process worked is on a systematic basis. The science group that I was part of would assess the science. Steve's group would assess, okay, the science says we've got to phase these things out. What can we phase out? What is technically feasible? And we would provide these reports along with the one from the impacts panel. that would say, you know, if you keep doing this you're going to have so many skin cancer cases a year by 2050 and stuff like that. All three of those reports would be explained to a group of policymakers in a UN meeting. So the decisions weren't actually made by Steve, but Steve's group was highly, highly influential in educating the policymakers and guiding them, really, on what would make the most sense, what could be done the most cost-effectively, the most quickly, etc., etc, and then they made the decisions. But the great thing about it is it's not a political group at all. In the old days we would call a bunch of guys with special needs, "the big guys," and they'd be like, "Well, you know what? slide rules, and, you know, that included the people who came from industry. They weren't the political leaders of those companies. They were the people in the trenches trying to actually figure out what to do instead, and that's what made it work so well. I really have often wished that we had a similar way of doing the intergovernmental panel on climate assessment process. We have a science panel that's pretty similar but we don't really have quite the same technology panel and many people have commented that the technology panel that Steve put together was just huge in making the Montreal Protocol work as well as it has, and the ozone layer is actually finally beginning to heal. So it's real testimony to their success. It seems like, into this Montreal Protocol, once they got it started on the right foot, they said this is a technical, yes, and economic issue, and we're going to deal with this rationally. What a clever idea. Yeah, and ultimately, diplomacy is... What happens when people from different countries meet and try to negotiate to find areas of agreements between their worldviews such that they're able to build projects together of a commercial or political or military nature, right? Diplomacy is about building relationships across countries, and the process that started at the Vienna Convention, because it was involving, you know, the survival of the species, really sort of ramped up into high gear the scope at which diplomatic negotiations needed to take place. This wasn't just a question of can we unilaterally convince US manufacturers to stop producing this? Can we influence consumer behavior here or there? No, you needed every... stakeholder at the table, and so I think Stephen Anderson spoke about the crucial elements was to see private producers of CFCs and also in the military, government contractors in general, these industries whose financial security depended on the production of CFCs. These businesses weren't seen as adversaries. they were seen as partners to be involved, and again, this is a planetary issue and at the same time was containable enough that a dozen companies were responsible for producing CFCs. So there was an important need to have these types of stakeholders involved in negotiation to find alternative technological solutions and off-ramps. It was very pragmatic in terms of... anticipating the reticence of industry to collaborate on this process and as we saw that was the reflex that kicked into gear that was the initial reaction for those businesses to protect their business model but in seeing them as partners towards developing and researching new alternatives they were able to be part of this negotiating process and they could be heralded part of it. It's also a question of ego that made this work. Involving them in the drafting of alternatives was a genius way to let them own, in a PR sense, some of the win on the transition, but also you let the experts who manufacture and develop the products be involved in the research process. They were still gonna be in this business, they just... to do a little more research and development. You know, it shifted their focus, but it wasn't like their profits were going to tank, and that was where Stephen Andersen did play a large role. His TEAP, T-E-A-P, organization brought these people together, and one of the points he makes is that the engineers just ate this up. The engineers were like, "Oh, I get to work with engineers in other industries, and we have this problem." People who I would never normally sit with, you know, they'd be trade secrets or military secrets, whatever. Not since the Manhattan Project had there been such a confluence of experts from different fields that led to work on such a global problem, and in the case of the Manhattan Project, it's sort of the opposite, isn't it? This is the anti-Manhattan Project. It brings it back to this big planetary decision. It's exactly the thing that we're trying to do with COP. That's why we opened with that comparison. You mentioned the IPCC and the COP process. There are things that really differ. The Montreal Protocol was not just, you name what you want to do, it's voluntary, there's no teeth. There were teeth in the Montreal Protocol, but they included not trading with countries that broke the rules. That's like a trade embargo. That's super sharp teeth. The goals of a company like DuPont or ICI might not have been aligned with the welfare of humanity, but because they were important trade partners and all... their other businesses that they were buying or selling to would have ostracized them and refused to trade with them if they did not participate for this. The lack of coercive mechanisms in the COP process and the fact that so many parts of this, as with the United Nations systems in general, the fact that so much of the process requires unanimous consent means that it's very easy for a few bad actors to completely throw things up whereas this goes back to the teeth not the teep the teeth the enforcement mechanisms in the Montreal Protocol were all about the idea of enforcing trade blockades on countries that were not cooperating or right you know companies members of industry that we're still using these bad refrigerants or these bad sprays you know this use of after the 1987 Montreal Protocol, becomes an international taboo, and if you want to trade with the global community, you have to commit to not destroying our shared ecosystem. What they did also put in there, wisely, was steps. If somebody is doing something wrong, let's mediate. Let's find out why, and this is literally the art of diplomacy. diplomacy. It's using conflict to de-escalate when countries were not cooperating with the process. They did have mechanisms for economic help, you know, for countries that couldn't afford it, that were much more meaningful and better funded, relatively speaking, than it seems to me that the IPCC mechanisms are. While there was teeth, people could get, there could be trade sanctions and so on. that had teeth, but it had teeth that people could live with, and this is something we don't have in the IPCC or COP, you know, the climate change treaties and agreements that we have. Yeah, they don't have these enforcement mechanisms. That's right, and it's all voluntary, and the other thing is, it didn't have to be unanimous. Now, when you have you have petro-states able to just say, snap their fingers and say, "No, that's not the wording," you know. Yeah, and they can hold things up, and they did. It's an important aspect of what made this work that we seem to lack in the IPCC process. Now, as complex as the COP process in dealing with fossil fuels is, let's not forget that finding replacements for CFCs was also not an easy task, and that was up to Stephen Andersen to make that happen. Back at the EPA, the colossal task of finding ways industry could continue without CFCs was handed to Stephen Andersen. So this was the most miserable job someone could get. What's hard to believe looking back is how many things we had to change for medical applications, weapons applications, rocket manufacture, there's foam blowing agents for cushions and chairs, for the dash, for the doors, everything imaginable from a refrigerator to the space capsules. 100 chemicals, Yeah, 100 chemicals, 240 sectors. This was really complex. Sure, refrigerants and hair sprays and other things like that, but it's so much deeper and so much more complex. So Stephen Andersen was tasked with finding technological solutions and replacements for ozone-depleting chemicals by the US government. So he was in charge of the panel of experts and researchers and scientists who were developing alternatives for ozone-depleting products, and as you just reminded us, and as he did, this concerned over 100 chemicals in 240 sectors, and so it went from, as we all said, and spray cans to medical applications, but also weapons, rocket manufacturing, used CFCs. So this was a critical thing for security infrastructure as well. This wonder chemical that had been invented in the 20s found its way in all types of vicissitudes of government and industry and the military and even all the way up to cushions in chairs, and electronics. fire extinguishers, things that were really critical to keeping things moving and working. Yeah, so these ozone-depleting chemicals that Stephen Anderson was tasked with finding replacements to were ubiquitous at the time in the society of the 1970s through the 1980s, and let's not forget that the Reagan administration was in power in the 1980s, and not all in the administration were friendly. environmental issues. Though fortunately in 1985, Reagan appointed a new head at the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, who saw the light. Lee Thomas was appointed by Reagan to be the new head of the EPA. I think this truly is an issue that we've got to come to grips with for our children. I remember the day in my office where, with staff, we were talking about how we're going to do this in terms of a solution. I remember reacting and I said, "Well, it sounds to me like what we've got is a set of chemicals here that are causing a problem. I think what we need to do is focus on how do we phase them out." The problem required drastic action, a complete ban of all uses of CFCs, and not just in America. Even in a Republican administration, they were willing to have an EPA head who actually saw a problem and thought, "Oh, let's not make a political football out of this. do something. It's not just an American problem. It's a global problem. But it is a problem, and that means we ought to try and fix it. Right. On the question of partisanship, I think hearing directly from Lee Thomas, Reagan's EPA head, after the fact in this documentary, is enlightening insofar as it shows that there were multiple factions within Reagan's cabinet. There was a solid group of people in the interagency process in Washington who believed the science, but there were deniers too. There were, if you will, climate deniers, ozone deniers at that time, and some of them were in very high places. The Secretary of the Interior, Don Hodel. In one meeting, Hodel suggested that rather than sign up to an international treaty to ban CFCs, Americans should simply learn to wear hats and sunscreen. So Donald Hodel, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, we're talking about factions inside of Reagan's cabinet. Clearly, he, with his protection plan of hats and sunscreens. hats and sunscreen against ozone depletion. - Yeah, that Hodel doubled down on this is amazing. It is so lame, and of course, part of that is a problem with the messaging. If you just talk about skin cancer and cataracts in people, well, okay, fine, you could bundle up your kids in the summer and all that. and slather sunscreen on, but you can't put sunglasses on fish. You know, you can't protect the ecosystem. You can't protect plants. You can't protect plankton. Reagan needed to be assured somewhat that industry could rise to this challenge. He's very business-oriented, but he did go by what is called the precautionary principle. Same thing for Margaret Thatcher. She was a chemist. She understood the chemistry. They just saw that this was such a big deal that something had to be done. Well, and precautionary principle meaning like it's not worth waiting until it's too late. It's sort of taking out an insurance policy. Exactly. If you're uncertain about this, think about the cost-benefit of like what is at stake. do nothing and it turns out to actually be a big deal. That's right. That's sort of like Pascal's wager, which is used in religion. Yeah, but, but no, it is, it is like that, and not only did Reagan go by the precautionary principle, and that's just like such a critically important principle. I mean, it's the one that says when things are really terrible and the risks are really high, you don't wait till it's too late. You don't wait. you of all the data. You take care of it while there's still time. But for him, I think it became more salient because the risks of more UV light were personal to him. >> Environmental protection wasn't high on President Reagan's agenda. >> Ronald Reagan, when he came to office, was not an environmentalist as you think of that. But he was an outdoors guy. He had a ranch. He loved to be outdoors, ride his horse, dig postholes, do physical work. He liked to look out and see the endless horizon, he called it. So he was instinctively appreciative of the environment. What's more, Reagan, who'd had skin cancer on his nose? Stay out of the sun. Understood the threat from the sun's radiation. Ow, that's hot. I don't know if I should be glad that Ronald Reagan got skin cancer, you know? Well, I mean, apparently it made him sensitive to that issue. The fact is, the precautionary principle said, how much risk you're willing to take in your investment in terms of retooling. industry, changing lifestyle, whatever, should be proportional to how bad the potential outcomes are, and here the potential outcomes were devastating beyond just the cancer at the tip of Renningen's nose. Just click the image. Like Reagan, Margaret Thatcher didn't believe in industry regulation. She was Britain's first female leader, but she trained as a chemist and was more proud of being the country's first scientist prime minister. She was a woman among men. She was a scientist among non-scientists. She regarded herself as prime minister as the sort of voice of science. She did go further than most politicians. But she was really bringing in the scientific dimension to politics in a way that nobody else ever did. She absolutely understood the importance of stratospheric ozone depletion, and to be honest, I was incredibly impressed by her intelligence and the penetrating questions that she asked, and they were penetrating. Just as the Montreal Protocol needed international support, Maggie stepped up. She appealed to world leaders to pledge vital funds. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out. Each country has to contribute and those countries who are industrialized, must contribute more to help those who are not. It is life itself, incomparably precious, that distinguishes us from the other planets. It is life itself that we must battle to preserve. I was just gobsmacked when I... I heard that quote. It's interesting to see the way in which this issue, which is quite reminiscent of CO2 and climate change, didn't seem to invoke the same partisan framings back then. Now we have Reagan, who was instrumental in getting this deal passed, and also Thatcher, and Thatcher's framing is that rich countries have to pay for poor countries in order to preserve life on Earth. Now, it doesn't take that many words to change to think about what was happening around CO2 at the same time, and the future that could have been, right? Because this just seems like the perfect blueprint for international collaboration to tackle this type of planetary issue.Music When England was the whore of the world, Margaret was her manner. 180 countries of the world would not say, "I've signed the Montreal Protocol that eliminates chemicals that deplete ozone." In fact, the main replacements for these chlorofluorocarbons were hydrofluorocarbons. Note, you don't have the chloro there, it means it doesn't have that extra chlorine. So, the hydrofluorocarbons, they weren't particularly bad for the ozone. They weren't the big ozone-depleting substance that the chlorofluorocarbons were, but they were still greenhouse gases, and it was around 2007 that they started talking more about that in the Montreal process. eventually led to the Kigali Amendment, which was in 2016. So in 2016, the meeting in Kigali in Rwanda dealt with HFCs, which are a replacement to CFCs. - In the years after the CFC ban, we began to use new gases called HFCs in refrigerators and air conditioners. HFCs are ozone-friendly, but they're powerful greenhouse gases. On the 15th of October, 2016, the world's nations agreed to add HFCs to the Montreal Protocol and begin work to phase down production. Another achievement for the Treaty that is now regarded as the most successful environmental agreement ever created. So, in working with Susan in 1995 on a joint report between the IPCC and the team, I realized that the Montreal Protocol had done a lot for climate that wasn't well appreciated over at the Montreal Protocol. idea was to say just how big was the contribution of the Montreal Protocol to protecting the climate and how do we communicate that to the Montreal Protocol so they would consider that as part of their obligation and part of their legacy. My concern that the Montreal Protocol plateaued. They were resting on their laurels and they had lost this impulse to get more stringent. So this committee was put together. It quickly came up with the conclusion that the Montreal Protocol had already accomplished more than the Kyoto Protocol could have accomplished. Every state government in the world joined Kyoto and all of them met its obligations. So this was huge. I mean, it was shocking to us. It was shocking to the world. We brought it back the same year, 2007, to the Montreal Protocol, and that year they accelerated the HCFC phase-down. So it was exactly what I would hope. would happen is if we assembled science in a new way that was headline news that the policy makers would get the message and do something important and then two years later the same team decided well why don't we show the Montreal Protocol how important it could be if the chemicals that 15% of the ozone-depleting chemicals, which are HFCs, were phased down under the Montreal Protocol. Ozone-safe chemicals controlled by the Montreal Protocol, and that was accomplished in 2016. It took a decade. They were willing to deal with the after-effects of their initial suggestions, which weren't perfect, and it goes back to this idea of... iteration and the perfectibility built into the Montreal Protocol process. So they were very effective at tackling climate change even though that wasn't entirely the purpose for which they were built. You think they're dealing with planetary problems and so they found a way to expand the list of substances and one might argue perhaps methane or other harmful greenhouse gases could be in this Montreal Protocol amendment process? Well, I don't know if they could, because it's not as direct. At least this is dealing with a chemical that was under their purview. So, methane may not fit into this. But I do want to say that I agree with your analysis there. If it can be done for protection of the ozone layer shortly, it can be done for protection of the climate, the oceans, the ecosystems, and species. The other thing that I'm realizing now is that when you're in a hurry, like we are for climate, you have to take advantage of the existing institutions. So, as quickly as we added HFCs to the Montreal Protocol, I would like... to add other chemicals. N2O, nitrous oxide, which is an ozone-depleting greenhouse gas that was neglected by the Montreal Protocol, and then there's other gases like methane that have nothing to do with the sectors that are involved in the Montreal Protocol. But the framework of the Montreal Protocol might be perfect. for a methane treaty. So you might have the Montreal Protocol people help design a methane treaty or if the Montreal Protocol can find its way to create new capacity with new skill sets, you could have methane drawn into the Montreal Protocol because its genius is partly that you chemical at the source and force all the downstream changes to occur, and so there's this inherent advantage of the Montreal Protocol. I absolutely believe the lessons could be taken up better than they have been, and I think if they were taken up, we'd be well on our way in many other environmental problems. precedent for that, and believe me, I would be happy to put it on their agenda if they wanted to. I think they've been very successful. As far as the specifics that Stephen Andersen was talking about, his interest in climate change and methane, he and several scientists and others who worked on the Montreal Protocol a book in 2021, same time as this interview, called "Cut Super Climate Pollutants Now," where they are suggesting a similar thing about use this kind of mechanism like they designed for the Montreal Protocol to target the strongest greenhouse gases, the ones where you would make an immediate difference. Cutting CO2... going to take a long time. We have to cut it because it's because it's there forever. But methane has a much shorter half-life. If we cut out every all the methane we save on, we're gonna see that effect in a matter of years, not in a matter of centuries, and in January 2023, United Nations released the panel for The Montreal Protocol confirmed that they have phased out nearly 99% of the banned ozone-depleting substances. Meaning it's working. They're really getting rid of the stuff that they say they're getting rid of. Just by getting rid of these ozone-depleting substances, CFCs, greenhouse gases that are so potent. That has been estimated. be from anywhere from a half degree to as much as a degree centigrade of climate change that will be avoided by the end of this century. So a half a degree to one degree is a big deal, but there was a recent paper in Nature that said not only that, but when you take into consideration these other... Well, long-term effects of protecting plants and plankton, plants and plankton, which draw down CO2. So if we had the ultraviolet light destroying plants and plankton, not only do ecosystems fail because of that, because they're the basic food group that supports both ocean and land ecosystem. plankton for ocean and plants for the land, but they also draw down carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. So if you're killing off plants and plankton then you're getting rid of a carbon sink. So it might be as much as two and a half degrees of warming avoided by the Montreal Protocol and these amendments. These chlorofluorocarbons have a long half-life, but as we said in the introduction, the ozone layer is expected to recover to the 1980 values, using that as a baseline, by around 2066 over the Antarctic, 2045 over the Arctic, and 2040 for the rest of the world. That's not that far away. Without this treaty, ozone... depletion would have increased tenfold by 2050 compared to current levels. So NASA has put out that they do believe that the ozone hole is getting smaller, and that's part of these projections, and without this treaty, the estimate is that by 2050, the ozone depletion would have been ten times worse. Now, there are Some other papers that looked at some of the effects already. A 2019 paper from Nature estimated that UV light getting through the ozone layer would have been 20% higher since 1990 if we hadn't taken the precautions we have. What world did we avoid? Well, by mid-century it would have been about a degree hotter than it's actually a good to get. So that's a degree Celsius, by the way. So instead of a degree and a half from mainly CO2 and methane that we're trying to avoid, we have an extra degree on top of that from CFCs that we would have had to avoid. That's a big deal. Something like 20 million skin cancer cases in the United States sticks in my mind by mid-century. Susan's absolutely right. But what if Molina and Roland had not had this hypothesis? And certainly you could say, well, someone would eventually. But if it had been five years later or ten years later, it would have been catastrophic because it did take time, as Susan said. It does take time to make a hypothesis, to confirm it, to do the ground measurements, to do the-- aerial flights and so forth. So it was just in time or a little bit too late that it was really a tight schedule that was working when you include diplomacy and corporate changes and all of those things. But you can also look and say, what if the Montreal Protocol and Melina had been delayed some period of time? What you can see is exactly what Susan said, that the CFCs would have grown in climate forcing, let alone ozone depletion, to a level that would have been untenable for Earth. They could have been almost the same level as the CO2 climate forcing. We were incredibly fortunate to have this early announcement. It was incredibly-- fortunate that the Antarctic ozone hole was noticed finally and announced and it was such a spectacular persuasion and then fortunate that the Montreal Protocol was able to take this and then in a derivative that the corporations were able to make their reductions. If you read the Nobel award for for Crutzen and Molina and Roland, it says that life on Earth would not have been possible as we know it. If you read Paul Newman's report on world avoided, you find out that it would have been untenable to go outside at most latitudes for very long without sun protection, far beyond what people wear when they go out today. So it would have been a lot of joy taken away, a lot of misery brought on by these medical effects, and it would be a less successful world. So, we've just heard Susan Solomon and Stephen Anderson telling us about what the world would look like if they hadn't stepped in, in terms of ozone depletion, this catastrophic world scenario. efforts have helped to avert. Now, let's listen to Susan Solomon again, but this time on how we can apply the principles of what worked for the Montreal Protocol to the climate change fight and the COP process by extension. Yeah, I like to tell students in my classes that there's three Ps that determine how well we do on any environmental problem. The first one is... is personal. Is the issue personal to me, to us? And in the case of the ozone issue, it was deeply personal because skin cancer, I mean, you know, cancer doesn't get any more personal than cancer, right? The second P is perceptible. Is the issue perceptible to me? In best cases, if I can see it with my own eyes, you know, like, like smog. But, you know, seeing the satellite images that we talked about earlier, you know, that was good enough to make it perceptible to a lot of people, and the third big P is, are there practical solutions? And that's where Stephen's type of work has been so important. So when you think about climate change and you think about the three Ps, people haven't considered it personal until pretty recently, because it seemed like a future problem, not a today problem, and we can talk all we want to about caring about our grandchildren, but really what we care about is us, right? We do care about our grandchildren. Of course we do, but not as much as we care about us. It's just a fact, I think. It's natural and normal. We don't need to be embarrassed about it, particularly when you're talking about a future problem and you can always hope that there'll be other solutions in place by then. So is it personal? For a long time, we thought it wasn't. Is it perceptible? For a long time, we didn't feel like it was. Nowadays, I would say more and more people are recognizing it as personal and perceptible. The kinds of things that have happened in the world. this year have just been amazing in being wake-up calls because so many places have flooded, so many places have had massive fire. These are all the sorts of issues that we knew were happening. So much erosion is going on because of rising sea levels, and actually, when people would say to me, "Well, it's not really perceptible yet," my answer to that would be, Yeah, I know, and it's a problem, but you know, it's going to fix itself with time, and I think we're just about there. It has fixed itself, and then there's that big third P is, are the solutions practical? And there's been a lot of propaganda, you know, out there saying solutions are not practical. But I think we're reaching the point now where we recognize that they are. So I think that we're really at a turning point on climate change. She's absolutely right, Susan. Solomon is right. You can't avoid the smoke, you can't avoid the hurricanes and floods forever. At some point it hits you over the head enough that you say, "Oh, this kind of is personal, if not to me, to somebody I know." So using her framework, it's definitely personal. affect your survival and your quality of life. It's definitely perceptible. Have you seen the air? And so the last one is, are there practical solutions? And as we saw for greenhouse gases or fossil fuels, there are solutions. So again, there it's more a question of thinking about the practicality of them and there are no silver bullets, which is why it's not quite as straightforward. But then again, you could have said the exact same thing. in 1987 about the Montreal Protocol and the truth is, as they signed it in '87, since we've discussed this, the solutions they initially put into place were insufficient. This is why it was part of an incremental process of revision. Absolutely. This really should be a bigger part of the public imagination as you have so much cynicism, everyone tells you politicians can't get anything done, all they care is about themselves, like... Well, did you hear about this time that a bunch of diplomats from all around the world came together and actually averted disaster by changing your hairspray? It's not only that they came together because as we discussed the process was Baked in that they would keep coming together and make changes as needed, you know Once they got started they Get that ball rolling. between the COP process and the Montreal Protocol that dealt with closing up the ozone hole. Number one, the enforcement mechanisms. There was an implicit threat to enforce a blockade, a trade embargo, against countries that don't cooperate. Now the commitments are non-binding in COP so there is no enforcement mechanism and the fact that these things were non-binding, it meant that they were largely a statement of good intentions, a form of virtue signaling, which, yeah, I'm not against virtue, like I'd rather people want to be virtuous and it's a testament to the fact that there's public demand for these views. So I'd say number one is the enforcement mechanism. Using trade as a negotiation mechanism has just completely been COP process. We're not going to stop trading with Saudi just because they're an oil state. That's the opposite of the way the world economy is working. So that would be an interesting suggestion to have, thinking about more trade embargoes as part of the COP negotiation process, and another one, and again this really feels counterintuitive as part of what we learned from delving into the history here, is this focus on having at the table. Now DuPont's initial reaction to the research by Sherwood and Molina was very reminiscent of the way the fossil fuel companies reacted to research on climate change. They did everything to discredit the science and they panicked and they pushed back and they dragged kicking and screaming so we can't pretend like these people are going to be friends but we also can't just treat them as adversaries and part of that might involve government get these companies to transition towards alternative methods, large projects of getting engineers from these different fields to be involved in research and development, get industry involved in being part of the solution, both so that they own it in an image sense. They have to own it, and they have to own their positions, but they also become part of the agreement. It does remind me of something that they also teach in martial arts. which is be very careful about backing somebody into a corner. It's often best to give them an out because if you got them in a corner, they have no choice but to fight as hard as they can. You give people room to change, right? And the fossil fuel industry has been horrible and still is. That doesn't mean that you can't do something about it, but you can't do something about it. mean that there aren't subsets within the fossil fuel industry that can't be reached. It's a delicate balance. When you have them back in a corner and you're giving them an out, that out shouldn't be a pathway to a gun. Yeah, I like that. Because ultimately giving them a seat at the table doesn't mean that you're giving them the gavel, right? I mean, you want them involved in the negotiation. Right. Which, of course, Of course, we have just done having a Petro State run our last COP28, but we do have to assume there's at least the possibility of making change happen and taking the narrative from the fossil fuel industry. That's a big part of what happened here. The narrative wasn't owned by DuPont. The other thing I want to say there is also the question of meaning unanimity. You know, everybody's got to sign off on it. That one small cabal can trash everything. Yeah, one veto can really screw things up. Just like at the UN. Yeah. One other thing I want to add, having brave scientists like Roland and Melina set a really good precedent, for people to use their knowledge for the betterment of mankind. Yeah, and without getting into the grandiosity, because again, it's never about the single negotiator or the single scientist. No, absolutely not. It's not a great man theory of history, right? It's all about these processes coming to a head. But you can really pinpoint some moments where Shahood and Molina understood. understood the scientific spirit, the pursuit of knowledge, in a way that their institutional authorities did not. Yes. Humans, as earthlings, can make a difference. We've done it, we should celebrate it, and we should realize that we can. do it now. That's why we chose this topic, because it is an uplifting topic. It's what made life on Earth possible. Without the ozone layer, we would have never been able to live on land from the beginning. This has determined that we're here at all the ozone layer. It's an interesting question to think about. Why was this possible in the case of ozone? and not in the case of greenhouse gases. But anyways, we hope that you'll join us for yet another excursion into these histories of climate discourses, and we hope you've enjoyed being along for the ride, and if you'd like, please leave us a rating and review in the iTunes store, it really helps others discover the show. Yes, please, please do! As the saying goes, as we've been saying in all these I hope that you stay planets and stay healthy. I look forward to seeing you next time. You too, Luc. Oh, and before you go, I believe you have a song to share with us. It was a song composed for the 30th anniversary of the Vienna Convention composed by David Haynes. Take us out, Luc. That big Antarctic ozone hole is healing ♪ thanks to the Montreal Protocol.