Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
energy. These fuels stood at the heart of the twentieth-century world
economy, and unlike CFCs they had few ready replacements— and none
at a global scale. Aerosol cans and halocarbon refrigerants were easy to
vilify, especially for an environmental movement that had cut its teeth
on more than a decade of consumer advocacy campaigns. The few large
U.S. chemical companies that produced these products gave groups like
the Environmental Defense Fund and the NRDC a target for the domes-
tic legal strategies that had served them so well on other environmental
issues. As early as 1976, a “Ban the Can” public relations campaign, along-
side a legal push from the NRDC, led the EPA to mandate phasing out
the production of aerosol products containing fluorocarbons, effective in
December of 1978.
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By the early 1980s, moreover, many of the companies
that manufactured CFCs in the developed world had already found ozone-
friendly substitutes, which they could adopt relatively easily to meet the
voluntary standards of the Montreal Protocol.
Finally, the Montreal Protocol itself changed the international political
landscape in which global warming advocates hoped to develop a conven-
tion on climate change. In creating a consensus on ozone, UNEP executive
secretary Mustafa Tolba and his colleagues took advantage of political buy-
in from the industrialized world, the eager support of a capable group of
concerned scientists, and, perhaps most important, the element of surprise.
Much of the process for building an international scientific consensus on
ozone depletion and translating that consensus into an international legal
regime unfolded in an ad hoc manner. International agencies like UNEP
and the WMO, along with environmental and scientific NGOs like the
NRDC and the International Council of Scientific Unions, carved out
niches within this new legal framework as they developed it. The few com-
panies and governments still opposed to regulating CFCs and other ozone-
depleting gases in the 1980s found themselves decidedly on the defensive,
reacting to these new forms of environmental advocacy.
The framers of the treaty on ozone hoped to help history repeat itself
concerning CO
2
. But history does not repeat itself. History informs the
contexts in which events unfold and thus prevents its own repetition. The
relationship between ozone and climate change is a case in point. Dur-
ing negotiations over a potential global warming treaty, opponents were
able to take the initiative in part because of their experiences with the
ozone debate. The success in regulating CFCs put powerful corporate and
