http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0720-02.htm
Published on Sunday,
July 20, 2003 by the Independent /UK
Bush Ready to Wreck Ozone Layer Treaty
- US Slips in Demand to Drop Ban on Harmful Pesticide
by Geoffrey Lean
President George Bush is targeting the international treaty
to save the ozone layer which protects all life on earth from
deadly radiation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
New US demands - tabled
at a little-noticed meeting in Montreal
earlier this month - threaten to unravel one of the greatest
environmental success stories of the past few decades, causing
millions of deaths from cancer.
The news comes at a
particularly embarrassing time for the
Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who pressed the President in their
talks in Washington last week to stop his attempts to sabotage
the Kyoto Protocol which sets out to control global warming:
one of the few international issues on which they differ.
Now, instead of heeding
Mr Blair, Mr Bush is undermining
the ozone treaty as well, by seeking to perpetuate the use
of the most ozone-destructive chemical still employed in developed
countries, otherwise soon to be phased out. Ironically, it was
sustained pressure from the Reagan administration, in which
Mr Bush's father served as vice-president, that ensured the
treaty was adopted in the first place. It has proved such a
success that environmentalists have long regarded it as inviolable.
The ozone layer - made
of a type of oxygen so thinly scattered
through the upper atmosphere that, if gathered all together,
it would form a ring around the earth no thicker than the sole
of a shoe - screens out the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays
which would, otherwise, wipe out terrestrial life. As it weakens,
more of the rays get through, causing skin cancer and blindness
from cataracts.
The world was shocked
to discover in the 1980s that pollution
from man-made chemicals had opened a hole the size of the
United States in the layer above Antarctica, and had thinned
it worldwide. Led by the US, nations moved with unprecedented
speed to agree the treaty, called the Montreal Protocol,
in 1987 - which started the process of phasing out use of
the chemicals.
The measures have been
progressively tightened ever since.
Scientists reckon that they will eventually prevent 2 million
cases of cancer a year in the US and Europe alone. But
President Bush's new demands threaten to throw the process
into reverse.
They centre on a pesticide,
methyl bromide, now the greatest
attacker of ozone left in industrialised countries. The US is
responsible for a quarter of the world's consumption of the
chemical, which has also been linked with increased prostate
cancers in farmers.
Under an extension
to the Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1997,
the pesticide is being gradually phased out and replaced with
substitutes; its use in the West is due to end completely
in 2005. Nations are legally allowed to extend the use of
small amounts in "critical" applications, but the US
is
demanding exemptions far beyond those permitted, for uses
ranging from growing strawberries to tending golf courses.
It is also pressing
to exploit a loophole in the treaty
- allowing the use of the chemical to treat wood packaging
- so that, instead of being phased out, its use would
increase threefold.
The demands now go
to an international conference in Nairobi
this autumn. Experts fear that, if agreed, the treaty will begin
to fall apart, not least because developing countries - which
are following rich nations in phasing out ozone-depleting
chemicals - could cease their efforts.
"The US is reneging
on the agreement, and working very, very
hard to get other countries to agree," said David Doniger,
a former senior US government official dealing with ozone
issues, who now works for the Natural Resources Defense
Council. "If it succeeds, it threatens to unravel the whole
fabric of the treaty."
Dr Joe Farman,
the Cambridge scientist who discovered
the Antarctic ozone hole, added: "This is madness.
We do not need this chemical. We do need the ozone
layer. How stupid can people be?"
© 2003 Independent
Digital (UK) Ltd
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